Perhaps it was the pork pâté or boudin noir, or maybe the blood sausage too hastily combined with six frozen mini — Milky Ways — but the world began to spin and Tull along with it. His cousin helped him return to his hotel room, a phantasmagoric journey the boy hoped never again to be forced to repeat. Luckily, the teetotaling Dr. Raff had long since turned in; Lucy summoned him; after the required palpations, acute gastroenteritis was diagnosed. Nothing was to be done. Tull emptied bowels and stomach of all they had while Lucille Rose — martyr, author, girl detective — laid on cold compresses as he lurched through the maze of his delirium. Pullman was there, and he was glad about that. They stood before the puzzle his mother had designed at Saint-Cloud and which Mr. Randoll Coate (who in his dream bore Reed’s supercilious countenance) now perfunctorily dismissed. His nasty thumbnail critique amused Mr. Hookstratten and the cousins, leaving Tull hurt and betrayed. Stung by the remarks, he suddenly noticed his mother fleeing into one of the pathways. Everyone disappeared. The boy knelt to examine Pullman, who was festooned with strange open sores, and was glad they didn’t seem to be causing the beast any pain. He sprinted down the dark lane toward Trinnie. Instead of reaching the heart of the labyrinth, he found himself in an open clearing — that of La Colonne Détruite. There, his grandfather, as if orchestrating the arrangement of stones in a cemetery, directed deformed workers while they raised up more cracked columns, ragged drapes flapping like crows in the frame of each eyeless window-socket. He heard his mother call out, and ran toward one of the mysterious buildings. Inside, the furnishings were uncovered. The Dane clambered up the spiral stairs, slipping on marble as Tull overtook him. The boy reached the topmost bedroom and tentatively entered. The bathroom light was on …
“Dad?” Tull bolted upright. “Daddy!” he shouted, blinking sweat from his eyes.
Lucy rushed over to minister; she felt as if they were onstage in that part of a play where the invalid’s fever breaks.
Seeing it was she, he became embarrassed. “I … I was dreaming of my father,” he stammered, almost politely.
Like most on board, Tull slept the entire flight back to California, with nary a ghost of present, past or future to invade unconsciousness.
Settling into the comfort of their respective homes, the youngest Trotters kept to themselves for a full week, hardly even speaking on the telephone — though, with usual aplomb, Edward sprang back in record time, the only toll paid for his resilience being a harsh and intractable case of acne.
Tull was slower to surface. He was glad to see Pullman again, but the dream had sorely spooked him; it was a while before he dared take his old friend on a constitutional in the sealed park, fearing what they might find.
†Something must be aired, if a bit prematurely. A question may arise: Why, or how, could such an impossible array of peculiar places be visited in so short a time? An eclectica of destinations was culled from the exotic wish list that Lucy and her brother had whimsically drawn up; their father was committed to fulfilling those wishes to the letter. The logistics were a challenge, but it would get done. There is no limit to wealth and its imaginative excesses, just as there is no limit to the proscriptions of poverty — but the details of both extremes are sometimes difficult to comprehend. Just as a sixty-year-old woman might spend three days knee-deep in recycling bins so she might gather the capital to buy her grandson shoes, so may a father fly a chef from Hong Kong to Palos Verdes with ten $20,000 boxes of saliva-thread swallows’ nests to make special soup for his daughter’s bat mitzvah. Such is the world.
†It should be noted that the Trussardis were $5,000 apiece, retail. Well, whether it should be noted or not, the author begs indulgence for his catalogue des excès and would argue it to be something more; that such details are relevant to this chapter and of legitimate ethnographic interest. In this vein, he will add that the eager students were cautioned to steer clear of Gothick Hall, which harbored a secretary built by Rhode Island cabinetmaker Christopher Townsend, its silver fixtures smithyed by one Samuel Casey, and recently acquired by Lord Went at Sotheby’s for the not unlordly sum of £7 million. Nor were they to approach the $210,000 bottle of Château d’Yquem, personally engraved with Thomas Jefferson’s initials — though grown-ups were allowed to have a look if not a taste. The good lord also happened to be a collector of money itself. As a hobby, he enjoyed buying uncirculated legal tender: $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills (he’d purchased one of the latter for around $115,000), whose value increased exponentially each year.
†Against all intentions, the Keatons did not make it that far. Young Dexter’s earache precluded her flying; the two graciously took their leave in Tel Aviv, and were much missed to journey’s end.
CHAPTER 27. For the Child Who Is Not Present
“I want everyone to look for the mosasaur, OK?”
The teenage docent held a shark fin in his hand. The children reached out carefully, as if the fossil might still cause mayhem.
“And when you find the mosasaur — you’ll see how really huge it is — when you find the mosasaur, just remember: this very huge creature was eaten by the much smaller shark.”
He stroked the hooked piece of cartilage to emphasize its role as David to the mosasaur’s Goliath. Then he held it in front of Amaryllis, cuing her to touch. She wouldn’t, a fact not lost on Dézhiree. The fin wound up at the wheelchair, in Cindra’s lap; the disabled girl squirmed and rolled her eyes in delight.
There were two MacLaren field trips that summer — the mosasaur having been encountered on a sweaty, bus-rattled fiesta to Exposition Park’s stately Natural History Museum. Though nearly ruined, the coliseum abutting that place was far from Rome; a newly minted IMAX behemoth had infected adjacent buildings with its garish pastels and multiplex aesthetic. “Dancing Waters,” those cheap public-space ejaculations that soak the kids during parental cigarette breaks, added to the sprucing up — all this part of the rankly meretricious, cheesily stimulating great American playground, arty and self-aggrandizing, thrilled with itself no end. The whole chain-linked grid, surrounded by a flatland of jaundiced soccer-trodden crabgrass, was supposed to be a free-spirited architectural tribute to the putative joys of Science and Learning yet was in fact an ugly hodgepodge of loading zones and dented dumpsters that no one, not even the brightest design intern, had thought to conceal from general view. But the children of MacLaren weren’t critics — they were just happy to be in the “outs,” roaming the cool halls of glassed-in bison and saber-tooth. The dioramas were as calming as meds.