francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-12 17:42:00 |
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The room did not exist. It was a tiny-teeny room in a tiny-teeny house and it had been a gift to him along with the gloves and the hat and the waistcoats (the waistcoats were very fine, very fine things, they were brocade as red as spilled blood, as broken hearts - except Rabbit did not like hearts broken at all). The house was gone now: safe as Alices, it was gone but it did not matter when there were dreams that could be dreamed. Nothing mattered, in dreams. In dreams, Alices had never been so it stood to reason that everything that had been before could be again, Alice-less. Rabbit preferred dreams to realities at best. The walls were the pale yellow of cracked parchment and the maid was not permitted in here at all even if she sniffed in the corridor beyond. She sniffed regularly, Rabbit knew, because she sniffed precisely between the quarter hour chime from the Swiss cuckoo clock on the left and the hour trill from the grandfather clock on the right. She sniffed precisely, a deep huff of breath and indignation drawn in along with her nose (possibly dust, there was no escaping dust in the house, even if there was no pepper at all) and the clocks chimed and it was as regular as it had been, once. It was never quite as regular as dreams. Rabbit smiled. The workbench was a slab of wood that ran the length of the room. There were windows but not for looking out - Rabbit did not look out in the room because he was too busy looking at everything in it. Light was a faint, soft wash of pale-tinged gold across the workbench and it caught on gears and twists and springs, it caught across metal like jewels. There were no dust motes to spiral - Rabbit liked his clockwork clean, he liked it to tick-tock precisely as it should and he liked it exactly as it ought be and there was no ought-be, with dust. Dust was imperfection. Dust might, Rabbit was sure, catch in gears and slow down the second hand and there you would be, with a whole second missing and everything undone. Everything undone. The man crouched over the workbench (for he was a man-thing now, he was man as he had been then and was occasionally now, although he had the occasional tendency to burst into rabbit when he was most twitchy, for which he blamed nothing but Alices) was a long, pale comma in thin sunlight. He was freckled-pale, the kind that was eyes the thin blue of days with weak sunshine and squinting concentration as he coiled height and length and the whole of himself behind the workbench and the small gold loup he held to his right eye. The clock was in pieces, the clock was disassembled past the point of a singular tick but the tock would come. One could always manage a tock, if there was likely to be a tick. The swish of pendulums and the faint metronome tick-tick-tick of other clocks all about were a lullaby, something to sooth the dismembered parts into order. Rabbit wielded the tweezers deftly and gently, a master surgeon at work. The coil of gold chain in his right pocket was a gleam, a protective guardian for the sweet tock-tick-tick of his watch, his watch, ticking quietly away in time with his heartbeat. The Cat was a cat. Low and black in the low, black shadows he prowled, his face triangular as a snake’s with ears flat and fangs just as bone-white and sharp. Resin-yellow eyes melted into pupils, pupils rounder and larger and blacker than they ever were outside of dreams. Here they bloomed deep, head to tail, a mirrored self-reflexive ouroboros. His tail twitched. The room made noise all around. It was as if thousands of tinny toy soldiers, their little uniforms painted oily bright with linseed oil, polished to a shine, tromped and marched erect in their rectilinear form, around and around and around on the heavy wood of the workbench, back and forth, over and over, here and there. Constant and unchanging. It was the sound of order. Not a footstep out of place, not a tick out of time. Order, rules, laws, everything in its place. Tick-tick-tick. No one had any imagination anymore. No one asked ‘what if.’ Instead, they paired cogs, they meshed the metal teeth of gears and ground them together, a machine to pull a string to ring a bell. A machine to make music. Why not let the wind blow and see what happened? No. It just wasn’t done. No one took a chance. There was no Alice. The Cat growled. Low and black in the low, black shadows he slunk. The tock-tick-tick felt cold, icon manacles slithering, trailing a bound and gagged Jacob Marley whose only question was the moaned ‘why do you doubt your senses?’ The Cat flattened to the floor. The ticking was like to drive him mad. Two feet, bare, milky and long, sprouting orange freckles, held the wood of the floor to the dirt of the ground. Two feet, bare, milky and long, sprouting orange freckles, not so unfamiliar. Lucky rabbit’s feet they were, only missing their fur. Pink pads softened the underside, clean. Yes, he knew them. The Cat came closer. He ventured into the eddy of sunlight that slipped through the one-way windows. The Cat was a man. The room shrank around the mirror-shine of his shoes, around the purity of his spats and buttons, and the golds and liquid ambers paled around the midnight plum of his evening dress, somber as it was, stiff whites sudden and starched. His collar stood, the cravat was tied, and his gloves were soft kid. His hat was fine and well-brushed and, atop the tall Cat’s head, it skimmed the ceiling tentatively, as a child might bring a bow over the strings of his first violin. And, indeed, however mundane it was, the fact that there was a ceiling was disconcerting. It was an odd addition to a dream. But, not, perhaps, to a dream about neat rows. Rabbit had never been one abandon a detail, however unwieldy or minuscule. The Cat smiled. The Rabbit liked locks. He liked keys - delicate twists of things, angular as teeth - but he liked locks more. Comforting solidity. All the doors in the house - his house, the one where the paint was smoothed over the walls and there were no cracks, not a one - had locks. All of them from the pantry to the porch and all of them were locked. Rabbit liked small spaces and he liked quiet spaces and he liked them best of all when there was not a chance of those spaces disturbed, order and reason left precisely in place. (The clocks tick-tock-ticked. They kept placid order and they said not one thing, even if all their faces looked directly at the Cat. If they were sentinels, they were silent and not a one provided warning). Rabbit did not breathe, in dreams. Breathing wrong, at the wrong time, at the wrong tick, could disturb a clock, could throw it quite sideways until it caught the seconds half a second too late, could undo the delicate chemistry (and he called it chemistry, Rabbit, the precise mechanisms lining up and the magic therein to set them whirring, he called it ‘chemistry’ to capture the indescribable that kept it ticking on long past hands had let it go) and Rabbit did not work at his clocks to leave them to chance. He did not breathe here, when he remembered. He remembered now. Rabbit’s breath was a shudder, a quiver. It skittered down the spine beneath the white cotton shirt and the feet - bare, freckled - lifted until they curled toes-first around the spindle of his stool. A smile, oh Rabbit recalled smiles. He recalled teeth. He froze and the clocks sang tick-tick-tick in and out, the frustrated, shallow little pant of breath in the back of his throat. "Y-you are n-not supposed to be here!" It would, perhaps, have been a rush, a loud one, but Rabbit stuttered around the words as though they too, wished to tick-tick-tick in his throat. He crouched over his clockwork and the loup dropped with a brassy clatter onto the paper spread over the worktable. This Wonderland, Rabbit’s Wonderland, was Alice’s England done up in oil pastels and a blind man’s watercolors, the sooty grays blotted out only by weak honey. But it was England all the same, all structure, all metal framework beneath brick, and supposed tos. It was a brass scale tipped, but precise, it was numbers scratched in an old ledger kept in a back room. It was suffocating. It was lobotomizing. The white of the Cat’s standing collar clung too closely to his throat and he felt it as he might hands, cinching their aperture ever so slowly, his windpipe crushing together in breathing red walls. There appeared a spider’s silk crack in the Cat’s olivine smile, an edge Wonderland had never known, and suddenly, with clocks counting seconds behind him, those burgeoning black pupils pinned to nothingness and the blue-green blossomed. The ticking was like to drive him mad. Rabbit twitched. He was pale in a pale room, white, yellow, orange, washed out and chalky, creamy and sweet. The Cat was drawn in a firm hand, a hard press to paper, thick black lines and generous inking. Two eyebrows rose and petaled lips pursed. The stuttered, shuttered words were magnesium filaments ignited by electricity, a flash bulb of memory for the Cat. He was certain he’d heard the same before and with the same ghost of a pop in their wake. "Where am I supposed to be, dear?" The Cat’s grin turned feral as he purred. Rabbit cowered before him, shy over the innards of his clock. There was something to be said about dreams, however. Even here Rudolf Clausius could be heard chanting his mantra: entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. Entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. Entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. It was no different in dreams. Disorder seeped in. Slowly, but not at all steady. One of the clocks chimed, shrill, though there was no hour to herald. Pure nonsense. Rabbit stuttered upward, the curl of his spine snapping straight with a judder that would be misaligned vertebrae, the click-tick-tick of bones breaking back into place and the calm scud of sunlight broken like a finger dipped into still green surface-tension water setting it to ripples. He knew the hours as they flitted past him in his sanctuary, his locked-door sanctuary with the sniff between the quarter hour and the whole. He knew them as the melody his own heart tick-tocked to and the additional and the out of place was strident note out of tune. Rabbit’s eyes were wide, terrified milky-blue as they snapped to the large, fulsome white clock-face over the door. The loup scuttered over the paper and rolled into the delicately layered, tissue-thin cogs and wheels all lined up. "No!" Rabbit’s voice was a weak yelp of protest, the sunlight that sifted placidly through the windows, filtered through the tips of his ears and tinged them a faint, rosy pink. If the lines were drawn in hard firm hand then Rabbit was pencil over damp sugar-paper, pastels scuffed into the corners and the watercolor sweep of the tremulousness of his straightened back. He stared at the clock in defiance and the hand rolled back, antique ironwork and fretwork needle ticking back down the seconds to a silenced hour indeed. Time in a dream could be taken up and held; Rabbit’s finger and thumb were rubbing the gold chain at his waistcoat pocket as though it were an anchor for an albatross. "Not here," he said crossly, swiveling on the stool and he blinked in the weak-tea sunlight, the creeping invasion of shadow as it curled around the Cat. Out there, where Alices ran wild, out there, where crowns could roll off before tea-time and the sandwiches came with the corners uncut, there time could be permitted to skip, to dance, to jolt itself before the hour but never in here. "You’re early. Or you’re late. But you’re not on time and never in here," Rabbit was most severe. Time was not a container. It did not hold. Time was not contained. It was not held. It was not sandstone on sandstone, face to sun, a hand-hewn jut of nose casting pleached shadows, gray over black over skittering sand. It was not the virgin countenance of a Cromwellian clock, copper alloy engraved with delicate tulips, petals just so, weights hidden so as obscure the magic, the gimmickry needed to present the façade of time as a thing one could keep. Time was not a container and it was not a line. It was a language to understand, to parse the ultimately anarchic world and nothing more. Rabbit’s tick-tock-ticks were his own. They were his chronos, not his kairos. They were simple, useless black lines painted onto discs, metered and even, but measuring nothing more than a heartbeat, than circumference. They did not keep time. Only now as Rabbit held onto the gossamer of gold that tethered his charm, his heart, white knuckled, wishing for order, the clocks sped up, rushing hands passing wildly over blank faces as the tick-tick-tick sought to match the pace of Rabbit’s own heart. The room grew loud, the din nigh a roar of history eeking in swashes of India ink, slipping from the page. It was a frenzy. Minutes whizzed by. Hours, even. Whatever arbitrary bite-sized blocks, sweetened with rosewater, man had decided upon to help prop up the withering stem of his undertaxed, atrophied brain—it all moved. The Cat need not say a word. He smiled at his friend, at the chipped lapis lazuli eyes that blinked milkily in the weakening light, and he did nothing else but stand. The ticking was like to drive him mad. The gold thread, the chain of the pocket watch, was pinched. It was suspended in sunbeams and it glinted. Mercurial pupils dilated and constricted. The Cat held the silly instrument in his palm, the cool metal cradled and pinioned by claws. Entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. "On the contrary, darling, it says I’m right on time." The Cat twirled the pocket watch until it was face-to-face with Rabbit. He snapped its golden shell shut, a little ruthless and a little cruel, his own heart slower than any clock could catch. His words continued along their sweet song, low and pretty as the candied glass of a cathedral’s east window, Ward and Nixon in cylinder glass, glazed with lead. A harmonic oscillator. Chaos. Rabbit’s fingers clutched, spasmed on nothing, fumbled at the brocade (the soft brocade, the pretty brocade, the brocade red as hearts) with a gasp and a strangled, spat-feathers choke at the back of the throat. The watercolor water spilled, stained him rose-red and his left eyeball began to twitch in wild panic (tick, tick, tick). He was dizzy in time, order skittering like metal spinning on glass, breath fluttering like wings beating wildly against the curtailment of his rib cage. The clock only half assembled on the wide slab of honey-colored wood began to tick, a wailing, death-rattle out of sync with all the clocks on the walls, the sundial sketched out on floorboards in chalk that the Cat stood so precisely in the center of. Rabbit scrabbled at his front with his fingers and he scrabbled with his feet at the stool, the thump-thump-thud of gaining purchase with bare toes until the stool went sideways and Rabbit did not. "That’s mine!" Rabbit howled, as the watch spun lazily from glass-shard claws, "That’s mine," it was the yelping of an animal caught in the snicker-snack of a trap and there were no Alices at all before but there might, there might be now (Rabbit’s nervous gaze bounced into the corners for a snatch of blue and white pressed cotton, for the flash of petticoats that was an Alice, loose). He reached, white-wild hands and milky skin and he gulped on the click of the catch, the time shut down, shut off, no comforting tick-tick-tock when it sat between the paws of the Cat. "It isn’t, it isn’t," he said and the clocks span, they danced to the different masters in the little room with the parchment walls, and the dials whirred like lunatic eyes. "There isn’t any tea for you, you can go away." The grandfather clock struck forebodingly, a pendulum swing of bass warning. "No sandwiches and no cake and no Alices." The little ticking heart, all gold-gilded and sparkling, twisted on its chain, a slow, spindling, curiously blank phenakistoscope. The reedy sunlight had been overgrown by shadows by now, erased by a hoarfrost of black, but still the pocket watch shined and it ticked and the slender chain reached toward Rabbit, a vital artery of red-blue decaying aurous, life to gold. The Cat clamped it between his hands, tight, and held it there. It beat against his palms fitfully. It was reminiscent of a captured mouse, he thought, held fast, a wee thing too exhausted for bellicose retaliation. It reminded him of his brother. The gutted clock on the workbench sang its song of the battlefield, a dying soldier, torn, bleeding, asking for water, just a little water, please, sir, a sip, and Rabbit’s perch tumbled. The little man jumped up and down on those white-pink feet, the lucky rabbit’s feet angrily, but he lacked the height necessary to retrieve his treasure. The Cat smiled again. The clock rimed with age, the grandfather, bellowed. He passed Rabbit his heart gently. It was the Cat’s way, after all, to mingle menace with kindness. Rainbows bled on oil and water, and they bled here too, bands of jeweled colors separating over black. Quite pretty. The room quieted a touch as Rabbit’s rose-sipper heart was returned. It wasn’t order, but it wasn’t chaos. The Cat looked down at the colorless tinkerer, stained as he was, with electric curiosity. There was a pause, an intake of breath before the short-lived silence. Another clock, from the wall to the right, awakened from some metronomic nightmare, startled, and set to catching up. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. The ticking was like to drive him mad. No smile broke through the night that had creeped so steadily, so surreptitiously over the room. The sun was unceremoniously snuffed out and the unused windows did as they always did (though they could have changed if they’d willed it), they sat. The sundial had nothing to read in the black on black, its gnomon dissolved. Entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum. "Alice is only just outside, Rabbit, love. Shall I call her in?" It was a taunt, a velvet tease that traipsed along the rose-bloom brocade of Rabbit’s waistcoat. The argon glow of a Geissler tube, the Cat’s sudden smile, skeletal, illusory glass, cut a swath in the black. The hummingbird pulse, the tick-tick-tick of the watch behind Cat’s claws and Rabbit watched, the faint twitch and jerk of his throat as it worked, the preternatural stillness of the cornered thing. The soft, dandelion-fluff of his white hair smoothed itself just a little too much into the sleek silkiness of what was almost fur. He waited, the unblinking freeze of prey-caught, prey almost and the flush of blood red as cards skated up his cheekbones, stained him livid as a knave until the swinging pendulum of the tiny gold watch caught gently into his palms. Rabbit gasped, a faint rush of sound as the clocks swayed to a time that wasn’t order, crazed soldiers marching on into nothing: he cradled the gold watch, bent low over it until he was a curl of bleached cotton and pink ears and he whispered to it, soothed it, stroked it, and tucked it back into the very inner waistcoat pocket made for things like hearts and final cards, for crowns, perhaps. He jerked, electric snap of spastic limbs, wild-eyed with fear as he glared at the out-of-order clock, the tick-tick-tock that tocked when it should tick and ticked a quarter-second out of step with the rest. He fumbled for the loup, a white-creeping crawl of fingers over workbench, the tremulousness of quivers sinking down his spine. The brass spiral of his widened, blinking eye stared up at the clock: the ticking quietened, an arrhythmia of apologetic tick-tock-tock-tick? until it settled into the steady pattern of the time. Rabbit was calm then, he was order restored until the shadows spread milkily and the Cat’s voice was an echo by the grandfather clock. "No!" His indignation was sharp, livid, "No Alices, none at all, not here, not orderly, not proper, YOU NEED AN APPOINTMENT!" The scutter of words into apoplectic noise and Rabbit clapped a hand over his mouth, wide-wide startled eyes above the pale stretch of his palm. He cleared his throat. He smoothed his waistcoat. "Alices are not invited," he said crossly, with the snappish syllables of Victorian England, of tables with cloths that stretched to the floor, "It is very rude to invite an addition without first asking the host." He eyed where the Cat had been, warily. The Cat was gone, but not gone. Even if the sun had held high in the sky, that resilient spray of molten gold, and had the Cat still stood with the heels of buttoned shoes sharply abutting, he would have cast no shadow. The sundial would read: nothing. Entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum, and in the moments where there was no Cat, where only his piano-toothed smile danced in the air amongst the dust motes or his words slid as silk and oil, he was nothing but entropic, a fluttering strip of chaos in this butcher shop of time, where minutes were doled out like thick, bloody fatback, the hours primal cuts, and the days exsanguinated in the back over the rust-red drains, viscera spilling from carcasses like so many worms. He hunted Rabbit unseen. He circled the small man on quiet feet, a cat’s silent paws, listening to his mad friend’s raving and squeaking with one ear cocked, pleased with the twitch of rabbit eyes and the snap of rabbit teeth. Cold fingers played, brushing the soft, soft cream of Rabbit’s neck, the small visible strip of skin bare of fur, just there at the back, below his pretty puff of white-blond hair and above the violent, rigid line of his collar. Another bit of teasing as dials and numbers and pendulums and weights and nonsense calmed, choosing an orderly rhythm. choosing conformity. The Cat found this most irritating. Claws extended. They pirouetted, skimming that vulnerable bit of neck delicately, never scratching, only pricking as a needle through starched cotton. The Cat bent forward at the waist, his body coiling close, his lips, a pas de deux pressed to the sweet floral flare of Rabbit’s ear. He breathed. Mastic. Mint. Bergamot orange. Tick-tick-tick. "If I had asked, you would have said no," he said. He already was mad, he remembered. Rabbit trembled. It was the expectant shudder of prey gamboling too close to predator, the thin shiver of wind-in-grass, of shuffling nearer-near-nearer to the catch of teeth, the velvet paddy-paws of stalking death. The tick-tock-tock of breath catching like cogs and clockwork and stopping - Rabbit liked time’s evenness, the predictability. Wonderland spun on to chaos, marched on without clockwork to run to (and why? You knew where you were in the game, with a clock, for a clock was not so very far off a compass and if you had a compass then you knew entirely which direction you were going in) and the Cat’s smile was a shudder-thing, a ripple of bone-gliding terror for all things that were smaller and flightier and twitchier. A man - a man, solid in his waistcoat and his breeches and his bare, flat feet on the floor beyond the sundial chalk sketch - would perhaps have turned, sighted down his pursuer. Rabbit’s heartbeat skittered, was a thready jumping vein in his throat. He waited, instead. Conformity was calm, the frost at the edge of the windows warmed, melted, the threat dissolved like thin spring sunshine. Nonsense could be held at bay with neatly pressed shirts, with cucumber sandwiches, with the calm tick-tick-tick of clocks counting down the seconds until it was time for bed, for warm milk and good sense (Rabbit read the dictionary before bedtime, entirely skeptical of poetry and nonsense that he chose solid words and meaning that could not be adulterated into the nonsensical). Nonsense was a copper spring coiled down tight inside the back of a pocket-watch, something that could not be helped but could be controlled. The pin-prick glass-points grazed skin that pinkened properly beneath, bloomed below and above the collar with blood. Rabbit twitched and he gasped. He spasmed, electric-jolt and tick tick tick very quick and he turned, face to face with a Cat and if he shook just a little beneath the spun-molten madness of those eyes, he drew himself up very smartly with a snap of his heels together and his hands tugging at his waistcoat until it was proper, the pass of his fingers over the needle-prick blossomed blood at the back of his collar with a cross twitch of his nose. "Invitations," Rabbit said sternly, the faint suffusion of blood paling until he was pallid as a fresh sheet of paper once again, "Are given in advance. Notice is required. Scheduling. One has to be entirely sure of where one is." There was blood. Underneath the translucent, mica skin, there was Queen’s red in full bloom, ruby gold, as it was sometimes called. Lead glass and tin. The Cat could smell it, ferric and implacable. Oh. An invitation. The Cat’s grin curled as acanthus stems and volutes, wide, white, and unscrupulous, arabesques of the most predatory make. Eye teeth as dangerous as Cimber’s dagger were molded egg-and-dart. (Ista quidem vis est!) His thirst grew and his claws pricked and he smiled so. He reappeared. The prim press of Rabbit’s order slotted back into place. As if it had a place. As if charmingly wrought iron hands, hairline thin and oh so rococo, measuring the tick-tick-tick were enough. As if any of it could stop the disorder that circled the shadows of the room as a wolf did man’s fire, hungry, salivating, patient and inevitable. Conformity was fear. It was a prop of tinder-sticks painted as pila, iron shanks truly ill-filed wood, it was organization and systems of myopic hierarchy. It was the division of time, the separation of tick and of tock, and a desire for safety in a universe that swirled precariously on the edge of the Antikythera mechanism’s vision. It was a cog meshing with a cog meshing with a cog, tooth on tooth on tooth, as they knew not what else to do and not a one thought to ask the simple question ‘why?’ Conformity was fear that the question ‘why?’ could only be answered ‘I don’t know.’ Not that it mattered. Disorder came. You know how the saying goes by now. Entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum. Rabbit faced the Cat as earth in an orrery faced the sun—defiantly, angrily, foolishly, by design. And the Cat faced the Rabbit as the sun in an orrery faced the earth, with naught but a smile. He considered the silver-leafed card and the willowy script, a fine penmanship of twitchy rabbit nose and wet rabbit eyes, punctuated with a cottontail ‘round behind he was sure. He considered his invitation. "Where are we?" He asked, long-fingered hands fluting forward dreamily to touch the fine brocade of Rabbit’s waistcoat, to hold it, to secure it like a pocket watch to a slender gold chain, a heart on a lead. Tick. He leaned forward, bending toward his prey, toward lemon-sweet breath and trembling lips. Toward the echoing zither note of fear. Tock. The Cat considered his invitation. Tick. "Where are you?" Tock. Invitations gave a thing order. They gave it a beginning and an end with a suggestion toward a middling that if not entirely entertaining, at least suggested some notion of preemptory boredom that could be expected and counted upon. One could starch one’s napkins, on an invitation. One could set the clocks, by an invitation. One could even expect - without severe outline of what one was expecting, simply by the addition of time and tick-tock-clocks. Rabbit rubbed the tips of his fingers stickily together and he produced the linen handkerchief from his upper breast pocket with a flick, a snap of fresh-pressed lavender-smelling cotton and he wiped until the red-as-hearts, red-as-rubies blood that clung there was a mere pinkish stain. He folded the handkerchief into the prim ironed-in lines as waspishly as a fop at court, and he folded it back in, with no attention at all to Cat when there was ritual to be observed (only the tremulous twitch of his left ear, only the quiver in his shoulder and the imagined clack of vertebrae shuddering together). He looked up. There was Cat. The claws - silver-sharp, flicked against his buttons (oh Rabbit liked buttons, he liked fastenings, holes that could be covered up, twists of silk and hammered-chased metal spirals that could be done up, all possible infractions closed) with a ping and Rabbit drew in short-sharp breath, all tremulous hesitation and trammeled discomfort for oh, oh so close to smiles and teeth! Where Cat smiled, Rabbit blinked moistly, breath stuttered in his throat, wheezed like sagging bellows. "Here," he said, and his throat worked, his fingers scrabbled for his pocket watch, fastened around it in his pocket, his thumb smoothing over worn, old-gold. "Here and now. The workshop. There is no time for nonsense, no time at all, I have things! I am doing things! There was no invitation, I withdraw the invitation." It stood to reason the Cat could not be permitted without one; wildly, Rabbit thought of burned paper, feather quills broken into two, india ink spilled over floorboards. No invitations had been issued, none could be retracted. "You are not supposed to be here," Rabbit said, snappishly. His pulse jumped in his throat. The single cranberry-glass thread that sealed the dream, the room, Rabbit and the Cat, the ticks, clocks, tocks, and heartbeat pocket watch together, that bound wood as lover’s lips to create a room in a place in a head on a bed, that laced the cranium with Sharpey’s fibers, it snagged. Rabbit would pull it taut with each attendant word, so trim and exact, thin as an Egyptian scalpel, and the Cat would pick it loose with the walk of fingers on silk-loomed red and the jag of teeth in the dark, with each twitch he elicited from his white, white friend. Not that it mattered. Here there was only here. No there. Or, if there was a there, it was not here, so it was there and it was irrelevant. Dreams were as real as anything else. A claw disjoined the poppy red thread. A clock ticked backward. Kcit. Rabbit puffed. The Cat smiled. "Where am I supposed to be, dear?" The conversation stuttered back to the beginning, a legato loop, a whimsical, carnivorous zoetrope, and Rabbit was drawn closer. His nose was pink. The Cat considered his invitation, and the lingering question mark, a hung Roman eroteme, at the edge of his vision. Curious he was. As curious as he was covetous. One had to be entirely sure of where one was, Rabbit said. The Cat was not supposed to be here. Rabbit was here. The Cat ought to have been not here. But there was no not here. More unraveling. A grandfather clock, Comtoise and potbellied, whirred rudely. The ever-patient Cat, the ever-languorous Cat, he poured forward. He bridged the short distance between his ‘here’ and Rabbt’s ‘here,’ until not a breath spanned them. He tasted bitter orange on the back of his tongue. He bore down on the shivering thing, every fiber expectant. Wanting. Waiting. And then he let the man go. All semblance of the Cat evaporated then and the insistent weight of his tall, thin form on the poor Rabbit’s lifted as a velvet curtain before the stage. The limelight blanched the room, purging shadows mercilessly. A clock ticked forward. Tick. Rabbit sputtered. He was outrage and indignation, a macaroon puff in brocade, a gasping misery of flushed albino-white. The shock of hair, blonder than a man might be, wavered a little like dandelion fluff, became all too much more like fur when Rabbit passed a hand over it, smoothed it into the gentleman’s side-part it resembled mostly (a man groomed himself: a man shaved and took care of his sideburns, Rabbit was very proud of his sideburns). It was an unbinding, an untwining, the trap was unset, the Rabbit twisted like a fish cut loose on the line and he spun toward his workbench in a flurry of pompous correction. The dreamworld stretched lazily and fluid, snapped as silken as elastic, as indignities borne down upon white-fair head. There was nothing dear at all, about Cat, just the warped space between seconds that he occupied, as proud as you please (as proud as a Queen, and wasn’t that exactly as Cat might wish? He would look at a Queen, unblinking and obscene) and the patter-flutter of his syncopated heartbeat re-regulating with the tick-tock of the clocks all nicely in unison, all humming their militancy as brave little soldiers, as if they had not abandoned their posts. Rabbit righted the stool. He picked up the tiny cogs and dials, the creamy fascia of a dial that would not yet tick but promise lurked as yet in its unwinking eye. He set about the room with the practical fuss and half-whispered snatches of exasperation that were tweaking a clock here and adjusting a pendulum there. The sweet, honeyed light that spilled from the window re-lit the workspace. Rabbit bent to re-acquire the loup, rubbed out smudged chalk with the side of his big toe. Order restored. The rules observed. Rabbit sighed satisfaction: oh, a Cat not seen was not a Cat not there. But there was no primitive thrill, no throat-catch that meant teeth. Wherever he was, the Cat had not begun to smile and as yet, Rabbit could re-seat himself. The nearest clock chimed four. The next followed and then the next, a bloom of descant bells. Tea, steaming and warm and served with delicate, paper-thin cups, appeared beside a plump, matronly pot. "If," Rabbit said, laying a doily on the scuffed bare wood with practical care, "You are still here. You may," a pause. "If you observe the rules," hurriedly, as though the catch might be observed, the loophole looped if he did not get there quite quickly enough, "Come to tea. To tea only! NO ALICES!" The rising, cloying haze of steam, the warmth of a hamam of turquoise and ivory, just there above the spout, as it climbed among the soda-lime sunbeams, began to fritter outward. It dispersed into the sunlight of the room warmly and with pleasure, in pretty olive-branch tendrils. It was only when Rabbit spoke, when he chittered and chattered and blinked and pressed and hemmed his invitation with caveats and ‘but but buts!’, that the disturbance became perceptible. The teapot’s exclamation was rippling. It was changing. The olive branches withered and the soft, gauzy cloud wicked outward, apparently solid, and two feline eyes, diamond-pupiled, smiled there, wispy eyelashes as viperous as any incisor. The Cat was not here. He was here, but he was not here, as should please Rabbit. The dear. It was best, however, not to let that go on for too long. The swirl of steam thickened, it reeked resinous and flowery, like incense and tar, a red ring of poppies. Syrupy light glanced off the solidifying steam, and it was only a moment before the Cat was once again here. His long, liquid legs were crossed at the ankles as he perched on the edge of the workbench, seated there as gentlemanly as he might in gothic-carved Hunziger walnut. Black-on-white buttoned shoes met Rabbit’s stool. Intricate linen openwork, the lacy white of Rabbit’s skin, lipped under the press of a houndstooth thigh. The Cat’s silk hat stood sentinel, a prop under his right elbow offering more support than possible in English reality. In his left hand, dainty bone china, scatter-rosed in a pretty yellow, a teacup more fragile than spun sugar, piped with lavender and Seville oranges, and a teacake, all studded jeweled currants, baked in readiness that morning, already tasted, balanced on the saucer. "How kind of you," was all the Cat said, his fresh shell-stitched smile throwing a single, starless shadow across the soft, maple floor. He purred and the clocks ticked. Rabbit very much disliked here and there at once. It was far more respectable to be in one place at one time and to close the door neatly behind you when you were not there - such doors being holes as well as doors, but if one had such a hole, one might as well fit a door to it, in the interim. It was perfectly possible that one might be here and then there with very little time in between but both at once was impolite. "Enough," Rabbit said, with the electric jitter of close, too close, far too close, improper and out of order and against the rules (Rabbit’s eye blinked rapidly, three times in succession before he managed control of it once again). Cat had to be hemmed in, given the fretwork of rules like iron, corded up and tied down like a recalcitrant bird tied up to a perch before its song was anything but discordant. "Enough of that." Rabbit’s step backward, a precise little gavotte around the intrusion of feet and legs and buttoned-over shoes (although admiration, as ever for Cat’s tailor, for the stout hat: Rabbit liked hats, you knew where you were, with hats) was perfectly in tune to the swinging tick-tock cello of the grandfather clock. The saucer shivered in his hand, the gritty slide of china on bone china as Rabbit raised his own and lifted the teacup daintily to his lips. There was something precisely soothing about tea, about the ritual: the clock struck ten past four exactly as Rabbit inhaled with a breathy sort of sigh, and set the teacup back down on the saucer with a business like twist until the pattern on cup and saucer lined up exactly. "One is always on best behavior," Rabbit said, with a faintly disapproving air, "At tea." Claws ticked on porcelain. Yellow roses shook. The tempo was uneven, an adagio-adagio of miniature pandemonium, without rhythm, without music. It jarred the dilute brown within, wrinkling it. A tempest in a teacup. Whitecaps pushed at gold. The Cat drank his tea, no sugar, no cream. Rabbit’s precious chronos was but a foundation. Tick-tick-tick, steady as the Queen’s Royal Regiment, was quick to dissolve into nothing more than a spastic, desultory tickticktick-tick-tick-ticktick-tick. Anarchy was chronos with a prefix. "And after tea, dearest?" The Cheshire grin rose over the demure teacup as the sun did over the ugly silver tongue of the Thames. It promised nothing good, though it poured light and it encouraged petals to reveal. The March Hare and the Hatter had him for tea, and ‘best behavior’ had nothing to do with it. The bouquet of the Cat’s feet still rested on the stool, kidskin spats atop of one another. He shifted. Tarry heels clapped to the floor and he stood. With cup and saucer set aside, tea leaves and soft paste settled by the stovepipe hat, he did no straightening of seams, no brushing of crumbs. He simply stood. The tall spill of shadow extended over the toes of rabbit feet, ink sable-brushed over clotted cream as the Cat stepped to Rabbit. Tea conducted elsewhere and elsewise had little at all to do with Rabbit. Rabbit was suited to napkins and thinly-cut sandwiches, to polite ‘mother’ pouring the pot and to the delicacy of one lump or two. There was, after all, nothing about tea that could not be ordered. Everyone could enjoy it, if it kept to the rules. He raised the cup delicately, and he sipped and something of ritual, of the gentle sway and tick-tick-tock of the clocks and the workroom’s warm cradle kept Rabbit very straight, very tall. He passed a nervous hand over the waistcoat front, smoothed silk brocade and twitched at his cuff without raising eyes to where Cat stood. There was, after all, a rule against acknowledging the poor manners of one’s guest. It was rude. Rabbit was never rude. "After tea," Rabbit said with the faint air of one giving instruction to a rather idiotic child - and if he quivered as shadow fell over him, as Cat prowled the path of the sun and was livid color and painted shadow, he had only to count in time with the seconds to keep very still for if you counted time, time continued, time could not simply cease if nine came before ten and half past three was merely thirty past the hour, could it not? "After tea, one leaves." The Cat’s glissando smile came in closer on raven’s wings, the fracture running through it as a shimmer in the still, dark pool of a looking glass, it was that eddy of absurdity that lapped at the swill of shadows in the room, it was madness, and the man stooped only slightly. He did like to be close. The cradled cup and saucer, the succor and balm with two lumps of sugar, prepared just so, were gone from Rabbit’s pink paws in an eye blink, as if they’d never been. The squat, prudish teapot sat calmly on the finespun slip of a doily, humming with warmth, self-contained and unflappable. It said nothing of the scene that played out. No, eyes were averted and lips hemmed together discreetly. The clocks in the room joined voices in a recapitulation of afternoon tea. The audience of impassive faces read ten after four. They asked for Cornish cream tea, please, for Battenberg cake, oh, yes, and cress and egg sandwiches, thin as paper. The Cat’s eyes flicked down with amusement, watching with feline fascination as Rabbit smoothed his waistcoat nervously. For a second time, the conversation, the time, the way the Cat twined forward, it was an echo of a dreamy earlier. The tail of the ouroboros to its head. ‘Round she goes. "Entropy," said the Cat to Rabbit. The pad of a thumb, so cold as to almost sear, as lost as Franklin’s Erebus, kissed the pleasantly flushed skin of the host’s downy, rabbit cheek, tracing outward, to skim the bone of his jaw and down. The smile was a rosary of baroque pearls, breath was the sickly-sweet incense of cinnamon, Mignotte, lemon balm, jasmine, fennel, cypress, and cloves. "Entropy of the universe tends to a maximum." It was a recitation. Eyes too dark to contain the marbled blue-green half-closed. Something somewhere was clicking, a gear trapped, a mechanical scream. The Cat did what he did not do earlier, sending the reprise off its greased tracks. Tempo abandoned for emotion. Rubato. Lips near to Rabbit’s, the Cat played. The artery of the pocket watch was severed with a hard, wicked yank. The chain spun wild and loose. The room went black. The audience applauded, roses fell, and there came no ticking. Rabbit screamed. |