handful of Vazimba to find the homeland of the invaders, but only made it to the Agalega Islands where, over the agonizing years, one by one, everyone died but her. After some centuries she returned, on a piece of driftwood to Madagascar, and found that all the Vazimba were gone with scarcely a trace, except in legend.
The story was too sad for Myron to know how to respond. He was used to the despair of Spenser’s stories, of course, but that was all philosophical despair. It was hardly personal, it was just the way of the world. Florence told the story in a flat and unaffected tone, but it was so clearly personal nonetheless.
“Did you ever go back to the Agalega Islands?” Myron asked.
“Oh yeah. I was a pirate queen there a hundred and fifty years ago. That was a good time to be a pirate.”
“Maybe,” Myron suggested tentatively, “maybe you have a story about pirates, too?”
And she did! They had a grand old time there, talking pirate talk, which Myron had picked up from Robert Louis Stevenson and R. M. Ballantyne and Jack London. After a while, when they were both feeling a little giddy, Myron asked if he could see the shape. Florence removed it from around her neck and handed it to him. It was heavier than he had thought.
“I don’t get this,” Myron said.
“You’re not supposed to get it.”
“Why do you have to be the one who has to carry it?”
“It makes sense. I can get away easily if Oliver decided to really go after it.”
“That’s what I don’t get. Why would he want to?”
“He doesn’t have a choice. He’s another experiment from another daycare center; an experiment to get children addicted to various objects, and in that way make them utterly loyal to whoever could provide them. I don’t know all the details, or if they put electrodes in his brain or what, but he ended up addicted to a certain shape: that one. It’s a hard shape to copy, although sometimes you’ll see him try to cut it out of cardboard.”
He handed it back. “There are others like him, then?”
“No, I think all the others went insane.”
“Insane?”
“Or died, or something, I don’t really know. He’s the only one it worked on.” And since Florence was, for the reason stated above, usually the one to carry the shape around, this explained, she said, Oliver’s unnatural (unnatural because lemurs and humans should not mix) attraction to her.
“This all sounds horrible.”
“I’m sure it’s not as bad as I’m making it sound. Most of this happened when I was still operating in Guatemala. I didn’t hook up with Emanuel till later.”
“Is it just coincidence, then, that you and Miss Emanuel are both ringtails?”
“Ringtail? What tail are you talking about there?”
“Her raccoon tail, of course. Raccoons have ringed tails, don’t they?”
“Oh! Oh, I was thinking of something else. Yes, of course she has a ringtail too, but that’s just a coincidence. And speaking of Emanuel, I’d better go tell her you’re doing swell.” And at that, the lemur was back, sitting in the voluminous folds of the red kimono. She wadded the silk up in one tiny hand and leapt to the window, and then scrabbled down the brown, dead ivy along the tower. She had clearly been lying about something.
Myron lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling and wondered whom to trust.
VII. The Conference in the Fortress of the Id
This is a great and terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it.
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
1.
It is an open question, how much impact one has on one’s own fate. Reasonable philosophers seem to argue for some. Certainly Myron Horowitz may often appear as a pawn, buffeted will-I nill-I by the hand of an unseen player, or by a cat that leaps on the board. But his was a restless soul, happy only on the move, that could never be satisfied with life at the top of Rapunzel’s tower, however pleasant the palace itself. So I ask you: to what extent did he orchestrate his own expulsion from paradise, or, if not paradise, from a warm bed, fine food, and a tastefully selected library? The chain of events that climaxed in him fleeing alone into the dark forests at night—did he wind it around himself?
I was relaxing over a cup of tea in my Boston brownstone. Alice would not get off the phone, demanding to know what I had learned so far. Somewhere