Fairy Tales 🧚 Black Diamond

Across the Street

From his second-story bedroom, Baldric saw him every afternoon drifting this way and that in the bubbled currents of his oversized jacuzzi, which was bordered by elaborate Portuguese tiles. The Jacuzzi was in the middle of a small room, which was built from red cherry and decorated with antique glass with small bright images of berries and leaves. Occasionally, Ragor peered over the frothy ceramic sides to see what was happening in the world outside. More often, he slid his toes up and down the smooth legs of his housekeepers. But mostly he kept his nose in his little green notebook, in which he was writing God knows what.

To Baldric, Ragor seemed to have everything. He never seemed to have to work, and yet he lived a scandalous life of prolixity with a jeepney-load of Filipina housemaids. Even when it was thirty below, he sat in the warm humid air, occasionally looking up into the tree-lined street and the nearby peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Yet at night Baldric saw Ragor in his attic bedroom nervously adjusting his little telescope, fixed on the stars. It was as if Ragor was an ant, obsessed with the size of trees. Sometimes, Ragor lowered his lens and peered into the windows across the street. That didn’t bother Baldric, however, since he suspected that his neighbour was as lonely, as alienated, and as confused as he was. In making this assumption, Baldric was incorrect.

Ragor’s house was large and full of meandering hallways. His parents built it fifty years ago, when Ragor was only ten years old. Because he was the only child, his parents gave him the large attic bedroom on the third floor. How he loved the house! It had a gigantic library at the back, overlooking the garden. The interior was all dark wood, teak, cherry, and maple, all delicately carved with lintels and cornices.

His father Alphonse was originally from France, yet he had fallen in love with Marianne, a French-Canadian girl who had already fallen in love with Byron and Keats. As a result, she could never quite give herself to her husband, even after he engraved Romantic stanzas into the dark wood all over the house. After the TB really kicked in and he saw her speeding ever more quickly toward death, he resorted to carving stanzas by the French poet Lamartine, yet this only made it harder for him to hang onto the time that was slipping through his fingers.

Ainsi, toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages, / Thus, forever thrown onto new shores
Dans la nuit éternelle emportés sans retour, / In the eternal night carried without return
Ne pourrons-nous jamais sur l’océan des âges / Can we never on the ocean of time
Jeter l’ancre un seul jour ? / Drop anchor for a single day?

Marianne died when Ragor was eleven years old. The house that she animated was shuttered for a full year. After 360 nights of mourning, Alphonse finally opened it to the sunlight. He vowed that the spirit of his dead wife would resurface from the dark bones of the wood.

Alphonse was a lawyer, and preferred the well-crafted paragraphs of an annual Berkshire Hathaway report to the stanzas of Dante and Shakespeare. Yet whenever he thought of that prairie girl whose eyes glittered with life, who threw the most elegant soirées in all of Western Canada, and who had stolen his heart and thrown it into the abyss, he couldn’t help but admire the ornate poetry of Keats that she had borrowed to decorate her life:

The level chambers, ready with their pride,
Were glowing to receive a thousand guests:
The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,
Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests,
With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts.

When Alphonse thought of how Marianne would open their home to everyone, as if it were her heart and her heart was a blossoming rose, he would wonder where all their friends had gone. After she died — in her bed which she had covered with red velvet, to mask the inevitable effects of tuberculosis — Alphonse’s heart ached, and a drowsy numbness pained his every sense. When he thought of how she would kiss him in the morning, when he was half asleep and dreaming of her wandering into the garden, he would sit down at his desk and think, till wealth and fame, gold bullion and t-bills, sunlight and truth, to nothingness did sink.

L’homme n’a point de port, le temps n’a point de rive ; / Man has no port, time no bank;
Il coule, et nous passons !  / It flows, and we move on.

When Ragor sat and thought about his father, cold in the study, a phial of prime Calcutta laudenum spilled across his desk, he also remembered the smile on his lips. He had gone where everything had fled, where he could be with the one which he did seek. Ragor realized that this was how it had to be, and that his father had the right to cease upon the midnight with no pain. Yet he also felt that his father had made a mistake, since Marianne had never really died. Even now she was pouring forth her soul from every window in such an ecstasy. All one had to do was scent the cedar and cherry maple, and guess each sweet wherewith the seasonable month endows the grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild.

Everywhere Ragor went in the house reminded him of his mother. Looking up from his bedroom window, he saw the words of the chameleon poet, gently engraved in seraphim script above the lintel:

A casement high and triple-arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imageries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings;
And in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.

For years, Ragor couldn’t bring himself to change a thing about the house. Yet still, it was his house and what could be wrong with extending its beauty? So he connected an indoor patio to the living room, making sure not to ruin the unity of the living room itself. Opening up the dark far corner, he connected it to a bamboo walkway, hidden behind a silk Japanese divider, so that one couldn’t tell exactly where the living-room corner ended and the birch trees in the front yard began.

The walkway led into the covered sun-room, which was within a green hollow where several more birch trees stood. He managed to keep the trees, and put between them, within the green hollow, where a curled crest caught the spectrum from the sun, a patio banked in such a way that it took advantage of the natural slope of the front lawn. One could sit down on the long cushioned bench, which itself leaned against the slanted earth, and see the jacuzzi, a small drinks bar, several low shrubs, the house across the street, and the sky above.

Looking casually out from the living-room window, all one could see were the birch trees. If one looked closely, one could see behind them several beams of a low wooden building, like a Tori gate amid a lush thicket. Even Sam, the local handyman who helped him with the project, called it “a miracle of rare device.”

The jacuzzi was in the shape of a crescent moon, where four people could sit on the side of the longer arc, with their backs sinking into the slightly-angled foam backrests. In front of them was a low ornate fence, a bamboo thicket, the top floor of Le Triste Manor across the street, and the blue Alberta sky above. On the low fence were garlands and carven images. Beneath the image of Hyperion was a long stain-glass window, which was set seamlessly, with only the glassy mirage of a transition, into the red cherry woodwork: a red rose queen and shining knight.

As Ragor sat in the jacuzzi looking at the red rose queen, Maria and Elee prattled on in Tagalog about how big a sucker this Whitey was. They still couldn’t figure out why Ragor never made them do the things they had done a hundred times in the backrooms of Ermita. They giggled — not from embarrassment, but from the strangeness of it all — whenever he slid his toes up their smooth legs, or whenever he turned toward them to massage their soft muscles with his slim fingers and notebook-weary eyes. But then he would turn back to the rose queen and his toes would drift away, as if swept away in a current below.

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Baldric would have liked to see the notebook in which Ragor wrote so furiously. One day when Baldric was cutting the front lawn Ragor came up to him and asked him two simple questions: Why did you splash into this world, leaving all other possible Baldrics in your wake? Where will the current take you next? Baldric was disturbed by these questions, perhaps as disturbed as Ragor himself, who feared that he was writing Baldric’s life as it went along. A liberal democrat with anarchist tendencies, Ragor felt that Baldric should at least have some say in the matter of his existence.

Baldric wanted to know more, so he asked if he could join Ragor and his girlfriends in his jacuzzi. Yet Ragor was worried that Maria and Elee would devour the slim morsel of Baldric’s heart, as if it were nothing but a shrimp rebosado appetizer. Reluctantly, he refused Baldric’s request. He then wandered back to his house, thinking that perhaps he should invite Baldric over for an afternoon in their humid indoor world of Madonna pop songs and pancit guisado.

This seemingly inconsequential encounter had a lasting effect on the boy. He came away from it convinced that Ragor was involved in some sort of complicated scenario which was as mysterious as Fate itself. If Baldric was in fact a character in this scenario, then what was his role? Where were the props, and why did the stage keep moving? Why were there so many other actors? And was it possible to change the script so that he could spend an afternoon in Ragor’s jacuzzi?

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Baldric told his mother that he was confused about life, and that uncertainty jabbed at his brain like demons with pitchforks. Beatrice beamed at him and called him her little Kierkegaard. But his father frowned, and said he was beginning to lose his grip on the horses of reason. At any moment he was liable to fall off his rocker. “Just grab their little pitchforks and make hay!” On hearing this, his mother shook her head and said, “It’s natural to be confused about life. Nobody knows the right answers, let alone the right questions.” She added, “Despite its critics, life is an absurd drama worth acting in.”

“Or acting out,” his father countered.

Undaunted, Beatrice continued: “In any case, there are a definite number of absolute variables that define the potential existences of a man. The greatness of a man’s character lies in his ability to be someone else, that is, to exist on another level. You must become Keats’ chameleon poet.” 

Angry that his wife had stolen the limelight and was plugging his son’s ears with literary putty, Antonio broke in with his one and only commandment, “To thine own self be true,” which Beatrice contradicted by encouraging her son to speak the words trippingly on his tongue, and not to saw the air too much with his hand, thus.

Frustrated by this endless debate, Baldric looked out the living room window at the indoor patio and saw the transfixed eyes of Ragor the Clerk. 

Ragor slipped, inch by inch, into the sparkling foam.

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The human part of Ragor was ashamed to treat Baldric like this. But his Blue Dreamer soul was completely indifferent, and saw it as Baldric’s Fate. He told himself that he just wanted to immerse himself deeper into the warm water, from his chest to his adam’s-apple.

Ragor didn’t really want to confront the fact hat he was playing fast and loose with Blue Dreamer privacy laws. Although it was legal to use mirror technology to share your experience, it was illegal to use mirror technology in order to share another person’s experience without their consent. There were of course Dreamers who argued that everyone had the right to dream in every possible way, from one’s own dreams to those of others. These Unlimited Dreamers believed that those who withheld their dreams, or who clung pathetically onto patents and privacy laws, were probably up to no good. They insisted that secrecy wasn’t the same as privacy, and that it went against the very essence of the New Blue Ideal, which was over 700 years old. This Ideal committed the Blue Dream to remaining open and translucent. It was to remain the experiment in laissez-faire transparency that the founding fathers had envisioned.

Ragor wasn’t sure, however, how Baldric would react if he told him that he’d seeded mirrors into his blood. Ragor only wanted to share Baldric’s experience. The mirrors couldn’t do him any harm: they only allowed him to see things from far away, not influence the events that he saw. But humans were persnickety about privacy. Maria didn’t even like it when Ragor watched her undress. He had to look carefully around her shoulder to see the front of her body in the mirror on her dressing table. Maria said that this was because she was Catholic. She knew that he was looking at her and she fervently objected. Still, she slowly lowered the strap from her shoulder blade and let it slide down to her elbow, slowly, so Ragor could get a good look.

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Baldric’s parents wouldn’t let it rest. Beatrice gave him two examples of the Wise Man of Contemplation: Byron’s Don Juan and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. When Baldric looked skeptical at this, Beatrice argued that the windmill analogy had been misinterpreted by one and all. By doing fierce battle with the whirling blades, Quixote had in fact accomplished more than Keats and Shelley combined: he had proved beyond the doubt of fiction that he was a dreamer, and that dreams held more Truth and Beauty than cannon balls and government stamps and hell-like institutions such as the one she had been trapped into by the sound of church bells and tin cans dangling from Lorenzo’s truck.

Juan and Quixote were then transformed by Antonio into vile, treacherous angels. He asked his trembling son with rhetorical anger: “Even at the age of fourteen, did Juan not have the precocity to twist the heart of his 24-year-old tutor, and to make a sweet mess on the scattered pages of his Latin Grammar? And did Quixote not demonstrate an unnatural affection for his horse, calling it Rocinante?” His father concluded that Juan and Quixote were therefore the greatest aimless wandering rogues in all of history.

Despite Antonio’s arguments, it was Beatrice’s quixotic interpretation that prevailed in Baldric’s mind. This was because she had the good sense to interpret literature without adding tangential demonic elements to the narrative. It was true she gave a few footnotes here and there, yet she didn’t scare Baldric with imaginary subplots about the communal drinking habits of Reverend Jimmy Jones. Nor did she advance ghoulish speculations about what Dr Jeckyl might have accomplished in this glorious age of pornography and drugs. Instead, she merely read the stories as she felt the authors had intended them to be read, that is, with a minimum of interpretation. More influential still was the fact that each night she would sneak him Girl Guide cookies and gargantuan slices of angel-food cake. These had the effect of soothing his mind and sending his body into a cloud-like stratosphere of thought.

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Next: 🎲 Three: At the Caffè

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