Chapter 3
7 June, 1941 CE
Oxford, England
"Lady Harris?" She heard the words as if she was far under water. The name drifted past, paling to an echo. She barely recognized herself by that name, or any other these days. Cold washed over the exposed skin on her arms and she instinctively drew the cape closer around her. It was more a work of art than a garment. Iridescent fabric flickered between emerald, blue, and deep blue-green. The cape was layered with cascading feathers, peacock at the hem and raven at the shoulders. Underneath it a simple, red silk shift skimmed her breasts and full hips, brushing the worn parquet floor of the ballroom of the Randolph Hotel. She was barefoot—an eccentricity afforded an old lady.
Frieda stared at the painting in front of her as unnerved as she had been nearly a year ago. The placard read: ATU VIII | ADJUSTMENT | MAJOR ARCANA. She’d been standing in front of the near-finished canvas when the eyes of the goddess she had painted shut flew open under her brush. Gray, intelligent, judging eyes. Not Maat, as Aleister proclaimed, but another goddess determined to make herself known.
"Lady Harris, please, might I have a moment?" The reporter asked a third time.
The water drained from the ballroom through the cracks between the squares of parquet. Frieda heard the reporter's voice behind her and tried to collect herself. She well understood that though the seventy-eight paintings were complete, the work she was asked to do as Lady Harris had barely begun. Get press for the paintings; raise funds for the printing; keep Aleister's name out of the whole thing until it was too late for investors to balk. It was damned inconvenient the way she had lost control of who occupied her body and mind, and when it would happen. It was nearly driving her mad. If she could change her OTO initiation name, maybe she would.
Soror Tzaba, sister host. Frieda had been living a literal translation of that name since the day she awoke covered in ash and found the Princess of Disks finished, propped on its easel. Perfect, and also not quite right. The color of skin—milky white. Auburn-plaited hair, instead of curly and black. The pregnant stomach. She had been unable to will herself to change these details, feeling as if something physically took over her brush when she attempted revisions. She’d decided the princess had a will of her own and left it at that. (Wrote as much to Aleister, in her own defense.) What had begun as an extension of her skrying journeys, something she initiated and could somewhat control, had become more.
The rest of the paintings had come in a fury, often completed without any memory of her part. When she’d started the major arcana, the figures in them looked out through the eyes. She had hated doing their faces for just that reason. She tried to make them look away, or painted the eyes shut, but they swiveled to look at her, plead with her, as if the beings they represented were trapped behind the canvas in some silent, flat, world and wanted out.
The High Priestesses’ eyes had met her gaze, beaming out from her stony face, skin pale as quartz, and it had felt lovely. Divine even. Frieda knew she was safe and protected. The web the priestess cast caught Frieda in it, making her feel purposeful, energized. Electric. But ATU VIII had been different. Those eyes stared out at her, cold, sizing her up. Then the mouth opened and spoke. “My name is Athena. You would be wise not to forget it.”
Frieda had been frightened for the first time since starting the cards, no, terrified. She of course knew the myths of Athena yet none of those stories could explain the hostility emanating from the painting. At times since she had felt as if Athena was inside her. Taking her over, intervening in her work and her life. The cape she wore had come anonymously to her door this morning by messenger. A gift. She knew Athena had sent it, and she was expected to wear it. Frieda was afraid what might happen if she didn’t. Other beings, goddesses she supposed, had been using her as their sister host too. They were lustful, needy creatures that entered and left as they pleased. (Most of them didn’t even speak English.) They caused her no end of embarrassment. Frieda had no notion how to close the door.
Frieda turned toward the reporter on her bare toes and as she did the cape swirled behind her, the raven's feathers at her shoulders flared. She hoped to stay present—herself.
The man, who was just a boy really, maybe twenty years old, stopped mid-sentence. His mouth hung open. Eyes shifted between Frieda and the painting. One eyebrow shot up.
“The cape.” Frieda, offered. “Beautiful, isn’t it? A gift from a friend.” She nodded toward the painting behind her, could feel Athena’s eyes on her back. “The model wanted to keep it. Of course I wouldn’t part with it for all the gold in the world.” She wasn’t sure what Athena’s game was, but she was ready to play.
“Right-o. Well . . . my editor . . . sorry . . . Oxford Sentinel, said you had asked he send someone over, get the scoop on these, um, paintings? Playing cards?” He read from a copy of the catalogue he pulled from beneath his notepad, stammering through the strange words “the TAROT Book of Thoth?”
“Yes, of course, let’s get some fresh air.” Frieda took the boy by the arm, leading him away from Athena’s self-portrait. She could feel her body start to, light up, was the best way she could describe it, when a goddess was trying to take control. It made her feel powerful, giddy and, frankly, aroused. She fought the feeling as best she could. This poor boy could be her grandson/he is a beautiful specimen.
“Stop it!”
The reporter stopped. “Did I do something wrong?” he asked, confused.
“No, of course not,” Frieda covered. Had she said “stop it” out loud? Damn. This was going to be difficult/fun. “Let’s do keep going, walk through the gardens. It’s stuffy in here.” Her fingers slid up and down his arm.
They strolled through the hall where the paintings glowed like stained glass windows. The hotel had agreed to hang the show for a considerable fee, which Lady Harris paid along with the price of printing the catalogue. She used her position and network of wealthy friends to rally a nice crowd and the attention of the more reputable papers. While she was considered a talented painter (it was true her study with Rudolph Steiner's theory of color had given her work an ethereal quality most couldn't achieve), her association with Aleister Crowley these last few years had done damage she would need to repair. This boy would write the story required to ensure the tarot deck would be printed and distributed by a good publishing house—one with international reach.
"Is it true Aleister Crowley is raving mad?" The boy hadn't yet learned the fine art of warming his source to his subject, she observed.
“Well that's that,” Frieda sighed. Her attempts to keep Aleister's involvement with the cards a secret had failed. She pressed the boy on down the hall and out into the night. She was intent on getting outside as she could feel what she had come to know was Crowley's own presence emanating like a foul vapor from some of the paintings. (The Ace of Disks had howled at her like a beast as she passed.) She didn't need his opinion on what she would do. She gentled the reporter through the doors.
The evening was clear and crisp for this time of year, the stars danced above them. As if the world was not at war with itself. As if the people and the gods were not dying. As if on this night, this woman and boy might do something about it. As she stroked the hairs on his arm, her nipples hardened beneath the silk dress and she considered taking the boy as a lover.
“Aleister then—the question of his madness—of course, let's begin there.”
The pair found a small conservatory, all glass and scrolled iron, lined with benches inside along its eight sides. She turned to allow the boy to take off her cape. As he was well-raised he did so without hesitation. Laid it to the side. They chose a bench with arms worked into the shape of a pair of white swans and sat down.
"Yes." She said.
He raised that eyebrow again and turned to face her straight on.
He stammered, "Wha . . . what do you mean?”
She felt bad for him. It was clear he was inexperienced at his task, hadn’t expected such a blunt answer. Perhaps it would be fun to teach him some things.
“Aleister is mad as a hatter, yet I'll ask you to please refer to him always as Master Crowley. And that mad-hatter part you won’t print.”
He blushed, perhaps from her chastisement. Perhaps from the heat vibrating between them.
"Of course."
She watched with amusement as he pulled the edge of her cape from the arm of the bench to cover his unfortunate erection. How awful for him. Turned on by an old lady. He had no idea how old.
While the goddess inside her toyed with the boy, Frieda fought to get out what she had to say, having in fact been talking for several minutes already on the subject of Aleister’s worldview. " . . . as is true for so many men of his generation, we Europeans having lost the taste for initiating our boys into manhood with the well, flair of the African natives. Aleister looked to his peers and together they threw out the book on the Church and their own fathers; who had all gone missing one way or another . . ." She rambled on for the next several minutes (or was it hours?), desperately trying to keep her hands off him.
". . . skrying." Now Frieda paused. How much was too much, too far? The boy looked bored. She couldn't afford to reveal her own role in the occult orders of London and Paris, given the rumors, which were far worse than the truth. Satan worship, human sacrifice, even cannibalism! Rubbish. She could use this young man and the credibility of his esteemed editor, an acquaintance of Percy’s that she would need to work on as well, to win their tarot deck a place in the annals. It wasn't a matter of profit or pride but a sacred imperative that the cards survive. She felt this as surely as if it was chiseled in stone and carried down from the mount. The reporter, as dark-haired and beautiful as the Prince of Earth (she had nearly dropped the sable brush the day that one smiled at her from the canvas; the princes flirted with her, but stayed locked in the paint), would write what she needed if only she could get him to concentrate on his task. She wasn't practiced yet in asking whatever goddess had got into her to step back and the wild scent of the unnamed deity steamed from Frieda’s pores like an animal in heat, even while Frieda was past her own fertile days by a decade. She tried a new tactic.
"What's your name?"
"Benjamin Williston?” he said, sounding a bit scared and a lot confused.
"Well, Benjamin," she said, nodding at the notebook on the bench, "this may take some time to explain. And more pencil than you have got there . . .”
“Ben,” he said.
“Pardon me?”
“Call me Ben, only my mother calls me Benjamin, and pardon me saying so, but you are nothing like my mother.”
“Right, Ben, I'll try to be direct and concise.” Frieda felt control returning. “What have you heard about the OTO?"
"That's a cult, right?"
"No," she sighed, "they are an order, like the Freemasons or Knights of Columbus, they study the occult which is based on the Latin occultare meaning 'secrete', and a frequentative of occulere or 'conceal', based on celare which is 'to hide'." She looked up from his un-moving stub of a pencil to see him staring with his mouth stuck open again. "Darling, please do write this down."
Ben shut his mouth and wrote occult=hide on his pad.
"They devote themselves to understanding the hidden mysteries of the universe, what it means to be human, the ways of the gods."
He scratched human and God on his pad.
Frieda peered at the scratchings. "No, gods. And goddesses too, to be precise." He didn't write that down so Frieda looked up and observed his tongue searching his lips. He appeared earnestly confused.
Even with that ridiculous look on his face the goddess wanted him and reached up a hand to stroke his cheek. Beautiful one, she crooned, long, long ago, in times we simply cannot remember nor imagine, we were one being. Like a perfect glistening bubble floating in light, contented, even while inside storms raged around a peaceful center. One day, the first day, something happened, don't ask me what, causing the bubble to split into two—one and a perfect mirror opposite. The force of the split cast the second bubble far from its twin. In the moment, for now there were moments, when they were still overlapped, precisely by half, a portal was opened and all life spilled forth. And in that bounty the first two bubbles were lost to one another yet were always tethered by a powerful force, like a string or a wave curving back to itself. Desire and pain were born. Longing and grief.
Overcome, quite unexpectedly—not being one for poetry, philosophy, or flowery words—the boy bowed his head and wept in her arms.
Frieda whispered in his hair, "We skry to be one."
He was hard again, and groaned into her neck.
She spread the cape beneath a tree and they both gave in to the strangeness that possessed them.
In the morning, Ben stumbled into the newsroom two hours late. He dropped into his chair behind a small, cluttered tank of a desk with metal drawers that didn't close right, which was painted a no-name color that ruined his mood day after day. He sat at his typewriter and flipped open his pad. Read occult=hide and human and _ _ _ (he couldn't make out what else, smeared as it was). Flicking through the rest of the pages with his thumb, a small black pinfeather, all fluff on a tiny rod, whisked into the air. He caught at the feather as a draft blew it over his head, wincing as he realized how badly his body ached—like a bad hangover, though he hadn’t had one of those in months.
"Bugger," he muttered and propped his elbows on the desk blotter, rubbing his eyes. "What the hell happened last night?"
He glanced toward his editor’s office. What was he supposed to write? He was fuming anyway at having been assigned this society piece. He was supposed to be a war reporter. Boots on the ground. Out in the field. The allied forces were struggling to hold the Germans in Egypt. The British army was fighting alongside the African Army at El Alamein and he was here, stuck in Oxford. The catalogue from last night got his eye. He flipped the pages. These paintings of a bunch of dusty old Egyptian idols was the closest to reporting on the war he was going to get, he thought bitterly. Yet the night had been interesting, to say the least. His fuzzled brain hadn’t yet recalled the half of it.
Ben got himself a cup of coffee; hot, black sludge left over from yesterday’s pot. Sat down and tried to add to the meager notes in his book. The old lady had had a lot to say. That cape was a hoot, boy. He should write about that. Fashion reporter would be his next demotion if he wasn’t careful. Shit. He closed his eyes against the buzzy glare of the bare bulbs strung across the ceiling; they reminded him of little heads in nooses. Shocked at their fate. Last big idea stuck forever in their stupid heads. Sicko. Focus! Crowley. What was his story again? He’d heard the part about fathers gone missing. One way or another Ben’s father and the fathers of his friends had gone missing too. Working through their sons’ childhoods until late hours, when their mothers would send them to bed with soft lips on their foreheads and nothing to tell them when manhood began. Having sex with a girl was definitely part of it, and getting a job and moving out on your own. There was more to it, he knew. He felt this in the pit of his stomach even more so, not less, after he took his best friend's sister to bed.
She had surprised him.
Ben had known Charlotte since they were little kids. He’d loved her every minute. He felt sick to his stomach thinking again about that night last summer when she’d come for the lecture and he drove her home. She’d let him make love to her. No, she had asked him. He thought he had died and gone to heaven. It was both their first times. She’d told him so before they started. Was that why she’d cried? He had been so confused and humiliated. Had he done it wrong? She had seemed like she loved being with him, having him inside her, but as soon as they were done she started crying. Hard. So hard she couldn’t talk except to ask him if he would please just go home.
For the remainder of the summer she avoided his calls. He missed her. Not the sex part, although that was like nothing he could have imagined. He didn’t know he could feel so close to another human being. More close to her than ever before. They’d always been friends. They laughed a lot. She had a sense of humor like his. If they’d talked, he imagined they would have joked over relieving each other of their virginity. Her maidenhead. You didn’t grow up in a town called Maidenhead without a lot of snickers on the topic. It was something they would have shared, just the two of them. He kept it a secret. He might be a reporter, but he knew how to keep his own business his own business. Lots of his buddies ‘got theirs’ that summer so it was topic numero uno of every night out. He just wanted her back. Back, as if he’d ever had her. Too smart for the likes of him probably. Can’t even write one dumb article about dumb tarot cards.
He flipped through the catalogue again. Better get on it before he got yelled at. The booklet fell open to a page with a photo plate of ATU VIII at the top. The one with the lady in the cape. The old lady. The cape. Ben’s eyes flew open at the suddenness of the memory—a train of sensations running over him at full speed ahead. He could smell her, like flowers on fire, taste her, like some kind of savory cream, and feel the heat of her on every part of his skin. He heard his own moans. Looked around and hoped to God he hadn’t done that out loud. That erection was back—painful and pushing against his pants. Bugger, she’d been an old lady, right? She wasn’t though. He remembered her smooth and young as any twenty-year-old co-ed at school, but sexy as hell, not like those girls. He couldn’t help himself. Now he felt worse. He had wanted to tell Charlotte he’d waited for her. Ben felt near tears when the phone on his desk rang. He grabbed the handset, foolishly, thinking it would be Charlotte.
Frieda circulated around the parlor of her friend, Philippa’s, home. She truly detested parties now, yet she needed to raise money for the cards. Percy had grown weary, and wary, of the whole venture and she couldn’t very well tell him how much she’d put out already. Used her allowance each month and more. Borrowed from friends. Well they were in the home stretch now. She could focus on getting the cards published and have an excuse not to pay Crowley another shilling. She understood him, better than anyone else she imagined, and admired him. Still, he did have a way of overstepping boundaries. Frieda glanced nervously out the windows.
“Lovely cape.” Philippa came up behind her, fingering the feathers at the nape. White raven there, in a cunning V. “Couture? Who’s the designer darling, please do share.”
Frieda turned, “A gift. Secret admirer.”
“Probably that doting husband of yours.”
Frieda couldn’t quite decipher the tone. She’d never been astute at decoding the layers of innuendo these women slipped between their words (like icing spread thick between tiers of sponge, changing the taste and texture of the cake in their mouths). This one might be sincerely sweet, with just a wisp of jealousy whisked into the frosting. Frieda and Philippa had been friends a long time. Although it had become social suicide to be on her side when talk turned, and it always turned, often before she was out of earshot, to her latest ‘illness.’ Schizophrenia was the most recent drawing room diagnosis and provoked the most horrified and delighted gasps. It was this freak-show attraction, in fact, that was her best asset right now. Friends of friends of friends crossed Philippa’s threshold to gawk at a safe distance and show off their compassion and their charity, especially in these dark times.
“Art must go on.”
“Percy deserves so much more, poor man.”
“A new game will be just what we need to keep our minds off those Germans.”
“She had better steer clear of my husband, I am telling you now.”
“We’ll be sponsoring that Emperor card, for a generous sum of course. Looks like my William, don’t you think?”
Frieda thanked Philippa, then excused herself. She had best make herself scarce. At the last house-party she had apparently incited a near riot among the husbands, all of them drunk and groping at her like sixteen-year-old boys. Thankfully, Percy had been too busy with the war council to attend these frivolous nights. He would have decked every one of the husbands and then where would she be? It was all she could do to spin the rumors as they got through. She felt bad putting all of the blame on the drunken buffoons, knowing full well that she had been half-occupied by some goddess that night, but she couldn’t tell Percy that!
Despite all of this, the deceit, the dispossession of her own senses, the financial woes, even the war (the atrocities of which hit her very hard, crying in despair a good part of each day), she felt more alive than she ever had. She was driven by a purpose she knew was important, bigger than any and all of this, even though she couldn’t see beyond her own small piece. Paint the cards. Get them printed. Distributed as far across the world as possible. Even Africa. Especially Africa. It didn’t make sense. She was following a faith, even if she was its only disciple. Aleister was part of it too, of course, although she sensed that her path was only crossing his for a moment.
The young reporter walked into the room just then. Surprised he’d come, Frieda hurried over and swept him away before Philippa could greet him, make him a part of her party. No, she had invited Ben Williston for something else.
“You’re here. Good. Come with me upstairs.”
“Wait! No. I didn’t come for that.” Ben squirreled out of her grip. He was slippery. Wet. Raining outside. He shook his hair like a dog.
“I didn’t ask you here for that. Just hush and come with me,” Frieda snapped.
She led him to the bedroom suite Philippa had provided her for the week of the show. Frieda threw the cape on the four-post bed and, while Ben renewed his protest, pulled him out the balcony door. A double chaise lounge filled the terrace where one could read away the afternoon or gaze out over the spectacular gardens, at least when it wasn’t dark and raining. She figured if her hostess or one of the guests should wander in she could throw Ben over the rail. Save her reputation. She smiled at her own little joke.
“Hey, it’s raining out here,” Ben sulked.
“The balcony above us will keep you dry. If I knew you were such a delicate . . .”
“I’m fine. Now, why am I here?”
“First, I wanted to apologize, again. For last night. I wasn’t myself. I think you know that?” Frieda was fishing, watching his face. There, the eyebrow, he’d known it was strange.
“Okay,” He broke. “What the hell was that? Who on God’s green earth are you? What are you? First you’re this old lady, then you’re like some sexpot and we are going at it like rabbits!” He was whispering now, looking around as if the rain had ears. For all Frieda knew, that was not entirely out of the question.
“Not rabbits. Gods and goddesses, as far as I can tell,” Frieda started. “I am going to take a risk here. If you don’t believe me, or do believe me and tell the wrong people, well I will just have to kill you. And I think you know that I can.” She was joking about the last part, but she thought he could take it.
“Here, sit, I have a story for you. One you can’t print, at least not in my lifetime.” Frieda sat on the chaise and patted the cushion beside her.
“How do I know you, we, aren’t gonna . . .” Ben flushed.
“Well, there are no guarantees, actually. I am going to try to explain all of that, and maybe together we can keep things under control. Just like you, I didn’t exactly want us to have sex. But something, um, extraordinary, is going on. It has to do with the tarot cards. And the war.” She’d thrown that last in just to win him over, yet she knew it was true.
Ben hesitated. Glaring at her with crossed arms, he warned, “I have a girlfriend.”
“No, you don’t. And you still need to submit a story. So have a seat, and let’s figure out what you can, and can’t, report.”
Three hours later the rain had stopped. The party-goers had cleared out and the household was asleep. Ben put down his notepad. The tarot card he had pulled out of the crude deck (Frieda had commissioned a photographic set and hand-colored it herself), ATU VI | THE LOVERS, sat between them. Ben reported what he saw. It pictured a wedding. A king with blue-black-blue skin held the hand of a queen with blonde hair and flowing orange robes. Twins, just walking age, one fair-skinned, one dark, crossed arms at their feet. A red lion and a white raven attended the children. Presiding over the marriage loomed a figure in a hooded, red cape, its face obscured by a Möbius strip, which looped endlessly through its outstretched arms.
“What does it mean?” Ben asked.
“I think it means a thousand and one things,” Frieda began. “I’ve never been tutored in reading tarot cards, but I made these, so this is what I believe. I think the picture rearranges itself, just a little, so that at any moment in time it shows the one who has pulled it exactly what they need to see.”
“So I need to see a wedding of an African man and a white woman?” Ben asked, a little bit irritated, a lot confused.
“No,” Frieda laughed, “First, not all dark skinned people are African. Second, you’re looking at it like a reporter. Objective. Literal. You need to see it. Let it breathe. Imagine the picture as a whole story in motion. It’s a part of your story. You have to find yourself in it.”
Ben didn’t get it. All he could think about was Charlotte. He looked at the picture and it was them. The skin color of the man disappeared.
“What are you thinking about?” She asked softly.
“My wife.”
“You don’t have a wife,” Frieda said, smiling.
“No, but I’m going to. And her name is Charlotte.”
Later that night Ben lay in his bed, listening to Carl snore and whimper in his sleep across the room. The guy talked in his sleep too, yelled sometimes. He wondered if Charlotte talked in her sleep. Dreamed about him, like he did her. Probably not, since their one time together had made her cry. Fuck all, he pounded his fists into the mattress. He was an idiot/a prince, a god. Suddenly her voice was in his head. Breath hot in his ear, urging him on. It still didn’t make sense. Ben flushed red to the top of his head. Restless, he turned on his side and curled up in a ball like he did when he was a kid. It had been . . . crazy, insane, he searched for a word to match the sensation of being with her. Frieda had tried to explain. It was all somehow tied to the cards. They told a story about princesses who had lost their princes, and when they found each other again their reunion was sacred, “an act of life, death, and life,” she’d said. That he could relate to. When he had been with Frieda (not Frieda she’d said, a goddess taken over her body—that he still couldn’t believe), right at the peak, he had thought, this is what alive is and at the same moment felt sure his heart would explode in his chest. She had howled. Howled, like wind in a storm. Her eyes were like fire, locked on his, and he had been both terrified and mad with pleasure. Ben grimaced, had he roared? Everything had gone silent then. Utterly still and white for, he didn’t know how long, then he was back, but different. New. Powerful. Invincible.
Ben curled tighter under the thin, scratchy blanket, feeling sick with shame and his want for Charlotte. With her it had been so different. Quiet. Ensconced in her room, like being underwater, just him and her and an ocean, and them at the bottom where no one could find them. He’d told her he loved her while she cried. She told him she loved him too, with her back turned. Ben had an awful thought. Had Charlotte been expecting, wanting, needing the sex to be like it had been with him and Frieda? Had she cried because it wasn’t? And if it wasn’t then he couldn’t be the one for her. Wasn’t the prince she was waiting for.
He thought then again of the farm he dreamed for them; rolling acres of wheat he’d grow from seed, black dirt squinched in his toes. At night, sitting by the fire, she’d laugh, making fun of the black slivers of moon under his fingernails. She’d tell him all about her latest scientific discovery. He’d tease her about loving things she couldn’t see or ever touch with her hands when her husband was right in front of her. Then they’d slide into their ocean and make beautiful babies. A boy and a girl, or a dozen of each. He smiled under his covers. Charlotte was coming to Oxford after Christmas. Carl had told him yesterday. Finished her twelfth form a year early by taking a test. God, she was smart. She would be here. Somehow he would convince her that he was her lost prince. She loved him, she’d said it. He could work with that.
CONSILIENCE
Unification by way of leaps. A jumping together of many, perhaps disjointed (chaotic even), ways of knowing into one. One. One thought. One web. One of which you and me are the strands of silk and the shivers of dew and the light that plays through, white, then fractured into fingerling colors seen and unseen by many kinds of eyes.
Tree. Yes.
(leap) Gatekeeper. Yes.
(leap) Wind Wrestler. Yes.
(leap) Confessor. Yes.
(leap) Transgressor. Yes.
(leap) Myth Maker. Yes.
(leap) Girl. Yes.
(leap) Princess. Yes.
(leap) Goddess. Yes.
(leap) Threat. Yes.
(leap) Savior. Yes.
(leap) Ash.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
To touch khaos in chaos say Yes.
There is this myth, I didn’t make it. Before epochs, Artemis and Athena’s father called his sibling gods and goddesses to a table situated in the north sky. (Hestia is the one sibling not named in this legend.) Around the table many kinds of eyes looked on the universe and decided to slay their parents, the Titans—the first beings birthed of Chaos and Gaia. Including Chronos, in whose absence, time began. Without time, the gods could not foresee what they did. Artemis and Athena can name each of the stars wedded together into the table where the cycle of life, death, life was unwittingly planned.
The professor points to the constellation and calls the whole of it Ara.
12 January, 1942 CE
Oxford
Charlotte sat in the seventh row of the lecture hall, twelfth seat from the aisle. She arrived early for class each day to claim the spot the professor’s eyes always went first when he paused his pacing and looked into the crowd of young women's faces. Charlotte read the plaque hanging on the oiled walnut paneling over the door as she did every day, a motto whose meaning she was sure held a secret significance that would be revealed to her in good time: Donec rursus impleat orbem. "Until it should fill the world again." Her reading on the history of her chosen college had not turned up any answers to what ‘it’ was. But the courses offered to her as a Reader of Physics and Philosophy included Theoretical Arguments of the Birth of the Cosmos, a racy title, even for the ‘undenominational’ bent of the college, given by one Professor Helge Guldbrandsen.
The auditorium was one of the oldest in the Somerville College at Oxford University, ensconced in a hall completed in 1913 to serve the increasing numbers of women seeking degrees. Charlotte looked around. Given the war, surely these girls were serious about their studies, not here to snag a husband from the few men still housed on the campus. Probably not though, she sighed.
Charlotte jumped in her seat when the hot water radiators rattled and banged from the perimeter of the room as if the students were under attack from a forlorn yet earnest battalion of boy-soldiers who hadn't had time to master their weapons. On this frigid morning, the radiators were working double-time. The heat got to Charlotte and she started to sweat. She shrugged the wool cardigan from her shoulders. Tiny sparks crackled and danced between her sweater and blouse as she peeled them apart. A faint, hot smell stained the air. How can steam heat make air so dry?
Charlotte had been drawn to these ironies all of her life and rather than keep them to herself she was more likely to pose them like the opening parry of a fencing match to whatever figure held the front of the room. She gauged their countering move, quickly assigning a label to her opponent—sheep or wolf. By the time she was five, Charlotte had simply worn her parents out. At five years and four months of age, Charlotte was admitted to primary school, the youngest in her class, when the headmistress proved no match for Charlotte's mother who returned each morning with the small, blonde-haired pixie in tow and left her at the door of Miss Dahl's first form room.
Miss Dahl was soon exasperated as well. Nursery rhymes seemed lost on the child. Every time the cow jumped over the moon, young Charlotte's hand shot up over the pile of wriggly small bodies at the feet of her teacher.
“Yes Charlotte?” Her teacher asked, first sincerely eager to engage this young mind, then wearily as the weeks wore on.
“How?” Charlotte asked crisply.
“How what?” Her teacher replied.
“How does a cow jump over a moon?”
“Why, he was so pleased with the cat's fiddling he kicked up his heels and leaped so very high that the moon got right under him.”
The other children laughed. (Some bubbled with exuberance for the dancing, leaping cow and some barked darkly, sensing danger in Charlotte.) Undaunted, she asked how again and again, always in the same parts of the rhymes. (Had someone been paying attention they might have noticed a pattern to her questions. No one did. They all thought her a strange and obstinate child, making fun of the lessons and trying to humiliate poor, pretty Miss Dahl.) One otherwise bright fall morning Miss Dahl smoothed her navy skirt over her knees while her cheeks pinked at Charlotte's impertinence.
“Charlotte, dear,” Miss Dahl cooed. “You may take your questions to the headmistress. Go now, shoo.”
“Yes ma'am.” Charlotte was hopeful that there, in the office with the huge wooden desk and the paintings of gray-headed ladies and men with glasses, looking smart and worldly, someone would answer her properly. Instead she was spanked with a strap and made to sit facing the corner until the mid-day recess. Charlotte picked at a burr that had got wedged in her sock and, away in her head, tipped the point of her nose toward the moon and howled, Arroooooooo. (Raised by wolves, she’d overheard the school secretary say.) Surely the pack that had lost her would find her again.
That afternoon, back home in her room, Charlotte had spread a fistful of crayons out on her flowered coverlet alongside a stack of white paper sheets she'd found in her father's study. She drew a picture of a cow jumping over a moon. On its back rode a small girl with blonde hair. In the next picture the cow had landed back on the ground, while the girl stayed in the sky with the moon and played hide and seek with the stars.
Professor Guldbrandsen was part of her pack, maybe the leader; Charlotte was sure of it when she'd first seen him lecture the summer before last, though he didn't yet seem to recognize her as belonging to him. Despite her strategic position in his line of sight, he hadn't called on Charlotte, or noticed her at all. He also didn't seem to notice the racket from the radiators or the heat rise. (This auditorium had been his domain so long that his body had been fired here like a pot in a kiln. The Professor had built up a resistance to the volatile temperatures and fluctuating humidity. He trod the floors in an elongated figure-eight pattern, wearing the thick yellow varnish straight through to the wood. The workers who sanded and poured a fresh coat every summer grumbled, "What, he thinks he's a racehorse?" as they filled in the track, double thick, and took naps while the varnish set.)
Professor G. lectured on astronomy. Once, in his youth, it was said, he was thought to be a brilliant talent yet had been slowly and quietly demoted to instruct the underclassmen. Now he lectured in the women's colleges on the dynamic properties of the cosmos.
While he paced and recounted the approved theories and known names of the celestial bodies to cohorts of teenagers who alternately sweated and shivered but rarely, if ever, asked an interesting question, he was defying the very boundaries of space and time. The slap slap slap of his oiled loafers on the smothered oak planks and the cadence of his own voice, singing the Greek names and estimated distance from Earth of the array of stars in the constellation Ara, and the additional heat generated from his pacing and breath, created a slit in the billowing folds of the universe through which Professor G slipped.
Charlotte waved her arm in the air and shouted, as it was known Professor G had become quite deaf, "Professor, how is it that Ara is one of Ptolemy's original constellations and the Greeks and even the Chinese have a unique name for every primary star within its boundary, yet we Brits call them all Ara?"
Charlotte's question shot toward him like an arrow then bounced clean off.
Helge was visiting a new galaxy today, the red clouds of the spiral nebula were stunning, morphing into dragon wraiths, spitting fire and twisting their serpentine necks together in a territorial battle. When the dragons returned to their dens, only their glittering eyes could be seen in the sky, piercing the smoky veil of their breath.
Charlotte watched the professor pause mid-step as if he felt the sharp point of her question strike its target, then the hard sole of his brown loafer hit the worn boards and he continued his talk. She wasn't put off. Charlotte's more tender feelings had hardened like the soles of those loafers by the principal's leather straps, and cold children's backs at recess, and the helplessness of her parents against her questions. Her intellect remained pliable and soft, which is not to say she was stupid, quite the opposite. She thought of most people as sheep, bunched together much of the time, scared for their lives. She had come here, to the place where the people named the names of the shapes and others renamed and reshaped them, in hopes someone would, at last, answer her questions. That someone had to be Professor Guldbrandsen.
This question about the constellation Ara wasn't the whole of what she needed to know, but it was a start. She could be patient, find a way to get his attention. She lowered her hand and began drawing on her notebook, the same picture she always made when she was sad or bored or thinking or not thinking at all.
As she drew, her mind turned to Ben. Irritated, she forced her thoughts back to the stars. It was no use. There he was. His mouth on hers under her bedspread. His hand on her arm, her first day on campus. Meeting her at the train. She hadn’t asked him. Leading her to the college building, lugging her trunk. Chattering away. He was nervous, she could see. So was she because she had come here for a reason and it wasn’t him. Wasn’t love and all that. Not yet. Charlotte eyed the professor. She needed a teacher. A real one.
10 February, 1942 CE
Oxford
Gert Guldbrandsen tidied her small flat, smoothing freshly-pressed linen doilies over the worn arms of the sofa and dusting the four figurines perched on a glass shelf. Each statuette was a blonde, pink-cheeked child on its own little porcelain island. Three girls all tended goats, though each was a bit different; one sat in a patch of painted blue flowers, the goat curled beside her with its head in her lap, another girl rested one pudgy hand on the head of her kid and raised the other toward the distance, as if beckoning to a friend. The figurines were reminders of Gert and her sisters, the youngest dead and the other an ocean away. It was just she and her brother left here. She picked up the last figurine, the boy, and kissed the top of its head, whispering, "Happy Birthday, dear Helge,” then placed the statuette back in its place.
Gert wasn't one to kiss or hug her real brother. They had all been raised with a great deal of affection but love was expressed between the Guldbrandsen siblings by attentiveness, listening to one another and asking after whatever might be in the other's mind. She supposed this was her doing. She'd had to finish raising them all when their parents died. Gert had been nineteen. Now she was eighty-two.
Gertie had wanted to bake Helge the traditional Norwegian cake her mother had made them on their birthdays each year, before they had moved to England. Even when the whole country was starving, because of the Swedes (Gert overheard her father say and it stuck in her, adding to the pains in her stomach already) her mother managed to save or trade for the eggs, sugar, and cream. Gert was having the same trouble getting the ingredients the pastry needed. There was no use if the eggs weren't fresh; the light, spongy texture came from the meringue made from whipping the egg whites, straight from the nest, into a foaming froth, then adding fine sugar very slowly until the batter stood up in glossy peaks. The war had made a good meringue impossible. Gert made due. She looked forward to the evening's festivities celebrating Helge's birthday. She and Helge and their special guest could share tales of the things they missed from their homeland. Seventy-seven stories. That was the tradition she had started with her siblings on their birthdays, to help them treasure the gift of life and remember their parents. A memory for every year you had lived.
Gert peered out into the night. It was snowing again. What a flurry they'd had this year. Strange, she thought. Of course everything was strange now. In what possible circumstance could she have imagined a king coming to dinner?
The moon lit the street more brightly than if the lamps had been on. Even though their town wasn't a target for bombing, they kept blackout conditions at night. An accord had been reached to avoid destroying the universities, at least that was the rumor—figuring perhaps that strong body, not intellect, won wars. Accords had been breached. In some cities and villages, she’d heard said, ash fell from the sky like snowflakes. The rumors of its source were too terrible to consider. Gert tried to put it out of her mind, at least for tonight.
She busied herself arranging the table. Beside Helge’s plate she placed a velvet bag filled with seventy-seven coins. She smiled anticipating his surprise. His joy at the collection of coins she’d assembled. Gert had used the very last of her savings to purchase coins from all over the world. Her favorites were, of course, a few skilling just as she remembered from when they were children. Gert had taken to giving each child one coin for every year, awarded with the telling of each birthday story. They could spend the money however they chose. Kristine, the youngest, surprised them just before bed on her tenth birthday, after the last piece of cake was in crumbs on the plate, she’d begged the family to ride into town. Helge had harnessed their single horse to the cart and off they rode. Gert remembered with a parent’s pride how Kristine had made Helge stop when she saw a figure, hunched in a doorway or under a bridge, cocooned in a tent made of cardboard and blankets. She gave all ten coins away in the streets.
Kristine had died the next winter of tuberculosis. On each of her birthdays after, they told her stories then gave out coins to the poor. A mixture of sadness and joy rushed through Gert’s tiny body. Soon, very soon, she would know what had happened to Kristine after she died. The best kept secret in the cosmos would be a mystery no more.
The first story she would share tonight would be of the day Helge was born. That's how they started the stories every year; Gert telling the special sister or brother the tale of their arrival on Earth, then lighting the candles on the cake. After the candles were blown out and the sponge and sweet cream passed around, the stories would come. Not in any order, and anyone could do the telling. The subject must be a celebration of the birthday boy or girl. Gert was a wonderful storyteller; she'd got that from her father. The birth stories were mythic, mysterious, and entirely true.
Another story that would surely be told is the day Helge had been helping their father put a fresh coat of paint on their house in Norway. Helge was eight. This was to be the last coat of paint on the house that hung on the edge of the sea. As they mixed the fresh-dug ochre with cod oil to make the red paint, the father told his son about a crevasse he'd found running through the woods like a river, a day's walk from their house. Each time he had gone there in the past year to hunt elk; the crevasse had grown wider, like the mouth of a deranged monster gulping down hearty portions of forest. Their father realized their village would be cut off from the mainland by the hunger of the beast. When he'd last stepped up to the ridge the beast had said, give me your children and my hunger will be sated.
Helge's father shared this story with his son and no one else, telling him as they brushed broad red swaths of paint on the house, "One cannot fight the land, nor live in the sea or the air. We will move inland and deny this beast its meal." Helge felt proud and brave when, six months later, they boarded up the red house and moved to England.
After the cliff sheared off and dropped into the sea, after the tidal wave the avalanche caused hurtled back at the land, growing higher than the cliff had been, touching the stars it was said, and dragged four villages to the bottom of the sea, after their parents were killed, crushed when their train derailed as they traveled back to Norway to see how they could help, Helge told the story of painting the red house to his sisters. It was his thirteenth birthday. They wanted not to believe him, but Gert said they must always believe one another, no matter what. His story within a story was mythic, terrifying, and entirely true.
They had lived in the old sea captain’s house outside of Oxford then, all together. Gert wished Helge would give up the house now, it was humongous and falling apart. She knew why he stayed in the bizarre place built by a man who had once loved the ocean, in the middle of farmland far from town. The sisters and brother made up stories about how such a house came to be here, dressing up in old clothes they found in trunks in the attic and playacting scenes between the sea captain and his wife and their four children—Helge always played the captain, of course, and the son. It was the widow's walk. This was the reason he stayed and the main reason she wished he would move in with her, or nearer in town at least to a faculty house or flat.
The widow's walk topped the four-story house. The house listed beneath it like a ship in a storm, and every night Helge climbed the ladder and paced no matter the weather. He was an odd duck, she thought. So was she, she supposed. Neither of them had married or had children. Both absorbed in their work, both bearing themselves like folk of the north. It would be a rare treat to spend this evening with the man who was King of Norway. King Haakon had been living in exile in London since the Germans took the ports and he and Helge had met somehow, become friends. She got word of Helge's special birthday (double sevens) to the king through a cousin who was sometimes a guest at the royal residence. She was delighted when he replied, and hoped the king would arrive before her brother, so they could hide and yell, Surprise!
Helge was late for his own birthday party. The moonlit snow held him captive on the top of his house. He stood very still and listened to the silence, watching the silvery show. For once, for once, he didn't feel the urge to make the three strides back and forth, back and forth, like the weight on a pendulum hung from the sky, until he slipped through the folds of space and time.
It happened first on the night their uncle came to tell them their parents had died. The girls had sat together in the front parlor and Helge had run up the endless flights of stairs to the attic. A maritime telescope fitted with brass, as long as he was tall, leaned in the corner, a remnant of the sea captain’s former life. Helge wrestled the telescope up the narrow ladder that led to the widow's walk. He had no idea, looking back, how he'd had the strength. At thirteen Helge was laughably skinny and cerebral. That night, Helge aimed the lens of the telescope north and tried to see where the train had run off its tracks. Tried to see their red house with its fresh wash of paint and the goats that his sisters tended, where they stood on the grass-covered roof of their shed. Tried to see the auroras wavering wetly in the sky like God's sheets hung to dry. Tried to see the faces of his mother and dad. Instead he saw stars. Great swirling masses of them, whirling about in all kinds of colors, then he was falling.
Helge's feet remained planted on the roof boards, yet he felt himself falling through a watery plane of lights that sparked where he crossed it. He slid through the hills and valleys of ripple after ripple; everything was iridescent blue-blue-green and smelled like spring ice. He continued falling, more slowly now, and found he could turn around. He wasn't in a body exactly; his presence made the colors shift where he passed and he could see and hear and smell more acutely than any other time he could recall. He smiled. He grinned larger than when he'd first truly seen the auroras and contemplated what they might mean. He had been perhaps five or six and until then the auroras had simply been part of the landscape like the food that he ate and water he drank and the house they lived in and the skinny goats that plucked at the grass in the short summer season.
That day Helge had been playing alone on the shore, having three sisters and no other boys in the village quite his age who could also tolerate his strange ways. The boy played alone quite a lot. He didn't mind it at all; he preferred it. Helge was skipping rocks over the water when a reflection on the surface of the sea made him look up. Out of the utter dark—it was the season of dark days—a towering door in the sky opened a tiny crack to a room with a light on; a sheet of shimmering haze wafted through the slit, furling unhurriedly, pulsing with pent up energy as it went. It occurred to Helge that he was watching an aurora being born and the sight set the notion in his young brain, deep out of the way, that there are rents in the air through which one can pass if one puts his mind to it.
That first night Helge fell through the door in the sky seemed like a dream that he couldn't repeat. The base elements of fresh grief, innocent youth, and a celestial anomaly caught in its act through a powerful lens made an alchemic reaction. The boy shimmered like gold that had caught the sun's eye as he gazed through the scope and fell through the stars.
Helge stood still, letting the snowflakes cover his face with wet kisses as they melted on his cheeks and the ridge of his eyebrows. He sensed that there was something more important than his travels in the galaxies about to start. It was his birthday, after all. Seventy-seven stories of his life and a new year of possibility lay before him. Perhaps tonight he would tell Gert about his interstellar expeditions. Though she was a staunch rationalist—a professor herself, a master of earth sciences—she had promised to always believe him. Helge took one more look across the dark fields that surrounded his house, opened the door in the floor and slipped down the ladder.
28 February, 1942 CE
Oxford
Donec rursus impleat orbem. Charlotte's attention dropped from the plaque to the professor sliding along his track. Until it should fill the world again. She would ask him this too. What is it? The word tapped at her brain like a woodpecker with a rhythmic insistence, drilling through her layers of thought taptaptaptaptaptap reaching a part that sent a jolt down her spine making her shift in her seat. It, it, it. Where had it gone? Why had it gone from the world and what, exactly were they to do until it returned? Charlotte eyed the Professor and resolved that today she would get through to him somehow, make him see her. She had come here for him. It hadn't been easy; though the tumblers inside the intricate locks that kept an Oxford education out of reach for most had fallen quickly with each step Charlotte had taken. Sit for her twelfth form examination a year ahead; finish in the top four percent of girls in Great Britain; convince her parents to let her go; hide her obsessions, including with the professor, from the panel who conducted her admissions interviews in hallowed, gothic halls and severe, clipped voices. The war helped. A general urgency prevailed to spirit the country’s promising youth out of the ruins and into the institutions draped with an imagined cloak of normalcy, continuity, and untouchability.
Charlotte watched as he moved in his track; the professor's long body held firm at the same angle at which one might draw an arrow on the blackboard with chalk to demonstrate the steep upward trend of the price of a stock, or the population of an invasive plant in a pond as it multiplied exponentially. His legs, thin as yearling pines, swung in evenly metered strides while his arms obeyed no rules of order one could fathom from watching. On one pass across the glossy floor he might stroke his own hair with his left hand, urging the escaped strands back into their hold, while his right hand disappeared into the pocket of his creased flannel slacks. At the turn, one length taking nine footfalls to make, he might draw both arms along his leaning torso, cupping his hands in the small of his back. At times an arm stuck up in the air with one finger extended like an aerial testing the wind and at others both arms scissored at his sides, bent at the elbow, making him out like a cross-country skier from the waist up. His students at first found his movements queer and alarming—the top starched and pointed and the bottom tick-tocking as predictably as a clock while the arms defied logic—but soon heeded the advice of upperclassmen to keep their attention on his voice.
The professor's voice was inky, the blue of night sky where it hung over glaciers, and spread wide through the room as he spoke—filling the space slowly like water fills a bowl, rising over the girls’ heads until the sound came in echoes. When the listeners were thus lulled, his arms became characters and landscapes and weather. Helge Guldbrandsen was a storyteller, like his sister, like his father had been. He always began his lectures with statistics as sharp-edged and preciously honed as gemstones, which for some students of a particular ear was a serenade, a seduction, while for others the coordinates and density calculations of stars and the relative distance of galaxies and mutability of gases made their mouths go dry as a pile of gravel. Charlotte was of the former inclination, fully submerged by the Professor's third or fourth word, while the other young ladies in her class, also quite brilliant in their own chosen fields—literature, anthropology, sociology—shuffled and bleated softly in their seats until, after nine footfalls times six or seven or eight, the professor would say the words, once, there was a story and no one to tell it, the stars knew the story—we only needed to see . . . and the numbers and lines became polar bears and snowstorms and doors in the sky that one might open if one had the key from under the pillow of the queen or the nest of the dragon.
Most of his students, young women, and the young men in previous years too, left his classes bewildered and soothed, then scored top marks on their exams and found top jobs in their fields or returned to family farms and led the rest of their lives, contented, with the sun on their shoulders and black, airy soil on their soles. Back in the day, Professor G's courses had always had a waiting list for which students bartered with one another and cajoled their advisors to move up a space. Helge hardly noticed, lost as he was in his own work. By the time Charlotte received her acceptance letter and her schedule, Professor Guldbrandsen's course had plenty of open seats, yet he was more unreachable than ever.
“Once, there was a story . . .” He began.
Charlotte tried again. Stood up this time. Waved him down. The man was impossible, already gone. She felt invisible. As if he didn’t see her, or hear her questions at all. How was that possible? She asked intelligent questions, ones she knew he could answer, probably, why didn’t he want to? Maybe she was too late. Maybe he’d gone dodgy since summer, like some of the girls said. Maybe he was going deaf. But blind too? She was practically jumping up and down like a lunatic. Charlotte decided to get bold.
Quite against the student handbook, and certainly the unwritten and even more severe code for young women out on their own, Charlotte followed Professor G off campus. That February afternoon a wet, heavy snow had started at four. Charlotte counted the gongs from the clock tower while she walked, timing herself to arrive at the north campus gate just behind the professor. The air was gray and biting as wool. The snowflakes seemed to catch and snag on the bristly air as they fell. She caught sight of the professor, a diagonal slash of black hat and overcoat and boots as he skimmed through the slush. He seems made for this stuff, Charlotte thought. His skin was the same gray as the evening light. Without his clothes I might not have seen him at all. In the classroom he seemed a hundred years old, craggy and mystic like a medieval wizard, but here, outdoors, in the cold and dark light, he might have been a young Nordic prince from the fairytales she’d loved as a girl. Charlotte felt her face turn hot and wiped the puddles of ruined snowflakes off her cheeks with her muffler. She followed the figure with great difficulty, he with his long, sleigh-runner slide and her hopping more than walking over piles of last week's snow and ice—defiled with the muck of the streets and the soot in the air from the overworked chimneys.
Charlotte found a rhythm, trotting behind Professor G in the parallel troughs he'd cut through the streets. She was surprised when they came out of the business district surrounding the campus into a flight of low, industrial buildings instead of the modest, if not shabby, string of houses most of the faculty lived in. They had walked the good part of an hour. Charlotte was tired and her feet were numb and she couldn't stop following the odd man who knew the names of the stars she had drawn for as long as she could remember. He seemed to know more and she wanted to learn everything. She had kept at least two blocks between them though he never once turned his head from the path he followed.
The professor disappeared behind a large building and when Charlotte arrived on the spot he was nowhere to be seen. The structure marked the edge of the district; beyond its looming hulk there was nothing Charlotte could see through the snow. A field maybe. She knew farms circled the town. She looked for a door. Charlotte sensed Professor G had gone in and besides she was cold. The whole place was built of corrugated metal. She ran her hand over the grooves to steady herself as she walked around looking for a way inside. The building stood at least three stories high with no windows she could make out. The set of doors she crossed now were as wide and as tall as a house. Trucks? Something huge must drive in and out yet the doors faced the open field behind her, not the street. She turned one more rippling corner of the massive shed and came to a normal-sized door with an ordinary knob. She hesitated only a moment, if she was intruding on some secret lair, a hidden part of the professor's private life, she would apologize; for now, her feet needed to thaw and her cheeks ached. She twisted the knob and the door opened easily, spilling clean white light onto the dirty snow. Charlotte slipped inside, closing the door quietly behind her.
Charlotte instantly felt warmer; her socks grew soggy in her boots and melting snow dripped off her hat down her nose. She peeled off her gloves and unwound her scarf. She unbuttoned her coat to the air, which felt hot on her skin all the way through the layers. The space was brilliantly lit so that she could see the four outside walls and the steel trusses far overhead. Airplanes littered the floor. She caught her breath and the hairs stood up on the back of her damp neck. Piloting a plane was the one thing she wanted to do more than anything and she'd never told a soul. She forgot the professor altogether.
Walking toward the nearest plane, she thought how much larger its front prop was than she had imagined. One blade was bent. The plane sat on two long pontoons that stuck out in front of the nose a good way. A seaplane. The pontoons were curved on the bottom so that the plane resembled a huge rocking horse. Charlotte hadn't liked her own rocking horse as a child, frustrated with all of that motion and energy spent when, in the end, the girl and the horse hadn’t gone anywhere.
Someone had wedged cement bricks under the rockers and Charlotte climbed up. She pulled down on one of the blades with all of her strength thinking that it would spin for her like the shiny foil star at the top of a pinwheel. It didn't budge. Smiling at her own foolishness (something rare for Charlotte, both the smiling and the foolishness), she jumped back down. Walking past the nose of the craft and ducking under the wing, the cone of the plane's body came into view. Charlotte stopped cold. On the side of the plane was a cross, painted in black thick lines, shadowed by white, and on the tail, where it stuck up in the air like a flag that bent to no wind in the world, the symbol that had come to mean evil and death vibrated in the light; a black swastika. She knew from a book her father had given her that the symbol meant love and light in many cultures before the Nazi's had taken it over. Changed the story from good to evil.
Charlotte ground her teeth hard to hold back the terror that flooded her body and shook her all over. Her mind fought the seizure, they're not here, she told herself. I am safe. The tremors instantly became anger instead, and then rage. So many men she’d known growing up, missing or dead. Rumors of trains, ghettos, camps. The silence that surrounded these spare words when her father’s friends gathered in his study scared her more than anything; that invisible, dark matter had a life of its own.
Charlotte found herself on her knees, choking on the lump in her throat, holding herself tight and rocking violently back and forth.
Long, ropy fingers gripped her shoulder and slowed her gently until she was still.
“Miss, Charlotte?”
She recognized the voice, even as he spoke her name, a word she hadn’t heard from him, much as she’d tried. Charlotte's sobs subsided into whuffs and her shoulders softened under the professor's touch.
“What is this?” She asked, so quiet, through gritted teeth.
“It's mine.”
She turned on him sharply, shaking off his grip and leaping to her feet in one fluid motion. She squared her shoulders and thrust out her chin. Her eyes looked ready to destroy him. He stood straight-backed, the first time she'd seen him at his full height, and he towered over her.
“What?” She asked in disbelief.
“Not what you think.”
“No? How do I know? What is this?” She asked the second time, emphasizing each word, not in dark wonder and grief but as a warrior of justice.
“I found it. Hidden in a gorge, covered with brush, about a year ago.”
Charlotte didn't move one muscle. Her mind churned over the possibilities and these words she had committed to memory for her twelfth form exams: We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible. Fully recovered from the emotional outbursts of the last minutes, Charlotte was once again the critical calculator, “like a machine,” her mother had often said, chafing against her daughter's cutting edges. Ptolemy's principle presided over the competing stories of Nazi in hiding as astronomy professor and astronomy professor, finder and thief of fallen warship. For an instant these thoughts were joined by the image in the book her father had given her when she turned five; the Norse prince, with a nose like a beak, leans in against a bitter wind, his piercing blue eyes straight ahead. He sluices through white drifts on magicked snowshoes, tipped like the bows of twin Viking ships. One arm reaches forward, planting a pole in the ground to pull his weight and the other cocks back, gripping a sheathed sword at its hilt, ready to slay the monstrous beings who will surely rise up between him and his lost kingdom. The prince's hair is blonde and long, streaming behind him. His shield hangs on his shoulder looming large and golden and round; the moon having dropped from the star-dappled sky for the thrill of the ride.
Charlotte knew the professor was lying. She looked into Helge's glittering eyes. All of her questions fell away. She decided.
“Teach me to fly.”
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