Read Online The Boy in His Winter by Norman Lock - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Norman Lock
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I clutched Wells’s book for courage, while I walked streets made dangerous by my friend’s death.
What else?
I rode a trolley up and down the bluffs, exhilarated by the luxury of horseless travel inside a conveyance illuminated by the same electric light that made the place a fairy town. I had no money, as I said; but I was used to getting inside circuses, magic-lantern shows, lectures on the pygmies, and other public entertainments without a nickel to my name.
On one street, people were jostling at the door of a building that had been converted from a grocer’s store into a nickelodeon. I had no idea what a nickelodeon might be, but I was attracted by the bustle and laughter, which defeated solemnity and, with it, death. I slipped inside, as though I had no more substance than a shadow. Maybe I was one; maybe I could’ve strolled, brazen and unseen, through the streets, sat inside the trolley car while it lurched uphill and down again, and walked into the nickelodeon without taking pains to make myself inconspicuous. Maybe on that night in Baton Rouge, I was invisible to everyone but Tom, whose eyes were fixed on ghosts. In my life, I’ve often hadthe sensation that I was unnoticed to an unnatural degree; that I made no impression on others’ optic or auditory nerves. Then in sudden terror, I’d act in an outrageous manner to make myself apparent. I was like a clean windowpane, unregarded until you accidentally shatter it.
Death had no dominion over me once the moving picture had begun. It routed the darkness, overthrew the gloom of melancholy. It astonished me as nothing before or since has done. A Trip to the Moon. The spaceship of the astronomers, their landing on the moon and battle with the Selenites, their escape back to earth, the rocket’s sinking to the bottom of the ocean among strange yet familiar fish . . . The people who saw it with me that night were struck dumb with wonder. How much more must a boy born three-quarters of a century earlier have been? I never forgot it. A Trip to the Moon —by Georges Méliès; I suddenly remember the magician’s name!—and The Time Machine have been for me bulwarks against the night. Not an April night in 1903, but those at the terrible end of days—without light, without a kind voice, without courage. The moving picture stopped, but the illusion of fantastic life continued awhile. I walked to the river and boarded the raft because it could not have been otherwise for Huck Finn.
I TOLD J IM THAT T OM S AWYER WAS DEAD , and he was sorry only as someone can be who has lost, beyond all hope of rescue, a portion of the past—that is to say, a vital piece of himself. I told him about the moving picture, and the idea fascinated him. Like a Hindu, he believed in the deceptive appearance of things: that the world is a thin film of light and shadows. What might be on the other side of thatfilm, Jim didn’t say. Maybe nothing. From what I’ve come to know of life, probably nothing.
“What should we do now, Jim?” I asked while he untied the line from a cypress tree leaning over the shallows.
My question was meaningless. We were in the current, which was a kind of intelligence: It knew the river’s course and purpose; and even if the atoms of water enfolding us had not yet flowed into the Gulf, the current itself already knew the river’s destination, though perhaps not its final end. We were held in the mind of the river, like a thought. The Mississippi knew what we would do next, notwithstanding the things that kept us busy: seamanly duties essential for life aboard a raft but, in the grand scheme, inconsequential. We were part of the Mississippi’s design and had been since our departure and, if Jim were right, long before that. Jim believed in destiny, which is why, I suppose, he did not bother to answer my question.
When the sun rose, we had covered only a few miles of water since Baton Rouge, but we had left 1903 far behind us. Time seemed more than ever
What else?
I rode a trolley up and down the bluffs, exhilarated by the luxury of horseless travel inside a conveyance illuminated by the same electric light that made the place a fairy town. I had no money, as I said; but I was used to getting inside circuses, magic-lantern shows, lectures on the pygmies, and other public entertainments without a nickel to my name.
On one street, people were jostling at the door of a building that had been converted from a grocer’s store into a nickelodeon. I had no idea what a nickelodeon might be, but I was attracted by the bustle and laughter, which defeated solemnity and, with it, death. I slipped inside, as though I had no more substance than a shadow. Maybe I was one; maybe I could’ve strolled, brazen and unseen, through the streets, sat inside the trolley car while it lurched uphill and down again, and walked into the nickelodeon without taking pains to make myself inconspicuous. Maybe on that night in Baton Rouge, I was invisible to everyone but Tom, whose eyes were fixed on ghosts. In my life, I’ve often hadthe sensation that I was unnoticed to an unnatural degree; that I made no impression on others’ optic or auditory nerves. Then in sudden terror, I’d act in an outrageous manner to make myself apparent. I was like a clean windowpane, unregarded until you accidentally shatter it.
Death had no dominion over me once the moving picture had begun. It routed the darkness, overthrew the gloom of melancholy. It astonished me as nothing before or since has done. A Trip to the Moon. The spaceship of the astronomers, their landing on the moon and battle with the Selenites, their escape back to earth, the rocket’s sinking to the bottom of the ocean among strange yet familiar fish . . . The people who saw it with me that night were struck dumb with wonder. How much more must a boy born three-quarters of a century earlier have been? I never forgot it. A Trip to the Moon —by Georges Méliès; I suddenly remember the magician’s name!—and The Time Machine have been for me bulwarks against the night. Not an April night in 1903, but those at the terrible end of days—without light, without a kind voice, without courage. The moving picture stopped, but the illusion of fantastic life continued awhile. I walked to the river and boarded the raft because it could not have been otherwise for Huck Finn.
I TOLD J IM THAT T OM S AWYER WAS DEAD , and he was sorry only as someone can be who has lost, beyond all hope of rescue, a portion of the past—that is to say, a vital piece of himself. I told him about the moving picture, and the idea fascinated him. Like a Hindu, he believed in the deceptive appearance of things: that the world is a thin film of light and shadows. What might be on the other side of thatfilm, Jim didn’t say. Maybe nothing. From what I’ve come to know of life, probably nothing.
“What should we do now, Jim?” I asked while he untied the line from a cypress tree leaning over the shallows.
My question was meaningless. We were in the current, which was a kind of intelligence: It knew the river’s course and purpose; and even if the atoms of water enfolding us had not yet flowed into the Gulf, the current itself already knew the river’s destination, though perhaps not its final end. We were held in the mind of the river, like a thought. The Mississippi knew what we would do next, notwithstanding the things that kept us busy: seamanly duties essential for life aboard a raft but, in the grand scheme, inconsequential. We were part of the Mississippi’s design and had been since our departure and, if Jim were right, long before that. Jim believed in destiny, which is why, I suppose, he did not bother to answer my question.
When the sun rose, we had covered only a few miles of water since Baton Rouge, but we had left 1903 far behind us. Time seemed more than ever
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