“You were having a nightmare,” Jeremy said. “You woke me up.”
“You whacked me in bed with your plaster club,” Ryan said, glancing over the seat. “Humor me, Jeremy. This is a long trip. Now of all times.”
That hurt so much, Jeremy thought it was unfair. “I’m listening, aren’t I?”
“We’re not going to have too many of these days, you know, so I thought I’d impart a little of what it means to be your dad, a little fatherly wisdom, however cracked.”
Jeremy did not know whether his father was feeling self-pity or expelling a lousy joke. (Ryan always called telling a bad joke “expelling,” like coughing out a piece of food or a gob of phlegm stuck in the wind-pipe: “You try to tell a joke and it makes you choke, but stop! Don’t expel it. Wrong joke or wrong crowd.”)
“Impart away,” Jeremy said, preparing to suffer in relative silence, because Ryan wasdying, he was pretty sure of that, though of course nobody would tell him anything right up front.
“All right.” Ryan thought for a moment, frowning in concentration. “These suits keep them alive and together in a dark, nasty land where there are no rules. But the people with little ears—me, my friends—we’re going out there, into the weirdness, and these superiorpeople—the tall fellows—are suiting us up. They won’t go themselves. Maybe they can’t, but we can, the little ones. Weird, huh?”
“Totally,” Jeremy said. “I never have dreams like that.”
“When things change, dreams change. I used to have normal dreams. What do you dream about?”
“Roads. Toads and roads.” Jeremy had worked out a pretty funny routine about toads crossing a road, grim and hilarious. “I want to dream about Mom.”
“Right.”
Ryan drove for a while without saying anything.
My father is fat. He wants to be a comedian.That’s what he had told Miriam Sangloss in the clinic. Jeremy’s father had thin red hair and a round red face and the body of a carny roustabout—big muscles, big bones, boiled-freckle skin, Mom had called it, that memorable time when she painted Ryan up in flower and beast tattoos for a street parade in Waukegan. She was acting in a film then, a real paying job, and they stayed over for a few weeks after the end of the shoot, doing local theater and of course that parade, which had been fun.
Jeremy had been eleven. On his fingers, he counted the days after the parade, the days before she died. Four.
The Dodge had taken Ryan and Jeremy through Montana and Idaho and into Oregon. They had stopped off in Eugene, where Ryan had worked a small circus whose owner was once Mom’s boyfriend. Ryan and the circus owner spent one night drinking and crying on each other’s shoulders— veryweird, Jeremy had thought.
They left Eugene for Spokane, crossing the eastern high desert. Their last trip.
“We all lose our mothers,” Ryan said on that trip. “Every mother since the beginning of time has died. Memory is the mother of us all, Jeremy.”
And now— Nunc—he was sitting in the chair.
Everything signifies, nothing is of itself. You call yourself Jack because it is a safe name. So many are named Jack, you can hide; but it is a strong name, universal.The odd thing, as if there had ever been just one singular, odd thing in his life, was that sitting in this room, he had no difficulty believing that road trip with his father was his very first memory, his first experience of being alive. What went before—his mother’s death, the beginning of the trip, breaking his leg—was like the sound of the dying city outside this high, empty room: there, but unconvincing. There is a number, assigned to volumes arranged on a nonexistent shelf in a time far away from now, all waiting to be reconciled. Waiting for choices to be made. Where do youreally come from, Jeremy?
Who is your real mother?
And why does she seek you?
Ginny closed her eyes. She was back in Milwaukee, then in Philadelphia. She was back with her parents.
They rarely stayed in one place more than a few months. And when they moved on, they arranged things so they left behind no impression—nobody remembered them. They could have circled back through the same towns, moved back into the same houses a few years later, and would have been greeted as newcomers. But they never did.
“We don’t leave footprints,” her mother had told Ginny as a child. Ginny remembered her attempts to make friends, meet boys. But then, inevitably—exhausted, discouraged—her family stayed too long in one town and the whole memory thing doubled back on them. Her mother wandered off or just vanished, as if erased from a giant blackboard. A few weeks later, her father vanished as well. Maybe they were taken by collectors, like the man with the coin or Glaucous. Maybe her parents sacrificed themselves to protect her. She would never know. Her entire family might as well have never lived. There was no proof they hadlived, other than the library stone. Alone, carrying the sum-runner, her dreams began—and she learned she could shift. She had come so very far. Her entire life became a long bad dream; both of her lives, hereand there. It was curiosity about therethat landed her in her present trouble. A few weeks after her father’s departure, Ginny boarded a Greyhound and stared out a smudged window at rolling wet miles of fields and hills. In Philadelphia, she lived on the streets for a few months. Street people forgot things under the best of circumstances. She decided that wasn’t what she needed. She soon hitchhiked to Baltimore, where she peeled a tab off a flyer on a bulletin board, and that same night carried her backpack into an old two-bedroom row house occupied by goths and ravers—determined to settle in, stay awhile, leave behind some footprints. For the first time since her parents had vanished, she felt comfortable, at home—for a while.
Then she left the house in Baltimore and called the number in the newspaper ad. Ginny looked up at the blank wall, the peeling paint, the shadows moving slowly over the overlapping slats of wood.
Is this what you choose?
Is there a better past for you?
“Who are you?” she cried.
No answer. Foolish question. She already knew the answer—though it did not make much sense.
“What am I, then? I really don’t remember anything before I called that number—is that it? Who were my parents? I couldn’t just pop up out of nowhere, out of nothing, could I?”
A polite waiting.
“All right,” Ginny said, angrily determined to test the limits. “You asked for it, here it is. I come from a country called Thule. It’s a big island northwest of Ireland. The last contact with the outside world was…World War Two. The Germans occupied my island, but we pushed them out before the war ended. There were huge stone castles built on the crests of high hills and in the mountains. My parents worked in the royal palace on the southern coast, and I had the run of the hill-castles where the prince and princess were hidden, moving to a new castle every day. Everyone was afraid, but not my family. My brothers and I—I had three brothers—we used to ride gliders off the cliffs, and I broke my arm…”
Someone laughed—behind her, around her—delighted with her presumption. Her arm suddenly ached, and with this pain, all the memories flooded back: broad fields below the stone castles, brown and purple with sweet prickle-thatch, the taste of comb-laden honey-of-Thrace in the fresh spring air; her father’s concern as the palace physician set her arm without anesthetic, wrapped it in a poultice of lard and chalice-herb, then in a temporary wax-soaked cast stiffened with clean white pine slats…