Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [160]
Nicholas hadn’t heard about the Twin Towers until he got back into his car, after his lunch with the Adult, and had been driving back home when he had turned on the radio and listened to people being suddenly hysterical. Still on the freeway, he called Daphne to see if she was okay (she was), and then he had called Mrs. Andriessen.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was strange, with an odd stillness. “I just heard. Someone else, a friend, called to tell me.”
“Isn’t it terrible?” Nicholas asked. “My God.”
“Yes, it is,” she said calmly. “Quite terrible.”
“I don’t know what to think,” Nicholas said, imagining the smoke and the piles of the dead.
“Oh, you don’t?” the Adult asked him. “I do.”
Two weeks later, on the day that Nicholas flew up to Alaska, the airplane had so few passengers in economy class that the flight attendants were handing out free meals—this, from an airline known internationally for its stinginess. Nicholas himself had taken a seat in first class, suspecting (correctly) that no one would question his right to be there. The anxious, unattractive people clumping down the aisle toward steerage stared at him helplessly.
Once airborne, after eating the broiled chicken, green beans, muddy mashed potatoes, and brownie, and gulping back the last of his scotch, he turned off the reading light, expecting to see from his window the empty black familiar nothingness of space and the Yukon Territories. Instead, he gazed outward at a vast velvety array of northern lights folding and unfolding. Shimmering with color, purple and blue, as hideously majestic as a floor show in heaven, they kept up with the plane, not underneath or above but beside it, and beside him, somehow. He closed his book and for a moment felt deranged by humility.
In Fairbanks he checked into a Holiday Inn near the airport. The next morning, he decided to take a walk after breakfast. The sky had acquired a peculiar royal blue, and when he returned to the hotel lobby, an airline pilot told him that the sky looked that way thanks to the ban on airplane travel that had been in effect for the past two weeks. The upper atmospheres had cleared themselves. Deep colors had returned overhead, at least for now.
The trees around Fairbanks were in full autumnal display. Leaf gold was everywhere. There were no maples up here, so all the usual reds had gone permanently missing. Nicholas drove north of Fairbanks to the house of Granny Westerby, one of his regular suppliers. Like Nahum Fester Cobb, Granny W. was a bit of a graphomaniac, and like him—like all of them—she imagined up for herself Blakean angels, devils, and end-times. A retired cleaning lady whose husband had worked for the Alaska Railroad, Granny painted words on the sides of jug lamps and bottles, though she also made the occasional message board. Her specialty was visionary Eros.
I AM COME INTO HIS GARDEN WHERE MY LOVE HAS BREATHED MY NAME. MY LOVE IS LIKE UNTO THE CLIMBING VINES, FOR HIS LUNGS INSPIRE THE FAIREST WINDS AND HE BLOWS HIS GOD-BREATH AGAINST MY CHEEKS. I AM FAINTED FOR HIM & XIST. I AM HIS LILY SECRET, I AM PLANTED AS A SEAL UPON HIS LIPS, HE WATERS ME. G.W.
The sources for these feelings, the words themselves, stumped him. Nevertheless, that blue love-craziness on a painted closet door happened to be the first piece of folk art Nicholas had bought from her. Shipping it down to the lower forty-eight had cost him hours of trouble. A client of his in Connecticut, a lawyer, had bought it and used it as the door to her guest room. When Nicholas had paid out the sum Granny W. had demanded in