Christopher Lee Chilton
Divorce had been kind to him. He’d emerged from the ordeal like a polar bear from a cage: shaggy and certain, powerful and deliberate. We had expected him somewhat to wither, to pucker like a fruit cut from the mother vine. He’d always been so twined up with her, living, we believed, on her vital green forces. He’d always said of Carlotta: She gives me life. But now Carlotta was in the wind.
Afterward he was not seen out of seersucker. Before he’d worn only too-small shirts. Now he had given himself room to grow in yellow and white suits like rumpled sails, with mint and peppermint stripes. In his penny loafers he wore two fifty-yen coins, the ones with the chrysanthemums and the central hole. We saw him sometimes at the Saver Plus with his new monkey on his shoulder, amber and docile as a sweet potato. He called it a tamarind and fed it seedless grapes. He had the air of a man who’d gone on and come back changed, even though it was Carlotta who’d gone away. It was Carlotta who was in the wind.
I’m a man exhumed, he said, holding court by the bakery case. I’ve brushed the dirt off my clothes. I’ve gone around the house and taken all the sheets down off the mirrors. I’ve done a jailbreak on the house of mourning. I ought to write her a thank-you card every day and stuff it in a bottle and slip it in the Gulf, or else tie it to a kite and let it go on the wind.
We grew alongside him. We woke in the morning hearing songs we ourselves turned out to be whistling. Every day we shaved and made our beds. We became better bowlers, better lovers, better golfers. The high school football team began an undefeated streak and the bottling plant reopened. We opened our windows in the afternoon and let in the smell of malt and sweet corn syrup on the wind.
He threw tiki parties and luaus. He hung paper lanterns from the live oaks and went around handing out snake’s-blood cocktails and bamboo fans. He handed out tender pineapple-crowned pieces of animals that had heretofore been slowly swiveling on spits. The sweat on the back of his jacket appeared in the shape of a heart, a bird, a flower. We wrapped around him on the wraparound porch and listened to the music of his pan-pipes being carried off by the wind.
It was at one such luau we discovered her. Someone went into the old plantation house and took a wrong turn up a wrought-iron staircase or through the butler’s pantry, ending up in that wing which was under what he called eternal renovation: a jungle of vicious nails and toxic powders where entry was prohibited, for our own safety. It was an innocent mistake, but an urgent one, and can you blame them for thinking that narrow door with the bar lock on the outside might have been a bathroom?
On the other side of the door was a girl’s pink room, foamy with lace and piled high with coloring books and stuffed horses. Inside this girl’s pink room was a pink girl. She wore pink overalls and rainbow-striped socks and her dark hair in bangs. She was sitting cross-legged on a bed among pillows shaped like hearts, birds, and flowers. She was, in short, everything a little girl ought to be. When the door opened, she looked up from what she was doing, which was studying a Magic Eight Ball. The one in search of a bathroom said: And who might you be?
She didn’t answer. She only smiled and shook the ball and held it up for them to see. It said: Ask again later.
***
About the girl, we could not decide. The sheer fact of her was fairy-tale impossible, like a wife on a hook in a secret chamber. Except, of course, she was alive and in the plump of youth, seeming well-fed, neat and clean in well-fitting clothing, clam-happy in her pink shell as far as anyone could tell, serenely sweet and sweetly serene. The brief glimpse we’d received suggested no mal- or mistreatment.
Was she a distant relation? A niece-in-law or cousin, so many times removed? Perhaps a capital-L capital-S Little Sister, selected by an organization one might refer to as the capital-P program, to edify and uplift our friend in his impending dotage? A goldheart runaway adopted off the infamous street? All seemed possible to varying degrees, but none explained why he’d kept her a secret, hidden away in a crawlspace, like a disfavored rug.
Finally, we had to admit the girl had something of the icy winkle of our friend’s eyes and an adumbration of Carlotta in the dimple of her chin. No doubt she was their daughter. Could anyone remember Carlotta pregnant, or having disappeared for a nine-month holiday?
And what of the girl’s affect? She hadn’t answered when asked about her name. What if she had no name? What if she could not speak? We floated a theory among ourselves that she’d been raised in that room and never let out of it, otherwise well-treated but never spoken to, so that she never acquired the gift of language, and was left wordless as a post or a penguin. She was reading that Magic Eight Ball, someone pointed out. But maybe it was enough, someone responded, the blue tetrahedron emerging prophetically from the dark well. Maybe the Magic wasn’t really in the words.
Imagine this: you’ve lived all your life in a single room, whose four walls, for all you know, represent the limits of the material universe. From time to time a door opens and a god or goddess comes bearing food, clothes, toys from heaven. Then one day the door opens, and in comes someone else, some other being from some unknown pantheon—would you cry out it fear? Or would you simply accept that the door to heaven brings forth strange creatures as it does blocks and socks?
We fell silent, and we began to take a hard look at ourselves. When had the last of us gone completely bald? Our true faces had emerged at last from the epistemic tyranny of hair—no one looks more himself than a bald man. What we saw were our own delicate skulls, as dappled and vulnerable as birds’ eggs. What did we know about children? And how could we ever confront our friend, with his authoritative Santacular mane?
We thought we understood. We’d been so worried that our friend would wither without Carlotta’s vitality to energize him, but all along he’d been drawing from the vitality of the girl, shut up like a dynamo in a chamber. The room was a Faraday cage, and he fed on the current of her youth. What’s more, we understood that all our late attainments, our happy marriages, our success on the gridiron and the crossword page, came because we fed on this current’s overflow. He thrived on her, and we thrived upon him.
Perhaps it would be best to forget we’d seen anything.
***
Well, we tried. We tried to forget, and we did, more or less, until he himself reminded us in the morning’s small hours, when he nearly broke down our doors with his furious knocking. He was handing out shotguns like stalks of licorice. She’s in the wind, he said. Get up, we’ve got to find her.
What were we supposed to say? We weren’t supposed to know about her at all. But now that she was in the wind, he seemed to forget she’d ever been a secret. We took the shotguns and followed him into the bayou, with his klieg lights and nuclear compass, with his night-vision goggles and his hunting swans. By the time dawn rose on us, we were further from home than any of us could ever remember.
From time to time, he thrust a pink scrimp of ribbon or a rainbow sock into the faces of the swans, who took in the scent and pushed forward on their leather thongs, huffling and gruffling. He led us across riverbanks and cypress domes, under overpasses and over underpasses, through the baking plans of hardware store parking lots. Sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, we saw him offer the swans an elegant square cut from a shawl of paisley silk or a calfskin driving glove. In this way we discerned that we were hunting both the girl and Carlotta. They were out there together, in the wind.
We covered five, ten, fifteen, twenty miles a day. We slept in empty cisterns or snuck into the bedroom showcases of department stores. In the morning, we did our best to blend in with the arriving customers before slipping out through the automatic doors. Already we had become a kind of Masonic cabal, moving perpendicularly to ordinary folks, in cunning disguise. When we left suburbia behind, we slept on the hard ground, and he softened our sleep with his pan-pipe music. This is what men once did, he said. They quested. They sacked Jerusalem and brought it back home, brick by brick.
But none of us could help but notice the fifty-yen pieces were gone from his loafers, and the holes looked out at us like the puckered eyes of a blinded man.
We came to a desert where ferocious things emerged and converged. Scorpions, jackrabbits, snakes, rattling and sticking their tongues out like babies, coyotes and black bears, came out in the bright moonlight to sniff at us. They were curious, and we were out of place. What must we have looked like to the multiplicate eyes of the tarantula? When the snake licked our pocket of air, did it taste our incertitude? Did it learn something about us that we ourselves did not yet know?
We came to an arroyo, and he cried. We had never seen him cry before, and it worried us. This channel, he said, was carved by water. But where is the water now? He cried so hard we thought we meant to fill it all by himself. But his tears disappeared instantly in the dust.
Our nights were now cold and dry, so we learned to set fires by snapping our fingers over brushwood. We taught ourselves to gut a cactus pad as easily as a tuna, without pricking our fingers. We began to recognize the girl’s tracks in the dirt along the trails of the curious animals. We were discovering there were places in the world where no one could hide, and nothing could be hidden.
There were times when he walked far away from us so that he could not be heard or seen, but no matter how far he walked, we could see his silhouette on the horizon. The name he repeated to himself was carried to us then, wrapped in a whiff of creosote, but we won’t write it here, out of respect for everyone concerned. We let it tumble in our ears, and then sent it off again, on the wind.
***
Sometime later we were on the sea. The land we’d left behind was utterly flat, a sheet of permafrost slightly hairy with grass and pimpled with colorless flowers, but the sea was like a range of granite peaks, and we rode them up and down. In the pilothouse there were two Inupiat sailors, and one smiled back at us with checkerboard teeth as if to say, Don’t worry, the sea is like this always. But the other was frowning so rigidly in his concentration it seemed that, if it were to break for a moment, the boat would be folded summarily up inside the sea.
We stood inside a tangle of ropes, and the freezing spray made fantastical whipped shapes around us. The smiling sailor came to us and pointed where we were headed—Look, he said. Iŋaliq, Imaqłiq. Yesterday Island, Tomorrow Island. But we could not see what he saw hidden in the crease of mist. He said, No time at all, but the other sailor’s face said it would be a long time still. The sea tossed up white birds among the foam and they went past screaming in the wind.
The birds, the wind, the sea—they were too loud for us to talk to each other. But after so long together we’d learned to communicate through a pidgin of hand gestures and richly meaningful spasms of the face. In this manner we agreed that Carlotta and the girl were there, on those islands. We’d caught their scent on the wind.
Later the unsmiling sailor—our darker angel—came to us. Your friend is not well, he said. You should go and see him.
Below deck he was like another pile of noodled rigging. We lifted our canteens to his corrugated lips, but he barely had the strength to drink. We offered him squares of pink blubber, like bubblegum, but he barely had the strength to chew. Once he’d been ravenous, picking boletes and spruce tips out of the woods by the bagful. He’d long since eaten his hunting swans, his monkey. He’d never learned what we’d learned to do: strengthen ourselves on a handful of grass, a plover’s egg.
In our private language we concurred. He hadn’t much time. Once this might have frightened us—what would become of us without him? But it was plain to see by his condition that if he’d sustained us once, he no longer could, and maybe never had. We were sufficient unto ourselves. Weren’t we stronger than we’d ever been? Weren’t our faces handsome, whipped golden by the wind?
Yesterday Island was a gravel hill patched with snow. Across the strait tomorrow’s light pinkly lingered. We stood at the shore and waved goodbye at our sailors, smiling and scowling, scowling and smiling. Our friend was going back with them; he was only cargo now.
At the end, we’d promised him we’d find them. He didn’t ask us to promise to bring them back, and we didn’t. What would we have brought them back to? A crumbling hotbox of waterbugs and English ivy? In our memories, our own houses had been reduced to flat compositions of light and shadow, blocks of color. We were having trouble remembering our professions, the names of our children and wives.
Which is not to say we’d never come back—the world, after all, is round, and the place to which you return is never quite the same as the place you left. For now, there was an ice cave out there somewhere ahead of us, winking with pink light.
We had the sense that, when we found it, the cave would be decorated just like the secret room in the plantation house, with its pink walls and bed hung with fragile lace, its menagerie of pillows. Perhaps the only difference would be that Carlotta would be there, too, sitting in the child’s rocker with crossed legs and a cigarette in her silver holder, like a wand. Perhaps we’d find the girl as we’d found her then, shaking wisdom out of its plastic well. We could hear it even now, the plastic swish of the toy, arriving on the wind.
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Christopher Lee Chilton lives and teaches in New York. His work has appeared in A Public Space, The Masters Review, South Carolina Review, Oyster River Pages, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He can be found in most social grottoes at @grnpointer.