Whatcha gonna do when you get out of jail?
I'm gonna have some fun
What do you consider fun?
Fun, natural fun
"Genius of Love," Tom Tom Club
They both listened to the clacking rails. The strumming tempo was off a hair, as though the car at the fore of this one was overloaded too much to the right. Alice could just see his outline, there on his back staring upward from among the hay. She couldn't sleep, she was far too awake, every little thing a distraction, and so instead pulled very hard on the door to get it to open just a little, and the girl watched the stars come and go from among the vaporous clouds. But they were cold and very far away despite glittering so prettily, and she swayed back over to the haystack as the car sank into a curve. Unfolding the cloth from her pocket and crumbling bits of cheese blindly, she lowered her voice to mask the awkwardness,
"Are you hungry?"
"Not especially." He didn't sound this way or that way emotionally, merely introspective.
"You haven't eaten in a while." And she might have let the whole thing go at that and continue working her way around the holes in the cheese, when the car turned again and the stars chanced to peer inside, giving her a dim blink of a glance at the strange smile he was smiling.
"It'll catch up with me," he said, for he had seen her looking.
"It won't be good," remarked Alice, rolling bits of curd between her fingertips, "What if we have to run to get away from the freightmen?"
"I agree," he said, and it did not sound so much like a realization as it did a correction, "But it will catch up with me, it is catching up with me, and there is nothing I can do for that, not now anyway."
"But you ate before. You can eat now." The car had lapsed back into darkness, and there was nothing to do but listen for the sound of him.
"That was for before."
"What's caught up with you?" this in a bit of exasperation, but more for the lengthiness of his point.
The Hatter paused a moment.
"The Idle Place."
"Your state of mind's caught up with you?"
"Who told you that?"
"One of the cows did," she replied. "It sounded a rather distressing way of passing time…" she trailed off tactfully.
"So you know," said the Hatter.
"Knowing isn't understanding, but yes."
He was silent again, and Alice dabbed folded the cloth back up around the food but did not tie it.
"You know, but you don't understand," she heard him repeat. He sat up, rustling the hay, apparently open to a discussion.
"She said people in there can't die, even without food and water, that all you're left with is what you've done wrong."
"That's true."
"How is that possible?"
"It's one of those odd queerer places." She could see in her mind's eye flipped portraits and floating lamps, chairs and disrighted mirrors and ferns, and behind them all the dirt and roots of a rabbity hole; it was not surprising at all that amid the usual unusualness of the Wonderland there should be spots of concentrated Outré. Far away and long ahead of them, the train's whistle hissed cold and high. "But that's only part of it—it's just as bad going in as it is to leave, because once you're out, all that lost time comes surging back, and you're hit with exhaustion and starvation." Alice thought back to the Hatter lying crosswise on the rotting four-poster for days and days.
"Then why not eat, if you're starving now?"
"You don't have enough food to sustain us both."
It was both the mildness in his tone and the idea of it that bade Alice sit back on her heels, surprised.
"How long will it last?"
"It depends on how long it was," he said. "I don't remember, I don't have any concept of time passing, it's all gone," he was agitated now, distressed.
"Where does this train go?" He did not reply. "You know, surely you know."
"This goes back to… the capital. I think."
"Anglantine, and you know it does."
"Who told you that?" the Hatter said, taken aback. An idea had taken hold in Alice's subconscious, and it occurred to her now to take better care in paying attention to the things the Hatter did not say, if not to be right-out suspicious, though that seemed perhaps rude.
"The Queen of Clubs," she replied, and was close to launching into it, but then Alice didn't want to tell him at all, and rubbed the palms of her mittens together instead.
"You've been busy."
"I think you should eat. The capital has food, and I'm not hungry." She pushed the folded-up fodder toward the spot where she knew he was, could tell by the warm rings of air even without him talking. The Hatter sighed, and they were silent.
"I had resolved not to think of it," he said after a few tics, and now his voice sounded thick with bread, "It is perhaps better."
"You cannot not think of it forever, surely you'd think of it immediately," Alice replied. She itched to ask him what the crown had seen fit to reprimand, so palpable that perhaps it was the dusty hay in her nose instead.
"What is this?"
"What's what?"
"This… salted something or other."
"Cured ham from earlier in the season—" and she was about to up and demand something from him, anything, when he said,
"I can't even see it," and Alice replied, almost a bit snippily,
"Light some of the hay for a torch."
There was a long time during which the Hatter did not even chew, until at last he talked in a flat voice.
"That would be dangerous indeed."
Alice felt her shame, and tried to mask it accordingly—"If you took care to hold it out, it wouldn't be."
The rails clicked beneath them so many times that she forgot to count, and it all started to sound the same, compounding the way her shoulders slumped.
"No," said the Hatter at last, and she had to lean forward to hear him, "Dangerous for me." She had not considered that, and it sat ill. "Solitude for thinking about one's wrongs is a dangerous thing. There is madness in that loneliness with no one there to correct or bolster you, and the unhappiness afterward, no matter how much comfort you come into."
He was inside his own self, and in the daylight perhaps it might not have shown through, but the sound of his voice held clear frustration. She heard him rise, and the Hatter went for the cattle door and pulled, threw it all the way back, opening them up to the night and loud cold. He stood silhouetted against the wavelength landscape rolling deep in the black, and Alice felt half-sure that he would jump from the way he was leaned out, looking down over the edge of the car, half-sure in the knowledge that he would not leave again, and sat perfectly still, letting bits of straw float away on the same wind that was whipping through his hair and coat.
Alice was beginning to lose feeling at the tip of her nose when he ground it closed again but for a hand's-width column of air feed, and there was overwhelming quiet for a moment, just before the clicking came back into focus.
In the end, they did not run from freightmen. The train whooshed out a great khasss of steam and slowed into the station, but while Alice slipped from the cattle car and crouched by shadow's dim, the Hatter walked straight and as normally if he were crossing a street at midday, neither stumbling nor noticing sleeper and ballast underfoot. Down the holding past the engine she could see long stickly shapes of crane arms moving and clunking; the lateness of the hour did not feel like a goings-about for business, though she could hear a muffled plug-plug-plug off in the distance.
The only thing to draw the Hatter up short was on the street corner, and only because Alice gave a panicked tug at his coat sleeve: the black group of figures standing near the wrought-iron handling by the wide steps projected an official sort of watch-eyedness.
"What—" he nearly said, but she mimed with a hand over her head, and he clapped his own onto his white hair, for it glowed in the hazy edge of lamplight. He stepped back, and to her surprise, looked astonished, as though he had forgot his bare-headedness entirely, and then he peered round the shop window's edge to get a better gawk at them, assessing and comparing old knowledge. "Hmm," he murmured, and then he darted; she only looked to follow. Alice was well thankful that he knew back passages and alleyways with confidence; she had but to step lightly in his ghosting wake and hold fast to the corners, and soon he had opened a side door, and they were in a wooden-sounding room with a peculiar arrangement of smells. The close nasal oldness of dust, an acrid taste of chemicals: his hat shop.
Down the few steps and into the passage toward his house, he shoved her before him and practically pushed her the entire way, one hand flat against the small of her back.
He lit a candle and its light instantly went to the blue handprint at the join in the basement wall, he held it all around, and then turned to see Alice standing quietly at the back archway.
"Your hat is over there," she said, tilting her head in the direction of the worktable. The man edged toward it, giving her a look that brushed up against both keen interest and the breath of suspicion.
"Useful curiosity on a night like this," he said, and set the candle near the goldfish bowl, which had a definite lack thereof.
The Hatter looked at his hat on the dress form, and the hat looked sightlessly back at him. Dumb and immobile as it was, he still lifted it gently upward with both hands and beheld it, brushed the layer of dust that had settled atop it, adjusted the price, gave a quiet sigh of satisfaction. It seemed a moment for privacy, and Alice turned to the task of digging through her cloak pockets to relieve all the uselessness she had collected. The chunk of blue glass, the center matryoshka, and the other things she dropped all onto a side table, but when her little fingers came over the lock of hair tied at its edge, the loop of yarn, and the hammer, she was glad her back was to him, and left them to sink secreted.
He would not have noticed either way, for it was with the air of expectant brightness that the Hatter had tripped up the stairs three at a time and disappeared to commune with his old abode. Alice thought upon how nice it would be to have a hot bath, and the sudden remembrance of where she was jerked her toward the steps like a doll on a string, going to tell him—
But she met with the now-descending Hatter, hat still in hand, looking distantly stunned.
"We can't go up and out," he said in a curious tone of voice, "Not with those people, anyway."
She stared.
"What people?"
"There's people."
"People, there's people? Upstairs?"
"It's a watch guard or something; not any great production, but we must be under surveillance—those men on the corner were Crown Guard, and there are more dirigibles than usual; something's afoot around here, and I imagine we might be the bugs they're out to quash."
"Did they follow us here?"
"I only saw a light outside, and there were voices."
Alice dropped her voice, self-conscious of her own presence in the house. "Did they get in?"
He shrugged, made a bizarre face.
"Well, what are we going to do?"
The Hatter leaned into the staircase wall and looked down the couple of steps at her.
"We have to leave again."
She dithered, creaking on the stairs, and let him past, where he sifted through lengths of pipe, half-woven baskets, and glass vials of vile-looking stuff, searching and clinking. After several minutes of this, Alice descended too, to perch at the edge of a chair where several pairs of spats had begun to breed.
Alice had nodded off, and awoke to find him standing in front of a slice of looking glass over the mantel. The Hatter was running a hand through his thick white waves, preparing to crown himself, settling the outmoded chapeau atop his bean like a flag at a summit's peak.
"May I ask you something?" It was a sudden urge more than process of thought that drove her desire for an answer.
"Hmm?" He smoothed a finger over an eyebrow and shifted his grip on the brim for the umpteenth time.
Alice squinted in the dim light. "Why do you keep a sign in your hat for ten shillings sixpence when the currency here isn't pound sterling?"
The Hatter turned the thing over in his hand to view the scripted tag jammed into the crown ribbon, and his smile was nostalgic.
"It's my premier favorite."
"But the price tag implies that you're wanting to sell it, and for a good command, too."
"No one'd recognize the price." He gazed at her evenly out of the mirror, a touch of amusement at the corners of his eyes. "So no one's ever asked to purchase, and I get to keep on wearing it. It is a stand-out example of my work, and I'm loath to give it up—my appreciation is the better gain." She had to admit that his logic was sound.
"And the tag?"
"It would look odd without it, don't you think?" His flourish was one smooth curve: twisted his elbow and gave a snap of the wrist to pop it onto his head, then turned to her, triumphant. He did look his old self again, bumptious and fruity for aught that meant in a basement. She almost didn't speak, but it slipped out of her and grabbed him by the collar.
"Wait," she called, scrambling up from over her numb legs as he went toward the arched passageway, "What if someone stops us? It's the most obvious thing about you."
He touched the brim briefly, then took it down and crumpled slightly.
"I only just got it back," she heard him say, plaintive. Alice went over to him; she disliked with a new vehemence being the common sensical source of his personal tragedies.
"We'll put it someplace safe," she offered to be soothing, "Where no one would look."
And so, standing before the gaping hole that the door in the tree made in the forest beyond the city streets, Alice did her best to balm the wound of his brief reunion.
"It's your favorite hat," she repeated him in affirmance, and he nodded, his back to her. It was like making a eulogy. "Is it the first one you ever made?"
"Oh, no," he said, "No no no, it takes time to perfect the craft—this is the certainly not the first, though it is by far the best." He turned slightly, holding it so that she could see the fabric's sheen, and she drew nearer. "Beaver felt," he said in a softer tone. "I lost track of how many times I had to boil and pummel it, and to dye it—" He sighed, deep and brooding.
"It is a lovely hat," replied Alice, and she looked up at his profile. Her eyes were threatening to sew themselves shut she wanted sleep so badly. "We'll find it again." He swung it twice, gave it a soft toss, and closed the door with a brush of his hand before notching a minor 'x' into the bark. It all seemed so désinvolte, terse and ossified by her dashing of his yen. But it was the better thing not to have it, and better still not to have it in a house surveilled.
They had not got too far deeper into the greenery of the forest at all when Alice's questions ached anew to be asked.
"Where are we going?"
"Far, but not far." He was paces ahead of her and did not turn his chin to answer; she fancied he had a plan of some sort, and wished he would hurry up and be himself again; no, that wasn't it—she kept knocking him to the ground each time he tried to rise, and Alice was on the windward side of feeling so guilty and so sorry for herself that she might have cried, only he unlatched another tree, and held it open for her, just now looking back at her over his shoulder.
It is not a terribly vast distance between Anglantine and Etlucindes, and really shouldn't be an epic trek, only the best travel companies would have you believe otherwise, that the smartest and really the best way to go is by fur-lined sleigh through the snow and by modish, but assuredly sophisticated, caravan in summer. Some people believe this; others arrive by a sleek white passenger train with four dining cars, a plush private berth car with a velveted four-poster, several sleepers for the servants, and a glass observation deck for viewing the better constellations—all of which very much require a slow journey if one is to fully luxuriate in one's own grand entrance. And certainly, one must. For Etlucindes has the best of everything, and everything must be the best for Etlucindes.
The journey becomes even shorter by doors, especially in the middle of the night with no one to ask what on earth you are on about. But stack these advantages against the illness of defeat, against unshod paths and a lack of sleep stemming from rancid anxiety, and the resulting mixture is one of distinct amnesia shot through with the strange taste of half-forgotten anger. The feeling is there, the energy returns, and one has no idea what hours ago was enough to inspire such germs of vexation.
Alice did not remember how she reached the top of the Grand Palais Hotel, and only had half a fast-fading memory of what she had told the concierge (and what she had told him was what the barn cat had told her in whispered confidence—the names of the Farmer and His Wife, who held, so conveniently that it was making her start to giggle, permanent reserve over the top-floor suite and surely would not mind if somebody actually used the blessed place rather than let it go to so much waste), but here she was, on a couchette the size of a canal boat, dressed in someone else's shabby clothes, so delirious that she didn't even know what sort of room it was.
It was too hilarious to not laugh about, really, and Alice would have continued but for the knock at the door which made her gasp and stare somewhat fishily at the ceiling, a strange, chuckled "What?" escaping from her, really more a reply to a fantastical untold story than to a knock at the door, but there it was. It would be strange for the Hatter to knock, and she gave a momentary space for thought to whether the hotelier was there to chuck her to the front gates, but it was neither of these two; it was a young woman with a strange face and a strange accent, who by degrees shuttled pliable Alice to an echoing inner terraced room, pushed the blonde charge weaving and bobbing somewhat around the sunken hotpool, marveling at the skylights.
Our heroine was not surprised, or even perplexed, when she looked around herself, blinked, and realized she was quite naked altogether. It seemed the thing to be for some reason, though, and Alice merely lifted her eyebrows and watched with mild interest the oblique repeating water lily pattern in the wall beyond breathe in and out by contractions.
"Relaaax," was the only thing the tellak would say, and pushed down on the girl's shoulders to get her to let go.
She had a strange dream, a dream that everything smelled of sweet almonds, that someone's fingers delved into her calves, someone stretched too hard and too deep into her back but she desperately needed it and never said a word, that someone's gentle and resolute palms pressed straight down on her breastbone just so, that her eyes in answer had gone wide and soft, her head lolled at this deep silent restoration. Sweet sand on her mouth, hands to the elbows dipped in warm weight and left to percolate and steam; Alice bent and swayed and dozed in the hot waters. Someone's hands were in her hair, combing through it soft and straight, holding it out and letting it fall in a curtain-drape, she felt every burst of flash in her scalp. Her toes were freed from the cracked brown leather boots, they stung and the flesh and nerves sang, Alice's hands were so warm, she had never been so warm or pleasurably relaxed in her entire existence.
Upon awakening she found herself wrapped in a cashmere kaftan, and standing over her bedside holding a cup and saucer was the Hatter, looking freshly slumbered and crisply laundered himself. He tilted his head to the side to better meet her gaze; she smelled sweet and nutty, her new braid essed out onto the pillow beside her like water, she molded to the bedclothes and tried to imagine what she looked like in the picture in his head at that very moment.
"Hullo," she said in a chummy sleepy way, breathing deep and feeling all around her a soft pile. She could hardly move for having been handily formed anew by such thorough means, and chuckled lush, just once, at how well she took to it, at how nice it was to have back again a Hatter with his tea.
"Well, well," he replied in almost avuncular approval, then sipped as Alice clenched every muscle in lieu of performing an actual stretch, the mattress creaking out the intensity of her enjoyment for her. She sat up, and with her the mile-high duvet folded into itself and collapsed like peaks on whipped cream. "Enjoy yourself?" and this was followed by another raise of the teacup, but this time accompanied by a subtle assessment over the edge.
"Very much so," and she flopped her arms onto the coverlet to mash the air out of it completely, but it squashed and jumped away from her, ballooned at the other side of the bed to hiss and crinkle. There was something hinting in his tone, something he didn't quite want to point out but needed assurance of. Alice looked at him directly and thought he seemed a bit ruddy in the cheek; she would feel the bath's undoing effects for days, very probably. "Thank you," she said, genuine.
"You're welcome," came his too-quiet response back in the tannins.
"I'm sorry."
"It's not for you to be sorry about."
They were lounging on the divans opposite from each other, his saucer migrating in a lazy slide toward the back of the cushion, his leg crossed one over the other in smart pinstripe trousers, Alice draped cozily among eleven or so cushions, a warm and content grande odalisque, the triangles of her embroidered velvet slippers poking out from under the fabric.
This was a strange sitting room—the fireplace humming while the broad high windows stood permanently open, a brisk contrast and specific point where the two airs blent. A broad selection of samovars on a pushcart had been brought up during her convalescence, she was pleased to see, and their gleaming metal sides reflected the burn and white marble of the buildings across the street.
"I know, but—I could have come sooner. I m—" and there Alice stopped, for this was a very tricky word, and it took her time to twist it out of her throat so that it held its shape and did not lame or weaken as to embarrass them both. "I missed you." But it toppled and cascaded in a long arc instead, bounced along and dilated the two of them.
"Oh." He did sound surprised. "It never was my intent to distress you so," he said, folding his hands awkwardly—and indeed, he himself looked in the afternoon light and fire somewhat disconcerted. "You are as excellent a friend as anybody could hope for."
Alice rubbed her eye with the cuff of her robe and felt warm and tired, relaxed.
"I miss..." Alice pursed her lips. "I miss the tea party. I miss having fun, and how easy everything was. I miss your stupid puns," and she laughed, "You are consumed by some great worry, and I am not sure whether you mean to shield me from it, or to deceive me. It is as though you are possessed of two characters, in mortal struggle with each other."
He rose and stood before the window looking down into the street, hands in pockets.
"We all have our faces, some we show at the door, some we keep on when it's light."
"Your strangeness I can accept; I should think I'd gone clean off the deep end if I found you tempered and even one day, but really, it's almost an unkindness to keep me so far removed." Alice had sunk belly first into the pillows, curling in and nearly talking to herself.
The Hatter scrunched up his mouth and wrinkled his nose, thoughtful.
"Can you promise me something?" She could, or she could at least try, and told him so. "There are things you don't want to tell me, I haven't missed that, surely you didn't think I would, and when things are aligned, we might have sit down at tea and have a nice talk, of this, of anything, if you like." She simply looked at his back, the young man standing in the window, but upon arighting caught him scrubbing a hand through his hair, chin down, and she spoke seriously, caught between the hissing blast of flame and a shiver of cool.
"It would be easier knowing that you were yourself again, or at least close to it." He turned toward her and put his head to the side, considering Alice for a moment.
"When I was much younger—much, much younger—I went camping, as people do. It doesn't matter why, or where, only that we were out in tents in the wilderness, and the fire was not far. It illuminated the cloth nearest my bedroll, casting everything into a flickering shadow, and I watched it for some time—the trees and their branches, rolling hills of... lavender or something, etc. etc. I awoke some time later and perceived a set of shadows there, not my companions, but little figures with neat hands and chattering voices.
"I lay still, listening to them," he continued, gazing off long, "And presently they grew bold, for no one arose to send them away. I was not terribly alarmed, mind you, for there are all manner of creatures in the forest, and they are certainly welcome to it, but after a spell I grew rather concerned, in a flat sort of way, as these beings did not move on, but lingered there, circling the fire, chanting, looking to steal our food. More and more, they brushed past, and I could nearly see the wild eyes through the cloth, their voices louder and louder to one another, scrapping, fighting, screaming—and I swung out with the end of my fist, bowling over the one insolent enough to come scrabbling against my wall. They scattered, shrieking a war cry, and I soon fell back asleep." That seemed to be the closer. Alice cast her mind back to search for a moral.
"And that's the story of the time I punched a raccoon in the face," said the Hatter breezily, the voice she recognized having come back into him over the course of his tale.
"You are still in there," she said with a wistful smile.
"No indeed, one could scarcely blot out something that burns through one's eyelids." He drew near the fire and held out his palms, fire on fire, she thought. "I suppose everybody has got their second self. You know how Byronic heroes are always hiding goodness and decency and... other irritating characteristics, with their surly-burliness, yes? Slapping the governess about, and driving hell over the moors in a thunderstorm, who knows. Perhaps the rightest way to hide a bit of darkness is to flood the room with light from every direction." He scratched at the outer round of his ear.
"But even a roomful of the brightest lamps will produce overlapping little shadows," replied she. "You would hardly be able to even look, let alone see the true and worthy character, for so much distraction."
"Yes, that is true," remarked her companion, sounding as though he could breathe easier and relax in dreamy repose, "Oh, well."