The Jabberwock Valentine

1

Out of New York, the Memphis-bound jetliner slanted its nose below the horizon and knifed into the cumulus. The clouds, so pristinely white and inviting moments ago, swallowed the aircraft in a slithery gray ooze. In my present mood it was no strain on the imagination to feel that the descent was into a repulsive nether region, primeval, roiling with unknown forces.

I looked at her lovely profile hovering in the seat beside me, looked away, forced my head to rest against the seat, and drew a long, careful breath.

I was not experiencing a reaction to flying. I flew as naturally and exuberantly as I sang off-key in an invigorating morning shower.

I was ridden with this certainty: that she was going down into the presence of death.

Since the spiritualist and shrink can’t explain it, I can go no further than the experts, the specialists. I can only make a statement about that which transpires.

The first transpiration in my memory was of myself as a young boy out racing about on his first bicycle. From nothingness came a sudden sensation. It burst over me with the force of a silent scream. Colors spun through my head; they froze, in an image of a boy, myself, tangled and bleeding in the ruin of the bicycle at the next intersection.

I had stopped the bike somehow, left foot extended and touching the pavement, and now I looked wildly about, as if trying to find out what I should see.

The intersection was empty, peaceful. The image slipped away, leaving an unpleasant patina on the skin and a shortness of breath in its wake.

The sound of an engine broke the quietude, rising from snarling whisper to thunder. A car careered through the intersection, a man lolling drunkenly behind the steering wheel.

And I, having stopped my bike in the place and time that I did, missed my appointment. I saw the drunken face in profile, rather than gazing straight ahead at the loose, slavering features swaying behind an onrushing windshield.

I pedaled quietly home; said nothing to anyone, and the moment slipped into the maw of the memory of an active growing boy.

I became a senior in high school, took a job as counselor at a summer camp. And I snapped awake one warm, soft night swathed in the peculiar sweat. I punched the pillow to go back to sleep, telling myself I’d dreamed, had a nightmare. I lay back, closed my eyes. And the scene flashed against my lids: boys mindless with terror, milling and screaming while tongues of hungry flames curled over them.

Muttering scorn for my own stupidity, I rose from my sweaty cot. Wearing the shorts in which I slept, I padded from the counselor’s quarters across the moon-kissed quadrangle to cabin B: it was dark, serene, steeped in sleep. But having already behaved like a fool, I went on inside.

I smelled the first acrid taint of smoke, saw the firefly like flickering in the corner. I turned on the lights, rousted eight confused, blinking boys from their bunks, and put out the small fire before it made its way out of the waste can. It had moldered and finally found life in a wadding of shoeshine rags. Some boy, experimenting with cigarettes after lights-out, had left a spark in a butt tossed in the waste can. We turned up the identity of the culprit, notified his parents, and put him on garbage detail for a week. He departed camp, thumbing his nose and lighting a cigarette.

I was eighteen, and the Vietnam War was winding down, but the draft board had no precognition that America would cut and get out within eighteen months. So I came to manhood in walks through steaming jungles, firefights, and temporary forgetfulness in Saigon whorehouses.

The patrol that day was a piece of cake — to take up station in a friendly village. But the colors burst in my head and I halted my men. I scattered them to cover, enfilading the trail. On their bellies, like bugs, vermin, they sweated in the heat, scratched insect bites, and muttered about the sergeant’s guts and sanity. ComPost crackled the radio. Where the hell is Sergeant Barnard? And I made no reply, no move, except to threaten to shoot a skinny private who finally said to hell with this, ain’t it a friendly?

And as the sun was sinking, Vietcong came creeping from the village to wonder why the intended victims hadn’t come. The Cong were killed; the fire sweeping the trail was too deadly for it to be otherwise. One was a thin-faced boy who had no excuse to own a razor. I wept inwardly and wished the sun would not show itself over the jungle tomorrow morning.

Back in the alien world of home, I enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lacking the sophistication of a ’Nam education, my peers seemed childish, callow, and naive, and I formed no lasting relationships.

One day during my senior year one of those fractured moments of nontime came from nowhere, and I got in the VW and drove home to Asheville. I was not empowered to alter this future moment, but I was with my father at my dying mother’s bedside.

Upon graduation, I landed a junior exec post in marketing in a corporation that made mufflers for cars, trucks, tractors, lawn mowers, boats. Lucky me. Enviable start from which I could one day achieve the privilege of lunching in the penthouse dining room.

I saved some money, got miserably seasick on a freighter wallowing its way to ports in Europe, and backpacked and bummed my way through Spain and Italy.

I thought a lot about going to India, land of gurus. But I already knew the lingo: channeling, trans-spatial existence, the Akhasic Records, trance-states, astral projection. I had done my reading and research, I had sampled cult experiences. I was way ahead of most of the field, and had discovered no guru, medium, or reincarnate worth emulating. They were either charlatans — or touched reality even more tenuously than I.

I went to work in the State Department as an assistant to an assistant secretary. As the years ticked off I became an assistant secretary, liaison to the White House, director of research, ambassadorial courier. Very nice life. Good pay, expense money, movement among the powerful, consorting with intellectual equals, lots of travel first class, in and out of American embassies in Europe. Female relationships of course, but never the satisfying of the quiet hunger within me.

Then in Paris I met her. The mellifluous voice of the ambassador at a party for a bigwig from Algiers: “Cody, I want you to meet Valentina Marlowe. Val, Cody Barnard, one of the unsung who mops up spills of politicians.”

Of course I had heard her name, seen her picture. What model has been more photographed than Valentina Marlowe? I turned, and our eyes met, and I don’t know how long the ambassador lingered. I can’t say what she was wearing or what was said in those first moments, or how we escaped the cloying boredom of the chitchat, clink of glasses, muted strains of a string quartet. By unspoken mutual agreement we sought a quiet in the lights of Paris. We had known each other always. We talked as if picking up a conversation begun and suspended perhaps a week ago.

We had four days that time. Simple pleasures. Communion. Lovers. But more — also friends.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow, Cody. I always spend Valentine’s Day with the home folks. My birthday, you know. Reason my mother tagged me with the given name.”

Home was Wickens, Louisiana.

“How long will you be in Wickens, Val?”

“I’ll leave the day after Valentine’s Day.”

“To Washington,” I said.

The oblique look from the expressive violet eyes in the wonderfully devised face. A toss of the mane of black, a wisp immediately returning to nuzzle her cheek. “You rat, I might have known you were behind the invitation.”

“Made a suggestion in the right ears, that’s all.” I laughed. “Doing my duty for my country. A symposium on women’s rights wouldn’t be complete without the presence of the world’s most beautiful model.”

“Then write my speech! I need ten minutes, and it’s been driving me up a wall.”

Now it was another February, month of the odd day every fourth year to reset the calendar, month of the day given to St. Valentine... Which? There were two saints of the name, you know.

And the clouds outside the descending aircraft were as filthy as the darkness in which I’d awakened three nights ago. The colors in frozen frame... her face in death, partly obscured by a swirling of water... the sounds of bullfrogs harrumping, the smell of swampy Louisiana bayou earth... then only the smothering darkness.

Luminous dial of the bedside clock: 3:00 A.M. I’d got dressed, gone out, and walked the quiet streets of Georgetown until the eastern sky showed gray.

From a phone booth I had called my secretary. No apology for rousting her out of bed. “I won’t be in today, nor for the next several days.”

Her voice cleared the cobwebs of sleep. “I don’t understand, Mr. Barnard.”

“It isn’t necessary for you to do so.”

“But your appointments, correspondence, the report—”

“Make excuses, Miss Clowerson! You’re very good at that sort of thing. Parcel out my chores, take up the slack, use your Washington logic.”

“Well, I can always say that someone very close to you suddenly died.”

I slammed the phone in its hook. Damn bitch! Damn unwitting, cruel, cruddy bitch!

A shuttle flight. A taxicab. Val surprised, her face lighting happily, heartbreakingly, when she saw me standing with a packed overnight and garment bag.

A kiss. Hug. A herding into the apartment with its view of Central Park.

“You’re going to Wickens this year with me!”

“Isn’t it time I met your mother, and this George you’re always talking about, and Keith, Lissa, and Reba who runs the house like a Captain Bligh, and the others?”

“Oh, Cody... I’m so glad you could arrange it. God, this will be the best Wickens year ever!”

Now her elbow nudged me. “Hey, Cody... Memphis below. Then a short commuter flight and you’ll experience Wickens, no less.”

My sham yawn was convincing enough. She’d turned her attention from my closed eyes to look out the window as the jet broke cloud level, and Memphis and the Mississippi River spread like a far-flung relief map.

She laughed. “He was a great songwriter, but he was wrong on one point.”

“Who is that?”

“Ira Gershwin... the lyricist. Look down there at the city, the farms, fields, docks, river craft just rolling along. I ask you. Is that an Old Man River? Male chauvinism, that’s what. Old Man River indeed! Any dummy from this part of the world knows the Mississippi is female.”

Our shoulders pressed as we both looked down before the plane wheeled for approach and the wing cut the river out of sight.

“Pure female,” I agreed. “Giver of life. Mercurial in mood from her icy beginnings in the north to her turgid joining with the Gulf. Comforter. Angry mistress, when she spews over her banks, scorning the levees trying to hem her in.”

“Don’t forget her mysteries.” Val smiled. “Beneath the warm, peaceful invitation of her surface are snags to rip the stoutest boat to pieces.”

“Oh, her mysteries fascinate me most.”

“I’m glad you understand, Cody.” She tweaked my nose. “How could I respect a man who didn’t see a truth so clearly?”

“Hell, it’s obvious. If the Mississippi is an old man, then the Statue of Liberty is a transvestite.”

She laughed, but I had a shriveling coldness inside.

For the nth time I thought to myself: Keep her away from Wickens, Louisiana, this Valentine year. If you can’t think of a logical reason, let her think you’ve lost your mind. Coerce, plead. Do it physically. Lock her in a room someplace and stand guard at the door until the Valentine hour is past.

But somehow I knew that this was not the alternative future that would work. Neither Wickens nor the forces would vanish at my whim. Wickens would be there all the years of her life. The issue had to be settled. There was no escape or normal safety until the issue was put to rest.