Two things happened at once, and I felt as if I were suddenly awakened. More than that; like I had escaped something. I had been freed. But...temporarily.
Moira was talking about renting a canoe, if there were any to rent, and paddling across the lake. Neal came out to the wooden porch and stood with one hand on his hip socket and the other hanging at his side, flexing its fingers. He was staring at nothing, and so was Moira. It was as though the three of us were in three different places; and that I was the only one who was 'awake.'
I had felt that I wanted to avoid Neal, but now I wanted nothing more than to go talk to him. I got up from the bench. I resisted the urge to sit back down. It was Top, using his mind on me. He didn't want me talking to Neal. He didn't want Neal to reveal a certain thing to me, and Neal himself was resisting this idea of silence, realizing that it was not his idea, but Top's. Neither was it Moira's idea to glide across the lake in a canoe, but, again, the devious Top's. He was trying to overcome her pathological attraction to bodies of water.
Neal didn't see me until I stood in front of him. He focused on me gradually. Then he offered me a Prince Edward cigar, a long slender one.
While I was stripping off the wrapper he said that someone was going to "come out, or get honest, get real," but that he didn't know if this unidentified person was to arrive later or was already here. He added that something was going to "fall, to impact on someone," but that he could not know whether this power was here, now, or was still on its way, from a far distance.
I lit the cigar and tried to make sense of what he was saying in his cool, collected manner. He remarked that he didn't see much use in the terms Good and Evil, since each was simply the reverse image of the other, like holding an orange in your right hand and seeing your image in a mirror holding the orange in its left.
"The more Good is different from Evil, the more it is like it," he explained in a self-satisfied tone. "Differences cause problems, but major differences solve them. Better that everything be alike in the end, after starting out very, very different."
I remembered Top saying that Neal had no disciplined philosophy. Either Neal's view was acquired and thus a philosophy, or it was an expression of a character quality, or flaw. I didn't agree with him but I didn't argue. I just wanted to know what he was expecting to happen. "You wanted Alicia Grimes to kill herself."
"There is no law against wanting someone to die."
"That wasn't my question. Why did you want her dead?"
He said pompously: "The age-old tragedy of unfaithfulness."
"She was insane, not unfaithful."
"It was her unfaithfulness that drove her mad."
"Not her abuse at the hands of her parents?"
"That's Everett's view," he replied, meaning Top.
"And he's next on your shit list."
"Yes, and I on his, because we are not different enough. I am the orange in the right hand, he the orange in the left. It is time to smash the mirror, and to unify the orange."
"In which hand?"
He made no reply to that. He was looking at Moira, who was blowing over the bottleneck of her ginger ale, making a sound like an oboe.
"If anything harmful happens to her tonight," I said, flicking ash, "I'm going to kill you. And not with my mind."
This didn't seem to bother him. "Why should she be harmed? Is she unfaithful?"
"No, she's just a little crazy. Probably not nearly as crazy as you and I, though."
He turned and went back into the cabin.
"William, look!" Moira was holding something in her cupped hands, standing at the tree line, not far past the picnic table. So I went over to see what it was, the cigar in my teeth.
It was a baby bird, apparently fallen from a nest in the branches above us. "It's still alive," she said tenderly. "What should we do with it? What if the mama bird doesn't come for it in time? I think if I wet some bread crumbs it would eat them. They have to eat a lot, and often, you know. Should we try it?"
I had nothing better to do, so I shrugged and we walked back to the cabin. I recall thinking how absurd this whole thing was; the absurdity brought into sharp contrast by Moira's little act of mercy in a place that hardly knew the meaning of the word.
Stella and Edna were shoulder-to-shoulder at the counter, chopping and seasoning steaks. Top was in a rockingchair by the bookshelves writing in a ledger. Neal was reclining on a couch with an architecture magazine, but not reading; rather staring at whatever was coming together in his mind.
I filled a glass with water, tore a piece off a loaf of French bread, and led Moira upstairs to our attic bedroom while she cooed to the baby bird.
She made a nest of socks for it. I watched her roll bits of bread into a worm shape, dampen them, and try to coax the fuzzy fledgling to eat them but nothing doing. "Maybe a little grease will help," I suggested in response to her panicky eyes. "I'll get some butter."
"Bring us back something to drink too," she called as I started down the stairs.
I was delayed about fifteen minutes by Top, first, who inquired about Roberta and "Josie," as to what time would be best for them to come ("I'll find out from Moira"), and then by the widows, who put a pad of butter on a saucer for me and talked about birdwatching while I stood there holding a beer and ginger ale in one hand, holding out the other in hope that they would shut up and give me the saucer.
When finally I got back upstairs Moira was standing by the window, lit up by the sunlight shining through it like an act of God. She was holding up the glass of water. Floating in it was the baby bird. It took me a moment to realize that.
She looked over at me and said: "Is there a lock on the door? Let's lie down on the bed and talk."
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