Chapter 30
John and the Warrior Queen Sloan are frozen in time. This is a literary device—we left them standing in the Eveningside parking lot a chapter or two back—but it is also a hard truth of memory, of organization, and of how the Universe spins and connects no matter our intentions or plans.
At any given instant
All solids dissolve, no wheels revolve
And facts have no endurance
And who knows if it is by design or pure inadvertence
That the present destroys its inherited self-importance?
…wrote Auden, and ain’t it the truth, Honey?
When time freezes catfish jump out of the water and are suspended in air. Bees mysteriously evacuate their hives and drop to the ground. Hens stop laying in mid squawking squat. Mice appear dazed and roll to a dead stop in an open hand. Snakes crawl from hibernation burrows and lie as sticks on the snow. Packs of dogs begin to howl simultaneously—and cease simultaneously.
This happens in a millisecond or a century yet, who knows for how long it happens? Gum pausing in mid snap snaps, vowels severed from consonants regroup, mephitis hangs in the mist, then wafts; the center ceases holding, then holds.
In the nick of time, so to speak.
John listens to Sharon’s cautionary tale, Mrs. Heartbreak grins: Clara Jane grins back. Mr. Eddie Keever is suave and charming on the Tradio Radio while daydreaming of a California beach; each is true: Tradio Radio, the dream and the beach.
Mrs. Gilmore observes a female cardinal alight on the rail of her Eureka Springs porch and thinks about visiting Kathmandu, a thing she has never done before. Cardinalidae Paroaria, as she calls herself now but who is really Gujeshwari Prachanda Deva, a human girl once living in Kathmandu, hopes Mrs. Gilmore will lay out some salt.
Gujeshwari Prachanda Deva ne Cardinalidae Paroaria has entirely forgotten about the husband who held her head under the water of the Kantipur River until she became a cardinal. But now—this minute, this second—Mrs. Gilmore reads it and remembers it, or can at least think about remembering it. Such is time becoming memory.
John Heartbreak, Dr. Sharon Sloan the Warrior Queen, The Fabulous Mrs. Heartbreak, Clara Jane Smith-Staley, Mr. Eddie Keever, Mrs. Gilmore, Gujeshwari Prachanda Deva, and Cardinalidae Paroaria, all share this exact moment, this exact time, this stuck in-between go there time and here time.
Between there and here a Eveningside Suit straining at the seams from angry steroids and Sermons from Revelations, is walking stiff kneed in a perfect line drive toward John and the Warrior Queen. The Suit has a small head, and rubies for eyes that rapidly revolve in deepening sockets.
There is a bulge under the jacket where a heart would be if ‘be’ can be deciphered in a Clintonesque way. The bulge should be unnoticeable, except that the suit surrounding it and under it is cheaply made and badly tailored. Pinned to the bulge is a plastic sign signifying ‘Chet Chandler Eveningside Security’. Chet is caught somewhere between ‘is pushing’ and ‘was pushing’ a wheelchair. He has joined John, et al, in-between there and here.
Dogs barking, bees dropping, beach dreaming and suave and charming on Tradio Radio, grinning exchanges, bird sightings, river murders, wishes for salt, all of it, was started and stopped and started again by Fiacre’s travel from the First Christian Churches’ Community Garden (there!) to the Eveningside parking lot (here!).
Time Travel is not seamless; it is not a fabulous run of modern gutter or a realized advertisement for a Caribbean Cruise, nor even the poof there to here suggested in the last chapter. Fiacre hopes to approximate the time and place where John and the Warrior Queen Sloan reside now, but it is entirely possible that he will miss them and it by an hour and a mile; perhaps by even a day and a league.
I’m sure you get it, especially if you are a traveler. John himself expected to arrive in Minneapolis at noon one day, but a weather glitch put him on a bus in Rochester, Minnesota instead. A flat tire, a revolution, a clerical error, all of these and a few more, have made John a day late and a league short more than once. Often, actually.
Sometimes the earth heaves or weeps, has a small seizure, shifts a plate, forms a Continental Rift Zone, or simply ignores the atomic clock and hitches a notch off center and back for no reason at all. Then Fiacre’s trip heaves and weaves, seizes up, shifts and hitches a notch off center; it happens to every time traveler. Fiacre has learned to sit back and enjoy the trip; perhaps he’ll get there a day before John and Dr. Sloan.
But:
Let us consider Chet. Suppose a man in a bad suit with steroid shot eyes, lumping muscles, and who is packing a gun, approaches you, led by a determined, angry stare. Suppose he believes that the world is ending, and that the ending will be supervised by a chosen few, he among them. You are not among the chosen few, according to him. You. Are. A. Problem.
So here is you, and there is Chet, and Fiacre is somewhere between here and there. What do you suppose will happen, you not being chosen and all?
