Читать книгу The Sorrow of Elves - Brian Bouldrey - Страница 6

New Life

And then what happened? Youth, power, bravery, yes. But first, all of his long muscles, the ones in his arms and legs, they flex in his body. A real pick-me-up. But the ones that dilate, around the heart, the tiny ones in the pupils of his eye, his very sphincter, these all dilate, for what are these but ring-shaped bundles of long muscles, pulling tight. How funny, that muscles can flex to relax. “The heart dilates,” Walace says out loud as the buzzing comes to his ear and a cough comes from his lungs, taking on the extra cargo in his blood stream. But though it his heart he last thinks of for a while, it is his eyes that jiggle in his skull, as if somebody has pulled back the shades too quickly. He lies back on his bed and lets the rush rush. He wishes he had the brains or power to take his clothes off.

Cal stands at the foot of the stairs. Who knows how long he has stood there. Who knows how long Walace Weiss has dilated. Hours. Days. Years.

“Uh-oh,” says Cal, which makes Walace get off the bed, “Our professor has gone down the habit hole!”

“Stop calling me professor,” says Walace, who does not need to teach at the college any more. He trundles down the stairs without falling. “And no, I haven’t.”

But the truth is, Walace is glad that Cal’s ball cap had burned before he slammed, because he might not have said, “Your cap is on fire” now. Not because he is mean, not really. It is just that after Walace’s heart opens, he does not go down any rabbit hole. He is always here, here where he is, except that his power seems to have been placed at the top of a tower, captive, like one of the elf maidens from his novels. In fact, this is the plot of his second novel, The Pleasure of the Elves, which we all have read, even Cal, who praised it for having some colorful pigments of the imagination.

From the tower of his body, eyes all pupil, Walace can see everything. He can see when Cal’s baseball cap is on fire, but now, for some reason, he would be unable to say, “Your cap is on fire.” His dilated mind wants him to say such things, but some other person or army inside him, a knight dressed in black, or a dark lady with spells, keeps his mouth from speaking. He can only see, not do.

And he can see even more than what is there. He feels so creative, he could write ten books, if he could just find his good writing pen. That is his own quest as a hero—to find a way to break out of this tower, find a pen, and write a new story for the first time in twelve years.

Perhaps, he thinks, being in the kitchen will feel like coming down from the tower. Cal is calling him. That helps. But the moment he gets to the kitchen, Cal walks past him and heads upstairs. “Where are you going?” Walace asks. But he knows. Cal is going to the drug attic. In a room over the garage, Cal has set up his magic engine, the great lab where household things turn into potions.

“I have some clients coming today,” says Cal. “And I’ve got work to do.”

“Have you been able to fix my computer yet?” asked Walace, who sometimes sees his broken computer as the only thing that stops the new novel from getting done.

Cal shakes his head. “Rome wasn’t burned in a day.” Walace would not bother Cal with this, except it was Cal, on his first day living here, who removed nearly every program on that computer, for fear of spies in the apps and cams, until it was nearly nothing but a lit screen and an off switch. Even then, Cal asked that Walace keep the screen covered with a heavy blanket. He’d fix it up good. It was on his to-do list. Until then, Walace could write his novel on notepads, like they did in the Days of Shivery.

It has been more than a month since Cal moved in. Cal’s girlfriend, Wendy, who reads all of Walace’s books, had thrown Cal out. Cal was sorry about that. He hoped Wendy might keep him in line, but she told Cal that she was not his mommy. Also, Cal did not like to be pinned down to just one girl.

Also, he had started a pretty bad fire in Wendy’s tool shed. She had made it into a little office where she could write poems. When Cal’s lab blast destroyed all of her verse and also sucked all the air from the windowless shed and choked her old cat, poor Syd, to death, that was the end of their true love. When Walace, her hero, took Cal in, she was a little surprised. But just a little. “Frankly, it explains a lot,” she had said, oddly, to Walace when he came to pick up Cal in his dented Maserati.