Paved Paradise

Afterword

The words tripped through her mind again.  “….and what if there had been no magical wardrobe?  What then?”

She bit into the plum, feeling the juices running down her chin, wiping them away casually with a stained hand.  The sweetness of the warm fruit mixed with the sweet stench of the freshly rolled cigarette, and she closed her eyes, feeling the sun spilling across her skin.  The supple flesh of the fruit, the warmth of the tiles underfoot, the cool breeze wafting across the balcony and through her tussled hair – these were not the things of the wardrobe.  No, there, in that scratchy darkness there was only cold, only ice crunching underfoot, only the haunting ring of the sleigh bells nearing, nearing, nearing.

She bolted upright.

“No wardrobe.  There is no wardrobe.  No wardrobe?”

She swallowed, blinked.  The plum had fallen from her hand, and she spied in on the tile nearby next to the knife…..next to the pool of blood.

“Of course there is a wardrobe, my dear,” she murmured.  “Of course there’s a wardrobe.”

There was no denying it.  Who was that fool to say there was no wardrobe?  Another author indeed.  Yes, another author, but just a fool whose works ran to all manner of horrible monsters and inhuman, yes inhuman, alliances!  Author indeed!  Famous?  Amazing work?  Who could believe that kind of work could come out of a Christian soul?  Elves and dwarves?  All minions of evil.  All horrible monsters that no man or woman could ever ally with or defend.  “Middle Earth”?

Standing, she looked down into the valley for a moment, and the mountains rose up around it.  She smiled, again feeling the morning sun on her skin.  The fog that had covered the valley earlier was beginning to lift, to burn away under the light of the coming day.  The mists gave way to conifer forests and little dots of red roofs here and there, tiny, sparse signs of civilization.  Swirling smoke drifted up from some of the little red splotches, mingling with the low clouds and then spiraling up into the sky.  The grayness of it contrasted with the brightening blue above and paralleled the twisting offering of her own cigarette only inches away.  Beyond, across the valley, the slopes of the mountains were still shrouded in shadow, a bleak reminder of the night’s horrible work.

“What if there had been no wardrobe?” she muttered.

It’s not like the pureness of Lewis’ tale, the very parallel of His life.  The slaying of Aslan, his sacrifice to the White Witch to save a child, his humiliation, death and then triumphant return!  His resurrection!  How could there be no wardrobe?  No closet full of fur coats giving way to fir trees, the spiny branches with their fuzzy needles, scratching at one’s skin, at one’s face.  She could remember now, the scent of the pines, the cold silence of the wood, the chill of the air when her coat had fallen open – it had never fit right, after all.  It had been for adults, after all.

After all – her mind drifted like the wisps of grayness warped by the morning breeze, and she reached down and caught the cigarette between her fingers, pushed it between her lips and took a long drag.  The coughing set in again, but this time it wasn’t as ferocious.  She held onto the cigarette lest it fall into the abyss below, and she leaed out over the edge of the balcony and tapped the ashes away.

She did not smile, but she could not help but take in the elegant beauty of the world she saw before her.  The breeze made her shiver, a reminder of the night again flashing before her eyes – slash!  She trembled.  Her hands were shaking so much that she wrapped her arms around her naked body in a desperately vain attempt to hold herself still.  Only the need to drag on the wet tip of the cigarette paper could move her.  And this time she didn’t cough at all.  She held the sweet smoke inside, held it against her nearly overwhelming desire to spew it out.  She held the cigarette at the cusp of her lips even though she knew she needed to toss it over the edge and watch it fall away into the smoky soup below.

She exhaled, shivered again, and tapped the ashes onto the balcony wall.  A breeze swept across and whipped them away into invisibility.

“No wardrobe?”

She blinked, crushing her lids together and then pulling her eyes open wide.  “What?”  Looking around, she licked her lips, tasting the foulness of her mouth, the thin film covering her teeth.  She licked at it with her tongue, her lips curled up into a malice-less sneer.  It seemed like she was just beginning to wake, but she was sure she’d been on the balcony for hours, watching the dawn break and the sun begin to peak over the tops of the black mountains.

She sniffed loudly, took another drag, and turned away from the splendor, crossing the balcony, around the small table and chairs toward the open French doors.  The tiles were so deliciously warm, a perfect mixture with the cool morning air that set her body to tingling.  It was a mouth-watering mix of sensations, similar to the juicy plum and the cigarette.  These flavors played across her mind even as she stepped into the small sea of blood between the table and the doorway and felt the icky liquid squish between her toes.

She didn’t notice it at all.

Tracking blood onto the beige carpet, she retraced her already well-established path through the main room and into the bedroom and bathroom, the off-white walls blurring together as felt rather than saw her way forward.  Her stomach was heaving, and she clamped her hand across her lips, one hand holding back the coming eruption, the other delicately holding the blunt while she fidgeted with the lid of the toilet.  Finally her pinky caught the plastic and flipped it up, revealing the desecration already left there.  There was no holding it back any longer, as the stench of it washed over her, and she spewed the little contents of her stomach across the seat and back of the bowl, retching and screaming as the liquid and bits of fruit evacuated.

She collapsed again, dropping onto the floor and onto her back.  She laid still for a few moments, collecting herself for a gargantuan effort:  getting back up.  The stench, the wetness of the floor hinting at something unseen, and the acrid taste in her mouth all called for her to get up and move, to get away, to get back out of this awful, ruined room and back onto the pristine serenity of the balcony.  She tilted her head to the side and spit over and over.

Twisting, a groan seeping out from between pursed lips as she strained, she rolled over on her side.  The cigarette had fallen from her hand, something she only noticed as she turned about and tried to push herself up onto her knees.  It had to be here somewhere, and it was likely that it was still lit.  Hopefully it was.

“I need another hit.”

It had to be here somewhere, she thought.  If only she could get up to look around, but her head started to swim with the exertion of pushing herself up and looking down.  She could feel her stomach turn, and she looked up, pulling her head up, eyes forward, trying to ease the sensation.  Her pale brown locks fell across her face, but she dared not shake her head to move them.  And she knew if she reached up to wipe the hair from her eyes, she’d end up flat-faced on the floor.

There was no one left to see her like this anyway, was there?

She groaned.  There was no one.  No one.  She was sure of that, but she was not sure why she was sure.  Something – something was nagging at her.  Something was there, tugging at her consciousness, something tapping at her brain, at her memory like the rain tapping on a window, like a man tapping his foot in rhythm.  It was there, but when she looked out of the window, she could not see the rain.  She could see nothing.  It was there.  She was sure of it.

It had something to do with that quote, that series of words that played over and over in her head.  It was……it might……it was something he had said, no written, no……no he had written it.  Her grandfather’s best friend for years.  Yes.  It was that man who had written those damning words, those words that grandfather had taken as a rejection of his faith, which he had worked so hard to regain.  It was those words that had driven them apart for so many years.  How dare he?!

“….and what if there had been no magical wardrobe?  What then?” she whispered.

And yet, they both believed.  Hadn’t they?  Grandfather had returned to the church through his and others’ fictional works, some even by the man who would later criticize him and write those awful words, an inscription on the inside from cover of that first book, grandfather’s beautiful depiction of his faith through the creation of a fantasy world.

“And that bastard had questioned him?”

She felt the anger building again, remembered the laughter from the night before.  Like a sudden burst of fireworks across the night sky, it flooded back into her head, the blurry, slurring laughter, the hilarity and humiliation.  The closet door, the fur coats, the………..the wardrobe!  The ice crunching under her feet, the cold wind across her face, the branches tangling in her hair.

How long had she been gone?  Weeks?  Months?  And when she’d burst back through the door…….

She shifted her knee and cried out.  The end of the blunt was still lit, and it slapped at the ashes that marred her pale skin.  Turning her head that quickly made her stomach churn again, but she steeled herself against it and held herself steady enough to reach down and catch the bit of the cigarette that was left.  Clenching it between her teeth, she turned back toward the bathroom door and began to crawl forward.

The smoke reeked, but it was a sweet, calming stench, blocking out the aftermath of the chaos behind her.  The wet swamp of the bathroom rugs gave way to the dry carpet of the bedroom, a light blue weave that looked and felt like the ocean.  It swam before her as she crawled slowly forward, keeping a steady pace, achingly migrating toward the incoming fresh air.

Following what had now become a rust-colored path through the azure sea, she crept along steadily.

Puff, puff, puff.  She stopped a moment, looking up as she retrieved the cigarette from her mouth.  She tapped it with her index finger, forming a little black pile just outside her path, a few inches away, and it mixed with the red-stained carpet.

Blood.

She thought it, but there was no alarm in her though, no sudden spike in breathing, no rush of adrenaline.  No, it was a thought full of resignation.  There was blood.  There was a lot of blood.  There was nothing else to be said or done about it.

The laughter came back full force, threatening to overwhelm her.  She could feel the grimace creeping across her features, twisting her lips into a snarl, crushing her eyebrows together.  There was so much!  They had all laughed!  Goddamned bastards!!!!

“Ahhhh!” she croaked, and suddenly she was overcome with coughing again.

The laughter!  It drowned out her fit of heaving until she could only feel her chest contract, spewing out the foul air that she’d collected there.  Spittle dripped from her lower lip, descending toward the carpet as if to mingle with ocean of blue beneath her fingertips.  As the coughing fit eased, she reached up and wiped at her mouth, missing twice before she could clean up the drool.  For a moment she just rested, trying to hold herself steady, whimpering slightly between breaths, but thankful that the laughter was fading away, drifting away back into her memory.

They had all laughed at her.  All of them.  And no one had believed.  None of them.  Not one!!!!

She’d been there.  She’d seen it.  Grandfather had been right!  Lucy and Edmond, Susan and Peter!  Who could have known?  But that fucker had said it wasn’t real!  He’d written it right there inside the front cover of grandfather’s first edition, the one he’d saved for himself and then his daughter and then his daughter’s daughter.  It was a horrible slap in the face, one that had nearly ruined him.  And yet, it was simply all true!!!

Moving forward again, she inched into the main room.  The carpet changed from a sea of blue foam into a land of dark grass, but the path remained, a dark, sinister, and revealing path………….streaks of red.  Stopping, she studied the floor.  It was only inches from her face, but the colors were so muted.  Red – definitely red, but only because she knew its source.  Could anyone see that it was red?  She looked up, turning her head, but there was no one around, no noise, no movement.  There was only the path, the road so very well travelled, and it stained her fingers and knees as she trod along it.

But where did the road lead?  Where did the path originate?  She couldn’t see it ahead of her, but she knew that it led back, back along the way she’d come, through the bedroom and into the bathroom, the horror that was there.  But before her – there was no telling.  There was only to follow and find out.  There was the unknown ahead.  The laughter had ceased, but there was so much else missing, so much else that seemed no longer to register inside her mind, lost minutes or hours, or days!  All she could feel inside her was an emptiness, and it wasn’t the hollowness in her stomach or the void in her chest that felt like her soul had been ripped away.  There was horrible blank in her head, a black hole whirling, expanding, sucking in everything, a gaping maw that engulfed anything that came in contact with it.  Already the laughter was gone!  She knew it had been there, had heard it echoing inside her skull over and over until she thought she would go over the edge of the balcony.  But it was gone now, and she could not bring it back.  The memory of it was there, like knowing the universe is there even when she couldn’t see it.

It had all had to do with that quote, that book, that something that had set off something, that moment that had turned into hours, that suddenly fleeting step across a great divide that had launched her along a path that she never turn back from.  And suddenly she knew!

She had stepped across that line and felt it, knew it, knew for sure then that Narnia was real, that grandfather had not lied, that she could follow him to that oh so real place where Lucy could be a princess of the realm and have tea with Mr. Tumnus!  It was real!!!  All of it!

She’d screamed at them!  The memories came flooding in, beating back the suck of the black hole, keeping it at bay for the moment.  They’d laughed at her book, that beautiful first edition of grandfather’s “Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe”, and they’d said it was just a silly children’s story with no real meaning or intent.  And she’d been so angry, so furious at them.  And she’d stormed away, throwing open the French doors and running into the bedroom.  Crying, so hurt by the sting of their words against a man she’d loved so much, she’d thrown open the doors of the wardrobe and dived in, disappearing into the comfort of the darkness, the warmth of the coats, and then suddenly, unbelievably despite her faith in her grandfather, prickly branches and crunching snow!

“I hate them!” she groaned.

It had been real.  It had been!  It was an amazing realization that she could barely fathom, a dream come true that she couldn’t wait to share.  The wardrobe had been full of coats, and it was winter in Narnia, just like when Lucy first stepped into the land by the lantern and met Mr. Tumnus, where Edmond had followed and been ensnared by the White Witch, where Peter and Susan had eventually found themselves, too, and each of them had become kings and queens!

Bursting out of the wardrobe, she’d squealed with glee and rushed back to the balcony.  Most of them we apologetic and listened intently when she’d pleaded for them to follow and see.  The doors had been thrown back……………the doors had been thrown back.

“My God in Heaven,” she coughed.

Still weak and wobbly, she turned back and pulled herself to her feet.  The wardrobe!  She inched closer, reaching out to the door handles, focusing on them, willing herself forward.  Grasping them firmly, she threw the doors open, and fell back with a scream, cracking her head against the glass table.  It cracked and fell in on her, the largest shard slipping across her exposed neck, decapitating her.  She died without a sound, her blood spilling out onto the cool blue ocean below, slowly drifting across the waves and mingling with the blood still dripping out of the wardrobe, the bodies piled within.

A single sheet of paper drifted aimlessly on the incoming morning breeze, slipping off the edge of the bed and catching in the sticky red mess on the floor.  “Come one and all,” it read, “to see the famous Violetta and the Amazing Cirque de Soleil tonight at the Chateau de Loire.”