Cyavana! thinks Charter as he runs. Cyavana! Cloaked in earth and swarming with ants, his eyes blazing. . Vanderloon writes: Cyavana in perfect disguise and isolation, relentlessly transgressive as he gazes upon the world. His looking is so like a hurricane in its intensity, it sends the world reeling, and when that world comes to rest it is no longer the same. It is irretrievably altered.
Back at Billy’s, Charter has taken up position in the shadows, the binoculars fixed to Asthma’s window. Dressed in a sheet, a peacock feather held to her temple with a barrette, she has enchanted herself and wheels around the tabletop like one possessed, setting up what appears to be a parade.
Vanderloon divides mankind into two constants: the ones who know how to play, are full of mirth and fellow feeling, and the ones who are killjoys and combustible. Play, he writes, is a powerful form of magic — sometimes white, sometimes black. But always it is born of invention and intuition. Play is about becoming human, just as it is also about becoming a lion, a tugboat, a galloping stallion. The hallway that leads away from the child’s room and into the depths of the house is a river, a glacier, a bridge to the moon.
And now, the moment — and oh! it is prodigious! — leaps into wonderment; Asthma is making it snow. She is sowing fistfuls of silver confetti across the mirror lake, the woods, the park, the barbershop and Sphynx, the brass pyramid that — before it fell to the floor — was a cigarette lighter. Charter feels this snow touch his hands and face and knows the world is sacred. Space and time have dissolved, the window glass has dissolved. Charter and Asthma breathe the same air. Jenny beside them, using her scissors and glue.
He knows he will never get closer to life, that this moment is as close as he will get. The snow falls, star by star.
The smells of supper rise from the kitchen. Rich smells from a world light-years away. The radio is on and stupidly he thinks its sound travels at the speed of sound.
As Charter and Billy eat supper, Asthma talks to her toys. She says: “One understands animals. One understands because One is an animal. I know your hearts, my beloveds, and I know your minds. Because I, too, have an animal mind. Just the other day my intelligent friend Mr. Brightfellow said as much. Animals need a forest and they need a jungle. They need a varied and healthy diet, and a large number of bees are on their way, should arrive any minute, and they shall take over the bakery.”
She ducks under the table and pulls out a white cardboard box. The box contains two dozen Chinese bees made of gauze and painted cotton. They have bright bead eyes and their little legs and feet are wire.
One by one she takes the bees out of their box and places them in front of the bakery, in rows of six. Then she introduces them to the cheering crowd, all up to their knees, bellies, necks, wings in snow. But someone — who can it be? — begins to make a rumpus. He fears bees! He loathes bees! They are not animals! They fly around with daggers!
“Who dares speak such nonsense?” Asthma demands that the heckler show himself. Who else could it be but the eternally grinning crocodile, who is forever sitting on a barrel when everyone else is walking around (except for the ducks, who cannot walk but remain swimming night and day). Asthma plucks him from the crowd and sets him down in front of the bees.
“Tell the crocodile why you have come all this way to celebrate First Snow and stay here with us forever and ever!” The bees begin to buzz and to hum. (If you looked very closely, you would see that each carries a tiny musical instrument — a harmonica, zither, xylophone, castanets, and so on. One holds a baton.)
“Honey!” the bees sing. “Bee cake. Royal jelly!” The bees sing in harmony. Their music prestissimo!
That night, as Charter lies awake, Dr. Ash prowls her yard. “I am losing my hair,” she weeps quietly. “I am losing my mind.” The breeze carries her voice directly to him. Charter likes to think this world of his is just one in an infinite set of worlds, each unique, some darker than others, some brimming with light. (He wants access to such a world!) Because these worlds are material, and because matter is driven to transform itself — just as a fox is driven to bite, just as a dreamy boy is driven to dream high dreams. . Once a world begins anything can happen.
He considers Asthma, as he always does. She is uniquely beautiful and strange, mutable, unlike any other in this world or any other; he thinks that she will never reappear once her time is over, or if she does, she will be unrecognizable.
“I had a tail once!” She had said this so merrily! Perhaps there exists a parallel world in which another version of Asthma has kept her tail! A girl driven to thinking in riddles, who navigates the air, rising and falling like tumbleweed. He imagines a gilled girl, a celestial girl, a girl made of sound, a girl whose ribs cage the light.
The universe is immeasurable and so is a child’s promise. Immeasurable. Today she wore a blouse printed with sea horses. She skipped down the middle of the street as the air billowed above her and he stood at the kitchen sink, spellbound. And now, alone in his study, her room still and dark, he is as lonely as he has ever been. He wonders if and when he will once more sit beside her, her very own Brightfellow! Brightfellow, she has named him. He backs away and falls onto the bed, having eaten a meal of impossible implications: not only meat and potatoes, but gravy and Parker House rolls — having paid his way with a fantastic tale of a swamp people who sleep and fish among the roots of trees; who milk the stars for answers to questions small and large; who dream of serpents; who know nothing of debt, of success, or even of failure; whose only punishment is silence; who see musical notation in the rotation of the planets; who know nothing of insomnia but instead sleep like hens. Whose infants are all born with yellow hair.
The room is uncannily still. Just as he begins to careen into sleep, Dr. Ash’s voice rises and for an instant he hangs suspended between two worlds.
“Ah!” She says it loudly. “Rats.”
Just as sleep fully claims him, he idly wonders if his study might be made into a camera obscura, Asthma’s window views magnified and projected onto his back wall. But why dream ways of seeing her if he has now entered so effortlessly into her world? Why not simply stroll past her yard again tomorrow?
That night he sleeps as does the clam inside its shell. One would need a knife to pry him open.
Meanwhile, Billy files his nails at the sink. Before Charter’s arrival, he was in free fall. Now he bustles around with purpose. And Charter is brilliant, unexpectedly entertaining. What was it he had said? They sleep and fish among the roots of trees. They spend their lives in and around the water and never drown. That many are born albino. . how mysterious! How marvelous!
But. . what is that sound out by the Circle? Ah! It is Dr. Ash. What can possibly be wrong with her? Billy inspects his nails. They are perfect. But liver spots compromise the backs of his hands, hands that make him think of his wife. He is appalled that he had once touched her with pleasure. What could he possibly have been thinking? Better to caress an eel in the dark.
Outside, an owl whispers through the trees. And then everything is still, everyone sleeps. . but not, not quite. Before the world goes silent, he hears Dr. Ash standing at her living room window and speaking. She is speaking to her house plant. “Why are you so green?” she asks. “Are you from Mars?” And she laughs.