Fairy Tales 🧚 Alberta

 Spin the Bottle

The Party

At 6:30 Friday night Baldric was hungry yet couldn’t eat. He’d never been invited to a party before. He couldn’t even figure out which clothes to wear. If he wore his jean jacket, what would he wear beneath it? And should he wear a jean jacket and jeans, which would end up looking like a one-coloured suit? It wasn’t helping that his parents gave him contradictory advice. Antonio told him to wear leather pants and the small Hell’s Angels jacket he gave him for his birthday. Antonio also told him that when he got to the party he should spike his coke with rum, in order to unleash more testosterone, the holy wonder drug which made the boys charge like raging bulls at the red skirts of the girls. Beatrice replaced Antonio’s rum-laced coke with a fresh one, and told her son to wear his blue jeans and checked blue shirt.

In no state to choose, Baldric kept on the same t-shirt and made for the door. Antonio caught up to him and slipped a switchblade into his back pocket, instructing him to use it to slice the bra strap of any girl who was “frigid” and pretended not to want it on the bathroom floor. Baldric just looked at him and walked out the door. He walked slowly to Patricia’s house, which was a strategic error, since it allowed him to be waylaid by Ragor, who had all sorts of incomprehensible things to tell him. Finally, the old geezer let him go.

As he waited on the doorstep of Patricia’s house, he had visions of bright balloons and parents serving trays of celery sticks and Cheese Whiz. He was relieved when Patricia’s mother pointed him toward a dark basement. As he descended the stairs, he noticed a musky, exciting smell. The girls were singing in the half-dark and waving incense sticks to the old song, “You’re So Vain.” The sticks swung in their hands, tracing zigzags and arcs in the black magic air.

And Alicia! She barely resembled her classroom self. Instead of her usual lace blouse with blue ribbons, she wore a dark, tight dress that clung to her slim form. And instead of her usual braids, her hair fell in whirls across her face, which moved in and out of the shadows, creating a shadowy, sensuous mask, an erotic collage of light and dark that shifted like the moon through leaves and branches in the middle of the night.

Alicia also moved differently, her body swaying in time with the knowing, reproachful lyrics: “You walked into the party / like you were walking onto a yacht…” The lucid sorcery of her eyes had enchanted her body, making it vibrate with everything that the school room — her confining desk, her ribbons and braids, her place in the third seat in the third row — stopped her from being.

Baldric stood mute and still at the bottom of the stairs. When the song ended the incense dancers planted their sticks in a nearby planter and moved to a table patterned with paper cups and plates, bowls of chips and pretzels, bottle of pop, and a checkerboard plate of brownies.

Alicia had noticed Baldric’s entrance, although she walked over to her friends instead. Maybe it was her dress that made her feel all-too visible, as if she were walking out onto a crowded beach wearing a bikini. It made her conscious about the way she walked. The sway of her hips seemed more pronounced than they had ever seemed before.

Two lines from a poem popped into her head: These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: I measure time by how a body sways. She loved the poem in the daytime, or studying in the evening in her room. But here, among the flock of girls, with the boys swirling around them like wolves, it made her feel uncomfortable.

She kept close to her girlfriends Tanya and Susan, who were doing their best to look cool, holding their drinks in the way their parents did at parties. Their blood hummed with the secret fiery rhythm of their incense dancing. When that ebbed, they wondered what they would do now they were back in their normal bodies.

Baldric suddenly felt very out of place. He realized that the other boys at the party were popular, especially Gary Schroeder, who had a Yamaha 125 and drank with the ranch hands behind the pool hall. Baldric was taken aback when Gary said hello to him and then actually asked him, “So, what do you think about that Tanya? She’s got a great rack.” Baldric had been so transfixed by Alicia’s lithe form that he had hardly noticed Tanya, who, he now readily admitted to Gary, had a certain Marilyn Monroe quality about her. “I saw you looking at Allie. How be we go over there?” 

As they approached, the girls lost all their composure. Nervousness spilled out of them in giggles and awkward gestures. Cocktail glasses turned into martini shakers, and slinking postures took on the electrified straight edges of a pop geometry quiz. Susan flung her hand into the air, and on the way back down it knocked Tanya’s cup of coke onto the carpet. This distraction made it easier for the boys: it allowed Baldric and Alicia to stand back and talk without having their every word gauged by a nervous group of adolescents. It also allowed Gary to come to Tanya’s rescue. He made extra sure Susan hadn’t spilled any coke on her pink halter top, which did its best to keep in check her ample breasts. Gary thought he saw a small splash of coke on her shoulder blade, but after he swiped at it with his finger he said, “No, it must be a freckle. I like freckles. This wouldn’t have happened if there was rum in the coke. Susan wouldn’t have gone spastic and tossed Tanya’s coke all over the carpet.”

Tanya responded, “Well, you should know. I imagine you’re a real pro at drinking.”

“Oh, I don’t drink that much.” He then threw his hands into the air with a grand gesture, as if he were an oil baron or a rancher with 5,000 head of cattle. “It’s just that I plan to make millions, and I don’t want to blow deals by puking all over an investor after we’ve had a few drinks.”

Tanya could not help laughing at that. “You got alot of important meetings behind the pool hall?” Still, she found Gary’s strategy wise for a fourteen year-old. She liked a guy who looked ahead. And when it came to sex, alcohol, and acting grown-up, Tanya was a futurist. To prove her sincerity, she got Gary to come back to a corner where their coats were, and she pulled a bottle of Bacardi Rum from her jacket. Alicia knew her queue: she grabbed a large bottle of coke and four paper cups from the table, and asked Baldric if he wanted to join her on the large sofa which was off to the side of the room.

Gary and Tanya joined them, and from this point onward they more or less forgot about everyone else in the room. They even forgot about Patrcia, whose birthday it was, and who was trying to get Gary’s attention with her vigorous incense-stick dancing. Yet Gary couldn’t see her dextrous circles of light because of Tanya’s halter top and the way she kept letting it slip further and further toward what she was wanting him to grab. She was the only person on whom the alcohol had a noticeable effect: her hands gesticulated wildly and her arms kept falling around Gary’s neck. Her elbow kept banging into his chest, and her large white breasts kept swaying into the equally impressive curves of his tanned biceps. Gary was all too happy to receive her stray body parts, and to buffer the effect of the rum.

The other two had no need for such checks and balances, for Antonio’s insistence that his son conquer the demons of alcohol (and use them as his minions) had the same effect as the Iberian drinking habits of Alicia’s parents. Yet the rum and coke wasn’t without any effect: the caffeine made them alert to what they were saying, and the alcohol made Baldric feel less inarticulate. Staring deeply into Alicia’s eyes, Baldric wondered if he might compose an ode to rum, something that combined his father’s Byronic credo that “man, being rational, must get drunk,” with his mother’s hope that the Bacchantes would give up their lust for torn flesh and instead shower the god Dionysus with the spiritual love he so desperately needed. Surprised by himself, Baldric said to her: Dreams without you drown my soul in drunken flames / But my eyes sober up / When I drink the fire-water of your name.

The rum gave a flow to Baldric’s poem, and lent an angelic glow to Alicia’s face. He noticed that the vein in her neck pulsed strong and fast. Alicia relaxed further, melted, making him feel a strong pull toward her magnetic eyes and dark sweater. In his stomach he felt they were connected in a way that the eyes, for all their depth, couldn’t match. The eyes float, and dart from place to place. They reflect the transient mood accurately, but the feeling in his stomach on the other hand was where he came from. It was the centre of life itself, halfway between his genitals and his heart.

Alicia felt the same way (except for the part about the genitals), and no amount of clowning at the snack table could take her from the couch. They saw the obscene gestures of Tom, who everyone called Tomcat. They heard the crude story that Sylvia told about three weird nuns in a gay monastery. But their stomachs kept them rooted to the couch.

A curious thought entered Baldric’s head: Alicia bore an uncanny resemblance to the Alice his mother had talked so much about. Although Beatrice said Alice was still working her way up from Wonderland, was it possible that she surfaced three or four years ago, about the time the Mirales family moved to Black Diamond?

Or, Alicia might be a reincarnation of Alice, who might have met a grisly demise at the hands of the Carpenter, the Red Queen, or any number of homicidal maniacs living in that hell-hole. Baldric knew all about reincarnation: his father insisted he was the reincarnation of Loki, the Norse god who loved to play practical jokes on the other gods before setting fire to Heaven and Earth; and his mother believed that angels were the reincarnations of prairie housewives who didn’t kill their husbands. With such specific examples of transmigration at hand, Baldric didn’t find it that odd to fall in love with a spirit that had previously inhabited another body.

Yet if Alice had been reincarnated as Alicia, then what other bodies had Alice been a visitor in? If in a previous life she’d been a dog or a cat, then he could love her. But what if she’d been a squirrel? Or a badger? Or a rat? What if she’d been a piranha, with terrifying teeth that defied geometry? 

Or worse, what if she’d been a boy?

In order to rid his mind of these fears, he asked Alicia point-blank whether or not she’d previously been someone else. Or something else. Alicia stared back at him, wondering what he was getting at. Yet he persisted: “For instance, have you ever been an owl or a Scottish terrier?”

Alicia was intrigued. What had she been before this life? Perhaps the best place to start would be to think about what she’d like to have been. Immediately, she thought of a marlin swimming in green shallow water, drifting gently in the waves.

“Maybe you could drift down the coast to California, maybe even Mexico.”

“Ya, imagine swimming in Acapulco.”

Without thinking, he slid his arm around her shoulder, letting his hand fall ever so lightly next to her collarbone. He gently touched the edge of her sweater, where the fabric edged onto her soft olive skin. Alicia turned gently toward him, closing the space between them and kissing him firmly below his right ear. She then whispered, “You know I liked you even before that day in class. I was always watching you.”

🧚 

After the party Baldric couldn’t stop thinking about Alicia. He could hardly wait till Monday morning when he’d see her again. However, that night when Alicia got home she stumbled on a pamphlet which had drawn her father to Canada. Searching at the back of her armoire for a dress to wear Monday morning, one that she was sure would drive Baldric crazy, she found the faded pamphlet from Immigration Canada. She brought it to her mother, who was hunched over the kitchen table making a green lace blouse.

Alicia asked her why they had such a piece of paper and why they hadn’t moved to British Columbia instead of Alberta. The parents had assumed that the Okanagan was the name of an Indian tribe which lived somewhere near the white settlers — and possibly raided them and scalped them from time to time. They ignored what they thought was irrelevant information. Alicia couldn’t help laughing at the sad mistake made by her father and mother, although something inside her told her not to explain the matter too clearly. But her mother insisted that she explain herself.

She wanted to know why her daughter was laughing at the parents who had struggled so hard to give her a better future. Alicia couldn’t lie to her mother at this point, and told her about the Okanagan region mentioned in the pamphlet.

That was the beginning of the end for Baldric. On Saturday they packed up, and on Sunday they drove to the vineyards of Kelowna.

The shock was too much for Baldric, who stared at the cold prairie sky and cursed every poet from Japan to Ireland. He no longer had a sense of who he was without her, for she’d brought up poetic feelings he’d never had before. These feelings had crept up within him, had consumed him and defined him, and now they were more precious than all those things he used to care about. They were more real to him than the Suzuki 90 which blasted over the foothills and through the winding forest trails.

He gazed at the posters on his wall: the collage of dirt bikes he had cut from Cycle magazine and the Uriah Heep poster of Demons and Wizards. He played the songs “Winter” and “White Room,” and then threw the speakers out the window. He finally knew what the lyrics were getting at.

The only thing that gave him comfort was reading Alice in Wonderland. His mother reassured him that Alicia was in fact the same Alice who had fallen down the hole which leads to Wonderland. In his grief this made sense to Baldric. He was no longer that same young boy who sat propped up in his bed on a huge pillow of four dozen volumes, sipping warm milk, and listening to angelic and nourishing fantasies about a girl called Alice. Baldric knew her in flesh and blood. And yet all he had left now of her were memories — and a short note that she managed to toss into his mailbox before her family drove to the Okanagan. It read simply, Sorry we have to leave. Find me sometime, somewhere. Love, Alicia.

Baldric determined to follow her, but before he could save up enough money for bus fare, he got a postcard from Portugal. Alicia’s father had cracked. After finding out how expensive it was to buy land for a vineyard, he decided to leave forever “this estupid country where the people comport themselves like Señor Quixote, pero they don’t even know where it is La Mancha.”

Alicia wrote that she and her mother were travelling onward from Valencia to Ukraine, in pursuit of the lace doilies and colourful Easter eggs that would resurrect the empty chalice of her mother’s heart. Alicia explained further that the real reason Alphonse wanted the family to return to Spain was that he couldn’t forget the cool sweetness of his first love, Illusia, who had spurned him as a boy and who every winter sent him chilling reminders of her beauty. Alicia added that they were going to set up camp somewhere near Krasnodar, and from there might travel to the fabled realms of silken carpets and geometric designs further east.

🧚 

Asking About Alice

As soon as Baldric read this he took the money he’d saved for bus fare and bought every single copy of Alice in Wonderland he could find. He pestered his parents to tell him everything they knew about Alice and about the chances of him meeting her again. He was shocked to find out how much his mother knew about that girl! Clearly, she knew more than Alice’s biographer, photographer, and hated rival, the mathematician Charles Dogeson. Beatrice knew so much because she didn’t waste her time making acrostic puzzles and stupid mathematical equations that passed in some people’s minds for poetry. Beatrice could as a result come much closer to Alice’s heart, and from there she could relay to Baldric the traumatic fantasies and spiritual longings that Alice endured in the Underworld of Wonderland.

Because Beatrice traveled to Wonderland so often, she could almost predict Alice’s trajectory and plans for the future. According to her latest calculations, Alice was searching for a way back up the rabbit hole somewhere east of Bukhara. Because she had proven herself a resourceful, assertive Liddle girl whenever confronted by sheer impossibilities, Underworld bookies were laying good odds that she would make her way up through the various subterranean layers to the surface. By that time she would have reached her early twenties, and would be on the lookout for a young man who could accompany her into the colourful world of her post-Wonderland dreams.

Beatrice predicted that in the real world Alice would want someone different than the people she had met so far. In particular, she would be sick and tired of her Maker, or, at least, sick of the idea that she had been created by some minor ecclesiastical member of the Church of England. She would loathe deacons, accountants, and any other Medieval mathematician who was interested in acrostic puzzles and the fringes of her petticoats. Alice wanted someone who was beyond all that. She wanted someone who could look at a number and see more than a figure, someone who could look at a mirror and see more than the reflection. In brief, she wanted someone like Baldric.

Yet Alice would be incommunicado for some time, and it would be best for her son to put her momentarily out of his mind. Baldric tried to explain to his mother that he was already out of his mind. But she didn’t want to hear any more of that nonsense; she simply meant that he was to stop pestering his teacher for the Mad Hatter’s zip code.

Baldric was also intent on tracking down a map of Wonderland, hopefully one which had a subway guide on the inside cover. But Beatrice was far more realistic, and urged him instead to spend his time preparing for his encounter with the formidable girl. For when the time came he’d need to think like Alice: he’d need to appreciate the absurdity of the world in all its mirrored ups and downs. Thinking in this manner was also a precondition for meeting her, for only when he could step in and out of a mirror at will would Alice pop up onto the landscape of his mind.

Beatrice went so far as to describe this landscape, so that when Alice popped onto it Baldric wouldn’t mistake it for another Illustrated Version and scribble all over his beloved with his coloured felt pens. Such a careless action would be fatal, for Beatrice knew that Alice was especially fond of her white dress with blue lace, and that she would cut the throat of any man who attempted to defile it. Underneath her calm and docile Victorian exterior was a raving anarchist and bomb-hurtling feminist. And Beatrice was on her side, counselling her to hide in a secret place all the scissors and rolling pins she could get her hands on.

But Baldric was less interested in this side of Alice’s personality than in hearing about the exact setting in which he was bound by the sanctity of his mother’s dreams to meet her. Beatrice didn’t disappoint her son: the setting she described was of the finest texture that had ever been woven under the loom of heaven, or, for that matter, under a dull candle in a dirty shop in Uzbekistan where underpaid weavers stared ten to twelve hours per day at a dull pink and sand-coloured carpet.

Beatrice saw woven before her eyes on her living room wall a windswept, Romantic scene located far from the din of cities and even further, she imagined (wrongly), from the inhumanity of man to woman. The scene she saw in her mind’s eye was set in a land so fabled and remote that it made Samarkand look like a tourist trap. She saw Alicia install her mother in a fabulous other world of bright chalk mandalas in a remote monastery high in the hills of Ladakh. Alicia continued her journey east, beyond Katmandu and Mandalay into the bright hills of Yunnan, forever searching the meaning of things that lay beyond the transmigratory illusions of this world.

Beatrice could feel that the reception was getting clearer and clearer. Baldric had been traveling for seven weeks by this time. Stricken with heat and dust, he was without the presence of mind to strike back. Then, when all hope faded from his rocky riverbed eyes, he would be blessed with a heavenly vision: there, among the bright skirts and head-dresses of Yunnan, he’d see the girl of his dreams. She wore a bright green skirt, and had a deck of cards in her hands. She was tearing the Queen of Hearts to pieces and sliding the twos and jokers up her sleeves. When Baldric asked his mother why Alicia was doing this, Beatrice faltered and said she honestly couldn’t say why. This made him suspect that his mother had been making the whole thing up. Yet she defended her vision with such honour and dignity that he didn’t have the heart to question her further. Besides, he was desperate to meet Alicia and didn’t want anything to get in the way of their eventual rendezvous.  

The intensity of his yearning led him to devise scenarios of his own, especially when he lay awake at night deep under the thick folds of his white duvet. As he floated on the goose down of his dreams, he swooped down from the clouds to catch a glimpse of his beloved in an alley in the city of Kunming. He saw her heart catch upon her breath and her beautiful face flow into his eyes like a colourful light falling from the ceiling of a gigantic room full of soft cotton beds.

🧚

Next: ⭐️ The Flight of the Chronus

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