McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [5]
He’d prevailed upon the housekeeper to give him access to the sanctuary—in order that he might help solve the mystery of the poor man’s disappearance—and there discovered, in the course of tearing the entire place apart, the man’s notes, a copy of the precious map: everything. On one of the three islands there was said to be a secret opening, a hidden entry to a sort of lagoon otherwise completely encircled by rock and ice. He was to look for light blue ice along the water level, under a half-dome overhang, to paddle up to that place, and to push through what he found. That would be his private gate into the unknown.
It had reached the point at which his friends had noticed that the great majority of his expressions reflected discontent, and he’d started speaking openly about being crowded round by an oppressive world. Everything had been herded into a few narrow margins; everything had been boxed up and organized. What was zoology—or paleontology —but an obsessive reordering of the boxes? Finding what science insisted wasn’t there—that was the real contribution.
He liked to believe that he was the sort of man who viewed the world with an unprejudiced eye and judged it in a reasonable way. In letters to those few undemanding correspondents who’d remained in touch, he described himself as suppliant before the mysteries of Nature.
He felt more frequently as though his only insight was his desire to be left alone. Passing mirrors, he noticed that his bearing was that of someone who’d seen his share of trouble and expected more on the way.
He didn’t find himself to be particularly shy. When addressed he always responded. He had proposed to one woman, and she had visibly recoiled, and replied that their friendship had been so good and so pleasant that it would have been a pity to have spoiled it.
His first memory was of beating on the fireplace hob with a spoon. Asked by his father what he thought he was doing, he replied, “I’m playing pretty music.”
His mother, whose family had made a fortune in shipbuilding, was prone to remarks like, “I have upgraded my emeralds, down through the years.”
As a boy he’d felt his head to be full of pictures no one else could see. It was as if the air had been heavy-laden with strange thoughts and ideas. He’d grown up on an estate far outside of their little town, with his brother Freddy as his closest and only friend. Freddy had been two years older. They’d trapped bandicoots and potoroos in the understory of eucalyptus stands, and Freddy had taught him how to avoid getting nipped by jew lizards and scaly-foots. They’d ridden each other everywhere on the handlebars of their shared bicycle, and worked together on chores. They couldn’t have been more different in their parents’ eyes: tall and fair Freddy, who’d announced at the age of fourteen that he’d been called upon to minister to lost souls in the interior, once he came of age; and the diminutive Roy, with a mat of brown hair he’d never fully wrestled into order and a tendency to break jars of preserves or homemade wine just from restlessness. Freddy had helped out at the local hospital, while Roy had collected filthy old bones and left them lying around the house. Freddy’s only failing, in fact, seemed to have been his inability to more fully transform his brother.
Until it all went smash, the day before Roy’s fourteenth birthday, when Freddy, on an errand to the lumber mill, somehow had pitched into the circular saw and had been cut open from sternum to thigh. He’d lived for two days. His brother had visited him twice in the hospital, and each time Freddy had ignored him. Just before he had died, in Roy’s presence, he had asked their mother if she could hear the angels singing. She had fallen to weeping again, and had told him she couldn’t. “What a beautiful city,” he had responded. And then he had died.
Tedford’s father had never mentioned the accident again. His mother had talked about it only with her sister and a close cousin. They’d had one other daughter, Mina, who had caught a chill and died at the age of seven.
His father