December 12

December twelfth started out sunny and muggy, just like most days in Hong Kong.  It was starting to get a little bit cooler – a sign that their short winter season was approaching.  Seven more school days until Christmas break.  Ten days, if you counted the weekend, and Pete sort of had to count the weekend, because his family wouldn’t be flying out until Sunday night.  Pete was looking forward to Christmas at his grandparents’ house in Oregon, with snow, and a Christmas tree.

Going downstairs, he found his mom at the computer again.  He asked if there was any news on Uncle Duane’s stench.

“Well, he describes it more clearly.  He says it smells like rotting flesh, and like blood, with a hint of saltiness – like pickles maybe.”

“That’s disgusting.  Has he been watching too much late night TV?”

“I don’t think he’s hallucinating zombies, if that’s what you mean.”

Pete grinned at the idea of an army of the undead, wrapped in rotting bandages, arms held out in front of them at ninety-degree angles, converging on his Uncle Duane.  Would Uncle Duane be frightened, or intrigued?  He would probably try to serve them tea and cookies.  It was a funny image.  He would like to be there to hear the conversation.  He decided to have some fun with his mom.

“He’s not hallucinating them?  You mean you think they’re really there?  The undead are going to rise up out of the earth?”  Pete stumbled around the room stiff-legged with his arms out in front of him chanting, “I will eat your brain” in a low rumble.

Joey ran downstairs, and clung to his mother, whimpering, “I’m scared, I’m scared.  Make him stop.”

Pete pivoted on one heel, and turned towards Joey, his “spooky” voice taking on a slight European accent for no reason he could figure out, but he went with it.  “Give me your brain to eat.  Juicy, juicy brain.  I will strain the slimy tendrils through my undead teeth.  I will roll the juicy, juicy grey matter on my decomposing tongue.”

Joey shrieked, and retreated under the computer desk, still clinging to his mother’s knees.

“Peter.”   It was his mother’s warning voice. 

Pete immediately dropped his arms, and his phony accent.  “Jeez, get a grip, I was just kidding.  It’s not like you were using your brain anyway.  A zombie might as well eat it.”

Joey crawled out from under the desk, but wouldn’t go into the kitchen until his mom walked with him past Pete.  Pete shoved him as they walked by.  Shoved him hard.  “Way to kill a good time, dude.”

Joey started crying, and Pete was sent to his room.  He stomped up the stairs.  There they went, taking Joey’s side again.  The kid got away with everything, and now Pete wasn’t going to get breakfast.  It figured.  It just figured.

By the time Pete got out of the house, Brittany had already left the bench.  He had to run all the way up the stairs so that he wouldn’t be late for school. 

She was, however, waiting for him on his way home.  She hadn’t opened the notebook yet.  She was waiting for him, which he thought was really nice.

They counted “One, two, three,” and they opened it together.  Today, Pete read aloud.

December 12, 2004

A snowy owl hooted in the distance.  He is not in the story right now.  But, the mice, pigs, deer, and wiener dogs are.  They are trying to save Christmas in two universes, from the clutches of an evil raven.

"Why does that raven want to undermine Christmas?" pondered Fred.  "Why has that water grounded Blitzen and the others, yet made Fawn able to fly, but not me?  Hmm.  Say--Chloe, would you be willing to take a sip of that water?"

"Well, I don't know.  Dear me, well, I guess so.  Can't hurt.  Okay."  Chloe took a cautious sip of the trough water.

"Well, can you fly?" asked Akelmeyer.

"Fly, fly fly.  Reindeers fly!”

"She not a reindeer.  Squeak, squeak."

"Just a regular deer.  Ground deer."

“Eeek!  Is she flying?  Is it magic?"

"I do feel rather light.  Oh, dear.  Oh, oh my, oh yes, look at me.  Oh, I'm flying!  Oh, oh, oh!"  Chloe did not take to flying with the same aplomb as her daughter, but she did seem rather pleased with herself.

"Yes.  And you have never flown before, correct?"  Fred was excited.

"No, never!" answered Chloe.

"Hey, c'mon Mom, let's go play sky-tag like the reindeer do--uh, I mean, you know, like they used to do, before..."

"Oh, dear.  I don't think so, dear."

Fred addressed Akelmeyer.  "Akey, drink some of this water.  It won't hurt you.  And, I'll bet it won't make you fly, either." 

"I don't know, Fred.  I'm not too thirsty."

"I'll try some," said Martin.  "You think this drink will make me an airborne pig?" 

"Go ahead Martin, it won't do a thing to you either, I believe.  I think it only affects those actually from this--this universe," said Fred.

"Well, then, why can't I fly?" asked Dasher.  And then, to Blitzen, "Who are these dogs?"

"We are the Three Wiener Dogs Gruff," said Fred, who had heard the question, "and this is Martin the Pig.  Chloe and Fawn summoned us from another universe, to help save your Christmas--and ours.  That would have sounded ridiculous to me two days ago, but I think you might have an easier time believing it in a place like this, where reindeer really do fly, and Ravens appear and disappear.

"And, as to why you can't fly, I think the magic in the water reverses natural abilities.  You could fly, so now you cannot, whereas Fawn and Chloe could not fly, so now they can."

"I think you are right about this," said Martin, slightly out of breath after drinking water and jumping up and down for about thirty seconds.

TO BE CONTINUED...

            “I looked up The Raven,” said Brittany.  “It’s a poem, by Edgar Allan Poe.”

         “Yeah, we had to read it in English.  I don’t remember it much, though.  Just this raven, saying, Nevermore, Nevermore.  I think the guy was crazy.”

         “Listen to this,” she read aloud in a solid, confident voice.  She made the poem sound a lot better than it had sounded in Pete’s head when he had studied it in school, and a lot better than it had sounded when his classmates had stumbled through reading it aloud in class.  He had found it complicated, and boring then.  Now it conjured up dark images that made him shiver.  He decided that she must have practiced. 

“here I opened wide the door; -

Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;” 

She looked up at him, clearly expecting a reaction.

         He just looked at her.

         “Isn’t that great?  That image of the deep darkness, and he’s looking, and looking, and afraid, but he’s still dreaming that he might find something there, but he’s afraid of what it might be – but it might be his lost love, Lenore, right?  So he’s going to keep looking.”

         Pete sat looking at her.

         She kept trying to explain.  “Keep looking into the darkness.  Darkness that might be dangerous.”

         “Sure,” Pete answered. “Nice image.  I’d kinda like to draw it, if I could figure out how to draw darkness.”

         “Isn’t it kind of like what we’re doing?”  Brittany asked.  “We’ve got this dark, dazzling mystery.”

         “How do you know it’s dark?”

         “Well isn’t everything dark, until you can explain it?  Until you see it in the light?”

         “I don’t know about that, but go on.”

         “Well, then he opens the door, and the raven comes in.  The raven sits there on this statue, and keeps saying nevermore until the narrator is lying there dead on the floor, or maybe he’s still alive, but the raven has his soul, because the last lines go:

And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted - nevermore!”

         “So the Raven is evil.”  Pete concluded.

         “Well, yeah.”

         “Why would he want the guy’s soul?”  Evil had never really made sense to Pete.

         “It’s really creepy, isn’t it?”  Brittany’s eyes were wide.

         “But didn’t we know the raven in the story was evil before you read the poem?  I mean, wasn’t it obvious?  I mean, he said he was going to do away with Christmas.  No more elves making toys.  How evil can you get?”

         Brittany looked at Pete for a moment before replying, incredulity visible in her tilted lip, and puckered brow, “I think you’re suffering from a lack of imagination.”

         “What do you mean?”

         Her response was slow and measured, as if she was considering every word.  “No more new toys?  I don’t think you have any real idea how evil things can get.”

         “What do you mean?”

         “You don’t need creepy ravens from other worlds.  It’s right here, if you bother to look.  World War Two?  Concentration camps?  And it would have been one thing if that had really been the end of it.  If mankind had really learned, but then there was the whole war in Yugoslavia, and then the Iraqis trying to exterminate the Kurds, and then September 11; it just doesn’t stop.”

         “Whoa.”  Pete tried to inject a note of levity into the conversation.  “Have you been listening in social studies again?” 

         “Don’t you listen?”  Brittany’s response was frustrated, and accusatory.  She wasn’t going for the levity diversion.

         Pete abandoned levity, and strove for soothing calm.  “Well maybe a little, but you get nothing but grief if you take it too personally.”

        

         “How do you get all those straight A’s if you don’t really listen?”

         “Well, you gotta remember it for the test, but you can’t think too much about it.  It’s not healthy.”

         “You’re not healthy.”  And Brittany stormed off.  She understood that a sense of cool detachment was a sign of, or maybe a path to, mental well-being, but there was such a thing as being too laid back.  Pete, as far as she was concerned, was just all-together too laid back.  

         She didn’t care any more.  She didn’t care what he thought of her.  She didn’t care if she seemed too young, or too serious, or too intense, or whatever it was that George and his friends didn’t like about her.  Here she was, doing her best to stop dwelling on her nightmares the cosmic implications of the tear in the universe.  Darn it if she was going to go from worrying about being responsible for the destruction of everything she knew and loved, to worrying about what people thought of her.  She was sick and tired of worrying about the opinion of people like her brother, and his stupid friends – people who skimmed through life, and didn’t really experience any of it – people who cared more about getting good grades, and about what other people thought of them, than about actually living life – actually learning about the world around them, and actually living in that world.  Living!  Not just existing!

         Who cared what Peter Meren thought of her?  Who cared if he never showed her another wiener dog installment?  Who cared if she wasn’t part of it any more?  She could find other things to occupy herself.  She had friends.  She had a life.  She had been perfectly happy before the wiener dogs.  That had only been twelve days ago, after all.  And who’s to say that the story would keep coming to Pete and not to her, anyway?  She was the one who cared about it.  She was the one who bothered to go to the Internet and look up the references.  She was the one who was doing something with it, like Mr. McAllister said.

But she could find other things to occupy herself with, even if they had nothing to do with mystery and adventure.  Even if they weren’t cosmic.  Who said something had to be cosmic in order to be important?  If she could just make somebody happy, wouldn’t that have cosmic implications too? 

         She slammed the door to her flat, threw her backpack across the living room, and stomped up the steps, clattering into her bedroom, and slamming the door behind her.  That’s what she needed.  Nice, loud, decisive noises.  She was sick and tired of tiptoeing around, trying not to upset Peter Meren’s delicate sensibilities.  Tired of trying to act mature and sensible.  Twelve days of that was twelve days too many.  She wanted to run around in circles, waving her hands in the air, yelling and singing at the top of her lungs, but that would be more fun out on the sports field where there was plenty of room, and plenty of people to scandalize.  Instead, she opened her bedroom door again, and slammed it one more time.  It felt good.  She picked up a pile of books from her shelf, and dropped them on the floor.  The thud they made was satisfying, but loud noises were getting old.  Nobody was coming to ask what was going on, so her family must still be at school.

         She circled her room, wildly looking for something to do.  Something practical.  Something that would have immediate results.  Not something boring, like cleaning, or practicing the piano.  She wanted something more dramatic than that. 

She didn’t have any homework.  She envied Pete and George a little.  They always had homework to do, and it always looked interesting.   To Brittany’s eyes, the ninth grade geometry book was full of interesting puzzles to solve, and the history and science texts were full of stories, and explanations about the world.  She had textbooks too, and she wasn’t exactly complaining about them, it’s just that she wanted to be studying something worth thinking about.  Something to keep her mind occupied, even after she left the school building.  Something difficult and important enough to require actual thought after school hours.

         Yes, she had studied ancient Rome in social studies.  She could explain what the houses and aqueducts looked like, because she had made models of them.  She knew how people chose names for their children, because she had written a story about it.  She knew where the Roman colonies were, and what goods Rome imported from each one, and why rivers mattered, and what people ate for dinner, and why Rome fell, but who really cared? 

         OK, so now she knew why lead paint was a bad idea, which was why all the adults here so adamantly told the kids not to lick the walls, because safety standards weren’t as high in Hong Kong as they were back home, but that wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering concept.  It was all really interesting, but what did any of it have to do with anything?  What was the point?  Nobody really wanted to lick the walls, anyway.

         And then she thought again; she knew what ancient Romans ate for dinner, but could she cook it?  Could she make a Roman dinner that her family would actually eat?  Cooking an exotic dinner would be practical, decisive, and it would make people happy.  And it would be fun.  She ran downstairs to the living room computer and Googled: “Roman food ancient recipes.”

         Yep.   There they were.  She was distracted for a minute by a description of a trip somebody had taken, walking along Hadrian’s wall in Great Britain, but then she found it:  recipes from an actual Roman cookbook.

         She wanted to cook right now, before her mother got home and started making something else for dinner.  That meant she couldn’t go to the store, so it probably ruled out things like soufflé of small fishes, or whole chicken with liquid filling.  She ran to the refrigerator to see what kind of meat, vegetables and fruit they actually had.  She found ground beef, and green beans.  Perfect!  That meant it was a go on Roman burgers, and Fabacia Virides, which the recipe said meant green beans.  The only fruit she found were lychees, and little tiny limes, which their maid must have found a sale on, because the vegetable crisper was full of them.  That’s OK.  She could make Libum for desert.  Libum, she had learned on the Internet, was a sacrificial cake sometimes offered to household spirits during Rome’s early history.  She wondered if it was meant to be eaten by people too, or just spirits.  She wondered if the wiener dogs would count as spirits, because they came from another universe.  The fox had recognized immediately that they were in the wrong place.  Was that because they looked different?  Were they, like, transparent, or did they maybe glow or something?  But she wasn’t going to think about the wiener dogs right now.  She was going to cook dinner.

         When George got home, the counter was covered with ground beef, coriander leaves, and green beans, and Brittany was happily soaking torn up bread in white wine, and wondering if green peppercorns were the same as regular peppercorns, because all they had were regular peppercorns.  Not that George even noticed.  He just dragged himself up the stairs to his room without even glancing into the kitchen.

         When her mom got home, Brittany was boiling wine mixed with grape juice, for the Roman burgers.  The recipe said that you could use either one – wine or grape juice – as long as you boiled it long enough so that when you were finished there was only half as much left as you had started with.  Unfortunately, it didn’t say exactly how much to start with.  It just said “some.”  She hadn’t wanted to use up all of either the wine, or the grape juice, and both were dangerously low, especially after she had used a bowlful of wine for soaking the French bread, which went into the burgers too.  Her mom asked her what the smell was, and seemed interested when she said she was cooking a Roman dinner. 

Her mom stayed to help chop the beans, but fled when she saw that her daughter planned to crush two pounds of cheddar cheese with a mortar, and bake it slowly in a hot oven, with a brick.  She tried to convince Brittany that the recipe probably wanted a softer cheese, and that their marble mortar and pestle set was meant to be ornamental, but Brittany didn’t know why you couldn’t use marble to crush things.  It was certainly hard enough.  Obviously they didn’t have any bricks to put in the oven.  That was probably meant for the kind of ovens they had used in ancient Roman times anyway, when they had used fire, not electricity, and why did adults always have to come around interfering?  She would do it her way, using the cheese she wanted to use, and she would try it without the brick, and she would see what happened.

         Pete’s little brother, Joey wandered in, to find her gazing in dismay at piles of chopped beans, chopped cilantro, chopped leeks, grated cheese, ground beef, and torn up, wine soaked bread.  Joey wasn’t usually in the habit of wandering into neighbor’s houses, but he explained himself by announcing that he was too scared to go home.

         “Scared of what?”  Brittany asked.

         “Zombies.”

         Oh, of course.  Zombies.  Brittany sighed.  “Maybe they came through the hole in the fabric of the universe.”

         “Yeah!”  Joey climbed up on the counter next to the cheese, knocking some of it onto the floor.  Here was someone who understood him!  “I like to cook.”

         Brittany decided he mustn’t be too serious about the zombies, if he was going to forget about them so quickly, so she didn’t offer to go check the house for him.  If any zombies had come into the Meren’s house through the hole in the fabric of the universe, Pete could deal with them without her.  It would serve him right.

         Brittany decided that Joey could provide some moral support, even if he was too little to be a real help.  She had prepared everything the way it said to in the ingredient list, but now there were an awful lot of ingredients spread out all over the counter, and a little bit on the floor, waiting to be put together.

         “Can I lick the bowl?” Joey asked.

         Brittany surveyed the piles of chopped up ingredients, and bottles of wine, vinegar, and spices.  “It doesn’t look too promising for bowl licking.”

         “That’s OK.  What do we do first?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “What do you mean?”

         Brittany didn’t know what to do next.  She had chopped.  She had soaked.  She had grated.  Now she had to figure out how to cook it all to get it to come out at the same time.

         “It’s like the puzzles we do in Math Lab!”  Joey announced.  “Lay it on me!”

         Going back over the recipes, they ascertained that the cheese-bread-for-the-spirits needed to cook the longest, and even after it was cooked, it wanted to soak in honey for half an hour.  

They put the flour, the grated cheese, and the egg in the big Pyrex bowl.  They mixed, and mixed but the ingredients just refused to hold together.  They put a handful in the mortar, and pounded with the pestle.  It would have made Brittany feel very authentic, if it had resulted in something resembling dough, but the flour and the cheese stayed dry and dusty, and refused to combine into neat bun-shaped mounds.  Meanwhile, the minute hand on the clock was moving relentlessly toward dinnertime, and nothing else was even started.  


Brittany was nearly ready to throw the whole dry, uncooperative mess into the trash, when Joey suggested that she add some softer cheese to it.  Something that would “soak up the flour.”  That seemed reasonable, so Brittany threw in some cream cheese and they went back to taking turns hammering at the concoction in the mortar and pestle.  She decided that Roman women must have had seriously developed arm muscles, and that the pestle was probably meant for herbs, not dough, because only a little would fit into it at a time, but they pulverized the flour and cheese in small batches, and a remarkable amount of it actually made it into the oven. 

Surveying what was left on the counter, and floor, they decided to clean later, when they could do it all at once, because they couldn’t expect all those vegetables, and that pile of ground beef to stay contained in bowls, and cooking pots any better than the cheese and flour had.  No point in cleaning up more than once.

The recipe said that they should mix up the meat with the wine-soaked bread, the peppercorns, and the pine nuts, and then wrap them in tin foil, and grill them.

         “What does it mean, grill them?”  Brittany asked.

         “My grandpa barbeques on a grill on the patio back in Oregon,” was Joey’s solution.

         “Well we can’t take these to Oregon.”

         “No, I guess not.”

         “And we don’t have a barbeque grill here.”

         “We don’t even have a Christmas tree here.”

        

         Brittany did a double take.  Was he being frivolously irrelevant, or freakishly profound?  He was right; neither family had a Christmas tree.  They never had a Christmas tree in Hong Kong because real Christmas trees were ridiculously expensive, because they had to be imported, and there was no point anyway, because neither family stayed in Hong Kong for Christmas.  And there was nothing unusual about Joey thinking about Christmas.  It was December 12, after all.  Twelve shopping days left, like the commercials said.  But was he implying that trying to re-create an ancient Roman dinner in twenty-first century Hong Kong was just as silly as trying to re-create an Oregon Christmas on a subtropical island?  Or was it more profound yet?  Was he saying that Christmas wasn’t coming at all?  She decided to concentrate on making dinner.  If she started thinking about Christmas, she would go back to thinking about how mad she was at Joey’s brother, and about the evil raven.

         In the end, they decided to wrap the patties in tin foil, and grill them on the electric sandwich-making machine, which worked, except that they came out with diagonal lines where a sandwich would have wanted slicing.  Also, a lot of grease escaped from the tin foil, and dripped out onto the counter as the patties cooked.  In the end, Brittany set Joey to wiping up the grease as it dripped, while she sautéed the vegetables in wine, and various other spices.  Joey commented that what with the wine-soaked bread, and the boiled wine in the meat, and the wine in the vegetables, that her family was going to be drunk when they finally ate it.  Trying to sound confident, she assured him that cooking the wine would render it harmless.  She certainly hoped it would render it harmless.  After pouring a quarter of a cup of honey on each of the cheese rolls, and arranging the food attractively on the rosewood dinner table, that her family had bought at the same time that the Merens had bought their rosewood dinner table where she had read the wiener dog story for the first time, Brittany called her family, and asked Joey if he wanted to stay for dinner.  Joey bolted out the front door, saying no way was he going to eat that stuff – calling out to her mom and dad that there were corns of pepper in the meat, and alcohol in everything, and that the bread was covered in something that had been touched by bees.  Brittany shrugged, and closed the door to the kitchen, so that her parents wouldn’t notice the state of the floor, and counters (and walls, now that she was looking closely) until after they had eaten her masterpiece.

*   *   *

At his own dinner table, eating plain noodles with butter, Joey announced that he had won the prize for integrity at his school’s monthly awards ceremony.  “And what does ‘integrity’ mean?” his dad asked.

Joey had an answer right away.  “Integrity is when you do the right thing, even when nobody’s watching.”

“If nobody was watching, how did they know you earned the prize?”  Pete asked.

Joey looked perplexed.  He turned his head from side to side in sharp, jerky movements, and replied in a mechanical voice.  “Does not compute.  Does not compute.  Logic circuits breaking down.  Must explode.”

Everyone laughed. 

“Anyway, it’s easy to do the right thing when nobody’s watching,” Pete said.  “The trick is to do the right thing, even though everybody’s looking at you.”  He was thinking about how hard it was to be nice to Brittany when people were around, and she was acting so weird.  He knew he should be nice to her, but it was so hard.

*   *   *

So many dreams.  So many plans.  Adventures.  Memories.  I wanted to dress us all – you, me and the boy – I wanted to dress us all in puffy sleeves, and boots, with sashes at our waists.   Pirate clothes for treasure hunting.  I made a map.  This many paces north.  This many paces west.  Find the gnarled tree.  But you were worried.  Worried about what people might think.

From the beginning I made other maps.  Maps in my heart.  Tracings of where the love would lead us.  

In the beginning you gave no indication.  No hint.  Not the simplest suggestion -- 

Love.  It filled me.  You were to be my home. 

But what if love is an inaccessible dream, existing only in the minds of poor simpletons like me?  A dream to mitigate the brutal incontestable fact that life is dull, unrelieved monotony?  We plod, and struggle towards a home that will never fulfill its promise. 

You were to be my home.

And the boy is no better than you are.  No saving grace, after all.  All he wants to do is build towers and knock them down.  Or climb to the top of things and hang from them.  The extent of his creativity manifests itself in the quest for new and more dangerous ways to climb on the playground equipment. 

He is his father’s son.  Build the two of you a life-sized teepee of fallen sticks, and first you refuse to join me inside for fear of spiders, then you join forces to break it apart until it’s nothing more than a useless, meaningless pile.

It’s getting very long, this letter.  So much to say.  So much built up inside of me.  Have I tried to say it before?  Perhaps.  Have you tried to listen?

And you were to be my home.

I can no longer endure the pointlessness of this life.