“That’s a different story altogether. One I don’t much like to recall. It started back on the Longest, and I don’t particularly . . .”
“Wow, the Longest!”
Mermaid tugs at my shirt imploringly.
“Please tell me, please? The Longest—that’s so exciting! All those tales . . .”
“That you’ve heard a thousand times already. Ask Tabaqui. He’ll read you the two-hundred-line poem he composed in honor of that night. And sing you any of the ten songs on the subject. Ginger was with us that night too. Let her tell you all about it. Why should I repeat something that you know by heart? That everybody knows?”
“Ginger is Ginger, and you are you. I’m not asking you for a retelling of Tabaqui’s songs and poems. But if you’re so uncomfortable with this, don’t say anything at all, of course. I just don’t understand. They all like to remember that night . . .”
“Ginger included?” I say, sure of the answer.
“No, not her. She cringes and changes the subject. Like you.”
“All right. Come up here. Listen, and maybe you’ll understand why it is that I don’t like to recall that night when everyone else does.”
Mermaid quickly clambers up on the bench and makes herself comfortable against my side. Her long, loose vest is crocheted so that the rows of fluffy knots running across the whole width of it can move freely, with the openings then exposing any writings on the shirt underneath that Mermaid feels like sharing with the world. She has more than a dozen different shirts with scribbles on them, fit for any occasion. When she sits the way she does now the only message that’s visible is on her left shoulder:
She wraps the stained sleeve of my sweater around her neck and hangs her tiny backpack on the back of the bench.
“Now you may begin.”
I sigh and dive into the vortex of blood that is the Longest, into its impenetrable darkness, the stuff of House legends. I dive in and swim through its muck and gore, invariably the favorite subject of those legends.
I begin where the Longest began for me. Anticipating the gasps from the audience along the lines of “Are you saying that you were simply asleep before that?” I even pause dutifully to give Mermaid the necessary space for expressing her indignation, but she does not avail herself of it, and so I stumble forward—after Humpback, who is lighting my way as we search for Tubby.
Truly “The Hunting of the Snark” has nothing on “The Hunting of Tubbs,” especially the way Jackal performs it. “Tenderly passionate lover, lover who conquers darkness, scratching through walls of stone, gnawing through doors of iron . . .” And so on, in the same breathless key. With slight variations, where, on the narrator’s whim, Tubby morphs from a tender lover into a libidinous maniac and back, while the finding of him by Sphinx, “he who at length discovered,” changes by degrees from one stanza to the next so that I perform progressively impressive feats, ranging from digging Tubby out from an avalanche of bricks, the remains of the wall he destroyed (listening to this version I picture myself as a huge shaggy Saint Bernard, complete with the Red Cross bag across my chest), to extracting him (using my teeth) from the boudoir of the innocently sleeping stark-naked tutoress. My teeth generally play a decisive part in the proceedings while Humpback’s participation is mostly glossed over, so it is I, with Tubby hanging down from my jaws, who crosses the interminable hallways, somehow capable at the same time of holding an extended conversation with him, chiding him gently while he whines contritely. The reality is so colorless and dull, so paltry compared to that elaborate nightmare, that I race through it in double time, through my entire stumbling night journey, up the stairs with Humpback, down the same stairs with him and Tubby . . . Noble, Vulture, Blind . . . And here we are, back in the dorm, where Tabaqui is already rehearsing the early drafts of the tales and songs he is going to dedicate to this L. N.
