Chapter 2

It can be hard to find your way someplace, and this is true for everyone. Harder still when you know very well that you've been there before, but can't seem to make a map in your head to your destination. I see myself then like an idiot cook in a grocery store — all the ingredients, but dinner's unlikely. I was trying to meet Arthur in a bookstore that I know now to have been literally around the corner from where we lived. And trying to meet her is how it felt — trying to find myself already there, skipping all intermediate steps and with no awareness of process. I was able to be there but not able to get there.

This, for better or worse, is how I discovered Apparation.

In Calculus class, I'm told, I had an issue with showing my work. My professor had insisted on seeing every formula resolved, or else "the result is invalid" (according to a graded quiz of mine, scrawled in red by a shaky hand). In retrospect I feel justified in not dissecting the process in explicit detail — first off, I couldn't be expected to remember the structures of the theorems I'd been taught two days previous, could I…and second, any landing is a good landing, as it is said. By someone, I'm not sure who. So when I would draw a graph of a function without doing anything else, I felt vaguely justified, or anyway if you'd asked me if I felt justified I might have given a vague assent before forgetting all about it.

None of this was in my head when I left the apartment, went down the stairwell and opened the front door of the building into poor weather. Even less was there when I tried to remember how to get to the bookstore. Cars hissed hatefully by. People walking with purpose and direction I could only imagine having. I can remember a feeling of withdrawing, resenting the unfamiliarity of the familiar, of pulling inward like a hermit crab, away from the cold wind and the drizzle, and wanting to just be there already, and my frustration shrank to a singularity, and took me with it. There was a tug, and a pop, and then my aunt was throwing a myriad of papers at me with a screech.

My first thought was, why are you doing that? My second one was, this place sure is dusty. Do they even sell any of these books or is this actually a dust farm? Beyond that I was a little unwilling to look around me, having had a mangy bookstore thrust on me in such an overly familiar and brusque fashion.

She glared at me briefly before she began hurriedly to pick up the mess, consisting of a few sheets of what looked like page three hundred of the tax code, and a couple of rolls of very heavy paper. "You could let a person know before doing that, you know — or even if you couldn't, well, I don't…" She returned to her usual muttering. I was watching her as though she were on television. Here I'd just moved from one place to another, showing absolutely no work mind you, and I was honestly a bit flustered by that, and this snarky little figure in front of me was irritated that I'd startled her - instead of surprised or… impressed, perhaps, that would have been me impressed right there. A brief skirmish broke out in my mind between the irksome-male-aunt camp and the I-just-did-something-outlandishly-weird/cool/frightening contingent with the victor being a third party, the short-attention-span militia, always stepping in to break up any unruly gathering before things got ugly.

"What's that in your hair?" I said.

She batted harriedly at her hair for a moment before shrugging her shoulders impatiently. "It's the bloody pigeon."

"Ah."

"Don't come that tone with me," she said, but clearly losing her head of steam. "It helps with the journey. They're quite good at finding their way over long distances, and with one along you always wind up getting where you're going."

"But why…" I gestured at my own hair, anticipating with some dread the inexorable pull of the bizarre that had bloomed of late like a whirlpool around my aunt.

"Well, my hands were full, weren't they," she said flatly. That I could accept.

"And they allow them on planes?" I asked.

"How should I know?"

"Wouldn't that be useful to know ahead of time?"

"And you feel you'll be needing to have that bit of information in the future?" she asked a little archly.

Around this time I had a memory. Slightly unusual for me at the time. I remembered a conversation I'd had with Arthur a few days ago in which we had spoken for at least five minutes before either of us realized we were talking about completely different things. She expected me to know things I didn't know, and was very circumspect in the way she spoke about the things she'd been hiding so long, and it left one feeling like one had boarded the wrong bus, so to speak, and was now very far from home.

"Are we not going to England today?"

"Well of course we are, but not by plane," she said.

"On a sh-"

"Honestly, Deasil, where have you been?" She was on the verge of losing patience with me, but suddenly she gasped, and closed her eyes. She swallowed hard (could I have simply not noticed that commanding lump in her throat all this time?) and her bony cheeks seemed frail and her skin drawn too tight over her face, and she said, "I'm sorry dear. I know where you've been. We're taking a portkey. It's like what you just did, only it lets you go further. In this case, all the way to England. It's why I said you should bring the small bag."

The difference between Aunt Arthur and me was: she wanted to forget all about what she had done to me and why. I wanted to remember as much as I could.

All right, then - large, very large blue eyes, that might be able to see backwards as well as forwards; that demonstrated a profoundly neutral mind operating them. I still remember them now, what it was like to see them erupt from nowhere behind my aunt, followed Cheshire-cat-like by the rest of a silvery-blonde woman in black robes. She had the appearance of evenness, of the person who meant the phrase "all things being equal". She took me in and processed me somehow and then put me back almost untouched, like a careful botanist.

She had a pinwheel in her hand.

Arthur turned and said, "Oh, is that us, dear?"

"Yes," she said in a light voice that sounded like a violin played very high and very soft. "I'm a bit early. I'm very eager to begin my journey." She stepped forward, her eyes following my aunt before returning to me. They seemed to land anywhere but on my own, but not in a shy way — rather, she was seeing details that interested her. I had an impulse to ask her if she knew me, and did so.

She almost smiled, in the sense that her face had been so tranquil beforehand that smiling didn't change her face much. Her eyes went to my right, then somewhere above my eyes. "We have not met."

I was running a list of questions in the way that you run a fever ("Are you a magician? Did that hurt just now? Are you Irish?") and my aunt decided it was best to starve them out of me rather than feed them, so with only a vaguely horrified look at the woman which I could not explain, and a glance at my face as though she'd forgotten something, she reached simultaneously for me and the pinwheel, which I thought at the time to be both strange and rude. At this point the woman was between my aunt and me, so it was a little awkward. As this didn't work, she began fishing in her purse for what turned out to be her chopstick and trying to see around the woman while she waved it in my direction. Recalling (!) the eggs, I avoided her line of sight.

The woman seemed to know what I was doing and casually blocked my aunt. I was able to manage a grin and say, "Are you…" before she nodded knowingly and said, "This is new to you, isn't it."

"Most…things are."

"It's a lot at first," she said in her thoughtful singsong as she absently fended off Arthur. "I have …friends who shared your situation, though only to a small degree. They said they found it like coming home. Like remembering things they'd really always known."

I'd like to say that filled me with hope, but actually it didn't sound that comforting. Memory had turned out to be a jagged path, and never enough information to make me comfortable. Always the pieces, never the whole puzzle.

"You can't hide him for long," she said, looking at me though I knew she spoke to Arthur, which was curious given that she was hiding me from my aunt.

"I know very well what I am capable of," my aunt said as she finally had an opening - and my face began to warm. I wasn't feeling embarrassed, though. She was just my aunt, and I didn't know why I should —

The woman's gaze still didn't meet mine, hovering above it a little. "I hope you enjoy your visit, then," she said to me. "Maybe we'll meet again when I come back."

Inexplicably, rather than ask her name, I squeezed out, "How long is your trip?"

She looked, if such a thing were possible, even more thoughtful. "That depends on whether I find what I'm looking for."

Arthur seized the pinwheel and said, "We must be off."

Realizing there was no arguing, I stepped towards my aunt, who was looking at her watch.

"I'm sorry," I said to the woman, not sure why I was saying it.

""You couldn't help it, could you?" she said, blinking slowly. "You don't know very much for sure."

"Right enough," I said, knowing it wasn't an insult. I was about to say something else equally as pithy when the lights went out, there was a faint sensation of cold and a strong sensation of sucking and nausea, and woman and dusty bookstore were replaced with what appeared to me as I tumbled to the floor to be a huge hall full of fireplaces. My aunt helped me up, handed the pinwheel to someone very short that I didn't really see and bustled me through a crowd of really eccentrically-dressed people from what appeared to be all unfamiliar walks of a completely different life. Still dizzy with nausea, I didn't notice too much as we left the building we were in and made our way to a small newsagent's.

It was impossibly small, actually. As my post whatever-the-hell-that-was grogginess began to clear, I saw that it was more like a broom closet set into the side of a building. There was a space for a fellow like me to step in and become generally aware of what things were sold there and then need to step outside to retrieve his wallet from his pocket. The proprietor was visible behind yellowed glass set into the rear wall of this tiny place, an Indian man reading a newspaper with a slowly-spinning mobile-like sculpture to his right. I decided to wait outside.

He barely looked up at my aunt before saying, "Destination." His voice through the glass made him sound like he was being squeezed from all sides.

She fished a piece of paper out of somewhere and pressed it to the glass.

"Thirty," he said. She rummaged in a bag and drew out some bills.

"British," he said.

She rummaged more, and then came up with some other bills, these with some color.

"Galleons," he said.

Her shoulders sagged a little. One last rummage (during which she banged her elbow on a magazine rack and cursed in an always surprising baritone) produced a bag of what sounded like coins. She dropped it on the counter by the glass with some finality.

I turned and looked out at the afternoon, which was like the weather back home — a rain like a million baby angels spitting at random.

"You told my parents I'm dead?"

The words must have come out of me. Only late.

Arthur inhaled sharply.

The voice behind the counter said, "Make that forty."

She turned and eyed me balefully. "I bloody well did not! They didn't ask!"

"Who…who would they ask?" I parried, but it was like a rapier versus a two-by-four with nails in it.

"Exactly," she said triumphantly.

"Well, thirty it is then," the voice said. I turned around to have a word with the voice, but as I did so the bag on the counter vanished and was replaced with a darning egg. I felt obliged to accept that, but I didn't have to like it.

"Oh, look, the express," I said.

She gave me another dirty look, grabbed my hand and held it to the egg. Possibly I should have prepared myself for what I knew was coming, but I couldn't imagine how to. I settled for a deep breath.

One more cosmic peristalsis spasm later, I was mostly standing in a country lane (I wasn't entirely standing, though I was entirely in the lane, though I felt like parts of me might have been elsewhere), thoroughly disoriented and a little irritated at having entire locales pressed upon me against my will. It was like having someone force food on you when you weren't done with what you had, in fact when you were overly full anyway, because you'd picked up something on the way and eaten that to be safe, and then there was dinner also, so you were eating to be polite, and then someone comes out with a plate of souvlaki, and you'd never had it or wanted it, really, something about the name, but here it was, like it or not…well, anyway I was saturated. I'd dropped my bag and my aunt was reaching to pick it up when it reared up on one side, avoiding her grasp, and inched over beside me like a large sloppy bulldog with no legs.

"All right then, but carry it, it won't be able to keep up," she said.

We had walked for a few minutes, mostly in silence. My bag had stopped squirming, but had indicated wordlessly in no uncertain terms that I was not to carry it by the strap. I had to settle for cradling it in my arms like a very fat baby. At this point I should say that there was a subtle tension that I felt just behind my eyeballs, and I was currently ascribing it to the buildup of things that I could make no sense at all of, and the pressure that such things might bring to bear on the skull of the recipient of said events. I was attempting to say things to myself like "this is a nice country lane", and not "what has someone gone and done with Manhattan?" The lane wound a bit, and was lined by trees, but one could still see the odd farmhouse here or there. There were no people visible.

Arthur seemed a little tense. She was smoothing her hair and her dress and licking her lips. I was wondering to myself if, when she'd left here, she'd told anyone where she was going, or how she'd likely appear when she got back. In any event, she moved as though she were climbing up the side of a building with a rope, as much pulling herself along as walking.

Suddenly she spoke. "They have to understand. They must! They'd have done the same thing, if I had…if I ever…" She bowed her head before turning to me and saying, "If I had been made to carry children, I…well, I would have…and I would have carried you…"

I felt a rush of lopsided warmth for this person. She was mixed in a funny order and came out a bit lumpy, but I loved her. "I think you have." I was thinking about how she had built a womb of sorts around me, and was now - in a way — delivering me — and as I was fully grown that had to smart a little. "I don't understand much of …anything…but I know you, more than I know anyone —"

"That's my fault!" she said despondently.

" - And I think I can guess how difficult it was for you to care for me, and —"

She stopped and put her hand on my shoulder. "I can't imagine it being difficult for anyone to care for you, D," she said, the baritone somehow a more tender tenor this time. "If I were any better at anything, you'd have at least been able to remember a friend or two." She began walking again, veering off the path towards a vacant lot. "You did have them; it was just so difficult for you to keep them when you couldn't— …when I had to keep you from remembering."

I sighed as we stopped at the edge of the lot. "Well, how can I miss what I can't remember?"

She was shaking her head very slowly. I thought she was denying what I was saying for a moment, but then I noticed her eyes darting left and right. They were narrowed, giving her a sort of cartoonish shifty appearance. This went on, inexplicable but riveting, for at least a minute, accompanied by a few elaborate sequences of backing up, walking briskly for a few steps and then jerking her head around. Finally a look of recognition appeared on her face and she grabbed a fistful of my jacket, pulling me forward towards the lot. I was going to ask her about it, really, but the words "bloody vacant lot" in my head were replaced abruptly by "bloody big house". I stumbled through a gate that hadn't been there before, under a trellis covered with vines, and stood looking at the house silently for a moment.

Then I turned to Arthur and asked "What was all of that…?' I gestured with my hands. "Did you just…make this place or something?"

"No, of course not," she said. "I just didn't want to walk into the fence. Nettles." She was standing next to a bell hanging on a cast-iron thing that holds bells (apparently, anyway I had no name for it in memory) and she seemed to brace herself before giving the cord a few vigorous shakes and looking towards the front door.

After a few moments the door opened. A familiar-looking man stood there, which is a lot to say for me as I was finding my own reflection in a mirror at that time to be only hauntingly familiar.

After a pause, he said to Arthur, "You're wearing a dress."

Arthur was quiet.

"Lilac is really your color."

The man smiled a little. I knew that smile. That one thing, I knew.

It was mine.

"You and your friend," he said, not yet looking at me, "have come at a bit of a funny time."

She found her voice. "You…I'm just going to say it."

"Say what, Arthur?"

"You have a son." It was one of those moments where I expected the words to echo, and the world to stop, and —

"Not yet," he said, grinning. "And how did you know? We haven't told anyone yet."

"What — what on Earth are you talking about?"

I was thinking, "She never actually says that to me."

"She just went into labor," he said. "I mean, not ten minutes ago. I thought you were the midwife." From inside the house there came a moan and a clear feminine voice. "Is that the blessed midwife or are we going to stick our heads in the blessed fire and drag her blessed self here by force?"

The man tried to suppress his grin, but failed. "She made me a promise that this time she was not going to curse, and bless her, she's trying."

Arthur had the look of someone whose grand entrance had been spoiled by the dog doing something unspeakable with a throw pillow. In circumstances like this, if there ever had been any, she seemed to be served well by her impatience with the world — it allowed her to cut through a lot of nonsense and get right to the point. Or her point, anyway.

"Your son. Is. Here." She glared at him to add weight to her words.

"Not. Just. Yet," he replied, clearly a little at sea. "Why are we talking like film trailers?"

"Film…" She looked apoplectic. "Bloody hell, man, look at him!"

For the first time, he really looked at me. His eyes seemed to focus on mine, and then a curious train of expressions crossed his face, of bemusement to bewilderment to a moment I felt like a sharp pain as he saw something he knew but could not believe. His gaze wandered somewhere over my eyes and back down over my face.

I wanted to say something, like "I'm Deasil, that means a little move to the right, and who are you?" That somehow didn't make it out. I couldn't say "I missed you," for obvious reasons.

I settled on, "I'm okay."

He reached out and brushed my hair from my forehead, a strange thing for a grown man to do to another grown man, and said softly, "Well, if that weren't enough, you certainly have her eyes."