‘You’ve wings, Timothy!’ He tossed the boy light as thistles. ‘Wings, Timothy: fly!’ Faces wheeled under. Darkness rotated. The house blew away. Timothy felt breezelike. He flapped his arms. Einar’s fingers caught and threw him once more to the ceiling. The ceiling rushed down like a charred wall. ‘Fly, Timothy!’ shouted Einar, loud and deep. ‘Fly with wings! Wings!’
He felt an exquisite ecstasy in his shoulder blades, as if roots grew, burst to explode and blossom into new, moist membrane. He babbled wild stuff; again Einar hurled him high.
The autumn wind broke in a tide on the house, rain crashed down, shaking the beams, causing chandeliers to tilt their enraged candle lights. And the one hundred relatives peered out from every black, enchanted room, circling inward, all shapes and sizes, to where Einar balanced the child like a baton in the roaring spaces.
‘Enough!’ shouted Einar, at last.
Timothy, deposited on the floor timbers, exaltedly, exhaustedly fell against Uncle Einar, sobbing happily. ‘Uncle, uncle, uncle!’
‘Was it good, flying? Eh, Timothy?’ said Uncle Einar, bending down, patting Timothy’s head. ‘Good, good.’
It was coming toward dawn. Most had arrived and were ready to bed down for the daylight, sleep motionlessly with no sound until the following sunset, when they would shout out of their mahogany boxes for the revelry.
Uncle Einar, followed by dozens of others, moved toward the cellar. Mother directed them downward to the crowded row on row of highly polished boxes. Einar, his wings like sea-green tarpaulins tented behind him, moved with a curious whistling down the passageway: where his wings touched they made a sound of drumheads gently beaten.
Upstairs, Timothy lay wearily thinking, trying to like the darkness. There was so much you could do in darkness that people couldn’t criticize you for, because they never saw you. He did like the night, but it was a qualified liking: sometimes there was so much night he cried out in rebellion.
In the cellar, mahogany doors sealed downward, drawn in by pale hands. In corners, certain relatives circled three times to lie, heads on paws, eyelids shut. The sun rose. There was a sleeping.
Sunset. The revel exploded like a bat nest struck full, shrieking out, fluttering, spreading. Box doors banged wide. Steps rushed up from cellar damp. More late guests, kicking on front and back portals, were admitted.
It rained, and sodden visitors laid their capes, their water-pelleted hats, their sprinkled veils upon Timothy who bore them to a closet. The rooms were crowd-packed. The laughter of one cousin, shot from one room, angled off the wall of another, ricocheted, banked, and returned to Timothy’s ears from a fourth room, accurate and cynical.
A mouse ran across the floor.
‘I know you, Niece Leibersrouter!’ exclaimed Father, around him but not to him. The dozens of towering people pressed in against him, elbowed him, ignored him.
Finally, he turned and slipped away up the stairs.
He called softly. ‘Cecy. Where are you now, Cecy?’
She waited a long while before answering. ‘In the Imperial Valley,’ she murmured faintly. ‘Beside the Salton Sea, near the mud pots and the steam and the quiet. I’m inside a farmer’s wife. I’m sitting on a front porch. I can make her move if I want, or do anything or think anything. The sun’s going down.’
‘What’s it like, Cecy?’
‘You can hear the mud pots hissing,’ she said, slowly, as if speaking in a church. ‘Little gray heads of steam push up the mud like bald men rising in the thick syrup, head first, out in the boiling channels. The gray heads rip like rubber fabric, collapse with noises like wet lips moving. And feathery plumes of steam escape from the ripped tissue. And there is a smell of deep sulphurous burning and old times. The dinosaur has been abroiling here ten million years.’
‘Is he done yet, Cecy?’
The mouse spiraled three women’s feet and vanished into a corner. Moments later a beautiful woman rose up out of nothing and stood in the corner, smiling her white smile at them all.
Something huddled against the flooded pane of the kitchen window. It sighed and wept and tapped continually, pressed against the glass, but Timothy could make nothing of it, he saw nothing. In imagination he was outside staring in. The rain was on him, the wind at him, and the taperdotted darkness inside was inviting. Waltzes were being danced: tall thin figures pirouetted to outlandish music. Stars of light flickered off lifted bottles; small clods of earth crumbled from casques, and a spider fell and went silently legging over the floor.
Timothy shivered. He was inside the house again. Mother was calling him to run here, run there, help, serve, out to the kitchen now, fetch this, fetch that, bring the plates, heap the food – on and on – the party happened.
‘Yes, he’s done. Quite done,’ Cecy’s calm sleeper’s lips turned up. The languid words fell slowly from her shaping mouth. ‘Inside this woman’s skull I am, looking out, watching the sea that does not move, and is so quiet it makes you afraid. I sit on the porch and wait for my husband to come home. Occasionally, a fish leaps, falls back, starlight edging it. The valley, the sea, the few cars, the wooden porch, my rocking chair, myself, the silence.’
‘What now, Cecy?’
‘I’m getting up from my rocking chair,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m walking off the porch, toward the mud pots. Planes fly over, like primordial birds. Then it is quiet, so quiet.’
‘How long will you stay inside her, Cecy?’
‘Until I’ve listened and looked and felt enough: until I’ve changed her life some way. I’m walking off the porch and along the wooden boards. My feet knock on the planks, tiredly, slowly.’
‘And now?’
‘Now the sulphur fumes are all around me. I stare at the bubbles as they break and smooth. A bird darts by my temple, shrieking. Suddenly I am in the bird and fly away! And as I fly, inside my new small glass-bead eyes I see a woman below me, on a boardwalk, take one two three steps forward into the mud pots. I hear a sound as of a boulder plunged into molten depths. I keep flying, circle back. I see a white hand, like a spider, wriggle and disappear into the gray lava pool. The lava seals over. Now I’m flying home, swift, swift, swift!’
Something clapped hard against the window. Timothy started.
Cecy flicked her eyes wide, bright, full, happy, exhilarated.
‘Now I’m home!’ she said.
After a pause, Timothy ventured. ‘The Homecoming’s on. And everybody’s here.’
‘Then why are you upstairs?’ She took his hand. ‘Well, ask me.’ She smiled slyly. ‘Ask me what you came to ask.’
‘I didn’t come to ask anything,’ he said. ‘Well, almost nothing. Well – oh, Cecy!’ It came from him in one long rapid flow. ‘I want to do something at the party to make them look at me, something to make me good as them, something to make me belong, but there’s nothing I can do and I feel funny and, well. I thought you might …’
‘I might,’ she said, closing her eyes, smiling inwardly. ‘Stand up straight. Stand very still.’ He obeyed. ‘Now, shut your eyes and blank out your thought.’
He stood very straight and thought of nothing, or at least thought of thinking nothing.
She sighed. ‘Shall we go downstairs now, Timothy?’ Like a hand into a glove, Cecy was within him.
‘Look everybody!’ Timothy held the glass of warm red liquid. He held up the glass so that the whole house turned to watch him. Aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters!
He drank it straight down.
He