Robots vs. Fairies(54)
The next shelf up they found easy purchase at the front, as there was only one row of books pushed all the way back. It was the shelf with my collection of the Lang Fairy Books, each volume a different color. That they all stood together was the only bit of authentic order in my library. I watched the fairies pass in front of the various colors—red, violet, green, orange . . . and wondered if they knew the books were more than merely giant rocks to be climbed. Did they know these boulders they passed held the ancient stories of their species? I pictured the huge boulder, like the egg of a roc, sitting alone amidst the golden grass over at the preserve and daydreamed about the story it might hatch.
The afternoon pushed on with the slow, steady progress of a fairy climbing thread. They moved up the various shelves of the bookcase, one after the other, with a methodical pace. Even the near falls, the brushes with death, were smooth and timely. There were obstacles, books I’d placed haphazardly atop a row, pretending that I intended to someday reshelve them. When the companions were forced to cross my devil tambourine, which had sat there on the fifth level since two Halloweens previously, it made their teensy steps echo in the caverns of the shelves. The big one, Balthazar, skewered, with a broken broom straw, a silverfish atop one of the Smiley novels, and they lit a fairy fire, which only cooked their meal but didn’t burn, thank God. Those three remaining climbers sat in a circle and ate the cooked insect. While they did, Sopso read from a book so infinitesimally small it barely existed.
I closed my eyes and drifted off into the quiet of the afternoon. The window was open a bit, and a breeze snaked in around me. Moments later I bolted awake, and the first thing I did was search the bookshelf for the expedition. When I found them, a pulse of alarm shot up my back. Balthazar and Aspethia were battling an Oni netsuke come miraculously to life. I’d had the thing for years. Lynn had bought it for me in a store in Chinatown in Philly, across the street from Joe’s Peking Duck House. It was a cheap imitation, made from some kind of resin to look like ivory—a short, stocky demon with a dirty face and horns. He held a mask of his own visage in his right hand and a big bag in his left. He tried to scoop the fairies into it. Sopso was nowhere in sight.
Seeing an inanimate object come to life made me a little dizzy, and I think I was trembling. The demon growled and spat at them. What was more incredible still was the fact that the companions were able to drive the monster to the edge of the shelf. The fighting was fierce, the fairies drawing blood with long daggers fashioned from the ends of brass safety pins. The demon’s size gave it the advantage, and more than once he’d scooped Balthazar and Aspethia up, but they’d managed to wriggle out of the eyeholes of the mask before he could bag them. The little people sang a lilting fairy anthem throughout the battle that I only caught garbled snatches of. They ran as they sang in circles round the giant, poking him in the hairy shins and toes and Achilles tendon with their daggers.
Oni lost his balance and tipped a jot toward the edge. In a blink, Balthazar leaped up, put a foot on the demon’s belly, grabbed its beard in his free hand, pulled himself higher, and plunged the dagger into his enemy’s eye. The demon reeled backward, screaming, turning in circles. Aspethia leaped forward and drove her dagger to the hilt in Oni’s left testicle. That elicited a terrible cry, and then the creature stumbled out into thin air. Balthazar tried to leap off to where Aspethia stood, but Oni grabbed his leg and they went all the way down together. Although the fairy’s neck was broken, his party hat remained undamaged.
Aspethia crawled to the edge of the shelf and peered down the great distance to see the fate of her comrade. If she survived the expedition, she would be the one responsible for telling Balthazar’s wife and children of his death. She sat back away from the edge and took a deep breath. Sopso emerged from a cavern between The Book of Contemplation and Harry Crews’s Childhood. He walked over to where Aspethia knelt and put his hand on her shoulder. She reached up and grabbed it. He helped her to her feet and they made their way uneventfully to the top shelf. As they climbed, I looked back down at the fallen netsuke and saw that it had regained its original form of a lifeless figurine. Had there been a demon in it? How and why had it come to life? The gift of seeing fairies comes wrapped in questions.
On the top shelf, they headed north toward the back wall of the room, passing a foot-high Ghost Rider plastic figure, the marble Ganesh bookends, a small picture frame containing a block of Jason Van Hollander’s Hell Stamps, Flannery O’Connor’s letters, and Our Lady of the Flowers shelved without consciousness of design on my part directly next to Our Lady of Darkness. A copy of the writings of Cotton Mather lay atop the books of that shelf, its upper half forming an overhang beneath which the expedition had to pass. Its cover held a portrait of Mather from his own time and faced down. Eyes peered from above. His brows, his nose, his powdered wig, but not his mouth, bore witness to the fairies passing. For a moment, I was with them in the shadow, staring up at the preacher’s gaze, incredulous as to how the glance of the image was capable of following us.
Eventually, they came to where the last bookcase in the row butts up against the northern wall. Aspethia and Sopso stroked the barrier as if it had some religious significance. She leaned over and put her arm around Sopso’s shoulder, turned him, and pointed out the framed painting hanging on the northern wall about two feet from the bookcase. He saw it and nodded. The painting in question had been given to me by my friend Barney, who’d painted it in his studio at Dividing Creek in South Jersey. It’s a knockoff of a Charles Willson Peale painting of the artist’s sons on a staircase, one peering from around a corner and one ascending. Barney’s version is green, with but one figure—a ghost with the acrimonious face of John Ashcroft, President Bush’s attorney general, looking back over his shoulder while rising.