Theodora Goss's Blog, page 63

Thea in the Moon

Tonight, I was going to write a blog post that addressed some of the issues I had brought up in my post on David Foster Wallace. It was going to be called "Making Believe." But I'll have to write that blog post tomorrow. I'm still working on the chapter I need to send out tonight. I'll probably be working on it for another hour or so. So I don't have time to write a blog post tonight, and honestly, whatever I wrote tonight wouldn't be very good.

Instead, I'm going to post a picture. This is a picture I used to have up on my old website, the old black and white one I created years ago, right around the time I went to Clarion.

I'm posting it because of a sentence I wrote in the blog post "What the Cards Said." Here is the sentence: "This is where you are going: the Moon." That's what Madame Violette said to Thea. So consider this yet another illustration for my story. It's Thea in the Moon, a representation of where she's going, whatever that means.

But it has to do, just a bit, with the blog post I want to write tomorrow, as well. I think that as we go through life, we have to tell stories. At least, I continually find myself telling stories – about where I have been, where I am going. And creating pictures like this one is a way of telling stories. Oblique, enigmatic stories about who I am. I don't know what they mean, of course. But then, I don't know what most of my stories mean when I write them either.

David Foster Wallace

Today, I spent the entire day writing, which looked like this:

No, I was not writing a story. I was working on a dissertation chapter. My dissertation has three chapters, each of which is about a hundred pages long. Because I'm also teaching three classes and writing professionally (I have stories and my Folkroots columns due), it takes me about a month to finish revising each chapter. This is the last chapter that needed to be revised. I will turn it in on Monday, and then I will begin putting the whole thing together. It feels as though, until I finish it, I won't be able to have anything approximating a normal life. It's been so long since I've gone anywhere on weekends, seen a movie or gone to the museum. Oh, I have scattered accounts of going to the museum here and there on this blog, but really taking a weekend off? It's been a long, long time since I've done that. And I feel as though my life, my real life, can't start until this is finished.

But that's not what I want to write about today. What I want to write about is David Foster Wallace.

I've never read his novels, and I'm not sure whether I would like them if I did. But I've read some of his essays, and I've read about Wallace, of course. On Friday, I read a review of The Pale King, the novel he was working on when he committed suicide, in The New York Times.

Here is a general description of it:

"His posthumous unfinished novel, "The Pale King" — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.

"Just as this lumpy but often stirring new novel emerges as a kind of bookend to Infinite Jest, so it demonstrates that being amused to death and bored to death are, in Wallace's view, flip sides of the same coin. Perhaps, he writes, 'dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,' namely the existential knowledge 'that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back.'

"Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find 'second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.'"

The problem is, I don't believe that. Oh, I believe that some of us are sometimes in danger of dying of boredom. I was a corporate lawyer, remember? But I got out of practicing law, left it to the people for whom being a corporate lawyer was not boring. The people who woke up every day wanting to be corporate lawyers. And yes, those people exist, and they are perfectly happy and very good at what they do. (I should make clear that there were aspects of being a corporate lawyer that I enjoyed. But I also knew that it was not what I was supposed to be doing, that the universe had set me another set of challenges. And when you feel like that, as though you're in the wrong place or doing the wrong thing, I believe you have to leave. You have to find where you're supposed to be, what your unique purpose is. What only you can do.)

I don't believe that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces. I suppose we are if you think of life as a materialist? But I've never been able to think about it that way. I've always thought of the universe as having meaning, as being filled with meaning, and of my life as having a purpose. I've always believed in the pattern I describe in Mother Night's house.

And I don't believe happiness consists in living in the moment. If I try to live in the moment – well, that's when I'm bored. I often live anticipating the future, or remembering the past, or doing something else with the moment, in a sense turning it into a story. Not just passively attentive to the moment, but telling myself a story about it, placing it in the context of the past and future. I'm not sure I can explain what I mean here, but perhaps I'll try in another post.

I guess my objection to Wallace's world view is that I see life as at least potentially magical.

This is from later in the review:

"Not surprisingly, a novel about boredom is, more than occasionally, boring. It's impossible to know whether Wallace, had he finished the book, might have decided to pare away such passages, or whether he truly wanted to test the reader's tolerance for tedium — to make us share the misery of his office workers, who come to remind us of the unhappy hero of Joseph Heller's 'Something Happened,' or some of Beckett's bone-weary characters, stuck in a limbo of never-ending waiting and routine.

"Yet at the same time there are some wonderfully evocative sections here that capture the exhausting annoyances of everyday life with digital precision. The sticky, nauseating feeling of traveling on a small, crowded commuter plane, crammed up against 'paunched and blotchy men in double-knit brown suits and tan suits with attaché cases ordered from in-flight catalogs.' Or the suffocating feeling of being stuck on a filthy bus, with ashtrays spilling over with gum and cigarette butts, the air-conditioning 'more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning' than the real thing.

"In this, his most emotionally immediate work, Wallace is on intimate terms with the difficulty of navigating daily life, and he conjures states of mind with the same sorcery he brings to pictorial description. He conveys the gut deep sadness people experience when 'the wing of despair' passes over their lives, and the panic of being a fish 'thrashing in the nets' of one's own obligations, stuck in a miserable job and needing to 'cover the monthly nut.'"

I think that at this point, I know something about the wing of despair. But I find that the way to deal with it is, again, to look at my life and find the pattern. That way, I can often see the events that put me into despair in context, and when I understand the context, I usually feel less despairing about it. And then, I make magic. I decide what I want my story to be and try as hard as I can to make it happen. (That's what I'm doing now, by finishing my dissertation. I want my story to include finishing it and then going on to write all sorts of wonderful things.  Writing it is an adventure in a way, and I think my life has been filled with adventures.  How many people get to do a PhD, go through the hard work of it?  The day after day of writing your analysis, thinking to the edge of your ability?  That is a great adventure.  I want to finish it and to on to all the other adventures that await.)

But I was thinking about Wallace specifically because what I write is so different, is fantasy. I suppose it's fantasy in part because it includes the possibility of magic, which is also the possibility of underlying meaning. That's what the story I'm writing is about, part of a larger story about Mother Night and Mrs. Moth and Miss Gray and Thea and all of my characters. And what it expresses, really, is what I think about the universe, how I think it operates. That it's filled with meaning, but it's up to us to read the cards, to figure out the meaning.

Which, much as I respect Wallace as a writer, is a very different worldview.

Describing the Castle

You can tell how tired I've been getting, because my writing hasn't been particularly good for the last few days. I'll give you some examples from the post called "Meeting Gwen," which I wrote on Wednesday.

First example:

Gwen looked at the Lady of the Lake and said, "Is it safe?"

"I don't see any time ruptures, do you?" said the Lady of the Lake, smiling.

"All right then," said Gwen, smiling back. She came forward and kissed me on both cheeks. "Welcome, Thea. This is like meeting my twin sister, in a way."

Smiling back? I was tired and didn't take the time to think about what Gwen's actual reaction would be. Smiling back is really a placeholder, the sort of thing I would change in revision. It's rather awful, isn't it? I mean, not at all what Gwen would do, and it makes the entire sentence fall flat. My fault for writing while tired, but sometimes I don't have a choice.

What happens is that my brain stops producing interesting images, and then I fall back on standard ones. (I'm writing while tired at the moment, and it's difficult just stringing sentences together.)

How about this: "All right then," said Gwen, still looking concerned. Is that better? After all, Gwen knows that a time rupture would have serious consequences for both her and Thea. She knows they would explode. And yes, I did put the idea of an explosion in there because I thought it was funny.

Second example:

"So, you're me," I said. Could I be jealous of myself from another time? It seemed like a contradiction, yet there it was. And she was dressed better than I was, too. She had on some sort of gauze shirt and a swingy brown skirt that swirled around when she moved. Even when she walked, she looked like she was dancing.

"Yes, she's you," said Morgan, coming through one of the doors. "Rather than repeating that again, can someone tell me what's for lunch?" We were in a sort of hall, with hangings on the walls. It looked medieval, like almost everything else in the castle. There were iron candelabras, a round wooden table with chairs, a chest or two along the walls. Morgan looked exactly the same as the last time I'd seen her: long black hair, dark blue robe embroidered with stars. Like a younger version of Mother Night.

Gauze shirt and swingy brown skirt? I'm dressing Guinevere of Cameliard here. What was I thinking? Honestly, what I was thinking about at the time was a gauzy cream-colored blouse, of some sort of linen, like a peasant blouse. And one of those skirts that are sewn in tiers, so that they really do swing out and make you look like you're dancing when you walk. (I have several of those.) And a belt of gold coins, with maybe some gold bangles on her wrists, some long, swinging gold necklaces. I want Gwen to move and shimmer, because she's supposed to be magical. After all, she's Merlin's great love (although I'm not saying anything more because I don't want to give the story away). And Thea, who is her but in another life, feels inferior, as though she can't live up. After all, she's not a princess or a sorceress, you know?

A hall with hangings, looking medieval. I really fell down here, didn't I? But I just didn't have the energy to describe a proper castle. I should be able to draw on personal experience, because I've been to a lot of proper castles. Hungary is filled with them, from all different eras.

What I imagined when I described the castle was gray stone, one of those castles that come from the medieval era and are actually quite bare. I don't think the Lady of the Lake cares a lot about furniture or decorating. Very high ceilings everywhere, relatively small windows with gothic arches and no glass. The floors are stone as well. Sometimes I think that I would like to live in a space like that, so spare, so clean. But I should at least have imagined the hangings, right? What sorts of hangings are they? I still don't know. Wait – could they have all the images that were on Madame Violette's cards on them? I actually rather like that idea. (And making up Madame Violette's deck of cards made me want to design a deck of cards, for telling fortunes with. I think tarot cards are fun, but wouldn't it be more fun to make up a symbol system of my own?)

Anyway, I didn't do a very good job, did I? It's the tiredness, blame the tiredness. Which is going to continue for a few days.

I promised pictures. Here is your picture for today. I found it when checking the spelling of Guinevere in Wikipedia. (I was pretty sure that I had gotten it wrong, and I was right.)

This is Queen Guinevere's Maying by John Collier, and it's almost exactly the way I imagined Gwen, except that this is a picture of her when she was Queen of England, and in the Castle in the Lake she is just Gwen. She often goes around in ripped jeans and Keds without shoelaces.

And here's what caught my attention at once. Can you see it? It's in the cheekbones and eyes. She really does look rather a lot like Thea.

The Next Few Days

For the next few days, I'm going to be ridiculously busy. And not just that, but ridiculously tired. I have a couple of deadlines, and I'm already not getting enough sleep but will be getting even less. So I can't write blog posts, not even the story I've been writing, which is much easier in some ways than trying to come up with something original, meaning something that doesn't continue on from what I wrote the day before. The story is easy, I know where it's going. But even that is too time-consuming right now.

So I'm not sure what I'll do for the next few day. I think I'll try to write short notes about what I'm doing, and then post pictures. I have a special one for you today, sent to me by Emily Lam, who's commented on this blog several times. It's a sketch she made in her math notebook. Do you recognize what it is? Merlin in the tree, of course. I think it's awesome. (Thank you, Emily!)

Where am I now? It's Thursday, and I have three days of incredible busyness ahead of me. I think I can get through the next three days, right?  I'm not sure what Monday will be like, that may be incredibly busy as well.  Four days at most – I hope. This will get easier. It's just this semester. But it will be over eventually, and then summer will begin. This summer is going to be both easier and incredibly productive. You'll see.

The story will resume next week, unless I find some free time. But in the meantime, bear with me, all right?

And if you want to send me any pictures of the story, my email is tgoss@bu.edu.  Just saying.

Meeting Gwen

The first time I saw Gwen, I thought I was looking into a mirror. At a prettier version of myself.

She didn't wear the glasses that I usually wear for nearsightedness. Her hair was longer and curlier than mine. And she had cute freckles on her nose.  I suppose I would have looked like her if I'd never written term papers on a computer or blow-dried my hair, and had spend my childhood riding horses and running around in the forest instead of going to school.

She was sitting at the table. When we came in, she rose and said, "I made soup and some sandwiches." She looked at me as intently as I was looking at her.

"Gwen, this is Thea Graves," said the Lady of the Lake. "Thea, Guenevere of Cameliard."

Gwen looked at the Lady of the Lake and said, "Is it safe?"

"I don't see any time ruptures, do you?" said the Lady of the Lake, smiling.

"All right then," said Gwen, smiling back. She came forward and kissed me on both cheeks. "Welcome, Thea. This is like meeting my twin sister, in a way."

"I don't understand," I said. "Why do Gwen and I look so much alike? And why was everyone worried about a time rupture?" Although to be honest, even then I saw at least part of the truth. But what a strange truth it was.

"Because you're me," she said. She had a nicer smile than I did, I suppose because she was more used to smiling. She looked happier. Her voice was more interesting than mine, too, with an accent in it, one I'd never heard before. I was starting to get jealous. As soon as I had seen her, I had realized who she must be: that Gwen.

"Yes, that's why we were worried," said the Lady of the Lake. "You're the same person, with the same soul, from two different times. But Emily thought it would be all right, here, in the Castle. And she was right."

"Thank goodness," said Hyacinth. "I was worried, you know. She seemed pretty sure, but still –"

"So, you're me," I said. Could I be jealous of myself from another time? It seemed like a contradiction, yet there it was. And she was dressed better than I was, too. She had on some sort of gauze shirt and a swingy brown skirt that swirled around when she moved. Even when she walked, she looked like she was dancing.

"Yes, she's you," said Morgan, coming through one of the doors. "Rather than repeating that again, can someone tell me what's for lunch?" We were in a sort of hall, with hangings on the walls. It looked medieval, like almost everything else in the castle. There were iron candelabras, a round wooden table with chairs, a chest or two along the walls. Morgan looked exactly the same as the last time I'd seen her: long black hair, dark blue robe embroidered with stars. Like a younger version of Mother Night.

"I made cock-a-leekie soup and cheese sandwiches," said Gwen. "Tell me what you think."

We all sat down at the – suddenly I realized what it was. The hole in the center was a pretty good indication.

"This is the round table, isn't it?" I said.

"It is," said the Lady of the Lake. "Much smaller than it was at Arthur's court, of course. It's magical, as you might have expected. It grows to fit the company. We don't need it to be large today, but it can fill a great hall."

I was eating cock-a-leekie soup for the first time in my life on Arthur's round table in the Castle in the Lake. I remembered when I had wished my life to be ordinary, and was very glad that at that moment it was anything but. The soup was good, and the cheese sandwich made me realize how hungry I had been. It was something sharp, like stilton, with chutney on it.

The Lady of the Lake and Morgan talked. Hyacinth joined in once in a while. They were talking about things I barely understood, places and times I'd never been, people I'd never met. Gwen and I sat across the table from each other, so we couldn't carry on a conversation, but every once in a while I caught her looking at me as curiously as I was looking at her.

"All right, my dears," said the Lady of the Lake when we were finished. "Morgan, Hyacinth, and I should discuss this situation. Gwen, why don't you show Thea around the castle? As as long as you stay inside the castle itself, you shouldn't explode."

"Explode?" I said as Gwen rose and motioned for me to follow her.

"Yes, what did you think would cause a time rupture?" asked Morgan. "The two of you in the same place and time would cause an explosion in the timestream."

"But we would explode," I said.

"Yup," said Gwen. "Come on, I'll show you around and we'll try not to. Explode, I mean."

I looked at the Lady of the Lake, Morgan, and Hyacinth in earnest discussion around the round table, then followed Gwen from the room. I suppose the possibility of exploding is one of the prices I pay for not living an ordinary life.

The Castle in the Lake

The strangest thing about the Castle in the Lake is watching it rise out of the lake, water streaming from its battlements.

Hyacinth and I were standing by the side of the lake. We had gotten there the same way I seemed to get anywhere when I was traveling with Mrs. Moth or Miss Gray or Hyacinth: we would walk through a door and suddenly we would be someplace other than where I had seen through that door. Once, I asked Miss Gray how it worked.

"Every threshold is every other threshold," she said, which explained nothing.

Hyacinth had come up to my room and said, "Thea, you might want to bring a jacket."

I had said, "You mean Miss Gray says it's all right for me to go?"

"Yes," she had said. "She did some research, and she's almost certain it will not rupture time."

"Almost certain?" I had said. But I had pulled on my jacket.

We had gone to the kitchen door, opened it, and walked through. To the lake shore.

It looked rather like one of those lakes in Switzerland, large and blue, surrounded by hills covered with pine trees and then mountains capped in snow. It looked like a picture on a postcard.

Hyacinth look out her phone. "I'm just going to let her know we're here." She dialed, and I could hear a series of chimes on the other end. "Vivian? We're here. Can you let us in?"

That was when the castle rose from the lake. As it rose, water streaming and throwing off rainbows in every direction, a drawbridge extended itself to the shore. When the castle had risen fully, the drawbridge touched the shore directly in front of us, lying on the grass by our feet.

We walked across. Once, I looked down and saw a large serpent swimming in the lake beneath us. It looked like a dragon without wings.

Under the portcullis, a woman was waiting. She had long white hair in a braid down her back, and she was dressed in a smock covered with splotches of paint and  faded jeans.

"Hyacinth!" she said. "I haven't seen you in ages." She took Hyacinth's face in her hands and kissed her on both cheeks. Then she said, "Thea, it's very nice to meet you. Come in, I'll just finish up and then we'll have some lunch."

We followed her through the courtyard, into a doorway and up a flight of stairs. The castle was made of gray stone and looked as though it must have been standing for a thousand years. Unless we were a thousand years ago? You never knew, when you traveled with someone like Hyacinth.

At the top of the tower was a room filled with light, coming through large windows. In it were an easel, a table with paints scattered over it, brushes in jars. There were paintings leaning against the wall, most of them turned toward the wall but I saw one of the Castle in the Lake. I don't know all that much about art, but I could tell it was good.  I mean, it looked real without looking too real, you know?

The painting on the easel was of a man in a tree. Him, of course. Eyes closed, pale as death.

The Lady of the Lake picked up a brush she must have put down before letting us in. She added some touches of brownish black to the leaves, creating shadows. While we waited, I wandered around. Out the windows, I could see the hills and mountains, and below us the lake. I wondered what happened when the castle sank into it. Was the interior sealed by some sort of magic? I supposed it must be.

"All right, that does it for today," said the Lady, putting her brush in a jar filled with some sort of clear fluid. "Let's have some lunch. I think it's time for Thea to meet Gwen."

"Who's Gwen?" I asked. But they were already going down the stairs ahead of me. One of the problems with people like Hyacinth and Miss Gray and the Lady of the Lake is that they only answer questions when they want to. I think it's one of their most annoying traits.

The Conference

There was a tree growing out of the dining room table.

It was only an illusion, of course. An oak tree, its trunk thick with years. Its branches reached up to the sky, its roots were covered with moss. On its branches were both leaves and acorns. So wherever the tree was, it was autumn. It must have been a hundred years old, at least.

We could see through all those layers, to the man sleeping inside.

Seeing it there, in Mrs. Moth's dining room, filled me with a sense of despair. It was so close that I could reach out and touch it, and yet what I touched would be – nothing at all, not the bark, not the bole, not the man. And even the illusion of it – you could feel how strong the magic must have been, that was keeping the strongest magician inside a tree. His own magic. Why?

"Thea, how did you learn he was trapped?" asked Mrs. Moth.

"I got a text message," I said. "Here, let me find it."

I went to Saved Messages on my cell phone. "Here."

Thea: No idea how he did it, Merlin trapped himself inside a tree for a thousand years. Go figure. Any idea how to get him out? Morgan

There were text messages after that, most of them from Morgan. Most of them in the same tone. He was her brother, she was used to him getting into trouble of various sorts. Being put in prison in ancient Rome, guillotined in the French Revolution, that sort of thing.

"The problem," said Mrs. Moth, "is that he's disappeared entirely. As Hyacinth has told us, he's not anywhere in the timeline. If the spell is supposed to last for a thousand years, we have no evidence that he ever comes out."

"What could have made him trap himself in a tree like that?" I asked.

"Perhaps someone was threatening him," said Miss Gray.

"The Merlin I know would have fought back," I said. "He fights back even when he knows he's going to lose. He's just like that." And he was. I'd seen some of his bruises. The worst were from gladiatorial games, especially those involving bears. Or the sorts of contests that make magicians have to regenerate body parts.

"Maybe he was protecting someone," said Hyacinth.

"Protecting them by trapping himself in a tree?" I asked.

She shrugged.

"I think we need more information," said Mrs. Moth. "Hyacinth, where is Morgan now?"

"I think she's at the Castle in the Lake," said Hyacinth. "Do you want me to text her?"

"Yes, make sure she's there," said Mrs. Moth. "But I think you'd better talk to her in person. You know how she is. She's going to say it's just him, always getting into trouble. But if he's gone, truly gone, we need to find him. We can't just wait for him to get himself out."

"Can I go with you?" I asked.

"Oh!" said Hyacinth. "To the Castle in the Lake? I don't know." She looked at Mrs. Moth and Miss Gray. "Can she?"

Miss Gray put her head to one said and looked at me, as though I were an interesting specimen in one of her magical botany classes. "Now that's an interesting question. Can Thea go?"

"Why, is it difficult to get there?" I asked.

"That's not the issue," said Miss Gray. "Do you know what the Castle in the Lake is, Thea?"

"I've heard of it," I said. "Isn't it where the Lady of the Lake lives?"

"Not just the Lady of the Lake," she replied. "I'll have to think about this." She looked at Mrs. Moth. "Give me time. I need to do some research."

"Think about what? Time for what?" I asked. But they were already getting up, leaving the dining room.

"Just try not to think about it, Thea," said Hyacinth before she too left. They all had things to do, no doubt. A universe to keep going. I was the only one for whom this was personal.

I couldn't not think about it, of course. I thought about it all the time. But I needed to do something. So I got out the bicycle and rode into Shadow. I went to the public library and checked out some books that had nothing to do with magic or trees. Or love.

I rode back slowly, looking at all the shops: the baker's, the antiques shop, the pub where some of the local farmers were already sitting and telling stories. And for a few minutes at least, I wished that my life could be ordinary.

In the Gardens

Surrounding Mrs. Moth's house are gardens. A series of gardens, all different. When I walk among them, I sometimes forget which one leads into another. Or maybe they move around? I think they move around, sometimes. Just so as not to get bored.

I went out the kitchen door, turned left, and was immediately in the rose walk. In summer, the rose walk is covered with roses, wild ones, small and white. It's like walking through stars. There were no roses now. (There are no roses in this picture either, but if you are clever, and I'm sure you are, you'll see that I'm showing you photographs from my last trip to Mrs. Moth's house, in autumn. Then, the roses had all fallen, their petals scattered like white rags on the ground, until they were washed away by the rains. Now, the walk was just a mass of canes beginning to bud.)

If you go down the walk and turn right, you will see the kitchen garden. Mrs. Moth grows all sorts of vegetables there. My favorite are the peas. Have you ever tried fresh peas? They taste nothing like the frozen ones, and even less like the dried ones. You can eat them right out of the pod. They are sweet, like candy. My second favorite are the tomatoes. How I miss real, ripe tomatoes, right off the vine, in Boston!

If you go to the end of the kitchen garden, you will come to a set of stairs between two hedges. I like stairs in gardens. They always make the gardens seem more mysterious.

Go down them, and you will come out in the orchard. In the orchard there are apple, pears, peaches, those old European plums that taste nothing like the ones we usually get in the grocery stores, cherries. The cherries are my favorite. In Boston they cost so much that I rarely eat them. Imagine having a cherry tree and picking your own, eating as many as you want! Hyacinth and I used to hang the double ones from our ears.

At the bottom of the stairs, you will see an alley, with a wall on one side and a hedge on the other.  Are you starting to get a sense of Mrs. Moth's gardens?  Of how many there are, and how easy it is to get lost in them?

If you turn right and go to the end of the alley, you will come to the secret garden. Unless it's moved, in which case go back and turn left. That may take you there. Or not. But here is the secret garden. It has two fountains. One of them has plants growing in it.

The other has the head of a satyr, with moss growing out of its mouth. It must have been growing for a long time.  Sometimes, to be honest, I don't quite like looking at it.

But this post isn't really about the gardens. The gardens are a way to avoid talking about loss and grief. Because as soon as I got out into the gardens, he was walking by my side: the ghost.

"It's nice today, isn't it?" he said. I was shivering, despite my sweater. I was very glad that Hyacinth had packed my winter clothes.

"Yes, it's nice," I said. I wasn't in the mood to talk to a facsimile, just then.

"I know a riddle," he said. "What has eyes but does not see? What has ears but does not hear? What has hands but cannot touch? What has a mouth, but cannot speak?"

"I have no idea," I said. "What?"

"I don't know," he answered. "I was hoping you could tell me."

If I'd been able to hit him, I would have. Sometimes I had felt that frustration with his original as well. Honestly, a man who disappears at a moment's notice, even if it is to set the universe to rights. That's frustrating, you know?

I had said that he'd never spoken to me as anything other than a friend, but that was not quite true. Once, I had received a letter – one of many letters, this time from the eleventh century, written with a quill pen on vellum. I had a whole collection of them: chiseled into stone, printed on a dot-matrix printer, etched into iridescent metal. At the end of this letter, after a description of the Battle of Hastings, he had written, "By the way, you may be my fate." It had been followed by a smiley face, so I had paid it no attention. After all, he was – well, him. That may have been the sort of thing he said to, I don't know, Marie Antoinette. Or Eleanor of Aquitaine. But I remembered one day we had been walking across the Common, after a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, when he had said to me, "Anthony and Cleopatra were a mess. Still – what would it be like, to have one of the great loves?" Suddenly, I wondered what it would be like to have one of those. Messy, probably. Still –

Where had the ghost gone? While I had been lost in thought, he had disappeared. It was only then that I remembered his riddle: eyes that can't see, ears that can't hear, hands that can't touch, a mouth that can't speak. The man in the tree. Had he found a way to speak, after all? Was this some cryptic effort to communicate? I had no idea. Perhaps Mrs. Moth could tell me.

I looked around me, at the two fountains, the hedges that surrounded the secret garden and that had always made me feel so hidden, so protected there.  Not this time. I shivered, and not because of the cold.

(Just in case you were wondering, here is the difference between Thea and Dora. The first photograph is of Thea, last autumn in one of Mrs. Moth's gardens.

The second photograph is of Dora, in Virginia.

You see? They really are quite different. And what has Dora been doing all this time? She has been working on revising the third chapter, which is due at the end of this month. Despite a truly horrible, heartbreaking week. Sometimes I think her powers of concentration are superhuman.)

What Hyacinth Said

When I got back to Mrs. Moth's house, it was almost dark. I had not meant to spend so long in town.

In the front hall, I saw my suitcases.

"We thought you might like your own clothes," said Mrs. Moth.

"You look pretty funny in mine," said Hyacinth. I gave her a long hug. Hyacinth is one of my favorite people. Although she's not particularly easy to hug. She's so slender that there isn't much there to hold on to, and you're always careful anyway because she seems so delicate.

"Where were you?" I asked her.

"Dinner in half an hour!" said Mrs. Moth, disappearing into the kitchen.

"I'll help you with your suitcases," said Hyacinth.

We walked up the stairs, me following her, both of us lugging suitcases.

"How long are you all expecting me to stay?" I asked.

"As long as it takes," she said.

Up in the tower room, we sat on the four-poster bed, Hyacinth with her legs crossed and me leaning back against the pillows.

"I tried to find him," she said. "I looked everywhere I could think of, in the timestream. Places where we knew he had been."

"And?" It was as though my heart had stopped beating. As though I couldn't breathe.

"He wasn't there. He wasn't anywhere. It's as though he's disappeared into that tree, every version of him."

I didn't know what to say. I had been hoping that if he really was the only one who could get himself out, there would be another one of him, somewhen. I could feel the tears welling up. It would be embarrassing to cry in front of Hyacinth, so cool and proper.

"Thea, tell me what happened," she said. "You were the last to see him."

"But I only saw him go," I said. "We were having breakfast." In my apartment in Boston, where he had come to visit me, for only the second time. What were we to each other? Friends, certainly. Beyond that? I did not know. He had not spoken to me as anything other than a friend, since that kiss in the Other Country. But there had been letters, long telephone calls, telling me about his adventures in other times. The telephone would ring and he would say, "Hello from the fourteenth century, Thea. It's a good thing you're not here. There's a famine, and we've eaten all the horses." Or "I'm hanging out with Marie Antoinette," which I have to admit would make me jealous.

He had shown up the previous night, said "I'm taking you out for a burger. Do you know I haven't had a burger for a hundred years?" and then fallen asleep on the sofa. I had sat watching him for a while: the pale, lean face, the green eyes closed, the mouth open. Snoring slightly.

"We were having breakfast and he got a text message. He said he had to go."

"Sorry, Thea," he had said. "I'll be back before the coffee gets cold." That was the advantage of time travel. It didn't much matter how long anything took. You could be back almost before you had left.

"Did he say who it was?"

"No, he didn't say."

Hyacinth sat silent, with her hands clasped in front of her. "I don't know, Thea. No one knows how he got himself into that tree, or why. What they do know is that he put himself there, and he's the only one strong enough to get himself out. Except Mother Night, and you know she never interferes."

"Not even for him? He's her son."

"Especially not for him."

"Then I'll never see him again," I said. The sense of despair that filled me was – like nothing I had ever felt, like an enormous emptiness inside me. As though I had been hollowed out. I remembered the card Madame Violette had laid down: Night. Except that Night had been filled with stars, and there were no stars in me, only darkness.

"What will I do?" I lay back and looked up at the canopy, which was made of the same burgundy brocade as the curtains.

"I promise we'll think of something," she said. "I promise, Thea." She put her hand on my leg, as though to reassure me. But it didn't. "Listen, let's go down to dinner, all right? We'll talk about it, me and Mrs. Moth and Miss Gray. I'm sure we'll think of something."

At any other time, it would have been such a treat – being at Mrs. Moth's house. After my cold apartment in Boston, being in a place with blazing fires, where breakfast appeared beside your bed each morning, where there were endless paths to walk along over hills, through fields. Even now, I was glad to have such a place to go. It felt more like home than any house I had ever lived in. But how I wished the circumstances could have been different.

"Dinner!" came the call from downstairs.

And so we went down, and I tried to pretend, as I had been pretending for the last week, that the world had not been turned completely upside down.

(For those of you who are curious about what Mrs. Moth's house looks like, I'm including a photograph of a house that looks very much like it. Here it is:

Except of course that Mrs. Moth's house is surrounded by gardens, and an orchard, and fields. And in case you want to now what Thea looks like, here she is, writing in her Boston apartment:

She looks like Dora, except younger. And like she gets more sleep.)

The Man in the Tree

On the way back to Mrs. Moth's house, or rather a short detour from it, there is a sort of waste. What I mean by a waste is land that is no good for farming. It's in the foothills of the mountains, and there are large stones. You can see them sticking out of the ground. Around those stones are the sorts of plants I would call weeds if they weren't so interesting: milkweeds that let their brown seeds fly on white tufts in the autumn, chickory that would be dusky blue when summer came, canes of blackberries that I had to avoid because I did not want to rip Hyacinth's jeans. In autumn I would come back with a bucket to pick them for eating and pie. But now there were no seeds on the wind, no flowers, no berries. The crab apple trees, small and gnarled, that grew here and there had buds on them, that was all. (Mrs. Moth makes the best crab apple jam.)

Now there was nothing but earth, brown stems, brown canes with thorns for me to avoid. Buds on the canes that showed where there would eventually be small white flowers. And stones.

I sat on one of the stones. The waste was higher up than the rest of the country, so I could see all around: on one side down to Shadow, on the other down in the direction of Mrs. Moths' house. I could see all the farms, the neatly plowed earth ready for seeds, the straight hedges. But up on the waste, nothing was straight, nothing was neat. It was all wild and tangled. The wind began to tangle my hair as well.

"Do you like it here?"

He was a pale ghost-version of himself, sitting on the rock beside me. I could see the sky through him.

"I do. I like it a lot. It's peaceful."

"Not pretty."

"It doesn't need to be pretty. I think I like the places that aren't pretty best, anyway."

He was silent for a while, then said, "You seem sad."

"I am," I said. "I am sad. I came here because I lost something."

"What did you lose?" he asked.

"Oh, a friend." I surreptitiously wiped my eyes. I didn't want him to see that.

He began to wave his hands, as though he were conducting an invisible symphony. In front of him, in the air, an image formed: a man, eyes closed. With the living tree around him, the layers of bole and bark. He was so pale, as though dead although I knew he was not dead.

"Is that your friend?" he said. "The one you're sad about?  I found him in your head."

"Yes, that's my friend." I looked at him, so pleased with himself. And then at the man in the tree, his double down to the slant of the cheekbones.

"What's his name?"

"That I can't tell you," I said.

"Because you don't know it?" Oh, I knew it. How well I knew it. As well as I knew my own name. "Maybe I can guess. Is it Rumplestiltskin?"

"No." I smiled, expecting a whole litany of guesses, but that seemed to be the limit of his ingenuity. He was a ghost in more ways than one: ghost of the man, of the intellect.

"Why is your friend sleeping in a tree?" he asked next.

I picked a milkweed pod from the previous autumn that still has some seeds in it. I set them sailing on their white tufts. "He became trapped. He's been trapped for a long time." That's the problem with time travel. You become trapped in the past and live on into the present. It helps to be immortal.

"Why can't you get him out?"

"He's the only one who can get himself out. He got himself in, you see." I'm sure he had very good reasons. He always seemed to have good reasons for what he did. But there he was, in consequence: trapped in the bole of a tree for a thousand years. "He could get himself out if he could just remember who he is. But no one can tell him, he has to discover it for himself."

"Who is he?" asked the ghost. I reached over, tried to touch his translucent hand, felt only the stone underneath. Not even to be able to touch . . .

"He's the greatest magician who was ever born. Only he can break his own spell."

"Oh, I see." But he didn't. He never did, never would. He was just a projection, the shallowest recollection of the man in the tree, some charm, some parlor tricks. All I had left of what had once been. I looked at the man who seemed dead but was not. How would he ever get out? How would he ever remember what he was, the power he had? His own name? The magic he wielded?

I blew on the image of the man in the tree and it vanished. As I walked away from the waste, glad to have spent a while even with his ghost, I looked back once: the ghost was still there, sitting on the stone, watching a line of ants. You once moved galaxies, I wanted to tell him.

But what was the use? He would be amused, would not understand. I got back on the bicycle and headed toward Mrs. Moth's house. It was getting cold, and I knew there was dinner waiting.