The book of love, p.64
The Book of Love, page 64
To Susannah and Daniel, Harmony said, “The door you keep will stay open for any who require it. Only Laura and Daniel may not pass through, until Laura decides she is finished with this world. It will stay open until Carousel and I are ready to go on. When we have done so, the door will be no more and your task will be complete.”
Then she became Laura’s old guitar again, only, of course, it wasn’t Laura’s guitar at all. It never had been. And now it was Carousel’s. This Machine Kills Gods. Laura’s joke, but now, of course, Laura was a god herself.
Bogomil said, “Take good care of it, Carousel.”
“It’s a magic guitar,” Carousel said. “Of course I’ll take care of it.”
“It’s magical,” Laura said. “But you can’t just go around doing magic. Just because you’re made of magic and you have a magic guitar doesn’t mean you can go around using magic however you want to.”
“But you can?” Carousel said.
“I’m a goddess,” Laura said. As if that settled everything.
“Susannah?” Daniel said.
“No more magic for us,” Mo said sadly to Thomas. But that turned out not to be entirely true. Susannah said, “I’ll be back. I promise.” And then she fled, pouring herself out of the world and into that place she had been promised so long ago, dark and lovely and strange.
The Book of Susannah’s Realm
When she got to Bogomil’s realm—no, it was hers, it was her realm now!—she couldn’t help herself. She went to look for Ruth. Hadn’t Bogomil said her mother had been here? But in all the shining darkness, in all the shadowed grass, on the silky paths, there was no one, no one at all. No Ruth, no Bogomil. Not even a trace of Malo Mogge; Laura had eaten every bit. There was no one there but her.
The Book of Mo
Later on Mo and Susannah met up for coffee at What Hast Thou Ground? Billy was at the counter; the Broadway cast recording of Carousel played over the terrible speakers. Susannah had used magic so no one would notice her. She explained to Mo, almost apologetically, that otherwise, if the customers noticed her, they would ask her for things as if she still worked there. The spell did not seem to have any effect on Billy. He appeared to be under the impression Susannah had a fancy new job in the Boston area, and he stopped by the table three times to ask after Daniel, how he was doing, what he was up to. Daniel was over at the mall, Susannah explained. Hanging out with his friends. The normal ones, she said. Billy nodded as if he knew what Susannah meant by this. There was a help wanted sign in the window.
There were muffins, which Mo enjoyed in moderation. His magic was dwindling away but not gone entirely. He’d spent a half hour as a veery on a tree branch the previous morning.
Susannah ate six muffins. Mo kept count.
They talked about Susannah’s realm. How it seemed to her, how it had been for Mo. As they talked, it seemed to Mo that the coffee shop grew colder, darker. Just out of his field of vision he knew the dusty path was making its way between the slender trees. Susannah, too, seemed made of shadows now, most discernable in the blackness around her nail beds, under her nails. She was quieter, somehow, but her teeth were sharper. But then, Mo was changed, too.
They didn’t talk about Daniel or Laura. They discussed Maryanne Gorch’s will—she’d left a lot of her money to a nonprofit foundation she’d been in the process of setting up. Some would go for grants to artists and writers, more would go to found a publishing company in the model of Odyssey or Arabesque to publish Black romance. This seemed likely, Mo said, to actually make money, and then the foundation would have to decide how best to use it.
He said, “So I think they’ve left town. Bogomil and Mr. Anabin.”
“I know,” Susannah said. “Good riddance. I ran into Bogomil, by the way. Well, by ‘ran into’ I mean ambushed. Kind of fun to turn the tables.”
“I bet,” Mo said. “How was he?”
“Sunburned,” Susannah said. “I told him he better live a long, happy life. Because when he dies I’ll be waiting for him. Anyway, you and Thomas and Bowie. Tell me the whole thing and don’t leave anything out.”
How ridiculous it had all been after Malo Mogge’s defeat, Thomas the gull chasing Bowie, and Mo chasing after them like the Three Stooges. Larry, Curly, and Mo. He had never quite caught up, and maybe that was because he didn’t really want to see Thomas kill Bowie. Just because someone you liked wanted to eat five hundred hot dogs in one sitting, had wanted to eat five hundred hot dogs for several centuries, and now they were actually going to do it, didn’t mean you had to watch them do it.
“Did you really just compare killing someone to eating five hundred hot dogs?” Susannah said. “Also, why wouldn’t you want to watch them eat five hundred hot dogs? It seems kind of cool.”
“I don’t really get the whole revenge thing,” Mo said.
And what if what had ended up happening was Bowie killing Thomas? Why would Mo have wanted to be there for that? What had he been thinking he could do? In any case, he’d thought he’d never catch up and by the time he did they would be engaged in their terrible business. He decided he would fly over them and shit on their heads. He would absolutely take a shit on Thomas’s head. Have a little humiliation to season your epic revenge. Good luck from your friend Mo.
“But that’s revenge, too,” Susannah said.
“I guess?” Mo said. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in the Lavender Glass books. In those books people did the right thing or the wrong thing and then more things happened. There was lots of revenge, plenty of boats and seagulls, but nobody ever got shat on. Not even the people who really deserved it.
Eventually he’d realized they were no longer over Lovesend. They’d gone inland. So that part of Malo Mogge’s spell was finished. He’d fleetingly wondered about all the people she’d done unpleasant things to, the people she’d made worship her. What would they remember? As it turned out, nothing. But in the moment Mo hadn’t really cared about Lovesend. All he’d been able to care about was Thomas. Even if Thomas killed Bowie, Mo would have gone on wanting Thomas in the same way he wanted music, planned to go on thinking about music and caring about music and the things that music could do. Maybe the way he felt about Thomas wasn’t the way he would always feel about Thomas. Sometimes that happened with music, with a song you heard on the radio or with something you were working on. Something you were super into or trying to make work. All that intensity of feeling boiled down into a kind of residue, and then the residue wore away, too, and there was nothing there. Maybe that was Mo, maybe that would be Mo with everything except for music and thinking about music. After all, that was how it had gone with Vincent, all the feeling boiled away. The other way, where all that feeling caught you up in it forever in a kind of hard casing, like amber, that was how it had been for Thomas, wasn’t it? With how he hated Bowie. How he’d hated Malo Mogge, too, even as he’d been tied to her for hundreds of years. Hundreds of years!
Mo wanted, though, to know what Thomas would be, who Thomas would be now that Malo Mogge was gone. And maybe, he’d thought, if Thomas killed Bowie, Mo would get that wish. To see what Thomas might become. But Bowie was sneaky, and Thomas hadn’t gotten the better of him once yet. If Bowie killed Thomas, what would Mo have done then? Become like Thomas, obsessed with revenge? Give up music? Not that Mo thought he would be any good at revenge. But maybe no one was, at the beginning.
He said, “So then it turned out we were over in Silverside above Cresthill Hospital. Where your mom worked.” Susannah looked down at that. Studied the empty plate where muffins had been. “That was where Bowie was headed. Right for the NICU, straight through a window someone had cracked open.”
“They do that when the heating is on too high,” Susannah said. “The Isolettes are temperature-controlled, but it gets pretty miserable for the nurses sometimes.”
Mo had gone sailing through the six-inch gap, marveling at this precision even as he enacted it. He became himself again at Thomas’s side. There was no sign of Bowie at all.
“A nurse came up and wanted to know what we were doing there, but Thomas just sent her away. I figured Bowie had gone out a door or something, but Thomas knew.”
“Knew what?” Susannah said.
“Bowie changed himself into a baby. Or babies. He may be babies plural.”
Susannah took this in. “Bowie went there with me once,” she said. “He told me all this weird stuff about Avelot and talked to my mom and held a preemie. Then he told me he ought to kill me. But he didn’t. If he had, maybe my mom would still be alive.”
“That’s a shitty thing to say,” Mo said.
“It feels pretty shitty when I think about it, so that’s about right. So what did Thomas do? And what do you mean, babies?”
Thomas had gone from Isolette to Isolette, peering in at each occupant. It had made Mo extremely uncomfortable. It wasn’t as if he’d been thrilled about the possibility of Thomas killing Bowie in the first place, but the idea of Thomas killing a baby was so much worse.
“Is it really worse to kill Bowie as a baby than to kill Bowie as Bowie?” Susannah said. “Why?”
“Definitely worse,” Mo said. “I feel like most people would agree with me. But Thomas couldn’t figure out which baby was Bowie. There were nine babies, and every single one of them was exactly as babylike or as Bowie-like as any other.”
“He was all of them?” Susannah said.
“Could he even do that?” Mo said. “I still don’t know! I don’t know why anyone would even want to become a baby!”
“Or, for that matter, a lot of babies,” Susannah said.
“The point is, Thomas couldn’t figure out which baby he wanted to kill. And he was wicked mad about it. I could see him thinking about how maybe he should just kill all of them, you know? He thought about it for a while.”
He couldn’t really explain to Susannah what it had been like in the NICU, all those babies like astronauts in capsules with their science-fiction-movie-style life supports, on their hopeful missions into whatever their future lives would be, Mo waiting to see if Thomas decided he wanted to straight-out murder one.
“I was just hovering there, like an anxious bat or something. I wasn’t literally a bat, I mean, but I felt like one. Vibrating all over the place. Waiting to see what Thomas was going to do, trying to figure out what I would do if he did anything. Like, this is not a relationship that is going anywhere if I can’t even figure out how to have an argument with him about why you shouldn’t go around killing babies. That’s not the kind of relationship fight I’m prepared to have.”
“Especially early in the relationship,” Susannah said. “Do you mind if we go somewhere else? I think I’m affecting the ambience in here.”
She wasn’t wrong about that. A kind of cold and crepuscular gloom was rising up from the floorboards, radiating out of the espresso cups, the cupcake crumbs. You could hear those trees whispering secret dark things. Mo and Susannah left What Hast Thou Ground? and walked down to the little park. Here, no one was looking, so Susannah became a black squirrel. She ran up the trunk of a chestnut tree and began to tidy her gothic plume of a tail on a high branch. Mo became a common loon and joined her on the branch. He said, “I think Bowie was tired of being Bowie. Third time’s a charm, right? Anyway, I left Thomas to do whatever it was he was going to do. I had a slice of really bad pecan pie in the hospital cafeteria. And eventually Thomas came and found me. He hadn’t killed any babies.”
“Kind of figured you would have led with that,” the squirrel said. “If he’d killed a baby.”
“I feel a little bad for him,” the loon said. “All he’s wanted for five hundred years or whatever. To find Bowie or Avelot and kill her. Him. And now what?”
“Wait another sixteen or seventeen years,” the squirrel said. “Maybe teenager Bowie will do something obvious. Give himself away.”
“Or all of those babies will turn out to be Bowie,” the loon said. “And they’ll gang up on him and kick his ass. Or Thomas will show up one day with all the babies, he’ll have kidnapped all of them so he can have a couple of days or years or whatever to figure it out. Which one he wants to murder. In which case, I’m out. Let him change all the diapers.”
The squirrel said, “He waited for a really long fucking time. What’s another decade or two?”
“Yeah,” said the loon. “Take the long view. How about you? You really like it? Being down there in the dark?”
The squirrel said, “Suits me for now. We’ll see how I feel in a decade or two.”
“Do you think it suits you and that’s why Bogomil picked you? Or do you think it suits you because Bogomil kept dragging you there? Made you into someone who would be the right fit for it?”
The squirrel did its best to shrug. “Does it matter? Don’t change the subject. You and Thomas.”
“Fine,” said the loon. “Okay. I like him. A lot. But do I really want to spend a decade or two or even a couple of long weekends with a guy who is mostly thinking about someone else? The one who got away? Yes, okay, someone else is someone he wants to kill, but that seems intense. I want to be with someone who is mostly thinking about me.”
“Mo,” the squirrel said. “You have music. You know what you want to do. What you want to be. You have all these ideas about songs, about things you want to do. Whoever you end up with, they’re going to have to put up with that. With all the stuff in your head and in your heart that isn’t about them. So, yeah, I mean, have a little sympathy for Thomas? Let him have his thing? Even if you don’t really get it?”
“Even if his thing is revenge? Murder?”
The squirrel said, “Maybe you give it some time. Give him some time. Maybe now that Malo Mogge’s out of the picture, he’ll find something else to be interested in. Like tabletop gaming. Or cake decoration.”
“I really like him,” the loon said. “And I want him to like me. I want him to like me a lot. I want him to like me, to want me, more than he wants to kill Bowie. But not, like, in an ultimatum way. I don’t want to have to make a whole ‘it’s Bowie or me’ speech. I couldn’t do it, up at the hospital. I wanted him to choose me without me asking him to choose me.”
“Well,” the squirrel said, “he did. He chose you. You and your slice of bad pie in the cafeteria. Didn’t he?”
The loon lifted one foot, scratched its sleek head thoughtfully. Then it swooped down to the grass and became a boy. “Yeah,” Mo said. “I guess he did.”
The Book of Carousel
After all the magic has been sorted out in Mo’s extremely cool attic and Susannah has gone to her dark realm, Carousel and Daniel get a ride back down from the Cliffs in Mr. Anabin’s car. She gets the front seat; Daniel and the Harmony ride in the back. Bogomil has gone ahead of them with Laura.
Daniel’s knees are up around his shoulders practically. He should have taken the front, but that’s Daniel for you. Very kind, not very intelligent.
First they stop at the Cliff Hangar because Mr. Anabin says there is someone there who needs Daniel’s help. This turns out to be the guy who runs What Hast Thou Ground? He’s sleeping up on the platform of the carousel, which Carousel has never loved. She’s always felt she was in competition with it, whether or not the carousel knew. It’s definitely more popular than she is. But it turns out she’s more magic.
“Malo Mogge did this,” Mr. Anabin says to Daniel. “You might use your magic to undo it. What magic you do here gives Susannah magic of her own. If you do none, she will, in time, have none.”
Daniel kneels by the sleeping guy. He says, “Hey. Billy. Wake up. Party’s over.”
The guy, Billy, opens his eyes, sees Daniel, and smiles. “Danny boy, my good friend,” he says, “long time no see. How you been?”
Carousel wanders over to the windows and surveys the night. Laura is out in the bay tearing apart Malo Mogge’s temple. She becomes aware that Bogomil is standing there, too, also watching. There’s someone else, a boy Carousel doesn’t know, the one who flew into the attic with Mo. They all watch in silence.
Mo? Mo stayed home. He said today has been a lot and he could use some downtime.
Carousel wonders what Susannah is up to in her realm. She wishes she could go visit, see this place, but apparently that’s another thing she’s not allowed to do, even though she’s in charge of the key. Most of the key.
Back in the car, Billy gets the front seat and Carousel goes in the back with Daniel and her new guitar. It’s all banged up and scratched, and maybe it wouldn’t mind if Carousel puts some more stickers on it, something to make it feel more like it actually belongs to her.
Billy keeps dozing off. Daniel is talking about applying to state schools. He asks Mr. Anabin to write him a recommendation. Carousel is perplexed. Her brother is the guardian of a magic door now. He has magic, he can do magic, he is magic. Shouldn’t he be thinking bigger? Well, he’ll figure it out as he goes. Carousel will, too. She sits beside Daniel, the guitar across her lap. She has discovered that she can talk to it and it talks right back. They didn’t really ask you if this was what you wanted, Carousel says. I didn’t ask. Is it okay? What do you want?
To be something other than what I have been, the guitar says.
Fair enough. Carousel has no idea what she wants to be, either.
They have to make more stops on the way home so Daniel can help people step down off pedestals. Help them stop being statues. It’s nice to see Daniel using his magic. Carousel is proud of him. She knows how hard it can be to try new things.
When Mr. Anabin finally drops them off it’s so very late that time has wrapped back around itself and now it’s early. The rest of the house is asleep, but here are Lissy and Dakota. They have their coats on over their pajamas, and they’re putting on their boots.
