The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
Henry David Thoreau
"Even after she nibbled some of the lefthand mushroom, she walked up towards the March Hare's house a bit timidly, saying to herself Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I'd gone to see the Hatter instead!"
"Well, I'm glad she didn't," said Alice's older sister from the port side before anyone could say anything.
"Oh?" said the older reverend from where he was making a heave and lean, heave and lean motion with the oars. "What makes you say that?"
"I've seen the hatters in town," she continued—a bit snottily, Alice thought, but perhaps Alice hoped for it, to have something to blame for the story's interruption. "How small they become, needing someone else to sell their hats for them because of the state they get into."
"I am sure they do what they can," offered the older reverend.
"What do you mean?" said Alice's younger sister. "What's wrong with them?"
"Mad, bad, and dangerous to know," said her sister on the other side.
"Why?" said the other again.
"Because they're hatters," said the other.
"But what's wrong with them? What do they do?" The older girl tilted her head impatiently at this continued line of questioning. Alice wasn't entirely sure her older sister knew what she was talking about to begin with, but the girl went on.
"They're awful, going into such wicked fits. I heard one of the students saying they can't stop themselves shaking, as if they can't help but behave like savages. They yell and scream and treat their wives in the most abominable fashion..." She checked her chin to the left and went on. "You shouldn't be concerned with those people, dearest. And stay away from them, they'd give you nightmares if you saw them." Alice's younger sister thought about this for a moment and then spoke gravely in her young voice.
"People must lead such desperate lives in secret. I think that we should pity the poor hatters, if that is the case. They must be lonely if they can't sell any of the hats to the people who come to the shop. They would never know who was wearing their hat around town."
"Hatters make many hats every year," the older reverend interjected gently, "I am sure they are very proud of their work, and glad for the remuneration." The youngest girl nodded calmly at this.
"What did she do, in the story?" This was the first that the real Alice had spoken in some time, and the young don looked up at her in the middle of the little rowboat. "She went to go see the March Hare; what did he tell her?"
"Well, he was having a rather chaotic tea party with the Mad Hatter himself," replied the don. Her sisters turned to look at her.
"So she did see him after all." The young man smiled.
"She could hardly avoid him. He was best friends with the Hare, and they were stuck at tea time because the Hatter had once insulted Father Time." He paused, and the older reverend kept rowing. "Would you rather she never went to their gathering?" Alice was silent for four turns of the oars.
"I don't want to ruin your story."
"It is very much your story."
"But you are the creator, you decide whether or not she is destined to go among mad people or not."
"Perhaps, but life does take one down ineluctable paths sometimes. What if she can't escape their meeting at some distant future point, regardless of my efforts?" Alice reflected again.
"Then I suppose she ought to pass through to their meeting as soon as possible."
"Go to them on purpose!" cried her older sister softly.
"On what theory?" asked the don with a cunning look. He was always wanting to know about her chain of logic, how she had gotten to a conclusion. She was readily coaxed into giving it up; it did make her feel a bit important.
"Well, when I avoid doing lessons or delay them until it is nearly too late, I find myself in a much more unpleasant situation than if I had done them promptly, as I ought to," said Alice.
"Yes, but that is your fault, not that of Destiny," pointed out her younger sister kindly.
"I think," said Alice, "That if in the story she avoids these two at present, then time will stack up against her and produce a different outcome than if she met them sooner..." She trailed off. "If you don't release a steam valve in time, it becomes overwhelmed with pressure and is certain to explode and all come rushing out at once. It is better to have gotten things over with, especially if the March Hare and the Mad Hatter are as distressing as they sound."
They passed a low-slung tree, the girls ducked and managed their bonnets, and the older reverend murmured apologies for letting them drift in that direction.
"It is not March in the story, and so the Hare will not be in that unique state of frenzy." The don looked at Alice, and she looked at him. "This Hatter is not like the ones in town. He is more eccentric than terrifying."
"That sounds more amenable to a party. Perhaps he can tell her where to go next."
"Perhaps—or perhaps not. He is still a Hatter, after all, and can't help being what he is."
Alice opened her eyes and gazed up at the ceiling, letting her pupils adjust to the light of one candle. Her time in the bathtub was growing cold, but she didn't want to sit up. The water was comfortingly buoyant in a way that recent armchairs hadn't matched, and the unadulterated silence was broken every time she breathed, her ears submerged so that the sound filled the corners of her head. And there was her own heartbeat to keep her company. She liked listening to it now, feeling the lengths of floating hair close and around her, and keeping her lips and nose just over the line where the water turned into air. Twilight, she lay there so still that she fancied she could feel the twinge of lub-dub, lub-dub uttering just enough to tremble her private sea.
It had been a difficult number of weeks, the majority of which she had spent inside the White Rabbit's former cottage, dimpling her fingers into pie crusts and tossing the burnt remains out the back door, patty-pan and all. There was no concentration, just a long gaze out the window at the purple and white flashes of lightning, for it had stormed hard every day. Dust gathered in metaphorical streaks across her sleeves in those gray, unmemorable weeks, gathered across her mantel, across the moulding above the door. One day Alice forewent risking another fallen pie, shook those weeks from her sleeves, reached for her umbrella, and went into town without word or thought to purpose.
This new phase of autumn effected a change in the idle passersby as she reached the center of the capital—no more were there groups of identical faces with detailed costumes and festoons. A single stooping figure here or there kept close to the rows of terrace houses and did not seem to be walking for the sake of walking. The market was no longer supportable in this weather, signs of it gone from the streets entirely. The green on copper government buildings was turned a brackish gray, and so with her restiveness unslaked, Alice made the easy decision with a sigh to go home again. She dragged the umbrella's tip against the cobblestones, more for the accompaniment of noise than out of a childish petulance—it wasn't raining, anyway, all "sound and fury signifying nothing."
But Alice went, one afternoon, to a large antiquated granite building with a hand-lettered sign at the door giving the hours simply as daylight, which it was fast un-becoming with the sun tilted winterishly in the sky. She took a number off the small metal hook by the door and sat on a long wooden bench, dallying and skimming her toes over a checkerboard tiled floor, entirely alone in the lobby.
She waited and waited and waited, and eventually a young clerk with a green visor came out of a back room, and as she resisted the impulse to stand and call to him, he disappeared again without seeing her. Alice sat back and smoothed her hands over the dark glossy wood, slowly and carefully twisting the tip of her boot around into a juncture where two white squares and two black squares came together. She jumped up very quickly when the young man ambled over by the counter, and came near to be sure that he would see her.
"Er," she said aloud, and the sound seemed out of place in the big quiet space, bringing home to her how little she was, and how little her voice seemed.
"Have you got an appointment?" said the young man briskly, but not unkindly.
Alice looked at the big quiet space, which was still completely empty but for they two.
"I do have this number," and clicked it onto the counter. The young man slicked it in a drawer underneath the flat plane and folded his hands in front of her.
"I was recommended to come here and inquire after a house," said Alice carefully.
"Which house?" said the clerk.
Alice relayed him what she had come for.
The day previous, she found herself at a familiar fork along a garden path in the forest, and this time took the path she had not traveled once before. One direction would take her to one familiar house house, and the opposite direction would take her to the other familiar place. Alice folded her hands at the small of her back and stood in silence, feeling rather than thinking this decision out.
There was nothing at the end of the right tine of the path that would not be at the left, she thought to herself, but was wrong and surprised when she reached the mansion and found a group of figures up under the porch. She would not have seen them there had she not bothered to look. They were some of them animals and some of them men, and they seemed to be taking inventory on the place, testing it out, inspecting it.
What are you doing? she asked the foreman of the group at the top of the steps. He had a large crooked nose, a heavily worn and smudged dust coat, and was busying himself with a toolbox. She had said these words in a polite tone of voice, having neither authority nor energy to demand answers out of him.
Boarding the place up, miss.
She had looked at him, and then looked at the house, and then looked at him again before hooking her umbrella on the door handle. Alice had expected to view the house alone, in silence, before perhaps trying the door, and if she were admitted, to go through it and close up the shades to save the furniture for another day and nothing more. Eventually she got it out of him that she should go to someplace in town to inquire why the great raspberry house hidden among the trees was in danger of being condemned like this.
Not condemned, miss, I wouldn't put it that way.
Oh, with relief.
More like razed.
"So you see, I am come to ask you what is the matter with the house," said Alice to the clerk.
"What do you mean?"
"Why it's being razed, it is an awfully fine house." The clerk gave her an odd look before he turned and went to the wall behind the counter, which was covered in handles and labels. He pulled out a long narrow drawer and fingered through the card index there before pushing it all the way shut with a single shove. He inspected the card under a magnifying glass, and Alice leaned forward to see.
"This indicates ownership by the Mad Hatter," he remarked, looking at her over his half-spectacles, a bit critically, perhaps. Alice did not reply for a moment.
"Yes," she said at last. He cleared his throat.
"It isn't set to be razed," continued the young man, "It has to be stripped of all the occupying furnishings, fixtures, and base materials, which will be auctioned by the crown at public." He looked at her again over the spectacles. "What is your interest in the house, miss?"
"I had passed it before once and wanted to know what was inside," she lied slowly.
"Was there anything else?"
"If you don't mind my inquiry, what is this place?" He tapped the edge of the card on the counter for a moment.
"This is the Bureau of Local Affairs. Housing and personal records, taxes, distribution, and proportion. Did you have something in mind particular about that house?"
"Well, I--" said Alice, "I am curious about the previous tenant." The clerk looked at Alice for a long silent moment, and then looked at the card in his hand. He pushed on the counter, and part of it swung backward like a little gate.
"Follow me, if you please," he said.
He led her past the wall of card indices and down past where she could see from the bench in the lobby to a door with a frosted glass plate, which he unlocked and into which they passed. It was a very handsome hall of records with a high ceiling and brass handles on all the big, deep drawers and shelving. The clerk climbed a track-bound ladder and went to open one, sifting through paperwork in a file. She turned to admire the place, and he slid the ladder over a few feet to hand her down an open folio.
"He's been exiled," was his conclusion.
"I know," she returned. "Does his record say where he is now?"
"That's only a property ledger; just says that he's been formally stricken as the titular holder of the property, which will revert to the crown." He looked down at Alice. "You were a friend of his, weren't you?"
"Friend, no, I--"
"No need to explain," he said, waving a hand. "No one else comes around here asking what the Bureau does, or interested in the records. You'd have to have better than a casual passing interest in a house like that." She pulled at her eyelid with her fingertips, thinking. She could not be sure if the clerk was sympathetic to whatever cause he thought she was about; it did the Hatter injustice to discount him so quickly, but to claim him outright would do her a greater disservice.
"What happened to him?" she said finally. The clerk backed himself down the ladder to level with her.
"The official answer is retribution for treason," he said, and they were both unmoved, for it had been repeated so often lately than she wasn't quite sure what it meant anymore.
"And the unofficial version?"
"Personally," said the clerk quietly, "And mind you, I'm only the housing and records clerk, but... I think all the minor 'incidents' and 'situations' and 'affairs' and 'happenings' he's perpetrated over the years finally reached a point for someone or some entity. Straw that broke the whatsit's back."
Alice looked at the floor as though it were a very great distance away from her.
"Everything that man has done over the years is recorded and kept in these deposit boxes." They turned and looked around the whole room again. "Not all bad; the government keeps an eye on folks just the same if they steal or save a life. Supposedly it keeps people hopeful of having more good than bad about them written up here. But the Hatter—it's a mystery to me how he ever attracted this much attention."
"I only thought he was an especially busy person," said Alice. She was detaching herself from her surroundings, being careful to keep the room at arm's length, and was glad when the clerk reset the file and escorted her from the room. Assuredly she would grow curious and want to open and sift through the paperwork, stacking it in great piles of a grid on the floor and flipping through the leaves, slipping through the hours, thoroughly laying out the man's life.
But Alice kept it at bay and was soon on the other side of the counter again.
"Can you tell me when everything will go up on the block?"
"The house is still being inventoried." She shifted from one foot to the other and pressed her fingers into the counter.
"So it will be a few days before everything is gone."
"Longer than that, one expects. Of course, that will mean more work for the comptrollers, that house being as big as all such."
"Why's that?" The clerk tilted his head to the side and looked past Alice, considering.
"An auction for fixtures means everything has to be sold piece by piece, and probably at a loss. Isn't a guarantee that anything will be of value in there. Could take months to dismantle that house."
"What a slow process in making an example of all this." Of him. She looked at the black tile under her toes.
"They'd be better off selling it, spend their time finding a buyer." And Alice looked up. The sun was really setting now outside, she could tell from the golden haze beginning to fill the hall. The clerk was beginning to whisk papers into drawers, his eye turned toward the clock on the wall where a flamingo was telling time with crooked wings. His answers were becoming breezy, almost offhand in his desire to get home for the evening.
"How would one go about doing that?" He stopped the end of day ritual for a moment to look at her directly on. His expression had turned into one of sympathy, or at least good intentions, she thought. Perhaps he spent most of his day alone and was appreciative of her concern in addition to making him useful by asking so many questions.
"Why, are you interested in buying it?" She did not answer, and he went on somewhat philosophically. "I don't think you would ask if there wasn't something in that house worth it to you to rescue." He paused. "The crown will put what's in that house up for everybody to ogle and gawk at. Even if you discount him as a friend to the whole world, you could still save his possessions."
Alice could picture in her mind what she wanted from the house, and looked out the window at the fading light.
"When are you ever going to wear that hat I made for you?" His voice was so quiet in the lulling thrum of summer's last stand that she could hardly hear him over the sounds of herself beginning to fall asleep.
"You didn't make it for me," she heard herself say in a low, sleepy voice. "You pulled it from a box." Alice tilted her chin as far back as she could so that she could see the Hatter. He lay perpendicular to her on the blanket, one leg crossed over another, arms behind his head, dreamily watching the squares and diamonds of sunlight rotate through breaks in the red and yellow leaves like a zoetrope.
"Like magic," he replied. They were very tired from both the sunlight and the wine and the cheese and the game of horseshoes they had attempted to play. But they were not very interested in following the rules of that last one, and so instead spent the better part of two hours trying to get a ringer to spin all the way round the stake to the bottom, like a barber pole.
"Well?" he said again. His voice was ruining the long hot quiet and the way her eyelids kept sinking together, and Alice waited a moment for a vaguely unkind reply to slowly waft away again.
"Well what?"
"I wear a hat." Their conversation was very slow and if there had been any eavesdroppers they might have mistaken languidity for boredom, but there is distinction in the secret language between people, and must be finely discerned beyond casual listening.
"That you do, don't you?"
"Why don't you wear a hat? Do you not like it?" Alice opened her eyes and looked up into the boughs above.
"I do like it, I enjoy gifts from other people. I don't know why I've never worn it."
"It's not that I'm angry or that it bothers me," replied her friend in such a dry voice that it seemed ready to crack and drift, "I just wanted to know that you liked it, that's all."
"Be reassured that I do."
"Take excellent care of it, it does need attention every now and then," he said, and she could hear him smiling through that sentence.
"It's not a pet," said Alice, and tilted her chin all the way back to look at him once more. He was grinning, and she caught it. "But I shall do my best to honor us both when I do wear it."
She had to get to his house, and fast. Alice was running in the dark shadows of the garden paths, the horizon grading faster and faster into reds and purples and oranges, her dress pinched and caught at intervals in the hedgerows. Pressing matters of salvation and life and death do not often come upon us in truth; the most trivial matters are so commonly treated as a defining moment in one's career of bravery or pluck that when it comes time for us to be shoved into the heady rushing flue of real conflict, we may be apt to simply toss our hands into the air.
It was his hat which worried her, and not just worried, but gnawed at her deep in her stomach and made each step reverberate upward so that she ran not Mercury light on her mission, but heavy and mortal. She was bouncing inside uncomfortably, reminded of her realness and smallness. It was important, he had stressed that to her on more than one occasion, and certainly at their first meeting. It had his things inside of it, essential to his well-being and existence. His symbol, his icon, his profession, his raison d'être.
Why would he leave it behind?
Alice practically fell stumbling through the gate and tripped along up toward the house, and her hand was raised when suddenly there came upon her a realization, and with it, the sickly gray dawn.
She turned to face a familiar gathering; she met an empty lawn.
The speech she had been practicing in her mind—all the necessary facts, all the desperate but calm and clear intonations meant to call forth a sense of duty in whom she sought—she forgot, and instead Alice put her hands on her face and tried to divine what this meant. He was gone on holiday, supposed to be anyway, but what had the Hatter said, he was delayed a few days by rained out roads.
But then again, she had never seen the March Hare's tea table completely disappeared. Alice turned back to where she had meant to knock at the door and nearly had her hand on the knob, and just stood there. That word, disappeared—the table was not just gone, or put away, or in storage, but disappeared. All the guilt bobbed and flanked her, and Alice looked down at herself.
Her dress was, she could see, ruined by several tiny pulled thread patches that could never be made right. A tear could be sewed up again and disguised, a stain could be put out, but a single missing thread was an obvious irreparability. The Hare hadn't removed his furniture last she had seen him—one doesn't move the furniture before going on holiday. But did the tea table go inside for protection, or was it gone and he was gone too now?
As the dawn swelled pathetically in half-measures and thin clouds, she could feel a night's worth of waking catch up with her, and she couldn't do it, she couldn't open the door and call for him. She didn't want to know. It was—she could see the grain pattern in the door clearly and then out of focus, and she turned and went across the lawn, passed through the gate, and then down the bricked path home.
She sat up in the cool air and wrapped her arms around to her shoulder-blades, shivered. Alice almost felt nauseous for a moment, the sudden change from floating quietly to being weighed down by several pinstraight pounds of sopping hair releasing their curls and water in an echoing instant coming so fast. It had been a very long day, a day spent calculating and realizing. They had let her keep the mateless diamond earring after all, for the money that the Hatter had given her was more than enough. One of the comptrollers had spent the intercession eyeing her, but no one said a word as to her purpose, and at the very end, after she had been written into the books, he approached, pressed the little jewel into her palm, and said,
"You should keep this, Lady." Alice smiled briefly at the little white sparkle. "But may I recommend that you not sell it, if you please."
"A single earring isn't any good to anybody, is it? Perhaps I'll find its second again someday." He raised a finger.
"On the contrary, I hope that you do not. A diamond is a diamond, even without a match. It'll change settings a thousand times and still be the hardest rock."
Alice smoothed her damp hair into the towel and looked around the unfamiliar bathing room again. It felt odd, even when she didn't quite acknowledge it. She had taken each carpeted stair to the second landing slowly, carefully, memorizing the place in its stillness, its newness. Given up and back was the White Rabbit's cottage and everything she owned within it besides, which was not much in reality. The one thing she did consider her own was the blue and cream striped box and its contents, and this she had placed in what she knew to be a guest bedroom, for it had an open door and an armoire that would give her a dress. It was the only room she had cared to look within so far.
The hat with the black and white stripes secured, Alice felt odd, in transition. All the things that surrounded her were now her own, but they were not hers at all. She would go through the house in the morning. The smooth round box, for tonight, was her only possession in the entire world.