Alice, falling, imagines that the tunnel comes to an end in a heap of sticks and dry leaves. In the instant that her foot touches the first stick, she realizes two things: that the tunnel does not exist, and that she is about to wake up with her head in her sister’s lap. And indeed, already through the black wall she can see a shimmer of sun, the cupboards and maps are growing translucent, she can hear the tinkle of sheep bells in the fields. With a sharp, sudden motion of her mind she banishes the heap of sticks and dry leaves. And as when, in a darkened room, a heavy church or stone bridge becomes airy and impalpable, staining your hand with color as you pass your arm through the magic lantern’s beam of dust-swirling light, so Alice’s foot passes soundlessly through the heap of sticks and dry leaves, and she continues falling. Is it possible, Alice wonders, to resist the tug of the upper world, which even now, as she falls in darkness, entices her to wake? For should she wake, she would find herself on the bank, with itching bones, beside her sister, who will still be reading her book without pictures or conversations. Alice wonders whether it is possible to fall out of the bottom of a dream, into some deeper place. She would like to fall far, very far, so far that she will separate herself forever from the dreamer above, by whose waking she doesn’t wish to be disturbed. Have they anything in common, really? Sooner or later the girl in her sister’s lap will wake and rub her eyes. And in that moment she will sweep away the tunnel walls, the cupboards, the maps, the dark, replacing them with the tree, the book, the sun-dappled shade. But for dream-Alice the tree, the book, the sun-dappled shade are only a trembling and shimmering, a vanishing — for here there are only the hard walls of the tunnel, the solid shelves, the glistening glass jars, the lifted hair, the wind of her slow falling. And who’s to say, Alice thinks to herself, that one’s more a dream than the other? And is it possible, Alice wonders, that she will stop falling only when she releases herself utterly from the upper world, with its flickers of sunlight, its murmur of sheep bells, its green-blue shimmer of field and sky? Then in her toes she will feel the tingle of the end of falling. And with a sense of urgency, as if only now has she begun to fall, Alice bends her mind downward toward the upstreaming dark, looking expectantly at a map showing the Division of English Land by the Peace of 886 A.D. between King Alfred and the Danes, at a shelf on which sits a glass-domed arrangement of artificial leaves and flowers composed of knitting wool stitched over wire frames, at a painting in a carved gilt frame: in a parlor window-nook a woman with her hair parted in the middle is sitting in a maroon armchair with buttoned upholstery and an exposed frame of polished mahogany; in her lap she holds knitting needles and the beginning of a gray shawl, but her hands are idle, she is looking out the window; one gray strand leads to a ball of yarn on the floor, where a black kitten with green eyes and tilted head lifts one paw as if to strike the yarn-ball; the room is dark brown, but sunlight pours through the open window; in the yard stand blossoming apple trees; through the trees we see glimpses of a sun-flooded field; a brown stream, glinting with sunlight, winds like a path into the shimmering distance, vanishes into a dark wood.
THE INVENTION OF ROBERT HERENDEEN
I trace the origin of my perilous gift to an idle morning in the fourth grade. I was seated at my desk before an open geography book with double columns of small print. A gray photograph in one corner showed a banana tree with a sharply focused trunk and high, blurred fruit. In front of me sat Diana Cerino. For a while I studied her complicated black hair and her two raspberry-red barrettes, one of which was tilted at a disturbing angle. I considered how I might go about fixing it without attracting her attention, but already I was losing interest in Diana Cerino’s barrette and in fact her entire existence and was wishing I’d bought one of the pink rubber balls I had seen that morning at Rappoport’s candy store in a shallow box next to the cash register. The box held a tightly packed layer of fifteen identical pink rubber balls arranged in three rows of five. A second layer of eight pink rubber balls rested neatly on the depressions formed by each group of four adjacent balls in the first layer. On the very top, where there was room for three more balls, sat a single pink rubber ball, king of the mountain. The balls cost fifteen cents apiece and I had exactly fifteen cents in my pocket but I had needed time to make up my mind. Now my desire for the unbought ball made me tense and irritable. The minute hand of the big round clock prepared for its jump but did not jump. I sometimes wondered about those clocks. Did time just stop during those suspended moments and then pass in a rush? Was an hour a kind of corpse that sat up with a grin once a minute, only to collapse again with its arms folded on its chest? Was my entire life going to consist of blank stretches of deadness punctuated by feverish rushes? The pink rubber ball would have sat very nicely on the pencil trough between my yellow pencil and the inkwell. Desperately I desired that ball. I saw its precise shade of dark pink, the hairbreadth raised line that encircled the ball and divided it exactly in two, the black, stamped star. I could smell a faint pink rubbery aroma, I felt a bursting sensation in my brain, and there, seated in my pencil trough between my yellow pencil and the inkwell…Ghostly and translucent, it seemed to be trembling slightly. I could see the dim glow of the overhead lights at the top of its smooth pink roundness, shading to darker pink toward the bottom. A peachlike pink bloom dusted the surface. Already my palm tingled in anticipation — but the minute hand jumped, Diana Cerino creaked in her seat, the phantom ball rolled from the desk, dropped to the floor, bounced silently away…
My name is Robert Herendeen. But really, should I continue? And here let me say that I begin this report against the grain of my own better nature, for I’ve never cared for the confessional tone so dear to our contemporary romantics. If in the course of this rigorous record I happen to bring forth my own feelings, it is I hope never for their own sake but solely for the sake of those other phenomena which I propose to examine in the clear light of — the clear light of! — and which, even now, when I look back on them — but this sentence is already quite long enough.
I was a precocious dreamer. At the age of one I lay in my crib and saw forest paths winding among fat trees full of cupboards and stairways. At five I imagined detailed houses with manypaned windows and precise fireplaces, all of which mocked the conventional squares with rectangle roofs that alone my childish fingers could manage. Yes, even then I was aware of the painful rift between the vivid images my mind created and the mediocre drawings, clay figures, and stories that I brought to birth in the material world — always to the hysterical praise of some aunt or schoolteacher, who would raise her clasped hands to her throat in an ecstasy of admiration. In the second grade I imagined a story that would fill many volumes and take up an entire shelf in the library, but somehow I never progressed beyond the first chapter. I invented wonderful toys that I never knew how to embody in actual wood or metal. One day in the fourth grade I saw on my desk a pink rubber ball but did not yet understand its meaning. I was very good at making detailed maps of South America and Australia, though I was reproached for my tendency to insert an eccentric twist of coastline here, a little green island just over there. I was well liked by my classmates and received A in everything, but my sense of secret failure was so sharp that I felt stunned with sorrow.
With the onset of adolescence my powers of imagination, so lively and varied during childhood, took a conventional turn. My sexual fantasies were precise, obsessive, and inaccurate. I was particularly fond of imagining the slow, the very slow, the dreamily slow raising of a dark wool skirt or light summer dress to reveal pastel underpants molding themselves to disturbing bulges. I imagined that girls were quite smooth under there, like rubber dolls, until one day a schoolmate with a beet-colored birthmark on his jaw carefully unfolded a wrinkled photograph. After that I imagined prodigious growths, exuberant and impossible burgeonings. In high school I amused myself by mentally removing the skirts and slips of girls who stood writing on the blackboard. I waited for them to turn, to look at the entire class seated in suspenseful silence, to begin to realize…but they never did, those brazen girls, they just brushed the chalk from their fingers and ambled back to their seats with that little tick-tock motion of hips as if nothing had happened. One evening in the winter of senior year I placed my right hand on the bare upper thigh beneath the charcoal-gray skirt of Carol Edmondston. She looked thoughtful, as if she were trying to remember an address. That spring I took up oil painting without success and planned with a friend a long summer trip that never materialized.