The Talisman

“If I can.” He stood up.

“If you can. Of course. Forgive me.” She looked down at nothing, and he saw that her eyes were unfocused. Red dots burned in the middle of her cheeks.

Jack leaned over and kissed her, but she just waved him away. The waitress stared at the two of them as if they were performing a play. Despite what his mother had just said, Jack thought that he had brought the level of her disbelief down to something like fifty percent; which meant that she no longer knew what to believe.

She focused on him for a moment, and he saw that hectic brightness blazing in her eyes again. Anger; tears? “Take care,” she said, and signalled the waitress.

“I love you,” Jack said.

“Never get off on a line like that.” Now she was almost smiling. “Get travelling, Jack. Get going before I realize how crazy this is.”

“I’m gone,” he said, and turned away and marched out of the restaurant. His head felt tight, as if the bones in his skull had just grown too large for their covering of flesh. The empty yellow sunlight attacked his eyes. Jack heard the door of the Arcadia Tea and Jam Shoppe banging shut an instant after the little bell had sounded. He blinked; ran across Boardwalk Avenue without looking for cars. When he reached the pavement on the other side, he realized that he would have to go back to their suite for some clothes. His mother had still not emerged from the tea shop by the time Jack was pulling open the hotel’s great front door.

The desk clerk stepped backward and sullenly stared. Jack felt some sort of emotion steaming off the man, but for a second could not remember why the clerk should react so strongly to the sight of him. The conversation with his mother—actually much shorter than he had imagined it would be—seemed to have lasted for days. On the other side of the vast gulf of time he’d spent in the Tea and Jam Shoppe, he had called the clerk a creep. Should he apologize? He no longer actually remembered what had caused him to flare up at the clerk. . . .

His mother had agreed to his going—she had given him permission to take his journey, and as he walked through the crossfire of the deskman’s glare he finally understood why. He had not mentioned the Talisman, not explicitly, but even if he had—if he had spoken of the most lunatic aspect of his mission—she would have accepted that too. And if he’d said that he was going to bring back a foot-long butterfly and roast it in the oven, she’d have agreed to eat roast butterfly. It would have been an ironic, but a real, agreement. In part this showed the depth of her fear, that she would grasp at such straws.

But she would grasp because at some level she knew that these were bricks, not straws. His mother had given him permission to go because somewhere inside her she, too, knew about the Territories.

Did she ever wake up in the night with that name, Laura DeLoessian, sounding in her mind?

Up in 407 and 408, he tossed clothes into his knapsack almost randomly: if his fingers found it in a drawer and it was not too large, in it went. Shirts, socks, a sweater, Jockey shorts. Jack tightly rolled up a pair of tan jeans and forced them in, too; then he realized that the pack had become uncomfortably heavy, and pulled out most of the shirts and socks. The sweater, too, came out. At the last minute he remembered his toothbrush. Then he slid the straps over his shoulders and felt the pull of the weight on his back—not too heavy. He could walk all day, carrying only these few pounds. Jack simply stood quiet in the suite’s living room a moment, feeling—unexpectedly powerfully—the absence of any person or thing to whom he could say goodbye. His mother would not return to the suite until she could be sure he was gone: if she saw him now, she’d order him to stay. He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly. In the end he went to the telephone pad printed with a drawing of the hotel on eggshell-thin paper, and with the Alhambra’s blunt narrow pencil wrote the three lines that were most of what he had to say:

Thanks

I love you

and will be back

4

Jack moved down Boardwalk Avenue in the thin northern sun, wondering where he should . . . flip. That was the word for it. And should he see Speedy once more before he “flipped” into the Territories? He almost had to talk to Speedy once more, because he knew so little about where he was going, whom he might meet, what he was looking for. . . . she look just like a crystal ball. Was that all the instruction Speedy intended to give him about the Talisman? That, and the warning not to drop it? Jack felt almost sick with lack of preparation—as if he had to take a final exam in a course he’d never attended.

He also felt that he could flip right where he stood, he was that impatient to begin, to get started, to move. He had to be in the Territories again, he suddenly understood; in the welter of his emotions and longings, that thread brightly shone. He wanted to breathe that air; he hungered for it. The Territories, the long plains and ranges of low mountains, called him, the fields of tall grass and the streams that flashed through them. Jack’s entire body yearned for that landscape. And he might have taken the bottle out of his pocket and forced a mouthful of the awful juice down his throat on the spot if he had not just then seen the bottle’s former owner tucked up against a tree, butt on heels and hands laced across his knees. A brown grocery bag lay beside him, and atop the bag was an enormous sandwich of what looked like liver sausage and onion.

“You’re movin now,” Speedy said, smiling up at him. “You’re on your way, I see. Say your goodbyes? Your momma know you won’t be home for a while?”

Jack nodded, and Speedy held up the sandwich. “You hungry? This one, it’s too much for me.”

“I had something to eat,” the boy said. “I’m glad I can say goodbye to you.”

“Ole Jack on fire, he rarin to go,” Speedy said, cocking his long head sideways. “Boy gonna move.”

“Speedy?”

“But don’t take off without a few little things I brought for you. I got em here in this bag, you wanna see?”

“Speedy?”

The man squinted up at Jack from the base of the tree.

“Did you know that my father used to call me Travelling Jack?”

“Oh, I probably heard that somewhere,” Speedy said, grinning at him. “Come over here and see what I brought you. Plus, I have to tell you where to go first, don’t I?”