Alice Unbound Read online

  As Alice did when she tumbled down the rabbit hole, we have come to accept the abnormal as normal, a world in which distinctions mean little or nothing. A world in which lies have no consequence, which means that truth has no consequence, which means that irreality is reality, which means that “Life is, but a dream…”

  THE SLITHY TOVES

  Bruce Meyer

  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician known to the world as the author Lewis Carroll, was framed by a not-so-imaginary thing, which was not scholarly jealousy. What plagued the author was the same thing that appeared in my childhood. My St. George-like struggle against the beast began one summer day when I was three.

  The red rose petals on the trellis vine turned grey, causing my father to plunge his spade into the earth, looking for whatever was killing the plant. Wiping his brow, he went into the cellar to find rose food. As soon as he left, I took the shovel, slapping the mud and scraping the bole until small fleshy wounds appeared. Something stirred.

  A large worm slithered through the muck, entwining the bush as if swimming in the flowerbed. I poked it with the spade’s pointed blade. I jabbed harder and harder, hoping to split the thing in two, driven by curiosity to understand what it was.

  The yellow and black-striped body surfaced. It sprang at me, hissing and snarling. The thing’s face resembled a woman’s grimace, black eyebrows raised. Its matted hair and red lips parted over jagged, rotten teeth as it reared up.

  I choked and gasped, then dropped the shovel and ran into the house sobbing and screaming.

  I stuttered to my mother that it had stung me. She checked my arms and legs for signs.

  “Was it a wasp? Where?”

  I pointed to my heart and sobbed.

  “Nothing has stung you. You’re imagining it.”

  I woke screaming for nights afterward. Whatever it was, lived in my mind, shrieking into my face, this she-thing’s breath worse than rotting marigolds. I knew it waited in the dark for me to return to the garden.

  For the remainder of the summer, each time I entered the garden I sensed it hiding behind the lilies, lurking in the delphiniums, or waiting twined around the base of the mountain ash tree. The Baltimore orioles that sang in the branches vanished, that thing having driven them away. I couldn’t breathe outside. I watched the lilies wither and brown as a bulge of earth tubed through the flower beds. The berries on the mountain ash turned black and fell like drops of poisoned rain.

  That was when time came to my childhood garden and the snow fell. The world turned grey. I watched from my window as something slithered, diving in and out of the white drifts as if it was a joy to be among the thorns and dead things.

  By the following spring I had forgotten it existed. Children bury their fears. We moved to a new house. The garden where time had started became a myth, and I grew up.

  In my final high school year, I spent spare periods in the library reading all eight books of The Caxton Encyclopaedia of Art. In the middle of volume L to P, there was a full-colour pull-out of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I borrowed the librarian’s magnifying glass and poured over the page. The hand of God reached out to infuse a mortal digit with the splendour of life. In the panel to the left of The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo painted the moment of human tragedy, “The Downfall of Adam and Eve and Their Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.” There, wrapped around the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, handing the Fruit to the first couple was the thing I had seen in my backyard.

  Michelangelo Buonarotti was not the only painter to have known that thing. Holbein gives the serpent flowing locks. Dürer paints breasts on the beast. No matter how the great masters treated the motif, that creature served as a constant reminder that something horrid always lurked beneath the topsoil. I told myself my imagination had better things to do.

  I fell in love with reading. I went to university the following September to study literature and see where my imagination would take me.

  At the frosh welcome-weekend pyjama party, we were given numbers and told to go look for a member of the opposite sex with the same number. Not long before midnight, a young woman with blonde hair, protruding teeth, and a heavy flannel nightgown came up to me.

  “We share the same number,” she said, removing my number from my back and presenting me with hers. She motioned me onto the dance floor. Without holding hands during the slow dance, she pressed against me and whispered in my ear, “I want you. Let’s go to your room now.”

  The worm turned inside me. I suddenly lost control, yet marvelled at the thrill of the experience. She stood between me and my bed and drew the nightgown over her head. I wanted to touch her smooth, white body. As I stepped out of my pyjamas the streetlight’s glow illuminated her left thigh. A lump moved back and forth beneath her skin.

  “Is there something wrong with your thigh?” I said, and pointed. The lump, like a tongue rolling in the wall of someone’s cheek, put me off.

  She lay back on the bed, tossing her hair to one side. Reaching down, she wriggled out of the lower half of her body. She set her legs on the floor, then pulled the blonde wig from her head, and spit out her overbite to reveal black teeth. Her yellow and black tail rose and waved in the air, curling and beckoning me like someone gesturing “C’mere” with an index finger.

  “You must remember me now,” she whispered.

  I opened the leaded casement. “‘Come to the window; sweet is the night air’.”

  “’Ah, love, let us be true to one another.’ I adore it when a willing young man quotes ‘Dover Beach’ to me just before I give him my special touch.”

  She leapt toward me. I caught her, and in that instant, my hands burned and blistered. She tried to wrap her arms around me, her black claws suddenly protruding from her fingertips. I turned to the window and flung her out.

  She thumped off a dumpster, screaming shrilly as her body hit the ground. Then I picked up her wig, teeth and her lower half, and tossed them into the alley. I closed the window and pulled the drapes shut. My heart pounded. I washed and washed my hands, dressed, and ran into the night toward the Bloor Street crowds. The all-night student hangouts looked like safe havens when I reached Bathurst Street. I found a bar with thumping music and a waitress willing to serve me as many Jack Daniels as I could buy. I came to my senses several hours later in a doughnut shop, a Korean man standing over me with a carafe, asking if I wanted more coffee. I never felt safe in my dorm room again.

  As the leaves turned orange and red around the campus, and the sky burst into that brilliance of blue that can only say “I am dying in the most beautiful way,” autumn came to my freshman year. The yellow and purple mums in planters along the walkways shrivelled and browned. I knew it was her doing. She lurked behind the college walls to suck the life from my world. I stopped giving a damn about worldly things. The only thing I knew I could trust was literature, and I found my passion in Professor Lamoore’s class. Her name was poetry.

  By November the snow fell in soft, heavy flakes outside. Professor Lamoore leaned against the windowsill talking nonsense, literally, explaining what it meant to craft a new diction and use it to describe the heroic act of slaying a dreaded beast.

  ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  Lamoore, an older, plump man, had taught my mother during her undergraduate years. His bald head reflected the brightness from the ceiling fixtures. “Now what was that?” he asked.

  “Gibberish.”

  “Not quite. It was Jabberwocky.”

  The class sat in silence. Some sighed with a “Let’s get this over with” attitude. From under his arm, he produced a copy of Through the Looking Glass, a book that I could never bring myself to read, and I could not recall why. Perhaps I had been frightened by the pictures.

  “The poem is a folk ballad in the tradition of Lord Randall or Sir Patrick S
pens. There’s something unusual about what Carroll does to the poem a few chapters after it is presented. A good poet is like a good magician.” Lamoore thumbed through the pages of the little book. “A good magician never explains his tricks or how they work. Yet, in Chapter Six, Alice meets a big egg named Humpty Dumpty who relishes in exegesis, that art of explanation. Humpty sits on his wall and professes, critiques, and insists that everything must mean something. And so, he explains the meaning of Jabberwocky to Alice. He recites the first verse of the poem, then:

  “Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy.’ ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

  “I see it now,” Alice remarked thoughtfully: “and what are ‘toves’?”

  “Well, ‘toves’ are something like badgers – they’re something like lizards – and they’re something like corkscrews.”

  “They must be very curious-looking creatures.”

  “They are that,” said Humpty Dumpty: “also they make their nests under ‘sundials’ – also they live on cheese.”

  “And what’s to ‘gyre’ and to ‘gimble’?”

  “To ‘gyre’ is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To ‘gimble’ is to make holes like a gimlet.”

  “And ‘the wabe’ is the grass-plot round a sundial, I suppose?” said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity.

  “Of course it is…”

  I left Professor Lamoore’s class with a sudden interest in Lewis Carroll. I knew I had met the slithy tove.

  Carroll’s illustrator, John Tenniel, depicted the tove in the 1871 edition of Through the Looking Glass and got it wrong. The badger suggestion was Lewis Carroll’s purposeful misdirection. Maybe the author meant wolverine but understood that English readers would not be acquainted with the vicious North American animal. Perhaps he wanted to hunt the tove himself without giving away too many clues. Why? The tove was more lizard-like than badger, but its claws and arms, to say nothing of its foul disposition and cheesy breath, were suggestive of a badger.

  I believed Dodgson had encountered the creature and had been plagued by the tove, which hated innocence and happiness. The tove whispered in the ears of those harbouring doubts, and wove those doubts into jealousies. It poisoned the world. When I was kicked off the college paper’s editorial staff without any other reason than that I was constantly distracted and looking over my shoulder, I knew the tove had planted seeds in my fellow reporters’ brains. In the dining hall no one would sit with me. Other students just looked at me and then moved their trays. I tried to overcome attacks on my reputation, the sort of college stuff that always happens – lending notes and offering to buy coffee. When I asked what I had done, people simply answered, “Well, you know…” and said nothing more. I found myself on the outside of the reindeer games that occupied most other students’ time. The only place I felt secure and happy was in Professor Lamoore’s class.

  Lamoore and his wife, Gamba, held regular teas in their Victorian “house of grace,” which was a haven for ideas and literary talk. I was always invited to their gatherings. The Lamoores welcomed acclaimed authors or renowned scholars as their guests. Just to sit there and listen to the stories was a tremendous privilege. The teas prepared me for my later work.

  By the end of my honours year I won a scholarship to Oxford, thanks largely to the tutelage of Lamoore. One day, Julia Cassidy came to Lamoore’s tea.

  Mrs. Cassidy had been the wife of a strange but troubled professor whose brilliance and temperament had mixed within him in an unusual way. While researching Lewis Carroll, he was found hanging in his office. Julia had the countenance of a suffering angel and an air of wisdom as if she carried a very old soul. During the tea, Mrs. Cassidy quoted from Duino Elegies.

  “He sounds inspiring,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “Rainer Maria Rilke,” sang off her tongue through her flowing Irish lilt. “Have you not read Rilke?” she asked with patience. I shook my head. “He also did a wonderful book, Letters to a Young Poet. We shall have to see to that.” She smiled and went back to her dessert.

  The next day, I was packing for Oxford when the porter came to my door with a small package. The outer envelope said simply, “Do not open until you are on your way.” Halfway across the Atlantic as dawn was just beginning, I opened the envelope. It was a copy of Rilke’s volume of advice to literary types, Letters to a Young Poet. I could hear her voice: “In your moment of greatest need, Rilke will provide the answer to your question. Be well and journey bravely, Julia Cassidy.”

  I settled into my room at Christ Church College. The slightly vaulted ceiling and stone door frame, fireplace, and leaded windows made me feel monastic. As I lay in my cot the first night, I looked up at the ceiling where it met the cornice. In the nineteenth-century plasterwork a strange bulge seemed to indicate the pipes were about to burst.

  I stacked my chair on my desk and reached toward it. The moment my fingers hit the brittle plaster, the bubble burst and a withered grey corpse I mistook for a large cat fell to the floor with a thud. Someone from a nearby room hollered, “Keep it down in there, you bloody sod!”

  The skull cracked slightly on impact. The corpse’s sinews held the body together. I viewed the remnants of an upper torso with nothing below the waist but a long series of vertebrae and ribs tapering to a point. The skull looked partially human but small horns protruded from the sides of the cranium. The finger bones were tipped with claws. Here was the skeleton of a tove.

  I didn’t touch it, having seen how a tove sucked the life out of a garden, and had burned me. I put on heavy leather gloves I had brought for winter. When I touched the corpse, the palms paled as if the tanning was being drawn out. Piling the remains on my desk, I stared at the corpse. Here was proof that the tove was real. But why was it here? Why this room, my room?

  In the morning, I went to the Dean’s lodge, not to tell him about my zoological discovery (which I hid in a paper bag under my bed and transferred to a rental locker at Oxford Station later that afternoon), but to ask who had previously lived in my chamber. I was handed a large black ledger. I poured through the names of previous inhabitants until, under an entry for the Michaelmas term, 1851, I found the name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. I was living in Lewis Carroll’s old digs.

  Had the tove come to his dorm room to claim him as a prize? What if the tove had crawled in through a dovecote in the stone eaves, become entangled in the medieval masonry and died there?

  In studying Carroll’s life, I found there were four missing diaries. Their absence has been used by his detractors to indict him for adultery and even child abuse. The volumes date from 1853 to 1863 and include the years that Carroll spent completing his studies at Oxford as well as those with the children of a local clergyman, Henry Liddell. Several scholars argue that he was in love with the eldest Liddell daughter, but spent his time amusing her younger sister, Alice, with his labyrinthine tales of logic and fancy.

  The Liddell home still stands in Oxford. I found the name of the current owners. Carol Framwell answered when I called. “Of course, I am a Lewis Carroll fanatic,” she bubbled. “I adore living here, and we bought the home because of the Liddell connection. I shan’t be here, but do come around on Saturday afternoon. My husband will show you the house.”

  “I’m not really all that interested in the inside as I am in the garden,” I said to Richard Framwell who looked disappointed. He was a DIY man, and I think he wanted to show off his handiwork.

  We wandered around the back, standing in the rain. I had my umbrella up. Richard Framwell is one of those English-men who is impervious to water, and he merely tucked his hands in the pockets of his brown oilcloth jacket and remained dry.

  “May I ask what you’re specifically looking for?”

  “This is where Lewis Carroll took most of his photographs of the Liddell children if I am correct.” Framwell nodded. “What I’m looking for is the sundial’
s location.”

  “The sundial? As in slithy toves? You aren’t secreting any Stilton, are you?” He looked disconcerted and then smiled with the hope that I would catch his allusion. I laughed. Richard had his hand out to see if the rain was still falling. I saw the bushes rustle. I put my finger to my lips. I did not want the tove to overhear, though I could not tell my host that.

  “Do you have trouble growing roses?” I whispered.

  He shook his head, talking at full volume, ignoring my attempts to hush things. “I am an ivy man, myself. Holly and ivy. Great Christmas fare. Funny,” he continued, “you should ask about the sundial. I found the base of it. We have it in the shed if you’d like to see it. It was there, about ten paces this side of that old oak, though I suppose in Carroll’s day it was exposed to the light far more. I was digging there several years ago, and I had a strange experience. The mud started moving beneath it. You don’t suspect it was a tove, do you?” He chuckled.

  “You don’t mind if I poke around, do you? I want to get a sense of the place.”

  “Be my guest,” he said. “I shall put some tea on so please join me when you are thoroughly cold and soaked.”

  I stood gazing at the spot.

  The birds chirped, and the rain pinged on my umbrella. I imagined a conversation, a polite male voice speaking softly to a young girl. She is giggling.

  “That’s enough,” Humpty Dumpty interrupted. “There are plenty of hard words there.”

  “And what are they?” the child asks excitedly. Suddenly, she screams and points.

  A yellow and black worm slithers from beneath the sundial.