NOS4A2(27)

“Static,” Vic said, forgetting the promise she had made to herself only a moment before, not to finish any of Maggie’s sentences for her, no matter how badly she stammered.

Maggie didn’t seem to mind. “Yes.”

“I get something like that,” Vic said. “When I’m crossing the bridge, I hear static all around me.”

Maggie nodded, as if she found this the least surprising thing in the world. “A few minutes ago, all the lights blinked off in here. The power died in the whole library. That’s how I knew you were getting close. Your bridge is a short circuit in reality. Just like my tiles. You find things, and my tiles spell me things. They told me you’d be coming today and I could find you out back. They told me the Brat would ride across the bridge. They’ve been chattering about you for months.”

“Can you show me?” Vic asked.

“I think I need to. I think that’s part of why you’re here. Maybe my tiles have a thing they want to spell for you.”

She undid the drawstring, reached into the sack and took some tiles out, dropped them clattering onto the desk.

Vic twisted around to look at them, but they were just a mess of letters. “Does that say something to you?”

“Not yet.” Maggie bent to the letters and began to push them around with her pinkie.

“It will say something?”

Maggie nodded.

“Because they’re magic?”

“I don’t think there’s anything magic about them. They wouldn’t work for anyone else. The tiles are just my knife. Suh-s-something I can use to poke a hole in reality. I think it always has to be a thing you love. I always loved words, and Scrabble gave me a way to play with them. Put me in a Scrabble tournament, someone is going to walk away with their ego all slashed up.”

She had by now shuffled the letters around to spell THE BRAT HAD LUNCH TO RIDE F T W T.

“What’s F-T-W-T mean?” Vic asked, turning her head to see the tiles upside down.

“Not a damn thing. I haven’t figured it out yet,” Maggie said, frowning and moving the tiles around some more.

Vic sipped at her tea. It was hot and sweet, but no sooner had she swallowed than she felt a chill sweat prickle on her brow. Those imaginary forceps, clenching her left eyeball, tightened a little.

“Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.”

She bent her head once more and shifted the tiles around in a decisive way. Now they read, THE BRAT FOUND HER CHILD A RICH TWIT.

“I don’t know any rich twits,” Vic said.

“You also look a little young to be with child,” Maggie said. “This is a hard one. I wish I had another essss-s-s.”

“So my bridge is imaginary.”

“Not when you’re on your bike. Then it’s real. It’s an inscape pulled into the normal world.”

“But your Scrabble bag. That’s just a bag. It’s not really like my bike. It doesn’t do anything obviously imposs—”

But as Vic spoke, Maggie took up her bag, unlaced the strings, and shoved her hand in. Tiles scraped, clattered, and clicked, as if she were pushing her hand down into a bucket of them. Her wrist, elbow, and upper arm followed. The bag was perhaps six inches deep, but in a moment Maggie’s arm had disappeared into it up to the shoulder, without so much as putting a bulge in the fake velvet. Vic heard her digging deeper and deeper, into what sounded like thousands of tiles.

“Aaa!” Vic cried.

On the other side of the fish tank, the librarian reading to the children glanced around.

“Big old hole in reality,” Maggie said. It now looked as if her left arm had been removed at the shoulder, and the amputation was, for some reason, capped by a Scrabble bag. “I’m reaching into my inscape to get the tiles I need. Not into a bag. When I say your bike or my tiles are a knife to open a s-s-slit in reality, I’m not being, like, metaphorical.”

The nauseating pressure rose in Vic’s left eye.

“Can you take your arm out of the bag, please?” Vic asked.

With her free hand, Maggie tugged on the purple velvet sack, and her arm slithered out. She set the bag on the table, and Vic heard tiles clink within it.

“Creepy. I know,” Maggie said.

“How can you do that?” Vic asked.

Maggie drew a deep breath, almost a sigh. “Why can some people s-s-speak a dozen foreign languages? Why can Pelé do the over-his-head bicycle kick? You get what you get, I reckon. Not one person in a million is good-looking enough, talented enough, and lucky enough to be a movie s-s-star. Not one person in a million knew as much about words as a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins did. He knew about inscapes! He came up with the term. S-some people are movie stars, some people are soccer stars, and you’re a suh-s-strong creative. It’s a little weird, but so is being born with mismatched eyes. And we’re not the only ones. There are others like us. I’ve met them. The tiles pointed me toward them.” Maggie bent to her letters again and began to push them here and there. “Like, there was a girl I met once who had a wheelchair, a beautiful old thing with whitewall tires. She could use it to make herself disappear. All she had to do was wheel her chair backward, into what she called the Crooked Alley. That was her inscape. She could wheel herself into that alley and out of existence, but s-s-ss-still see what was happening in our world. There isn’t a culture on earth that doesn’t have stories about people like you and me, people who use totems to throw a kink into reality. The Navajo . . .” But her voice was sinking in volume, dying away.