“Oh, Nef, Nef,” he cried. “I love you!”
It was twilight. The lace curtains continued to move in a white snowfall above them. The Chinese wind crystals on the porch chimed. They lay hand in hand, dear chums most dearly met, eyes shut, drinking the silence, dressed only by the late sunlight and the weather, and at last she said: “How would you like to live a few hundred years? Or,” she added, “forever, whichever comes first.”
“Forever, I think,” he said.
“Good.” Her hand tightened on his. “Trust me?”
“Yes. No. Yes.”
“Which?”
“I’m confused,” he said. “I’m not one of your miraculous longtime historical ‘sports.’ Can you make me one?”
“You came to us, remember.”
“But for two reasons. To see your town before it was buried under cement. And I was carrying the news of your destruction, which you didn’t know, and I had to tell. Two reasons.”
“Three,” she said. “There was a sense in you, as in most of us, like a homing pigeon, a thing printed in your blood or behind your face, a ghost in your head. And why not? A ghost of a need, just as our ghosts moved us, let us recognize each other when we met on street corners or in passing trains. Your third reason for coming here was as natural as breathing. You came here looking for the right place, but you couldn’t admit it, so you gave other reasons. You’re like us, or almost like us. You have the inclination, the grammar printed in your genes, to let you live to four times the age you are now. We can only encourage you with our company and, of course, the weather, food, and wine.”
“Is the fountain of youth bottled, then?”
“No, no.” She laughed quietly. “There is no such medicine, no cure. We only supplement what God gave you first. Some people never have colds, never break bones, don’t get headaches, drink without getting hangovers, climb mountains without having to stop to rest, remain passionate beyond belief, all God-given. Our gift from Darwin’s God or God’s Darwin is simply being part of a moveable feast of inheritance moving upstream against death. Oh, Lord.” She laughed quietly. “How can moveable feasts swim upstream? But you know my meaning. You refuse that dark tide that sinks down into night. Otherwise you would not be here, listening to a fool.”
“Beloved fool, crazed lady, beautiful lunatic,” he murmured.
“Now, let me give you the final explanation for myself and all the friends whom you have met here. The great ‘medicine’ was finding that we were alive and loving it. We have celebrated every day of our lives. The celebration, the exhilaration, of worshipping the gift, has kept us young. Does that sound impossible? By simply knowing you’re alive and looking at the sun and enjoying the weather and speaking it every moment of your existence, this ensures our longevity. We live every moment of our existence to the fullest, and that is a superb medicine. In that way we refuse the darkness. Now think of what I’ve said and tell me about your future.”
He lay back and scanned the ceiling for answers. “Good grief!” he said. “I don’t know. I’ve got obligations back home. Many friends. Mother and father both still alive. A woman I’ve been almost engaged to for two years—two years—think about it! I’ve been dragging my feet, taking advantage, typical male. So many loose ends, knots to be tied, goodbyes to be said. I’ve just started thinking and don’t know what to think. I know that I love this town, these people, and you. God, I’m in the midst of love and am afraid to fall further. It’s too much in a few days.”
She waited and saw an outline of her future on the ceiling, also. “I will not be the cat on your chest that inhales the air you need to breathe,” she said. “But you must decide. And I have saved one final thing for last. If you stay you will be in many ways the center of our existence. You will definitely be the center of mine. Because, as you well know, there have been no children born in this town for a long, long while.”
“And soon,” he put in at last, “the first new child must be born and someone must be the father. Perhaps that father is me.”
“Perhaps you already are.” She placed her hands upon her stomach, as if trying to sense a presence. “Perhaps you are.”
“That would be quite a responsibility,” he said.
“So,” she said, “I’ve put a big burden on you. I must let you go and hope that you will return. But you must decide soon. We won’t be here much longer, soon the town will be gone. We’re leaving.”
“Is that possible?”
“Yes. It’s happened many times before, before Summerton even existed. We carry our homes in our heads. All across country, from Providence to Kansas to points farther west. If we can’t save this town, we’ll burn it and scatter the ashes. We won’t be revealed again. The bullies must never know we exist.”
“Oh God,” he whispered. “It is a burden. Let me sleep. Sometimes in dreams I find answers.”
“Sleep then,” she said.
“You,” he said. “Not the weather, not the genetics, you, dear Nef,” he paused, “are my fountain of youth.”
“Let me make you young again,” she said.
And sealed his mouth with hers.
CHAPTER 28
He slept and he dreamed.
He was on the train, going east, and then suddenly he was in Chicago, and even more suddenly, he was in front of the Art Institute and was going up the stairs and through the corridors to stand before the great Sunday in the Park painting.
A woman was standing by the painting and she turned and it was his fiancée.
As he watched, she grew older, aging before his eyes, and she said to him, “You’ve changed.”
He said, “No, I haven’t changed at all.”
“Your face is different. You’ve come to say goodbye.”
“No, just to see how you are,” he said.
“No, you’ve come to say goodbye.”
And as he watched, she grew even older and he felt very small, standing in front of the painting and trying to think of something to say.
Quite suddenly she was gone.
He walked out of the building and there at the bottom of the stairs were seven or eight of his friends.
As he watched, they grew older and they said the same things that she had said.
“You’ve come to say goodbye.”
“No,” he insisted. “No, I haven’t done that.”
Then he turned and ran back into the building, a young man suddenly old among old paintings.
And then he awoke.
CHAPTER 29
He sat for a long while listening to the wind howl in the chimney and the rain funnels outside.
The old house creaked down into a deep swell of night then backed up and over, out of sight of land and light.
Rats practiced graffiti on the walls and spiders played harps so high that only the hairs inside his ears heard and quivered.
How much loss, how much gain? he wondered. How much leave, and how much remain?
What to decide? he thought.
All right, he called into himself. What? Which?
Not a stir of dark in his head. Not an echo.
Just a whisper: Sleep.
And he slept again and put out the light behind his eyes.
He heard a locomotive whistle across his dreams.
The train was gliding, rushing in the night, taking the curves under the moon, hitting the long straight-aways, tossing dust, scattering sparks, laying out echoes, and he was atilt and adream and somehow the familiar words came back in his head:
One kiss and all time’s your dominion
One touch and no death can be cold.
One night puts off graveyard opinion
One hour and you’ll never grow old.
Drink deep of the wine of forever
Drink long of eternity’s stuff
Where everyman’s learned and clever,
And two billion loves not enough.
He cried out in his dream. No! And then again, Oh God, yes.
And
some final few words spelled his dreams:
Somewhere a band is playing,
Playing the strangest tunes,
Of sunflower seeds and sailors,
Who tide with the strangest moons.
He was waking now. His mouth sighed:
Somewhere a band is playing
Listen, O, listen, that tune?
Learn it and you’ll dance on forever
In June and yet June and more…June.
The train was not far off now. It was rounding some hills. The sun was rising and he knew he had changed his mind.
He looked out at a sunrise that was bloody, a town filled with farewell light, and a weather that was so strange he would not forget it for a thousand days.
He saw his face in the bathroom mirror as he shaved, and the eyes looked immensely sad.
He came down to breakfast and sat before the mound of hotcakes and did not eat.
Nef, across from him, saw what he had seen in the mirror and sat back in her chair.
“Have you been thinking?” she asked.
He took a deep breath. Up to this very moment he didn’t know what would come from his mouth.
“Stay,” she said, before he could speak.
“I wish that I could.”
“Stay.”
And here she reached and took his hand.
And it was a warm hand and his own was cold. She seemed a goddess, bending to reach into his tomb and help him out.
“Please.”
“Oh God,” he cried. “Oh Christ, let me be!” He wept inside. “You don’t understand. I’m not made to not grow old.”
“How can you know?”
“Each of us knows. I was born to live and die at seventy. Then I will really be filled up. The fire of life, the good stuff, goes straight up the chimney. The sins, the sadness, whatever, stays like soot on the chimney walls. One can gather only so much darkness. I’ve collected too much. How do you knock the soot off the walls inside your soul?”
“With a chimney sweep,” she said. “Let me sweep and knock those walls until you laugh. I can, if you let me.”
“I won’t allow it.”
“No,” she said, quietly. “I don’t suppose you can. Oh, God, I might cry now. But I won’t. Goodbye.”
“I’m not going yet.”
“But I am. I can’t watch you go. Come back someday.”
“Do you think I’ll never come back?”
She nodded, eyes shut.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s so hard. I don’t know if I’m ready to live a hundred and thirty years. I wonder if anyone is or can be. It’s just,” he said, “it sounds so…lonely. Leaving everyone behind. Coming to the day when the last friend goes into the graveyard.”
“You’ll make new friends.”
“Yes, but there are no friends like the old ones. You can’t replace them.”
“No. You can’t.”
She looked at the door.
“If you go, and you do decide to come back, to try and find us, don’t wait too long.”
“Or it won’t work? I know. I’ll be too old. Must I decide before I’m…fifty?”
“Just come back to us,” she said.
And suddenly her chair was empty.
CHAPTER 30
At the train station, there were sunflowers out on the track. Someone had been there ahead of him and if it was Elias Culpepper, he never knew.
The train stopped this time, and he got on and as he bought a ticket from the conductor he asked, “Do you remember me?”
The man looked at his face intently, scowled, and looked again and said, “Can’t say I do.”
And the train gathered steam and chugged away from the station and Summerton, Arizona, was left behind.
CHAPTER 31
The train flew across flat corn lands, over the horizon, by the lake and to the great turbulent city next to the lake, and he was running up the steps of the museum and walking among paintings to sit before the endlessly intriguing Seurat, where the Sunday strollers stood still in an eternal park.
Now beside him sat Laura, glancing back and forth from the green park to him, stunned and questioning.
At last she said, “What have you done to your face?”
“My face?” he said.
“It’s changed,” she said.
“I didn’t change it.”
“What is it, then?”
“Things. Things changed it.”
“Can you change it back?”
“I’ll try.”
And then, as in the dream, but now in reality, he walked down the steps of the museum and all of his friends were waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
There were Tom and Pete and Will and Sam and all the rest and they said, “Let’s go out for a long dinner.”
He said, “No, I haven’t the time.”
“You’ve only just said hello,” they said.
“It’s not easy,” he said. “I’ve known you all for years. But, I’ve changed. And now I’ve got to go.”
He looked back up and at the top of the stairs stood Laura. A single tear rolled down her cheek as she stared at his so-familiar yet oh-so-changed face.
He smiled, and turned away and walked down the street toward the railroad station.
CHAPTER 32
The train came out of the east and without thinking of time or place, glided slowly past a spot that was marked only by dust, wind, cacti, a scatter of leaves, and a profusion of ticket-punch confetti that celebrated on the air and settled when the train was gone.
Meanwhile, a familiar suitcase skidded to a halt on the remains of a ramshackle station platform, a few surfboards on a tide of sand, followed by a man in a wrinkled summer suit who tumbled out like an acrobat, shouting with pride when he landed, swaying but intact.
“Damn, I did it!”
He picked up his flimsy suitcase and stared around at desolation, wiped his brow, and looked toward the end of the station platform where the mail catcher stood. He saw a white envelope in its steel holding arm and went to pluck it from the equipment’s grasp. On the front of the envelope he saw his name. He looked around, studying thirty thousand acres of blowing dust, and no roads leading in or out of the desolation.
“Well,” he whispered, “I’ve returned. So…”
He opened the envelope and read:
“My dear James. So you’ve come back. You had to! A lot has happened since you went away.”
He paused and regarded the empty desert where Summerton, Arizona, once had stood.
He returned to the letter:
“When you read this, we will be gone. There will be nothing left but sand and a few footprints soon to be blown away by the wind. We did not wait for the arrival of the machines and their operators. We pulled up our roots and vanished. Have you heard of those orchards that once thrived near certain small California towns? As the small towns grew into big cities, the orange trees mysteriously disappeared. And yet, passing motorists who glance off toward the mountains will see that somehow those orchards have drifted or blown to settle and take root in the foothills, green and flourishing, far from the gasoline stampede.
“Well, my dear James, that is us. We are like those orchards. We’ve heard, through the years, late in the night, the great boa constrictor, the terrible endless snake of concrete rushing upon us, nearly soundless, no men swearing or shouting or revving tractor and truck engines, but just a terrible oiled hiss, the sound of reptiles sidewinding the grass or sifting the sand, all by itself, no men guiding, no one riding its loops and folds, a destination to itself, mindless but drawn by body warmth, the heat of people. And so, drawn by that warmth, as reptiles are, it came seeking to disturb our sleep, evict us from our homes. All this we imagined in our dreams, long before you arrived with your awful burden of news. So do not let this weigh too heavily on your soul. We already knew this day was coming; it was only a matter of time.
“Years back, dear James, we began to prepare for the death o
f our town and the exodus of our people. We brought in hundreds of giant wooden wheels and a plentiful supply of heavy timbers and iron fastenings to bind them together. The wheels lay waiting on the edge of town for years along with the timbers drying in the sun.
“And then the deadfall trumpet blew, to tell it with your humor, at the picnic of the Apocalypse and you saw the faces before you pale with each new revelation. Once in mid-speech I thought you might back off, break, and run, panicked by our panic. Yet you stayed on. Finished, I thought you might fall and die so you could not witness our deaths.
“And when you looked up we were gone.
“We knew you were sick at heart, so I gave you what medicine I had, my attention and my pitiful words. And when you left on the noon train, leaping on long before it stopped, we looked at all those iron and wooden wheels beyond the city, and the platform timbers on which we imagined our houses, barns, and orchards transported so far off that no one would suspect this place had once known a life and now would know no more.
“You have seen, have you not, those solitary parades, single houses hoisted up on wooden plates and pulled like toys along the streets to empty lots to be replanted while the old sites turned to dust? Multiply that by three hundred homes and witness a parade of pachyderms, an entire town gliding toward the foothills, followed by the orchard trees.
“It is all quite impossible. Yet, in times of war, think of the preparations, the blueprints, the final accomplishments, thousands of ships, tens of thousands of tanks and guns, more tens of thousands of rifles, bullets, millions of iron helmets, tens of millions of shirts and jackets. How complicated but how necessary when war shouted and we ran. How much simpler our task to uproot a town, to run and rebirth it with wheels.
“In time, our fevers turned into a festival of triumph instead of a funeral march. We were forced on by the imagined thunder, the threatening hiss, of that new road beyond the eastern range. At night we could hear the road coming toward us full steam, rushing to catch us before we vanished.
“Well, the purveyors of concrete and movers of earth did not catch us. On the final day of our escape there remained, where you stand, the ruined station surrounded by a jungle of orange and lemon trees. These were the last to go, a beautiful excursion of softly scented orchards that drifted, four abreast, across the desert to nourish our newly hidden town.