“I like spying,” says Asthma.
“She spies on you!” cries Pea Pod, sloppily sucking foam from the bottom of her glass with a straw. And then, as the earth heaves under me, she adds: “She’s a peep peep, peep peep, peeping Tom” to the tune of “Sh-Boom.”
On the way home, Goldie, looking flushed and pawed over, asks Asthma what she wants to be when she grows up. Without hesitation she says:
“I want to be a pickpocket.”
“You are one hell of a tease,” says Goldie.
“I want to be a mermaid,” Pea Pod, wearing Wax Lips, whispers incomprehensibly.
“Asthma is speaking cryptically and symbolically,” I say, having regained my composure. “What she is saying is she wants to see the beauties of the world and live her life deeply.” Asthma snorts.
“Since when,” snarls Goldie, “do eight-year-olds need interpreters?”
The Époisses is pungent, it raises a stink. Charter holds his breath and takes a bite. It tastes of the forest floor, mushroom maybe, the underside of a rock. It’s fecund, impossibly rich, and it is good, astonishingly so when eaten with crusty bread and wine. There is also a Maroilles — equally fetid, outrageous, maybe even obscene, delicious. For the first time Charter tastes a Côtes du Rhône. This, he thinks, is the life.
The Époisses thickening his tongue, Billy mumbles: “Tell me more about the — what did you say they were called?”
Bloody hell. . the wine. The wine! Charter can no longer remember.
“The Mannja. . Mannja. .,” Billy struggles.
“The Mannja Fnadr.” Charter recalls it. “Let’s see; welclass="underline" when it thunders — and it thunders often — they strike things together, things like bones or stones. This is done to remind the gods that they, too — the Mannja Fnadr — can make a noise.”
“And when they die?”
“They say when it’s time to die, the gods pull them up to the sky by the neck with something like a fishhook.”
Billy roars with laughter. Charter joins him and for a moment they are both once again overcome with hilarity. But just as quickly Charter is sickened by this laughter. He feels he has betrayed — and how absurd this is! — these people, the Mannja Fnadr, whom he has invented! He thinks he must come up at once with a transcendent vision. He wants the Mannja Fnadr to impress Billy. He wants them to forgive him for his banalities, his facile mocking of their “savage” state!
“And the soul?” Billy asks, as if reading his mind. “What do they say of the soul?”
“They say. . they say we each have a bird within us. A bird of breath, a bird of fire. Longing for. . release.” Billy grows quiet all at once and his gaze clouds over.
“Longing,” Billy says. “Yes. For release. Yes. Yes! That’s it, isn’t it! What we all—”
“I never told you what Mannja Fnadr means,” Charter continues. “It means the first ones here. And they may well be. The first ones to come; the first ones with sinew in the soul.”
“Such a notion, Charter: sinew in the soul. Why that’s downright wonderful!”
“It also means: first sprouting or, if I understand correctly, first budding of the initial impulse.”
“My god! My god!” Billy rises, agitated, and begins to pace. Earnestly he says: “I sometimes wonder, cannot help but wonder, what if we — yes our entire species — are the first budding, the first and only, Charter! And what if we’ve. . missed the boat?”
The early evening has moved closer to the night. In this way, eating and speaking together, they live the hours. In a brief week’s time, on such a night as this, Billy will ask Charter: “Tell me something of your father’s death. You carry it awfully close to your heart, I can tell. You said your mother had gone far too soon, but peacefully, but what of your father?”
Charter will not see this coming and he will be knocked off balance. What had happened to his father had been terrible. Charter could not tell Billy how he had run away, been homeless, a scavenger, living under porches, in cabinets stocked with dead mammals floating in formaldehyde — all that. How he had returned one day to find his father on the floor, how his father had been dead well over a week, how he had built a good fire in the middle of the house, how that fire had brought it all down, everything down to ashes. Instead he will say: “A long illness. A long and terrible illness.” Which in its way was true.
It is late. Outside, Dr. Ash is wandering in her yard. “It’s all wrapped up!” she shouts, startling them. “Wrapped up and posted!”
“I have no child,” Billy says. “The house, as you know, belongs to the college, but everything in it, what I have in the bank, well — it will all go to you. Do not protest. I have thought this over carefully. I have thought of little else for some days now.”
After Billy goes up to bed, Charter returns to the porch. Wearing a towel and barefoot, Dr. Ash is not far, her voice more or less carried by the breeze. Dearest. . she murmurs. Dearest. . my dear heart. There is a good breeze moving through the leaves and as it lifts the night is replete with voices. Dearest, she says. Dear heart. . my dearest heart. He hears the cat, the crickets, the owl, the fleet passage of something or other; he sails the night on a sea of sound. Dr. Ash says: I shall make an inventory—and off she goes.
For a time hers is the only light remaining. Everyone is on their backs adrift in the night. As he sits there alone on the porch, things continue to spill past like smoke — the wood, after all, is close at hand. A fox perhaps, or hedgehog. The Circle is now theirs. He imagines this must be a relief. Their beautiful unhindered nights, the air alive with bats and fireflies, crickets, moths, things with fur, owls.
But then he catches her scent; it is Asthma, Asthma breathing just behind the screen.
“Brightfellow!” she whispers. “Dr. Ash is scratching around in the cat box!”
“No! No!” Charter leaps to his feet, startled. Horrified. “That can’t be!”
“It could be true, though.”
“Don’t upset me like that, Asthma.”
“Blackie fell asleep on the couch.”
“Go put a blanket on her, Asthma, dear. It’s a chilly night.” This appears to pain her. But as much as he adores, yes, adores, her proximity, he is unsettled by this unexpected intimacy. Panic rises within him. So he says, “I’m turning in.”
“Good night, Goodfellow,” Asthma breathes, her nose pressed to the screen. “Good night, gadabout.”
But Charter does not turn in. And now, alone on the porch in the dark, he is dismayed that he sent her away! Asthma, right there behind the screen, a breath away, gleaming! Asthma! Her breath a secret writing on the air. She surges in his mind’s eye, tucked into a bed littered with animals, crayons, books, her pajamas buzzing with planets, moons, stars. Her window as dark as the ink of squids, the deepest recess of deepest space.
He realizes for the first time — how has this escaped him? — that the houses on the Circle are all the same! Except for the way they are placed at odd angles, each with a different approach. The houses orbit the Circle, as it were, the one tugging at the other. The weather all around them ebbing and rising — a network of sighs and bewilderments.
And their windows are like eyes.