Once Upon a Wardrobe(52)

Mr. Lewis looks to Warnie, then to me. “Who is Aslan?” he asks. “He is the King of Beasts. Son-of-the-Emperor-Over-the-Sea. King above all High Kings. The Great Lion. High King of the Woods.”

“Oh, Mr. Lewis, I know all of that. But who is he really?”

“That is who he is.”

“Is he . . . God?” I ask outright the question I’ve been thinking. This is what I want to tell George: Aslan is God; all is well. There is a place where things are made right and good again. There is hope.

“That is the question I get all the time. What I did when crafting this tale, Miss Devonshire, was to suppose that there was another world, and God entered it in a different way than He did here on earth. And so there you have Aslan. It’s a supposal, if you will.”

“A supposal. What’s that?”

“Something supposed, an idea of another world. And if there was this other world, how would God show Himself?”

I smile. “Or herself. And who is the Witch?” I ask, hurtling through my prepared list as quickly as possible, not wanting him to stop answering, believing I am at last finding my way to the missing puzzle piece.

“She may be any number of things.”

Warnie laughs at this answer. Even though he remains otherwise silent, he seems to be enjoying this conversation, like a show.

I toss out an idea. “Is she Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen?”

Mr. Lewis lifts only his right brow. “Or, Miss Devonshire, is she Circe from Homer’s Odyssey?” He leans forward. “Who knows? But don’t we all know the White Witch? Must she be someone in particular? We can try and find the source, but we are all born knowing the Witch, aren’t we?”

“Yes. We are.” I think about the disease that has ravaged my brother’s heart, making it weak. His illness is the White Witch. War is the White Witch. Cruelty is the White Witch. I take a breath. “There are so many things in your novel, Mr. Lewis. And then I’ve listened and I’ve written down the stories you tell me as best I can in my notebook, and I’ve read fairy tales and George MacDonald. I see, of course, that there is Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology in your Narnia story. There are British fairy tales, Irish folklore, and . . . even Father Christmas.”

His laugh bellows across the room so loudly that outside I spy a flock of birds loosening from their branches and flying away with their black wings. “Yes, indeed,” he says. “That is what my friend Tollers doesn’t like.”

I sink inside, drop my chin into my scarf. “So there isn’t one answer for each question.”

“There rarely is, Miss Devonshire.”

“I wish there were.” I look up. “And the character Lucy, she’s named after someone because I see that name in the front of your book.”

“Yes. My godchild is named Lucy. She is the daughter of my dear friend, Owen Barfield, an author and poet, a fellow Inkling. When I started the book, she was four years old. Now she is fourteen.” He shakes his head.

He is quiet for so long that I think perhaps he’s done talking, that I have finally, finally outdone my welcome. Then he speaks. “Megs,” he says, calling me by my first name for the first time. “We rearrange elements that God has provided. Writing a book is much less like creating than it is like planting a garden—we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream that works, so to speak, its own way.”

“In its own way?” I repeat.

“Do you know Psalm 19?” he asks.

I think for a breath and then another, moving myself backward through my memory to catechism days. “The one about the heavens or the sky showing God’s handiwork?”

“Yes. The cosmos reveals God’s handiwork.”

“So you’re saying maybe stories are the same? That they reveal . . . God’s handiwork?” I think for a better word. “Or truth? They reveal some kind of truth about the universe? That’s what physics is all about.”

“Yes, that is partly what I am saying. Megs, stars are made of dust and nitrogen; they are balls of gas and hydrogen. But that isn’t what a star is; it’s only what it is made of.”

“I . . . hear you,” I say and think about how this is the phrase young Jack Lewis wanted to hear from Mr. Kirkpatrick. “I hear you.”

I don’t want to say I understand, because I don’t.

Not yet. Not fully.

“Did you want your book to have a spiritual message?” I ask. “To really say that . . .” I falter.

“I continue to hear this idea, that I have set out to write a Christian allegory, but it is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Like I said, everything began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. And archetypes,” he says. “You know about those?”

“I do,” I say. “Carl Jung. I learned in secondary school how there are . . . what? Twelve types, I think. And they each show a kind of person or trait. Is it that each one represents a universal pattern of human nature? Or . . . I can’t really have any kind of intelligent conversation about it. Which is the only kind I would like to have with you. I would be mortified to be considered daft.”