Lizard Music (11 page)

“Good morning,” the lizard said. “My name is Reynold.” He wasn’t any of the Reynolds I had met the day before. “I will show you where you can wash.” He took me down the stairs and led me into a sort of back yard, where there were a number of stone washrooms. Reynold waited for me. When I came out he said, “I’ll take you to your friends. We can have breakfast while I tell you the plans we’ve made for you.”

We walked back into the building where I had slept. In a large room I found Charlie and Claudia already having breakfast, those Thunderburgers again. The night before they had tasted a little like meatloaf; now they tasted a little like bacon and eggs.

“I’ve been telling your friends something about our island and what we’d like to show you,” Reynold said. “There’s a lot to see. I’ve made up schedules. We’ll have to skip a lot, because you’re going to have to leave late tonight.”

I must have looked surprised, because Reynold said, “Please don’t be offended—we’d love to have you stay longer. The reason we will send you off tonight is so that you will be able to get home at all. You know this is a floating island. Of course we can’t control when or where it will move, but we can predict it. At high tide tonight we’ll start moving, and by morning we’ll be a hundred miles away.”

Charlie asked a question. “Why doesn’t this island ever float closer to shore than ten or fifteen miles?”

“It’s the invisible wall,” Reynold said, “the same thing that keeps boats from bumping into us. It’s like a big invisible bumper all around the island.”

Reynold took a sheet of folded paper out of his pocket. This shocked me, because he wasn’t wearing any clothes. They aren’t put together in the regular lizard way. Reynold unfolded the sheet of paper.

“In order to cover most of the important sights on the island, we will divide into two groups,” Reynold said. He was reading from the sheet of paper. “The Chicken Man and Claudia will visit the House of Ideas and the House of the Egg. Victor will visit the House of Plants and the House of Memory. I’m afraid that’s really all we’ll have time for in just one day.” Reynold folded up the sheet of paper. I watched to see if he was going to put it back in his pocket—I wanted to be sure I had really seen it the first time—but he just left it on the table.

Another lizard came into the room. “This is Reynold,” Reynold said. “Reynold will guide Victor, while I, Reynold, will guide the Chicken Man and Claudia. To save time and give each visitor the widest possible impression of the important things on our island, Reynold will tell Victor all about the House of Ideas and the House of the Egg while they are on their way to the House of Plants and the House of Memory. Meanwhile, I, Reynold, will tell the Chicken Man and Claudia all about the House of Plants and the House of Memory while we are on our way to the House of Ideas and the House of the Egg.”

The lizards seemed to be really having a lot of fun being tour guides. They were very organized and businesslike. Both of them were wearing what looked like wristwatches, but on a closer look they turned out to be flat pebbles taped to their wrists. Reynold looked at his pebble. “It’s 7:15, time we started out.”

Reynold and I had a fairly long walk down the hill and through the city. While we walked he told me about the places I would not have time enough to see. The House of Ideas and the House of the Egg were near the center of the city, in two of the big buildings we had admired from the plain. The House of Ideas was a big empty building with nothing in it. It had no windows and only one door. Outside the door a lizard sat at a small desk. On the desk was a little wooden box. If a lizard had an idea, he could go to the House of Ideas and give an Agama Dollar to the lizard at the desk. Then the lizard at the desk would unlock the door for the lizard with the idea, who would slip inside and shout his idea. For example, a lizard might get the idea that lizards should not give advice to their friends unless they were asked for it. He would go to the House of Ideas, pay one Agama Dollar, and shout, “Lizards should not give advice to their friends unless the friends ask for it.” Then the lizard at the desk would lock the door, and the lizard who had the idea would go away satisfied.

“In this way,” Reynold explained, “we have collected and kept safe all our ideas for generations.”

“You mean that you think all those ideas are still in there?” I asked.

“Of course,” Reynold said. “How are they going to get out?” This struck me as a little dumb, but it didn’t seem polite to say anything about it.

The House of the Egg was apparently a place where they kept this egg that was sort of sacred. It seems that someone named Reynold (what else?) had been a big deal on Diamond Hard a long time ago. He invented the House of Ideas and the House of Memory and television, and all sorts of stuff. He was almost like a god to the lizards. When Reynold the first had died or gone away—Reynold (my Reynold) didn’t make it clear which—he left this egg and told the lizards that one day a stranger would come to the island and the egg would hatch, and they would have a leader and do all sorts of good things—conquer the pods and everything. I stopped Reynold there. I wanted to know what he knew about the pod people. It turned out that the lizards all believed in pod people. They thought that almost everybody outside Diamond Hard was a pod.

“Lizards and pods are natural enemies,” Reynold said. I had sort of figured that out for myself. Anyway, when the egg hatched, the lizards would start to fulfill their destiny, as Reynold put it. They would become a powerful influence in the world outside, everybody would see their television programs, the House of Ideas would be broken open, and all the good ideas would flood out into the world, and it would be the end of podism. It was all going to start with a visitor to the island, and that’s why they had everything ready for visitors and were so nice to them, even though nobody ever found their way to the island for years at a time. They never knew when it would be the visitor who would hatch the egg.

I guessed the egg, if it really was still hatchable, had some kind of baby super-lizard in it, maybe like a crocodile or a dinosaur. Reynold told me that when the egg was hatched, the invisible barrier around Diamond Hard would start breaking down, so everybody could come to Thunderbolt City and enjoy the House of Plants and the House of Memory.

It all made a good story (maybe it was even true), but I hardly thought Diamond Hard would get to be a big tourist attraction because of the House of Plants and the House of Memory—not if they were no more interesting than the two places where Charlie and Claudia were being taken. After all, one was just a big empty building, and the other one was just a place with an egg in it. I didn’t see how those things could be very interesting. I mean, Diamond Hard has a lot of wonderful stuff, and I think anybody would enjoy a vacation there, but looking at monuments is always a bore. Whenever I go someplace with my family, they always stop and read those signs along the road: In 1852 So-and-So Stole a Cow on This Spot. And it is just a spot with a few trees maybe. I guess maybe my family would like to go and see the egg.

It turned out that the House of Plants was very interesting after all. I really wasn’t prepared for that after the description of the House of Ideas and the House of the Egg. The House of Plants was a big greenhouse all made of glass. It was hot and muggy inside and raining in places. It was like a jungle. There were all sorts of weird plants and trees. Some of them looked like nothing I had ever seen before. There was a Diamond Tree—that’s its name. It had a trunk as clear as glass, and the leaves and branches were transparent too. It shimmered like diamonds and reflected rainbows of light. Yet if you touched the leaves and branches they bent. They looked as though they should have been brittle. There were trees with bright blue leaves and red trunks. There were plants that moved continually—like dancers. There was something called the Truth Tree. It was a sort of dumpy, scruffy, dark green thing like a bush or shrub. It didn’t have much of a shape, and the leaves were moldy-looking.

“This is the most beautiful plant here,” Reynold said. “Don’t you think so?”

“Yes, it’s very nice,” I said, trying to be polite.

The Truth Tree shook its leaves and made a noise.
BRRRRATT!

“You lied,” Reynold said. “It does that whenever anyone lies.” He was laughing.

“Why didn’t it do that when you said it was beautiful?” I asked.

“Because I really believe it,” Reynold said.

Truth Trees are planted in all the front yards in Thunderbolt City. Before a lizard takes an idea to the House of Ideas, he tries it out on the Truth Trees. There were other trees and plants; almost all of them had something special about them. The House of Plants was the most fantastic place I’d ever seen. When Reynold told me that it was time to leave, I didn’t want to go. I was starting to feel that all the plants were my friends. I mean, it was like the Hogboro Zoo only much better. Reynold insisted. It was time to go to the House of Memory. We had to keep up with the schedule.

There had been lizards strolling inside the House of Plants, and lots of lizards watering and taking care of the plants. Outside, lizard families were having picnics, and lizard kids were playing ball. The whole place had the atmosphere of a park or a zoo.

The House of Memory was a very different sort of thing. We took a narrow path that started behind the House of Plants. There was tall grass on both sides, and the path was dusty. It wound down through taller and taller grass. The grass was spiky. Mosquitoes buzzed around us, and I got a lot of bites. The path kept going downward. There were some scraggly trees and bushes with stickers. We were getting into a forest, a dark one. It wasn’t like the forest we had passed through on the slopes of Diamond Hard. This forest was sort of mean and dark and mosquitoey. My nose was full of dust from the path. I was hot and sweaty, and sort of scared. I really wished we could have stayed in the House of Plants. I wished it even more when I saw the House of Memory.

It was a little hut made of sticks and bundles of grass. There was a little dirt clearing around it, and there were lots of mosquitoes all around. The whole thing wasn’t any bigger than maybe a couple of telephone booths.

“This is the House of Memory,” Reynold said. “I’ll wait outside for you.” It was obvious that both of us wouldn’t fit inside very well. There was a little low door, like the door of a doghouse. It was dark inside, and there was a sort of sweet hay smell that I didn’t like.

“What’s inside?” I asked.

“You have to see for yourself,” Reynold said, “and don’t think about a snake.” I hadn’t been thinking about a snake! Up until then, I hadn’t. Now I couldn’t think of anything else. This whole thing scared me. I really didn’t want to go inside the hut. There was a sort of watermelon smell that was making me nervous.

“I don’t want to go in there,” I said.

“You have to go in,” Reynold said. “It’s on the schedule.”

I didn’t want to make a fuss. All the lizards had been so nice to me. I figured it wouldn’t take more than a minute to look at everything inside the hut and come right out again. It seemed very important to Reynold, and he showed no sign of letting me get away without seeing whatever was inside the House of Memory. What had he meant about snakes? Why shouldn’t I think about one? And why couldn’t I stop thinking about one? “It’s just an old shack,” I thought. I was sweating. Then Reynold did a very unfriendly thing—he just shoved me inside the hut.

It was dark inside. I couldn’t see a thing. Then I saw something. It was the biggest snake I ever saw, bigger than the one in the Hogboro Zoo, and he was standing up and looking me in the eye, and he was a cobra.

“He can’t hurt you!” Reynold shouted from outside. “I told you not to think about a snake!”

I can say for sure that I have never been so scared in my life. I just stood there with my knees shaking. I wanted to run, but I was afraid to move. By the way, the cobra was white. That made it worse. For the second time in two days, this time for real, I was sure I was going to die.

“Think about a corn muffin!” Reynold shouted, and the snake turned into a corn muffin. I looked at the corn muffin, a regular corn muffin. I thought about the snake. The corn muffin started to wiggle a little. I thought about a corn muffin—it was still. So that was how this place worked! You had to be careful what you thought about. I didn’t like it. I made for the door. But the door wasn’t there. This may sound funny, but the House of Memory was much bigger on the inside than on the outside. I mean, a whole lot bigger. It was as big as a barn at least, maybe as big as a football field. It was fairly dark, but there was enough light to make my way around. I guessed the light was coming from the doorway, and I tried to make my way in that direction.

“What is this place supposed to be?” I thought. I really didn’t like it. Then I found the squirrel. It was my old gray squirrel. Not a real one, the one I had as a little tiny kid. This squirrel really meant a lot to me when I was a baby, and I was happy to see it again. It wasn’t just a squirrel like mine, it was the same one. I mean, I used to know every inch of that squirrel, the places where I had sort of sucked the fur off the ears and the green thread where Mom fixed it when the stuffing started to come out. It had one original glass eye and one coat button. This squirrel was really broken in, and there wasn’t another one like it in the world. Somewhere along the way my squirrel had disappeared. I never did know what happened to it. To tell the truth, a month didn’t go by when I didn’t wonder what happened to my squirrel. Finding it like that really made me feel good. When I picked it up, all the old feelings came back—not that I go around sucking the ears of stuffed animals. It just felt and smelled the way I remembered it. The House of Memory! So that was what this was! I walked around in the almost darkness, holding my squirrel by the hand, to see what other memories I could find.

There were a lot of them. It was like walking around in a store or a museum. I recognized a few memories of mine, mostly baby stuff—my little bowl, my blue blanket, stuff like that. There were a lot of baby bowls that I didn’t recognize too, other people’s memories. There were memories that were really strange. I think they might have been memories of animals, or even plants and rocks—funny things like sounds, warmth, reddish light. My squirrel and I walked around among all the memories, looking for pretty or interesting ones. Little girls’ party dresses were popular, also scenes of the insides of rooms. There were no people. I don’t know why, maybe the lizards don’t collect those. Some of the strangest memories were feelings. You are walking along, and all of a sudden you are in a big puddle of warmth, or fear, or anger, or pleasure, or a particular smell. Then you step out of it and you’re back in the dark looking at somebody’s cap-pistol. I noticed that the majority of the memories were kid memories. There weren’t many grownup things. Also, you can pick up and handle your own memories, but other people’s memories are just like shadows. You can put your hand right through them. The one I really liked was a bunch of lions, maybe twenty of them, playing in this grassy place with bright sunlight. They were really great. I could smell the lions and the grass and feel the warmth of the sun. They raced around and knocked each other down and jumped each other, and wrestled, and swatted each other. They were big lions, but they weren’t all grown up. I really liked looking at them. I was really close to them, almost in among them. They were really enjoying themselves, and so was I.