“Sorry,” I said.
“Iza okay.”
The camera was a necessity. I couldn’t rely on her to comprehend what she was being sent to examine, much less convey it to me. Ideally I would have asked Jerry to do it—he’s smarter, and would do it much more quickly in exchange for the bottle in my pocket—but it would have taken too long to find him. There are just too many bars to choose from. This way was imperfect, but ultimately faster.
“There’s an open window on the second floor. Do you see it?” I asked.
“Iza see.”
“Okay. Good luck.”
She buzzed off. One might think that even if the three-and-a-half inch pixie was difficult to see, the slate gray micro-camera flitting across the street would be obvious, but as I said, pixies are very fast. Not even owls bother with them. I lost sight of her myself and I knew to look. I still stood there for a few minutes, looking for some definite indication she’d made it to the window, but getting none, I moved on.
* * *
A pixie saved my life once, back in the first century AD. Of course, we didn’t call it that back then. We didn’t call it anything back then, because the Roman calendar was still in vogue. (Every time I come across a new calendar, I have this bizarre need to go back and figure out when everything happened in my life according to that calendar. It’s a bit anal, but I have a whole lot of free time. And between the Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Egyptian, early Christian, Islamic, Julian, and Gregorian calendars—among others—I had to do this quite a bit. My personal favorite calendar was one used by a small equatorial African tribe, which held that every day was Tuesday. Inaccurate, but very convenient.)
I was living in a small harbor town called Herculaneum, on the Bay of Naples. The whole area was a vacation spot for wealthy Romans, sort of an ancient equivalent of the Hamptons.
I liked it there. It was warm and breezy and pleasant, and I didn’t have to do any fishing, something I’d grown tired of. I worked as a gardener, of sorts. Farmer, really, which I’m pretty good at. (Most jobs I’ve had have been variations on hunter-gatherer and farmer. I was one of the first to say “Hey, if we grow our own food, we won’t have to hunt it down all the time.” Mostly, I was just tired of moving around constantly, but you have to admit it was a pretty good idea.) I was working for a fat old Roman named Adolphus. He was a retired prelate and acted like one, but he gave me room and board, appreciated the yield from the modest garden I tended, and otherwise left me alone, which was about all one could ask for.
I had been having a problem with my olive tree. I’d spent a couple of years nursing the thing to health after the last caretaker had nearly killed it by not watering it enough (olive trees need a ton of water) and this particular summer was supposed to bear the fruits of my success. But while it did produce healthier olives than before, the yield was still low. It was frustrating as all Hades. I was beginning to think maybe the tree was suffering from some sort of root disease, but that sort of thing usually manifests itself in the bark somewhere and I saw no evidence of that. It was baffling.
It took half the summer before I considered perhaps the problem wasn’t with the tree at all. Perhaps I had a vermin problem. Despite the difficulty of imagining a rat climbing the tree and dangling off a branch to prey on my olives, it was the only thing that made any sense.
Intent on solving the puzzle, at the next full moon I camped out at the edge of the garden—motionless, hidden beneath a sackcloth—and I waited.
Shortly after the moon reached its zenith, I caught some movement in the tree. Mind you, I didn’t see anything there, but the leaves on one of the branches twitched and an olive fell. A few seconds later, another branch jerked and another olive fell. Still, I didn’t see anyone or anything. I’d have thought a ghost was responsible, except there’s no such thing.
Unwilling to sit around and watch the whole tree being denuded before me, I sprang to my feet wielding a broom I’d brought for just this occasion, and went at the tree swinging.
It is a known fact that most creatures will run in the face of a well-swung broom. Even some larger creatures, like tigers. Honest. But instead of frightening whatever-it-was away, I just annoyed it.
“Hey!”
I stopped swinging, as evidently the tree had suddenly gained the power of speech.
“Almost hit!” The pixie hovered in front of my face and pointed at me accusingly.
“Oh. Uh, sorry,” I said. This was the first time I’d seen a pixie, but I had heard of them before, so I wasn’t completely stunned at the sight of one.
“Okay,” she said, then flitted to the ground and picked up one of the olives, which she proceeded to eat. This is what I mean by naive. Any other creature, when facing a human swinging a broom might think, “The human is trying to hit me with the broom. Perhaps I should flee.” A pixie thinks, “He was trying to brush the dust out of the air and didn’t see me.”
“Hey, stop that,” I protested.
“You want?” She offered me the olive. “Is good.”
“No, I mean stop eating the olives from this tree.”
“Is good,” she repeated, taking another bite.
“Yes, I know it’s good. It’s my tree. That’s why I want you to stop taking all the olives from it.”
“Silly.” She continued eating.
“No, not silly. Please don’t.” I repeated, “It’s my tree.”
“Not your tree. Ground’s tree. Tree’s tree. Tree’s fruit.” Munch, munch, munch. It was exasperating.
“I grew tree,” I tried to explain. You ever notice how your syntax changes when you’re talking to an idiot? “Tree is for me.”
She frowned. “Tree is for you?”
“Yes, tree is for me.”
“Silly.”
“No, not silly.” I was ready to take another shot at her with the broom.
“Silly. Moon for you?”
“No, the moon is for everyone,” I said.
“Tree is for everyone.”
Pixies, the first communists. I decided to change tactics. “Do you like the fruit?”
“Good fruit.”
“Is there anything else you like to eat?”
She thought about it. “Mushrooms.”
“You like mushrooms?”
“I like.”
“Better than olives?”
“Okay.” That might have been a yes. Hard to tell.
“If I got you some mushrooms,” I asked, “would you stop eating the olives?”
She ran through her options carefully. “You have mushrooms?”
“I can get mushrooms.”
“Okay.”
“We have a deal?” I asked.
“Deal.”
“What is your name?”
“Win.”
“My name is Antony.”
And that’s how I made friends with a wild pixie. Every night I’d leave out a plate of mushrooms I’d either bought in the market or picked myself, and she left the olive tree alone. Every now and then I’d hang out in the garden and strike up a conversation with her. Once I got used to the interesting syntax and the Edenesque world view, it became a fairly easy matter, and by the end of the summer I even felt like I’d made a friend.
You can never have too many friends. They especially come in handy in bad times, like on days you discover that you’re living at the base of an active volcano.
* * *
I’ve seen my share of volcanoes, mostly from a distance, which is how you want to see one in case you’re wondering. The closest I’d ever gotten to one—up until that day in Herculaneum—was during the Minoan empire. I was working on the island of Crete as a fish merchant when a massive volcano on a nearby island—it’s called Santorini now; we called it Thera back in the day—basically wrecked the whole region. I mean wrecked. Earthquakes, showers of ash, and this nasty junk called pumice. It killed thousands of fish—which put me out of a job—and took down the Minoans almost completely. Plato even wrote about it, although he called the island Atlantis. (Between you and me, Plato was a hack. All that crap about higher forms and caves? He was drunk when he wrote it. I know. I was there. And Aristotle? Seriously obsessive-compulsive.) After that experience, I swore I’d never set up shop anywhere near an active volcano ever again. Nonetheless, sixteen hundred years later there I was at the base of Mount Vesuvius, which nobody even knew was a volcano. My own fault, I guess, for trusting mortals to check that sort of thing.