grew larger, kept growing. She said, “It’s not what you know about women. It’s the women you know.”
Quentin glanced at me. “You know why I did that, now?”
I said quietly, “I have a guess.”
He nodded, turned away from me, and said, “Let’s begin.”
The hand by which he held her he now raised to help her mount up to the stone. The dream had said she must stand upon it.
Vanity stood there, her black patent leather shoes turned ever so slightly inward toward each other, her hands toying with the pleats in her plaid skirt, her shoulders half raised in a shrug, her head half lowered in a blush. Even though Quentin was now standing below her, she seemed to want to look up at him, through the tops of her lashes.
2.
My guess was this: He wanted this to be his first kiss. At the moment, it was. If the experiment worked, and he got his memory back, this memory would still contain, nevertheless, in all innocence and all solemnity, love’s first kiss.
And then I had a bad thought. What if Nausicaa was already in love with someone else? Someone whom Vanity did not remember? Homer made her out to be pretty sweet on Odysseus, as I recall.
I had been assuming the spell, if it worked, was meant for Quentin. It had come in the middle of a dream about Quentin. But what if it worked on all of us?
And what about me? What if Phaethusa was, I don’t know, a murderess or an adulteress or an environmentalist or something? Someone who couldn’t do math, or who liked Tony Blair?
Did I want to be an adult, suddenly?
I did not think too highly of adults, not the ones I had met so far in my life. They seemed like the Upside- Down Folk to me, worrying about everything trivial and blithely ignoring everything great and fine and true in life.
I thought about what Victor would say about my doubts. First, he would look skeptical, and then his skepticism would deepen into a sarcastic grimace, and he would ask: “Is this the right thing to do?”
That is what he would have said. “Sorrow is merely an emotion. Pain is merely a stimulation of nerve ends. Neither one has any necessary relationship to what we have to do in order to survive. If our enemies”—and Victor always thought of them as enemies—“if our enemies make it more painful for us to do what we must do, that merely increases the wrong they do us. It doesn’t decrease our obligations. It therefore is irrelevant to our decisions.”
Thank you, Victor.
Aloud, I said, “I’m ready.”
3.
Vanity said, “I’m ready, too. What do we do?”
I said, “What do your instincts tell you?”
“Hmm… Let me think… Avoid falling from heights, dark places, and loud noises. Have babies.”
“I’m serious!” I said.
She looked at me with her wide, wide green eyes. “I am, too. What does ‘listen to your instincts’ mean?”
Quentin said, “The first thing to do in any ritual, is sanctify the area. Either the time, or the place, or the persons must be set aside, held pure, from other influences, chthonic or mundane…”
“What does that mean?” she said.
“Put on a white robe, or something. That way the spirits know you are about to initiate a transformation.”
“I don’t have a white robe.”
“Some witches go sky-clad…”
“What’s that?”
“In the nude.”
“You naughty, naughty boy!”
I said, “Enough banter! Banter fun, ha ha, very funny, you are both cute. Now stop. Quentin, I do not think your magic is her paradigm.”
“What is her paradigm?”
I spread my hands and shrugged. “You heard my theory at breakfast.”
“She interprets everything in terms of herself? Her own awareness? Hmm. I am not sure how one expands one’s awareness. Vanity, maybe you have to sleep, or chew peyote, or something.”
“I’ve drunk champagne. That’s all we have time for,” she said.
I said, “You could always just command the table to open a dimensional gateway to Myriagon. You know, say, ‘Boundary, Open!’ Or, ‘Path to Myriagon, Appear!’ Like that.”
Vanity tried a number of variations on this phrase. She tried singing the command, she tried sounding solemn, she tried asking nicely. She tried at least a dozen different phrases and tones of voice.
We two were getting bored.
Vanity looked up. “I am talking to a rock. Whose idea was this?”
I said, “Maybe if you tried harder; if you really felt, deep down in your soul…”
Quentin said, “No. That is a Colin paradigm. He is the one who thinks everything is done by an inspired effort of will. I do not think any two of us have the same paradigm.”
I spread my hands. “Suggest something.”
He frowned and looked around the room.
I said, “If Colin were here, he would make a suggestion.”
“Colin would suggest tantric magic,” Quentin muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Something sky-clad people do… Hang on.”
Vanity said, “What part of you am I to hang on to, then? If you’re nude?”
I said, “Enough banter! No more banter!”
Quentin was looking at the book cabinet. “What do we know about the Phaeacians? From Homer’s
I looked at him blankly. The only thing I remembered about the
Vanity looked embarrassed. “Gosh, I am supposed to be from there. I don’t remember a thing. Is that the place where they landed in a harbor and sent the messenger, and the messenger got eaten, and all the ships but one were destroyed by these bronze chariots? Nice, peaceful villages filled the valleys, but those people were actually just cattle for the man-eating men, the super warriors, from the hills?”
I said, “There was a Cyclops who ate people, but…”
Quentin was looking back and forth at us. “Uh, no. Vanity is right that there were anthropophages who dressed from head to foot in bronze, and destroyed the ships. They were called the Lystragonians. The Phaeacians were very hospitable. In fact, I always thought one of the points the poet was trying to make was to show the nature of hospitality versus barbarism, and the abuse of hospitality. The suitors of Penelope, for example…”
I said, “Rule number one: No banter. Rule number two: No digressions.”
“Fine. This is what I remember about the Phaeacians. I thought they were supposed to be fairies. Here’s
