Jumping forward a few chapters so we can get the the part where the plot (?) finally starts to go somewhere:
It is early on a Sunday morning- even the church-going families are just getting breakfast ready. The early-morning fog is still lifting, and the air carries the scent of green grass. Untrammeled by school, Anna wakes early. The cat is awake too, and eventually Walt groans and yawns and decides he’d better get up and let them both outside.
Anna is running slightly ahead of her father when she stops and points at something on the ground, about fifteen feet ahead.
“What is it?” she asks him.
It is a white line of toadstools, large and small, densely packed side-by-side in some places, scattered in others. They look like pearls unevenly strung. The line crosses the edge of the Healys’ yard back-to-front, is cut by the asphalt of the road but resumes on the opposite side, just skirting the Gratsias’ lawn, and continues until it disappears from view behind the house next door.
Walt catches Anna by the arm before she can step any closer to the toadstools.
“Don’t!”
Surprised at his own voice, he adds, at a lower volume:
“Don’t go any closer till I check it out.” Gingerly he approaches the glistening line of fungi, turning his head this way and that as he surveys it. “I think— I think it’s a fairy ring,” he finally says. “Let’s follow around it and see.”
Taking his daughter by the hand he leads her clockwise around what proves to indeed be a gigantic ring surrounding several blocks of the neighborhood. As they travel around its circumference, the meet their neighbor Joe, gazing at the phenomenon in his pajamas and dressing gown. He greets them, and Walt points wordlessly at the toadstools.
“Incredible, eh?” Joe replies. “Never seen one this big before.”
“You’ve… seen these before?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of fairy rings?” Joe asks him.
“In stories. I thought they were one of the made-up parts.”
Anna is delighted.
“Are fairies real, then, Daddy?”
“Hope not,” says Walt. Before she can ask him further, he adds: “Why don’t you run back to the house, wake Mommy and tell her to get the camera?” She darts off, and he calls after her: “Don’t step on the mushrooms!” To Joe he says, only half-joking, “Now I’m going to have to reappraise every tall tale my Da ever told me.”
“Well, they don’t usually get this big,” Joe admits. “Till now the largest I’d seen was maybe ten, twelve feet across?” He looks sharply at his neighbor. “You’re really spooked by this?”
“I know, I must sound superstitious as hell— it’s just that seeing one in real life–” Walt casts about for an analogy: “It’s like finding out bats are real.”
“Bats are real, Walt.”
“Go on!” Walt’s eyebrows shoot up. “I thought they were just in Dracula movies?” Joe shakes his head. “You’re seriously telling me” says Walt, “that winged mice really do live in church belfries? That doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
Just then Anna returns with her mother carrying the family kodak. Hilde is still in her housecoat and looks at the mushrooms in astonishment.
“I confess,” she says, “I thought Anna must be exaggerating the size of this… witch-ring, but I see she’s not.”
“You’ve seen them before too?” Walt asks. “A few times, when I was a little girl. But those were only a few feet across. Are they just bigger in America?”
Joe shakes his head:
“This one’s a jumbo.”
Walt turns to his wife:
“What did you call it?”
Hilde laughs.
“My old nurse told me these were the marks left where witches danced at their sabbaths.”
“Daddy said it was fairies,” counters Anna.
“I said I hoped it wasn’t,” Walt corrects her, but she shakes her head:
“When you hope something isn’t something, that means you think it is.”
“Now who can argue with that?” Joe asks. To Hilde, who’s begun lining up photos with the camera, he says: “Lemme get out of your way. You don’t want me in your photo in my lingerie.”
Hilde begins photographing the mushroom ring, by itself and with her husband and daughter posed in front of it. Joe returns to his house and the Healys continue their clockwise stroll around the ring. The sun is brighter now, and the fog burnt off. Shading his eyes with his hand, Walt looks towards the houses inside the ring:
“What’s at the center?”
The following day, Walt is seated by the drawing board with his elbow propped on his knee and his chin on his hand. In the other hand, he holds a mechanical pencil that he inspects, turning it this way and that until finally, he holds it to one eye and squints along the barrel as if looking down the sights of a rifle.
“Ready for parade drill?” Jake (NOTE -- Jake is a co-worker introduced in one of the chapters I skipped over) asks. Walt shrugs.
“A tool’s a tool. Gotta be maintained.”
“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
“Not at the moment it isn’t. I think the lead is broken.” Walt shakes the fragments of graphite onto a piece of paper, then carefully takes a fresh lead from a little box and inserts it in the pencil. Turning to his colleague, he nods towards a stack of slick paper and adds: “You, er, left some magazines under the desk. Do you want them back?”
“Oh, those.” Jake smirks, “not to your taste, eh?”
“I guess the women are all right, but the sharks and Nazis are a bit… off-putting.”
“Too much red meat for you?”
“Yep. Yes, that’s it exactly.”
Jake turns and faces Walt squarely:
“You know, it’s the guys like you who oughta be married and settled down. You like things cozy. The whole house-and-garden thing doesn’t feel like a cage to you.”
“Does it feel like one to you?”
“I dunno. Hazel’s a keeper, and Bonnie’s a good kid, it’s just – it feels like we used to be real men, and now we’ve been domesticated.”
Walt considers this.
“I think you and I remember bachelorhood very differently.” Jake suddenly realizes that their conversation is observed.
Emmett Moore is the man who shook Walt’s hand and welcomed him aboard some three years earlier. He is a short, slight man with silver hair and a quiet demeanor. According to one of Walt’s colleagues, Emmett was a pilot back in the First World War. Walt has never seen any reason to doubt this. Ignoring Jake, he waves Walt over to his desk.
“Walt?”
“Mr. Moore?”
“Can you stay late tonight and give me a hand? I’m preparing a report, and I could use a nice graph- you remember how we did them last year? We can order in some food.”
“Can we have it from the chop suey place? If that’s all right with you, I mean.” His supervisor chuckles:
“As long as it isn’t caviar and champagne, I think the firm can cover it.”
“Good. I’ll do just about anything for egg foo yung on the company dime. Just let me finish up the piece I’m working on, I’ll call Hilde to let her know I’ll be late.”
“That’s all right, I won’t be done with these figures till the end of day- the regular end of day, I mean.”
“May I use your phone?”
Moore waves towards it magnanimously, though he’s caught somewhat off-guard when Walt sits on the edge of his desk and leans across to begin dialing. It has never occurred to the older man that the phrase “I didn’t know where to look” could apply to someone fully-clothed, but in trying not to gaze up into that angular face, he is forced to focus either upon the hairs of Walt’s left forearm and the hand planted squarely on the desk in front of him; or upon the parts of Walt which are seated upon the desk’s corner. Then again, to stare down at his work the whole time would be simply rude.
Meanwhile, his employee is relaying his new plans for the evening:
“I agreed to stay and help with some extra work. No, nothing too taxing,” (he gives Moore a sidelong grin), “and they’re giving me supper, so you needn’t worry on that account. Yes. Yes that’s fine. See you later. Thanks heaps,” he adds to Moore before putting down the receiver and slipping off the desk to saunter away.
He returns a couple of hours later, as the rest of the office are grabbing their hats. This time, Moore glances up at him with a smile.
“Almost done here.”
“Good. I’ll get a copy of last year’s report to remind myself how it looked. Then you’d better come by my desk so I don’t have to move all my stuff.”
Moore realizes what Walt meant when he approaches the latter’s drawing-board, carrying the typed sheets of the report. Scattered about are pens, a blue pencil, a compass and other drafting tools, a razorblade, a pot of evil-smelling glue, and a great many sheets of Zip-a-Tone, as well as a copy of last year’s report that has been leafed through and flattened open to show a page with a pie chart, with the wedges filled in with different Zip-a-Tone patterns. Walt is shuffling through the acetate sheets to find transfers that matched last year’s.
”No sense reinventing the wheel,” he mutters to himself, gesturing to Moore to pull up a stool beside him. He continues talking as he lays out a new pie chart with a compass and a ruler, inked over the blue pencil, and begins the paste-up. The smell of the glue is making Moore a bit dizzy. “I’ve been talking too much, haven’t I?” Walt asks. “Don’t worry, I’m almost finished. Hand me a new blade, will you? This one’s getting dull.”
Moore phones the Chinese restaurant just as Walt heads into the darkroom to photograph the paste-up.
“This way,” he says, “the food should arrive just as you’re finishing up.” In fact it arrives with a couple of minutes to spare, and Walt comes out to find Moore has set out the myriad cardboard containers on a desk in the main office and is returning from the water-cooler with a couple of paper cups. “I suppose we should have ordered something to drink, too,” he apologizes.
“I know where...somebody... keeps a bottle,” Walt muses, “and he owes me a dollar-fifty, so he can’t complain if I start a bar tab with him.” He vanishes with the cups and when he reappears, the liquid inside is the color of strong tea and smells nothing like it.
“Cocktails before supper,” Moore says, raising his paper cup to Walt.
“Of course. This is a classy joint.”
They chuckle through their meal, Walt showing his supervisor how to hold the chopsticks, and another round of drinks, which Walt carefully notes down, still refusing to tell which of his colleagues is their host. They are both sitting on Moore’s desk now, with their feast laid out between them like a picnic lunch. The older man pats his stomach.
“Is it true I’ll be hungry again in an hour?” he asks.
“Probably. There’s leftovers, you can take them home.”
“I think you’d better take’em. I’m sure your wife won’t miss having to make lunch tomorrow.”
“True, we’re neither of us very imaginative cooks. Comes of batching it for so long, I guess. Or spinstering it, in Hilde’s case. Spinning it? Does that make sense?”
Moore clears his throat and addresses another topic he’s meant to bring up with Walt for a few days:
“Everything all right at home, by the way? You’ve had a bit of a faraway look lately.” A trace of worry must cross his employee’s face, for he adds: “Not that your work’s fallen off that I’ve noticed. I just want the men to feel they can come to me with their concerns. If any.” Walt shrugs, wondering what Moore thinks he’s seen in him.
“Touch of spring fever, maybe,” he begins, and breaks off at the sight of Moore’s embarrassed smile. “Not at all what I meant. Just, it’s hard being indoors in this good weather. We’ve moved to a new home,” he continues. “My first house— I’ve never had a back yard before. Always been a city boy till now. And... it’s so strange seeing plants... up close and personal, if you see what I mean?”
Moore nods, obviously relieved that his employee isn’t about to confess an extramarital temptation.
“Good for the soul,” he says, “to have a garden.”
“It’s just--” Walt says, “stuff like clover, apple trees,” he hesitates: “toadstools-- I knew they existed, but it turns out I didn’t really believe they existed until I saw them with my own eyes.”
“And milk comes from cows, not from a bottle,” Moore quips.
“Well, we’re not that far out in the countryside—” Walt begins, before he realizes his boss has taken his statements as comic hyperbole. “It does make me feel strange,” he insists. “Like living in a story. And don’t tell me that’s the fault of this New Modern Age, or some such—"
“We work in aircraft design; I’m hardly going to scold anyone for being a denizen of the twentieth century—"
“Because Anna’s taken to the outdoors quite naturally.”
Moore smiles.
“The things our children will live to see,” he says. “I can only imagine. Even you, Walt, are likely to live another thirty years or more in this world. I envy you that sometimes — and then sometimes I worry for you. There’s a temptation, when you work with new technology, to get... a bit mystical about it. I could tell you stories about some of the characters at JPL— but well, less said the better, maybe. That’s California for you. Point is, you mustn’t get superstitious about the work, or make an idol of airplanes or something.” Walt nods silently. “I’m telling you this because I really believe the only way forward is to balance nature and technology. You’re a bright boy, but I think you could stand to be reminded of that.” He pats Walt on the arm and asks: “Now, talking of the future, did they pack some fortune cookies in there for us?”
Walt rummages in the large paper bag from the restaurant and pulls out a pair of the thin, oddly-shaped confections. They are individually wrapped in cellophane. He closes a hand over each one and lets Moore choose. Moore taps Walt’s left hand and unwraps the fortune cookie within. Snapping it open he adjusts his glasses and reads it out loud:
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Wait, that’s the Gospels, isn’t it? Book of... Matthew, I think? Been a long time since Sunday school. What does yours say?”
Walt breaks his cookie and pulls out the paper slip:
“Water seeks its own level. Now that’s just confusing.”
“Perhaps it’s a suggestion we go into business together?”
“We can open a Chinese restaurant,” says Walt.
After Walt gets home that night, he opens the bedroom closet, slips between the hanging winter overcoats, and reemerges lugging a cardboard box marked RECORDS. He carries it to the living room and opens it, only to find it full of shellac 78s. He makes a huffing sound, which in spite of himself becomes a chuckle, and is about to close the box when he picks up the topmost gramophone record, examines it, shrugs, and goes over to the hi-fi.
Ten minutes later Hilde hears a slurred sound which, as Walt adjusts the turntable speed, resolves into John McCormack’s tenor voice, clear and effortless and straightforward, even though the scratchy old shellac, singing:
Once in the dear dead days beyond recall, When on the world the mists began to fall…
and comes out of the kitchen to investigate.
“It’s not too loud, is it?” Walt asks.
“Anna’s upstairs, and the singer is very good,” admits Hilde.
“Da always used to say the great thing about McCormack was that he never tried to oversell a song,” Walter whispers reverently. “Just let the music come through him, as it were.”
“What’s brought on this sudden devotion to the Muses?”
* * * * *
“What about seahorses?” Walt asks.
“Real. And,” Hilde adds, “the males have the babies.”
“No kidding? What about hyenas? Wait, I’ve seen them at the zoo. Tasmanian tigers?”
“Were real, probably extinct now.”
“Dinosaurs?”
“Definitely extinct, unless there’s a lost continent somewhere.”
“Are lost continents a thing too?” Walt doesn’t know what to do. Ever since the fairy ring, anything could be true.
He and Hilde are getting ready for bed. As has become their routine, he helps his wife unfasten the complicated medical corset that braces her spine. He glimpses the scars from her childhood surgeries, and then she pulls her nightgown over her head and gets into their bed. He climbs in and embraces her with a sigh he doesn’t realize was audible until she asks:
“Was that a happy sigh, or is something troubling you?”
Walt frowns in thought, and begins to speak, half to Hilde and half to himself:
“I told Joe yesterday, when we were looking at the… toadstool ring, that now I know those things aren’t made up, I was going to have to rethink every fairy story my folks ever told me. And I have been thinking a lot today, remembering back when I was a kid.” He pauses. “I’m not going to ask you to analyze me, mind; but I’m starting to feel like some of my memories must be mixed up.”
Hilde strokes his hair.
“Go on,” she tells him. “Begin at the beginning.” Walt closes his eyes.
“The earliest thing I can remember,” he says slowly, “is seeing my reflection and thinking what a stupid-looking child!” At this, Hilde laughs; it’s reassuring in a way, as though what he’s describing is funny and normal. “But the memory keeps shifting. Sometimes I think I saw myself in a mirror, and sometimes I see it as a puddle, on the ground. And then…” How to describe the dislocation of the next part? “I have this image of myself walking with my Da, but it’s like I’m looking at me from outside. And Da always had a moustache from the earliest I knew him, but this man doesn’t. I think his face is different too. But in the memory, I know I belong with him.”
Hilde listens.
“Also I think I can remember sitting up in bed with a lamp and a woman beside it, and her face keeps changing; sometimes she’s Ma and sometimes not. I don’t know how clearly I really recall Ma’s face anyway-” Walt swallows and a few moments pass before he’s able to continue. “I can picture her hands. The woman in the memory definitely doesn’t have the same hands. They’re not… chapped, and the fingers…” He grimaces suddenly. “I know, it doesn’t make sense.”
“What was wrong with her fingers?” asks Hilde. She has definitely noticed the face he made, even in the dim light of their bedroom.
“They were too long, or something. I don’t even know what I’m saying.” Walt sighs. “What if I’m not who I think I am?”
“You are your actions and your thoughts, not your origins.”
“What if I find something that makes me change my mind?”
“It’d still be your mind, by any other name.” Hilde takes her husband’s hand and squeezes it. “Look,” she says, “our childhoods are… like a building’s foundations. They set the shape of the structure, but not the style. Now if your foundations were really unstable in some way— hereditary illness, repressed trauma— you’d have noticed it before now.” She smiles: “Your floorboards would be uneven and your roof would leak.”
“Not sure this metaphor doesn’t have its own structural flaws.”
“No doubt. My point is, I don’t think there’s anything you could learn about your birth now that will fundamentally alter who you’ve become.” Walt gazes up at the ceiling above them.
“We’ve only known each other three years, Hilde. Even if we’ve done a lot in that time.” Hilde turns on her side to look at him.
"Suspect is a white male, around forty years old, about five foot eight and a half."
"Thank you for the and a half."
"About a hundred and fifty pounds. Hair- eh, let's call it dark blond."
"Hah."
"Complexion freckled, with a face as full of angles and quirks as any I've ever seen, and the bluest eyes in this county. Drives an old Ford sedan and should be considered disarming and only slightly dangerous."
"Why slightly dangerous?" Walt asks.
"That part was flattery. I thought men liked to be thought of as dangerous."
"I thought women were better at lying to us."
"Consider me a disgrace to my sex." Relaxing at the conversation’s change in tone, Walt asks:
“Did I ever tell you about the psych exam I had to take once? A man behind a desk asked me if I liked women; and then after a while he looked very hard at me and asked me if I could whistle. So I showed him I could, and afterwards they told me I was a normal heterosexual male. Is heterosexual the one where you like more than one sex, or—" Hilde laughs and throws an arm over him.
“Let’s find out, shall we?”
It is early on a Sunday morning- even the church-going families are just getting breakfast ready. The early-morning fog is still lifting, and the air carries the scent of green grass. Untrammeled by school, Anna wakes early. The cat is awake too, and eventually Walt groans and yawns and decides he’d better get up and let them both outside.
Anna is running slightly ahead of her father when she stops and points at something on the ground, about fifteen feet ahead.
“What is it?” she asks him.
It is a white line of toadstools, large and small, densely packed side-by-side in some places, scattered in others. They look like pearls unevenly strung. The line crosses the edge of the Healys’ yard back-to-front, is cut by the asphalt of the road but resumes on the opposite side, just skirting the Gratsias’ lawn, and continues until it disappears from view behind the house next door.
Walt catches Anna by the arm before she can step any closer to the toadstools.
“Don’t!”
Surprised at his own voice, he adds, at a lower volume:
“Don’t go any closer till I check it out.” Gingerly he approaches the glistening line of fungi, turning his head this way and that as he surveys it. “I think— I think it’s a fairy ring,” he finally says. “Let’s follow around it and see.”
Taking his daughter by the hand he leads her clockwise around what proves to indeed be a gigantic ring surrounding several blocks of the neighborhood. As they travel around its circumference, the meet their neighbor Joe, gazing at the phenomenon in his pajamas and dressing gown. He greets them, and Walt points wordlessly at the toadstools.
“Incredible, eh?” Joe replies. “Never seen one this big before.”
“You’ve… seen these before?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of fairy rings?” Joe asks him.
“In stories. I thought they were one of the made-up parts.”
Anna is delighted.
“Are fairies real, then, Daddy?”
“Hope not,” says Walt. Before she can ask him further, he adds: “Why don’t you run back to the house, wake Mommy and tell her to get the camera?” She darts off, and he calls after her: “Don’t step on the mushrooms!” To Joe he says, only half-joking, “Now I’m going to have to reappraise every tall tale my Da ever told me.”
“Well, they don’t usually get this big,” Joe admits. “Till now the largest I’d seen was maybe ten, twelve feet across?” He looks sharply at his neighbor. “You’re really spooked by this?”
“I know, I must sound superstitious as hell— it’s just that seeing one in real life–” Walt casts about for an analogy: “It’s like finding out bats are real.”
“Bats are real, Walt.”
“Go on!” Walt’s eyebrows shoot up. “I thought they were just in Dracula movies?” Joe shakes his head. “You’re seriously telling me” says Walt, “that winged mice really do live in church belfries? That doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
Just then Anna returns with her mother carrying the family kodak. Hilde is still in her housecoat and looks at the mushrooms in astonishment.
“I confess,” she says, “I thought Anna must be exaggerating the size of this… witch-ring, but I see she’s not.”
“You’ve seen them before too?” Walt asks. “A few times, when I was a little girl. But those were only a few feet across. Are they just bigger in America?”
Joe shakes his head:
“This one’s a jumbo.”
Walt turns to his wife:
“What did you call it?”
Hilde laughs.
“My old nurse told me these were the marks left where witches danced at their sabbaths.”
“Daddy said it was fairies,” counters Anna.
“I said I hoped it wasn’t,” Walt corrects her, but she shakes her head:
“When you hope something isn’t something, that means you think it is.”
“Now who can argue with that?” Joe asks. To Hilde, who’s begun lining up photos with the camera, he says: “Lemme get out of your way. You don’t want me in your photo in my lingerie.”
Hilde begins photographing the mushroom ring, by itself and with her husband and daughter posed in front of it. Joe returns to his house and the Healys continue their clockwise stroll around the ring. The sun is brighter now, and the fog burnt off. Shading his eyes with his hand, Walt looks towards the houses inside the ring:
“What’s at the center?”
* * * * *
The following day, Walt is seated by the drawing board with his elbow propped on his knee and his chin on his hand. In the other hand, he holds a mechanical pencil that he inspects, turning it this way and that until finally, he holds it to one eye and squints along the barrel as if looking down the sights of a rifle.
“Ready for parade drill?” Jake (NOTE -- Jake is a co-worker introduced in one of the chapters I skipped over) asks. Walt shrugs.
“A tool’s a tool. Gotta be maintained.”
“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
“Not at the moment it isn’t. I think the lead is broken.” Walt shakes the fragments of graphite onto a piece of paper, then carefully takes a fresh lead from a little box and inserts it in the pencil. Turning to his colleague, he nods towards a stack of slick paper and adds: “You, er, left some magazines under the desk. Do you want them back?”
“Oh, those.” Jake smirks, “not to your taste, eh?”
“I guess the women are all right, but the sharks and Nazis are a bit… off-putting.”
“Too much red meat for you?”
“Yep. Yes, that’s it exactly.”
Jake turns and faces Walt squarely:
“You know, it’s the guys like you who oughta be married and settled down. You like things cozy. The whole house-and-garden thing doesn’t feel like a cage to you.”
“Does it feel like one to you?”
“I dunno. Hazel’s a keeper, and Bonnie’s a good kid, it’s just – it feels like we used to be real men, and now we’ve been domesticated.”
Walt considers this.
“I think you and I remember bachelorhood very differently.” Jake suddenly realizes that their conversation is observed.
Emmett Moore is the man who shook Walt’s hand and welcomed him aboard some three years earlier. He is a short, slight man with silver hair and a quiet demeanor. According to one of Walt’s colleagues, Emmett was a pilot back in the First World War. Walt has never seen any reason to doubt this. Ignoring Jake, he waves Walt over to his desk.
“Walt?”
“Mr. Moore?”
“Can you stay late tonight and give me a hand? I’m preparing a report, and I could use a nice graph- you remember how we did them last year? We can order in some food.”
“Can we have it from the chop suey place? If that’s all right with you, I mean.” His supervisor chuckles:
“As long as it isn’t caviar and champagne, I think the firm can cover it.”
“Good. I’ll do just about anything for egg foo yung on the company dime. Just let me finish up the piece I’m working on, I’ll call Hilde to let her know I’ll be late.”
“That’s all right, I won’t be done with these figures till the end of day- the regular end of day, I mean.”
“May I use your phone?”
Moore waves towards it magnanimously, though he’s caught somewhat off-guard when Walt sits on the edge of his desk and leans across to begin dialing. It has never occurred to the older man that the phrase “I didn’t know where to look” could apply to someone fully-clothed, but in trying not to gaze up into that angular face, he is forced to focus either upon the hairs of Walt’s left forearm and the hand planted squarely on the desk in front of him; or upon the parts of Walt which are seated upon the desk’s corner. Then again, to stare down at his work the whole time would be simply rude.
Meanwhile, his employee is relaying his new plans for the evening:
“I agreed to stay and help with some extra work. No, nothing too taxing,” (he gives Moore a sidelong grin), “and they’re giving me supper, so you needn’t worry on that account. Yes. Yes that’s fine. See you later. Thanks heaps,” he adds to Moore before putting down the receiver and slipping off the desk to saunter away.
He returns a couple of hours later, as the rest of the office are grabbing their hats. This time, Moore glances up at him with a smile.
“Almost done here.”
“Good. I’ll get a copy of last year’s report to remind myself how it looked. Then you’d better come by my desk so I don’t have to move all my stuff.”
Moore realizes what Walt meant when he approaches the latter’s drawing-board, carrying the typed sheets of the report. Scattered about are pens, a blue pencil, a compass and other drafting tools, a razorblade, a pot of evil-smelling glue, and a great many sheets of Zip-a-Tone, as well as a copy of last year’s report that has been leafed through and flattened open to show a page with a pie chart, with the wedges filled in with different Zip-a-Tone patterns. Walt is shuffling through the acetate sheets to find transfers that matched last year’s.
”No sense reinventing the wheel,” he mutters to himself, gesturing to Moore to pull up a stool beside him. He continues talking as he lays out a new pie chart with a compass and a ruler, inked over the blue pencil, and begins the paste-up. The smell of the glue is making Moore a bit dizzy. “I’ve been talking too much, haven’t I?” Walt asks. “Don’t worry, I’m almost finished. Hand me a new blade, will you? This one’s getting dull.”
Moore phones the Chinese restaurant just as Walt heads into the darkroom to photograph the paste-up.
“This way,” he says, “the food should arrive just as you’re finishing up.” In fact it arrives with a couple of minutes to spare, and Walt comes out to find Moore has set out the myriad cardboard containers on a desk in the main office and is returning from the water-cooler with a couple of paper cups. “I suppose we should have ordered something to drink, too,” he apologizes.
“I know where...somebody... keeps a bottle,” Walt muses, “and he owes me a dollar-fifty, so he can’t complain if I start a bar tab with him.” He vanishes with the cups and when he reappears, the liquid inside is the color of strong tea and smells nothing like it.
“Cocktails before supper,” Moore says, raising his paper cup to Walt.
“Of course. This is a classy joint.”
They chuckle through their meal, Walt showing his supervisor how to hold the chopsticks, and another round of drinks, which Walt carefully notes down, still refusing to tell which of his colleagues is their host. They are both sitting on Moore’s desk now, with their feast laid out between them like a picnic lunch. The older man pats his stomach.
“Is it true I’ll be hungry again in an hour?” he asks.
“Probably. There’s leftovers, you can take them home.”
“I think you’d better take’em. I’m sure your wife won’t miss having to make lunch tomorrow.”
“True, we’re neither of us very imaginative cooks. Comes of batching it for so long, I guess. Or spinstering it, in Hilde’s case. Spinning it? Does that make sense?”
Moore clears his throat and addresses another topic he’s meant to bring up with Walt for a few days:
“Everything all right at home, by the way? You’ve had a bit of a faraway look lately.” A trace of worry must cross his employee’s face, for he adds: “Not that your work’s fallen off that I’ve noticed. I just want the men to feel they can come to me with their concerns. If any.” Walt shrugs, wondering what Moore thinks he’s seen in him.
“Touch of spring fever, maybe,” he begins, and breaks off at the sight of Moore’s embarrassed smile. “Not at all what I meant. Just, it’s hard being indoors in this good weather. We’ve moved to a new home,” he continues. “My first house— I’ve never had a back yard before. Always been a city boy till now. And... it’s so strange seeing plants... up close and personal, if you see what I mean?”
Moore nods, obviously relieved that his employee isn’t about to confess an extramarital temptation.
“Good for the soul,” he says, “to have a garden.”
“It’s just--” Walt says, “stuff like clover, apple trees,” he hesitates: “toadstools-- I knew they existed, but it turns out I didn’t really believe they existed until I saw them with my own eyes.”
“And milk comes from cows, not from a bottle,” Moore quips.
“Well, we’re not that far out in the countryside—” Walt begins, before he realizes his boss has taken his statements as comic hyperbole. “It does make me feel strange,” he insists. “Like living in a story. And don’t tell me that’s the fault of this New Modern Age, or some such—"
“We work in aircraft design; I’m hardly going to scold anyone for being a denizen of the twentieth century—"
“Because Anna’s taken to the outdoors quite naturally.”
Moore smiles.
“The things our children will live to see,” he says. “I can only imagine. Even you, Walt, are likely to live another thirty years or more in this world. I envy you that sometimes — and then sometimes I worry for you. There’s a temptation, when you work with new technology, to get... a bit mystical about it. I could tell you stories about some of the characters at JPL— but well, less said the better, maybe. That’s California for you. Point is, you mustn’t get superstitious about the work, or make an idol of airplanes or something.” Walt nods silently. “I’m telling you this because I really believe the only way forward is to balance nature and technology. You’re a bright boy, but I think you could stand to be reminded of that.” He pats Walt on the arm and asks: “Now, talking of the future, did they pack some fortune cookies in there for us?”
Walt rummages in the large paper bag from the restaurant and pulls out a pair of the thin, oddly-shaped confections. They are individually wrapped in cellophane. He closes a hand over each one and lets Moore choose. Moore taps Walt’s left hand and unwraps the fortune cookie within. Snapping it open he adjusts his glasses and reads it out loud:
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Wait, that’s the Gospels, isn’t it? Book of... Matthew, I think? Been a long time since Sunday school. What does yours say?”
Walt breaks his cookie and pulls out the paper slip:
“Water seeks its own level. Now that’s just confusing.”
“Perhaps it’s a suggestion we go into business together?”
“We can open a Chinese restaurant,” says Walt.
After Walt gets home that night, he opens the bedroom closet, slips between the hanging winter overcoats, and reemerges lugging a cardboard box marked RECORDS. He carries it to the living room and opens it, only to find it full of shellac 78s. He makes a huffing sound, which in spite of himself becomes a chuckle, and is about to close the box when he picks up the topmost gramophone record, examines it, shrugs, and goes over to the hi-fi.
Ten minutes later Hilde hears a slurred sound which, as Walt adjusts the turntable speed, resolves into John McCormack’s tenor voice, clear and effortless and straightforward, even though the scratchy old shellac, singing:
Once in the dear dead days beyond recall, When on the world the mists began to fall…
and comes out of the kitchen to investigate.
“It’s not too loud, is it?” Walt asks.
“Anna’s upstairs, and the singer is very good,” admits Hilde.
“Da always used to say the great thing about McCormack was that he never tried to oversell a song,” Walter whispers reverently. “Just let the music come through him, as it were.”
“What’s brought on this sudden devotion to the Muses?”
* * * * *
“What about seahorses?” Walt asks.
“Real. And,” Hilde adds, “the males have the babies.”
“No kidding? What about hyenas? Wait, I’ve seen them at the zoo. Tasmanian tigers?”
“Were real, probably extinct now.”
“Dinosaurs?”
“Definitely extinct, unless there’s a lost continent somewhere.”
“Are lost continents a thing too?” Walt doesn’t know what to do. Ever since the fairy ring, anything could be true.
He and Hilde are getting ready for bed. As has become their routine, he helps his wife unfasten the complicated medical corset that braces her spine. He glimpses the scars from her childhood surgeries, and then she pulls her nightgown over her head and gets into their bed. He climbs in and embraces her with a sigh he doesn’t realize was audible until she asks:
“Was that a happy sigh, or is something troubling you?”
Walt frowns in thought, and begins to speak, half to Hilde and half to himself:
“I told Joe yesterday, when we were looking at the… toadstool ring, that now I know those things aren’t made up, I was going to have to rethink every fairy story my folks ever told me. And I have been thinking a lot today, remembering back when I was a kid.” He pauses. “I’m not going to ask you to analyze me, mind; but I’m starting to feel like some of my memories must be mixed up.”
Hilde strokes his hair.
“Go on,” she tells him. “Begin at the beginning.” Walt closes his eyes.
“The earliest thing I can remember,” he says slowly, “is seeing my reflection and thinking what a stupid-looking child!” At this, Hilde laughs; it’s reassuring in a way, as though what he’s describing is funny and normal. “But the memory keeps shifting. Sometimes I think I saw myself in a mirror, and sometimes I see it as a puddle, on the ground. And then…” How to describe the dislocation of the next part? “I have this image of myself walking with my Da, but it’s like I’m looking at me from outside. And Da always had a moustache from the earliest I knew him, but this man doesn’t. I think his face is different too. But in the memory, I know I belong with him.”
Hilde listens.
“Also I think I can remember sitting up in bed with a lamp and a woman beside it, and her face keeps changing; sometimes she’s Ma and sometimes not. I don’t know how clearly I really recall Ma’s face anyway-” Walt swallows and a few moments pass before he’s able to continue. “I can picture her hands. The woman in the memory definitely doesn’t have the same hands. They’re not… chapped, and the fingers…” He grimaces suddenly. “I know, it doesn’t make sense.”
“What was wrong with her fingers?” asks Hilde. She has definitely noticed the face he made, even in the dim light of their bedroom.
“They were too long, or something. I don’t even know what I’m saying.” Walt sighs. “What if I’m not who I think I am?”
“You are your actions and your thoughts, not your origins.”
“What if I find something that makes me change my mind?”
“It’d still be your mind, by any other name.” Hilde takes her husband’s hand and squeezes it. “Look,” she says, “our childhoods are… like a building’s foundations. They set the shape of the structure, but not the style. Now if your foundations were really unstable in some way— hereditary illness, repressed trauma— you’d have noticed it before now.” She smiles: “Your floorboards would be uneven and your roof would leak.”
“Not sure this metaphor doesn’t have its own structural flaws.”
“No doubt. My point is, I don’t think there’s anything you could learn about your birth now that will fundamentally alter who you’ve become.” Walt gazes up at the ceiling above them.
“We’ve only known each other three years, Hilde. Even if we’ve done a lot in that time.” Hilde turns on her side to look at him.
"Suspect is a white male, around forty years old, about five foot eight and a half."
"Thank you for the and a half."
"About a hundred and fifty pounds. Hair- eh, let's call it dark blond."
"Hah."
"Complexion freckled, with a face as full of angles and quirks as any I've ever seen, and the bluest eyes in this county. Drives an old Ford sedan and should be considered disarming and only slightly dangerous."
"Why slightly dangerous?" Walt asks.
"That part was flattery. I thought men liked to be thought of as dangerous."
"I thought women were better at lying to us."
"Consider me a disgrace to my sex." Relaxing at the conversation’s change in tone, Walt asks:
“Did I ever tell you about the psych exam I had to take once? A man behind a desk asked me if I liked women; and then after a while he looked very hard at me and asked me if I could whistle. So I showed him I could, and afterwards they told me I was a normal heterosexual male. Is heterosexual the one where you like more than one sex, or—" Hilde laughs and throws an arm over him.
“Let’s find out, shall we?”