Errantry: Strange Stories (18 page)

He jumped to his feet and bounced up and down on his heels.

“Jesus, I’m frozen. Let’s get out of here. I’ll walk you back across the bridge.”

My leg was asleep, so it was a moment before I could run to catch up with him.

“For fuck’s sake, Miles, you have to tell me what that was—what that was all about.”

“I told you all I know.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, shivering now himself. “God, it’s cold. It’s called the emerald foliot—”

“Who calls it the emerald foliot?”

“Well, me. And the person who showed me. And now you.”

“But who showed you? Are there more? I mean, it should be in a museum or a zoo or—Christ, I don’t know! Something. Are they studying it? Why doesn’t anyone know about it?”

Miles stopped beneath the overhang at the entrance to the tube station. He leaned against the wall, out of the wind, and a short distance from the throngs hurrying home from work. “Nobody knows because nobody knows, Robbie. You know, and I know, and the person who told me knows. And I guess if he—or she—is still alive, the person who told him knows.

“But that’s it—that’s all. In the whole entire world, we’re the only ones.”

His eyes glittered—with excitement, but also tears. He wiped them away, unashamed, and smiled. “I wanted you to know, Robbie. I wanted you to be the next one.”

I rubbed my forehead, in impatience and disbelief, swore loudly, then aligned myself against the wall at his side. I was trying desperately to keep my temper.

“Next one what?” I said at last.

“The next one who knows. That’s how it works—someone shows you, just like I showed you. But then—”

His voice broke, and he went on. “But then the other person, the first person—we never go there again. We never see it again. Ever.”

“You mean it only comes out once a year or something?”

He shook his head sadly. “No. It comes out all the time—I mean, I assume it does, but who knows? I’ve only seen it twice. The first time was when someone showed me. And now, the second time, the last time—with you.”

“But.” I took a deep breath, fumbled instinctively in my pocket for a cigarette, though I’d quit years ago.

“Here.” Miles withdrew a leather cigarette case, opened it, and offered one to me, took one for himself, then lit both.

I inhaled deeply, waited before speaking again. “OK. So you showed it to me, and someone showed it to you—who? When?”

“I can’t tell you. But a long time ago—right after college, I guess.”

“Why can’t you tell me?”

“I just can’t.” Miles stared at the pavement. “It’s not allowed.”

“Who doesn’t allow it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just not done. And you—”

He lifted his head to gaze at me, his eyes burning. “You can’t tell anyone either, Robbie. Ever. Not until it’s your turn, and you show someone else.”

“And then it’s over? I never see it again?”

He nodded. “That’s right. You never see it again.”

I felt a surge of impatience, and despair. “Just twice, in my whole life?”

He smiled. “That’s more than most people get. More than anyone gets, except us.”

“And whoever showed you, and whoever showed her. Or him.”

Miles finished his cigarette, dropped it, and ground it fastidiously beneath the tip of one oxblood shoe. I did the same, and together we began to walk back upstairs.

“So how long has this been going on?” We stepped onto Hungerford Bridge, and I stopped to look down at the fractal view of the park, no longer green but yellowish from the glow of crime lights. “A hundred years? Thousands?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, the park wasn’t always there, but something was, before they made the embankment. The river. Enormous houses. But I think it’s gone on longer than that.”

“And no one else knows?”

“No one else knows.” He gazed at the park, then glanced over his shoulder at people rushing across the bridge. Someone bumped me, muttered, “Sorry,” and trudged on. “Unless everyone does, and they’re all very good at keeping a secret.”

He laughed, and we started walking again. “Why did you decide to tell me?”

“I don’t know. I’ve known you so long. You seem like someone who’d appreciate it. And also, you can keep a secret. Like you never told about Brian and that dog in Sussex.”

I winced at the memory. “Is there a set time when you tell the next person? Or do you just make up your mind and do it?”

“You can tell whoever you want, whenever you want. Some people do right away—the next day, or a week later. But I think most people wait—that’s what I was told, anyway. Though you don’t want to wait too long—I mean, you don’t want to wait till you’re so ancient and infirm you forget about it or die before you tell the next one.”

I must have looked stricken, because he laughed again and put his arm around me. “No, I’m fine, Robbie, I swear! I just, you know, decided it was time for a change of scenery. Warmer climes, adventures. A new career in a new town.”

We’d reached the far side of the bridge.

“I’ll leave you here.” Miles glanced at his mobile, read a message, and smiled slightly before glancing at me again. “I’m not falling off the end of the earth, Robbie! I’ll be in touch. Till then—”

He raised a finger and touched it to my lips. “Not a word,” he murmured, then kissed my cheek in farewell, spun on his heel, and began striding back across the bridge.

I watched him go, his fawn-colored greatcoat and wide-brimmed hat, until night swallowed him. For a few minutes I stood there, gazing past the bridge’s span to the dark river below, the image of a gemlike creature flickering across my vision and Miles’s kiss still warm upon my cheek.

Then I turned, head down, as a blast of wind blew up from the underground station, and hurried to catch my train.

The Far Shore

In dreams he fell: from planes, trees, roofs, cliffs, bridges. Whatever awaited him below, the impact was the same. His right leg buckled and a bolt of pain flared from ankle to knee, so that even after decades he woke with his old injury throbbing, bathed in sweat and hands outstretched to restore his balance. The pain subsided as the hours passed. Still, he no longer stood in the studio while his students practiced their moves, épaulement croisé, balloté, rise, ciseaux, but sat in a plain, straight-backed wooden chair, marking time with an elegant silver-topped cane.

When he received notice that he was to be replaced by someone younger, he reacted with the same calm he always displayed, the classical dancer’s legacy of stoicism serving him now as it had for the last three decades.

“I hope you understand.” The ballet master’s face creased. “You know I don’t want to do this. If something opens up, we’ll find a place for you.”

Philip inclined his head. “Of course.”

That night he called Emma, his oldest friend.

“Oh, Philip, that’s terrible!”

He shrugged, gazing out the window of his tiny studio apartment at the glass edifice that had been erected across the street. “Well, I was lucky they kept me as long as they did.”

“What will you do?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

She laughed, and he felt better. They spoke for a good hour, gossip mostly about dancers he knew and Emma had never heard of. Then, “Why don’t you come stay here at the camp while we’re gone?” she suggested. “Not for the winter—a few weeks, or a month, however long you want. We’ll have Joe Moody close up when you leave.”

“Just like
The Shining
,” said Philip. “What a great idea.”

“It won’t be like that in early November. Well, okay, it might snow. But then you just call Joe and he’ll come plow you out. I think it would be good for you, Philip,” she added. “I mean, being alone here might be better than feeling alone there. I think you just need to get away from the city for a few weeks. See if you can clear your head of all this. You know?”

He knew.

“Sure, what the hell.” He heard Emma’s sigh of relief.

He called a few friends to say good-bye, arranged for someone to watch his place, and several days later left in his rent-a-wreck. It was after midnight when he reached the camp. He missed the turnoff twice, its sign so overgrown with lichen and old-man’s-beard that he’d mistaken it for a dead tree limb in the dark.

CAMP TUONELA

EST. 1908

An hour earlier, the highway had dwindled to a track guarded by ghostly armies of oak and tamaracks. All the landmarks he’d loved as a boy had disappeared. Where was the ancient ice cream stand shaped like an Abenaki longhouse? And Lambert’s Gun Emporium? Where was the general store where he and Emma had made forbidden trips to buy fresh doughnuts, inevitably betrayed by the smells of lard and burnt sugar that clung to them when they returned to their cabin?

“Christ, Philip, those are long gone,” said Emma when she greeted him in front of the lodge. “The general store burned down in the eighties. Chimney fire. Bob Lambert sold his place, he died a while back. I don’t remember what happened to the teepee.”

They’d met at Tuonela decades ago, bonding over a shared love of
The Red Shoes
and cheesy Mexican horror movies. They passed most of their childhood summers there, first as campers, then counselors-in-training, before Philip defected to a dance camp in New York State, and finally to the School of American Ballet. Emma eventually parlayed her love for the place into an actual romance, marrying Sam, a fellow counselor, at a lakeside ceremony twenty-odd years before. Philip had been her best man. He stood beside the pastor of the old Finnish Church who performed the ceremony, surprised to learn that the name
Tuonela
was Finnish, not Abenaki in origin, though no one seemed to know what the word meant. Shortly afterward, Emma and Sam bought the camp, and raised their two daughters there.

But the last few years had been tough.

“Parents want high-tech camps now,” she told Philip as they carried his bags inside. “Wi-fi, all that. We don’t even have a cell tower around here. This year our enrollment dropped to about half what it was last year. We could barely make payroll. So we figured this was a good time to do what all real Mainers do in the winter.”

“Which is . . . ?”

She laughed. “Go to Florida.”

Their girls were in college now, so Emma and Sam would be housesitting for friends in Key West, a midlife second honeymoon. Philip hadn’t visited Tuonela, or anyplace else, in ages. He’d spent his entire adult life in the New York City Ballet, first as an apprentice, then a member of the corps de ballet, and finally as an instructor. He’d been like the other boys, at once necessary and interchangeable: a rat in
The Nutcracker
; one of the debauched revelers in
The Prodigal Son
; a huntsman in Balanchine’s one-act
Swan Lake.
He’d passed hours watching Edward Villella and Jacques d’Amboise with mingled admiration and wonder, but—almost unheard of for a dancer—with very little envy. He knew how fortunate he was to pace the same darkened hallways as they had, sleepwalking into class before nine a.m., then burning through rehearsal and performance, often not departing the cavernous theater until almost midnight.

But he also knew he would never be a soloist, or even a fine second-rank dancer. He dreamed of the lead in
Square Dance.
He’d have happily settled for a side part in
Concerto Baroco.
Instead, there’d been a dozen years as a dancing rat.

“You’re a foot soldier,” a former lover told him once. “A foot soldier of the arts. Canon fodder!” he added with a laugh. “Get it?”

Philip wryly admitted that he did.

Not that it mattered to him; not much, anyway. He adored being part of the corps, its discipline and competitive fellowship, the perverse haven of a routine that often felt like a calculus of pain. He loved the fleeting nature of dance itself—of all the arts the one that left almost no permanent mark upon the world, even as it casually disfigured its adherents with deformed feet, eating disorders, careers like mayflies. Most of all, he loved those moments during a performance when he could feel himself suspended within an ephemeral web of music and movement, gravity momentarily defeated by the ingrained memory of muscle and bone.

It all ended suddenly. When he was twenty-eight (“that’s ninety in dance years,” he told Emma) Philip shattered his metatarsal during a rehearsal. His foot turned in as he landed from a jump; he hit the floor, crying out in anguish as his leg twisted beneath him. The other dancers rushed over with icepacks and pillows, and arranged transport to NYU Hospital. He spent weeks in a haze of painkillers, his leg in a cast. Months of physical rehab followed, but ever after he walked with a slight limp.

Still, he’d always been popular within the corps, and the ballet masters and rehearsal teachers liked him. At twenty-nine he found himself teaching the company. His former colleagues were now living eidolons of youth, beauty, health, joy, desire flitting past him in the studio, lovely and remote as figures from a medieval allegory. What he felt then was less envy than a terrible, physical ache, as for a lover who’d died. He could still be transported by watching a good performance, the smells of adrenaline and sweat that seeped backstage.

But his ecstatic dreams of flight became recurring nightmares of falling.

Sam had already driven down to the Keys. Emma’s flight left on Sunday, which gave her most of the weekend to show Philip how to work the composting toilet, emergency generator, kerosene lamps, hand pump, outboard motor, woodstove. Philip knew the camp’s layout as though it were the musculature of a familiar body: the old Adirondack-style lodge overlooking the lake; the campers’ log cabins tucked into the surrounding forest, moss-covered roofs and bark exteriors nearly invisible among birch groves and bracken. In the middle of summer, filled with damp children and smelling of sunblock and balsam, it was heartstoppingly lovely.