Gypsies
by Robert Charles Wilson
One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but a path home.
—Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Part One
LAND’S END
Chapter One
Alone in her bed, Karen White dreamed a familiar dream.
There are dreams that are like capsules of life, that sum up a thing and define it. Karen’s dream was one of those. A bucket from the dark well of her past, it came up brimming.
In the happier part of her life the dream had recurred very occasionally; now—with all the trouble —it came more often.
The dream never changed. She might have invented all or none of it. It recalled a time in her life in which illusion and reality were more fluid, when certainties were few—a frightening time.
After midnight now—Gavin gone for good and Michael still not home—she dreamed the dream again.
In the dream she is a child, coming awake before dawn in her bedroom in the old house on Constantinople Street.
The room is dark. A summer night. The window is open and a welcome breeze rivers through the fly-specked screen. On an impulse, or drawn by some; sound, she rises, pads barefoot across the floor, and pulls the gently hissing curtains back.
The air feels good. She yawns and blinks, then gapes in startlement: Laura and Timmy are out on the lawn.
They are her younger brother and sister. Karen herself is nine—two years older than Laura and four years older than Tim. She imagines she is mature: how childish they seem, tiptoeing through the high dandelion-specked grass by moonlight. But it’s late. Past midnight, not yet dawn. What are they doing out at this terrible hour?
As she watches, they see her at the window.
Laura, the impetuous one, points, and Karen feels suddenly spotlit.
Tim, who turned five last December, waves her away. Go on, he seems to be saying with his hands. You don’t understand. Go back to sleep. She reads disgust in his small round face and is tempted just to give in… whatever they’re doing, does she really want a part of it?
But Laura is signaling, too; Laura is smiling “Hey,” she calls out hoarsely, a kind of whisper: it drifts up through the open window. “Hey, Karen! Karen, come on!”
Frightened, but feeling a tickle of curiosity, Karen tiptoes down the dark stairs. Mama and Daddy are asleep. Heavy presences in the deeper darkness of their bedroom, the door ajar: she feels as much as sees them. Daddy is snoring; she sees the outline of his shoulders, his eyeglasses abandoned on the night-stand. His snores are labored and masculine.
He’ll be so mad, Karen thinks, if he catches us. She resolves to scold her brother and sister. Tim especially: he’s the troublemaker. A bad streak in him, Daddy says. At five, he already reads ferociously. Devours comic books off the rack, because Daddy won’t let him buy them or bring them home. The man at the drugstore always yells when he catches Tim reading that way. Tim, predictably, doesn’t care.
Tim is behind all this, Karen thinks.
The house on Constantinople possesses a postage-stamp backyard which abuts a gully. It’s an old Pittsburgh row house on a hilly street. Some light filters through from the front. Beyond the back fence, with its rusty iron scrollwork, fireflies dance at the beckoning verge of the ravine. It’s dark, it should be scary—it is scary—but Tim and Laura are already prizing open the twisted coat hanger which latches shut the old wire-mesh fence.
They have been told not to go into the gully.
Breathless and feeling fragile in her nightclothes, Karen comes abreast of the younger children. She wants to demand an explanation, shepherd them back to their beds. You’re the oldest, Daddy has told her, you bear the responsibility. You have to look out for them. But Laura holds her finger to her lip, smiles a furtive smile as Tim jimmies the gate.
One by one they file across the lane and down a moist path into the dark of the woods. They navigate by moonlight and intuition. Karen guesses at the path and watches Laura’s pale shape in front of her. Walking, she realizes she is shoeless. The damp pressed earth shocks her feet; trees drape clammy leaves against her cheeks. The house retreats with all its warm reassurances until it is invisible behind them.
“Here,” Tim says finally, his high-pitched voice strangely authoritative. There is a clearing in the wood, a weedy gap between two stands of elm. They stop and wait.
The waiting does not seem strange. There is an electricity in the air, a humming in the earth. Karen can see stars now, obscured by a haze of city light but shining, rippling. There are night motions in the underbrush. Raccoons, she tells herself. A sow bug crawls over her foot.
“Do it now,” Laura whispers. “Now, Tim.”
Tim cocks his head at her—so adult-seeming in this light that he resembles a wizened old man—and nods.
He raises his hand.
Karen thinks for a moment he is playing band conductor: it’s that kind of gesture, dramatic and a little bit childish. She shakes her head and peers closer.
But he is not conducting. She should have known.
His hand radiates light.
Solemnly, he draws a big upside-down letter U in the air. An arch, each leg grounded in the dewy soil, as tall at its apex as a five-year-old can reach. His hand moves slowly and his face is screwed into a fierce knot of concentration. It would be comical, except that a miracle is taking place. As he finishes the arc the air enclosed within it seems to ripple.
Tim steps back now, mopping his forehead.
The cold light fades. But the U shape remains: a wedge of darker darkness.
“I told you,” Tim says, addressing Laura, sparing not even a glance for Karen. His child’s voice is merciless: “Apologize.”
“Sorry,” Laura says. But she’s not contrite. Her voice betrays her fascination. “Can we go through? Really?”
“No!” Karen says suddenly. Her voice is loud in the darkness. She knows what this is; she knows what Daddy would say. Bad bad bad. “Nobody go near it!”
She hears the sound of her own panic.
Tim regards her contemptuously. “You shouldn’t even be here.”
It makes her angry. “Go back to bed!”
She is nine. He is five. He ignores her. “You go back to bed,” he says.
The coldness in his voice shocks her.
Laura looks between them. Laura is the younger sister and—Karen has acknowledged it—the prettier. Laura has big eyes and a child’s full lips.
Karen, at nine, is a little bit pinched, somewhat narrow of face. Mother says it’s a worrier’s face.
My little worrywart, she says.
“We’ll all go,” Laura says decisively. “Just a little way.” Her small hand closes on Karen’s arm. “Not far.”
And before Karen can stop it—before she can think about it—they step through the arch.
It’s hard for her to understand. A moment before they were deep in the wooded ravine; now they’re in some dark, hard place. There are cobbles underfoot and the sound of her breathing echoes back from narrow walls. An alley. She blinks, aghast. There is garbage collected in steel barrels. A rat—clearly a rat and not a raccoon—noses through the litter. Streetlights at the mouth of the alley cast long unpleasant shadows.
“The ocean,” Laura says to Tim. “You said we could see the ocean.”
“This way,” her brother says.
Karen’s heart pulses against her ribs. That’s crazy, she thinks, what ocean, there’s no ocean, we live in Pittsburgh. In Pennsylvania. She retains a vivid memory of her school geography. The only bodies of water around Pittsburgh are the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, mingling t
o create the mighty Ohio. She has taken a boat ride; she remembers the old steel-girder bridges and the awe they inspired in her. There is no ocean here.
But they turn a comer and follow this cobbled street, which she does not recognize, and she smells a salt tang in the air, something bitter, ozone, and there are faint cries which might be nesting gulls.
The street itself is so strange she feels she must remember it. The buildings are odd, three- and four-story structures with the crosshatched look of the fairy-tale houses in her Golden Books, their brick chimneys gap-toothed against the cloudy sky. (But hadn’t there been stars?) The wind is cool, worse than cool, cold, and she’s dressed only in her nightie. Her bare heel skids against a residue of fish scale down among the dark cobbles and she clutches Laura’s arm.
They ascend a hill.
The city is spread out suddenly before them. Karen’s confusion becomes total: this is not Pittsburgh.
Not Pittsburgh, but a very large city nevertheless. Much of it is this same kind of gingerbread architecture, winding narrow roads punctuated by factories and mills that are the only illuminated buildings, their high wired windows spilling red and yellow furnace light. Farther off, where the land rises, the city seems more modern; she can see tall buildings like the buildings downtown—in Pittsburgh—but these are cheerless black obsidian slabs or squat, chalky structures. Atop one of them, a dirigible is moored.
But more marvelous than this is the sea.
From where they stand the road runs down to the docks. There are rows and rows of wooden warehouses. Inside their cavernous frames Karen sees people moving. It’s reassuring, in a way, seeing people here. It suggests some sort of normalcy. If she cried out for help, someone might hear. Beyond the warehouses, a long lighted pier runs out across the oily water. A few ships are docked; some have high wooden masts, some do not. One is immense, as big as an oil tanker.
The strangeness of the scene begins to affect her. She has the feeling of having come, somehow, very far from home. She’s lost—they’re all lost. She thinks of the arch Timmy drew in the dark air of the ravine, their only door… can they find it again? Or has it vanished?
“All right,” she says. “We’ve seen it. There it is. Now we have to go home.”
“She’s afraid,” Timmy says to Laura. “I told you.”
But Laura looks at her sympathetically. “No… Karen’s right. We should get back.” She shivers. “It’s cold.”
“It’s always cold here.”
Karen doesn’t stop to wonder what he means. “Let’s go,” she says.
Timmy sighs elaborately but cooperates, outvoted. They turn back. The narrow street, from this direction, seems completely new. Inside Karen the spring of panic has coiled tighter… what if they are lost?
But no, she thinks, that’s the alley there. She pulls Laura tighter so as not to lose her. She grabs for Timmy’s hand. He resists a moment, then relents.
Daddy’s faith was not misplaced. She can protect them.
But as they approach the mouth of the alley, a man steps out from the shadows.
He is looking directly at them. He is tall and dressed in a gray suit and hat. He looks ordinary, like the men she has seen riding the trolleys to work. But there is something in the intensity of his gaze, in the way he smiles, that amplifies her fear. A gust of wind plucks at his overcoat; a few flakes of snow swirl past.
“Hi,” he says. “Hello there.”
They stand still, transfixed. The man’s voice echoes down the empty street.
Still smiling, he takes a few sauntering steps closer. It occurs to Karen that there is something familiar about his face, the lines of it, the wide eyes… something she cannot place.
“We have to go back,” Timmy says—for the first time, a note of uncertainty in his voice.
The man nods agreeably. “I know. Everybody has to go home sometime, right? But look! I have presents for you.”
He reaches into his overcoat. Timmy waits, studious but unafraid. Karen thinks, He knows this man. He’s been here before.
The man produces from the depths of his coat a glass paperweight—the kind you shake and it snows inside. He hands this to Tim.
Tim stares, transfixed.
“The kingdoms of the Earth,” the man says.
Tim takes the gift, holds it solemnly.
The overcoat is magic, fathomless. The grinning man reaches in once more and produces—“Presto!” he says—a small pink plastic hand mirror, the cheap kind you can buy at the five-and-dime. He extends the mirror to Laura.
“Go on,” he says gently. “A getting-to-know-you present.”
A part of Karen wants to shout no. But Laura, frowning, takes the gift and regards it.
“Fairest in the land,” the man says, smiling.
And Karen cowers, knowing she is next.
The man looks directly at her. He is like the men on TV shows, like Eliot Ness in “The Untouchables”: ruggedly handsome. The smile is very convincing. But his mild gray eyes are as cold as the snow and as empty as the street.
He reaches into his coat again.
This time: a baby doll.
A naked plastic baby doll about the size of her thumb. It’s not much. But, curiously, she’s drawn to it. The expression on its crudely formed face attracts her. It seems to be asking for help.
Overcome, she snatches the doll and pockets it.
“Your firstborn child,” the man says softly.
The words set off silent alarms inside her. It’s like waking up from a dream. “Come on,” she says, taking charge at last. She tightens her grip on Timmy and Laura, their small, fleshy arms. “Now,” she cries. “Run! Come on!”
They duck around the gray man into the alley.
The darkness obscures the doorway. She hunts it out with some sixth sense. Beyond it, she can smell the wet night warmth of the ravine.
She steps through, pushing Tim and Laura ahead of her. The sky on this side is beginning to show dawn. “We have to hurry,” she says. “Up the hill! GO!”
There is no longer any question of disobeying. Daylight priorities have begun to assert themselves. The two smaller children scurry ahead.
Karen pauses a second to look back.
The door—Tim’s door—has begun to disappear. It fades; the borders become indistinct. But for a lingering moment she can see through to the other side, to that cold fish-smelling wharf city, the alley mouth, the gray man gazing at her. He makes no move to follow. He smiles blandly.
The image shivers.
He raises his hand and waves.
The doorway bursts like a bubble, and Karen flees toward the house.
The dream ended there. She woke from it shivering and reached for the bedside clock.
12:45, the bright digital readout announced.
Third night in a row now. The dream had never come so often or so intensely. That must mean something, she thought; but what?
No. Dreams don’t mean anything.
She scooted over to Gavin’s side of the bed, her arm extended toward him. But the bed, of course, was empty.
It had been empty for almost a month now.
She felt stupid and ashamed of herself, ashamed of the transient wish her body had betrayed. It was a rough time, she thought, yeah, but things were holding together, this was no time to freak out. Silently, she recited the litany she had invented for herself:
It’s only a dream.
Dreams don’t mean anything.
And even if it isn’t a dream, it happened a long time ago.
Quarter to one and Michael still wasn’t home. She would have heard him at the door; she always did. Well, but it was Friday night… she hadn’t given him a specific curfew. In the past it hadn’t been necessary. Mike was just fifteen, had few friends, had only recently showed any real interest in girls. The blossoming-out was good and Karen had encouraged it—it was a distraction from the divorce. But she wondered now whether it might not be too much distraction.
“Worrywart,” she said out loud. She sat up and wrapped a housecoat around herself.
Sleep was out of the question anyway, at least till Mike was home. She groped her feet into her slippers and shuffled across the bare bedroom floor. Gavin had insisted on exposed wooden floors. Gavin was all sleek austerity and polished pine. Karen thought she might have preferred broadloom. There was something comforting about broadloom. She liked it on her feet. It softened the hard corners of things—it was warm.
In the new place, Karen told herself firmly, we will have broadloom. Wall to goddamn wall.
The move was inevitable. She had household money from Gavin, but it barely covered her expenses. No matter how the divorce was settled, she and Michael would need a new place. She had already begun a haphazard program of packing: the bedroom was full of Mayflower boxes. She hated their shapes, the cumbersome bulk of them along the wall, the nagging reminder that her life could so quickly and utterly come apart.
Downstairs, she warmed up milk and made herself a cup of cocoa. She poured a little more milk in the pan and then set it off the burner—maybe Michael would want a cup.
She switched on one floor lamp and the TV set in the austere pine living room.
Not much on TV at this hour. David Letterman browbeating some guest, a crop of old movies. She stretched out on the sofa with the remote control and punched up the news network.
A bus had been firebombed in the Middle East, the civil service strike was in its second week, a hurricane was threatening the Gulf coast—business, in other words, as usual. She switched off the sound but left the set on for its flicker, the comforting illusion of a second presence in the room. She checked the clock on the face of the VCR. 1:05.
She tightened the belt on her housecoat and took her journal and pen from the end table. Since Gavin moved out she had been keeping the journal, a sort of diary and notebook: it gave her somebody to talk to, even if it was only herself.
The dream again, she wrote.
She pressed the nibbled end of the Bic against her teeth and frowned.
Meaningless, she wrote. Or so I want to believe. But it comes back so often.