THE BOOKCASE EXPEDITION
by Jeffrey Ford
I started seeing them during the winter when I was at death’s door and whacked out on meds. At first I thought they were baby praying mantises that had somehow invaded the house to escape the ice and snow, but they were far smaller than that. Minuscule, really. I was surprised I could see them at all. I could, though, and at times with great clarity, as if through invisible binoculars. Occasionally, I heard their distant cries.
I’m talking about fairies, tiny beings in the forms of men, women, and children. I spotted them, thin as a pin and half as tall, creeping about; running from the cats or carrying back to their homes in the walls sacks full of crumbs gathered from our breakfast plates. Mostly I saw them at night, as I had to sit upright in the corner of the living room couch to sleep in order not to suffocate. While the wind howled outside, the light coming in from the kitchen illuminated a small party of them ascending and descending the dunes and craters of the moonscape that was my blanket. One night they planted a flag—a tattered postage stamp fastened to a cat’s whisker—into my knee as if I was undiscovered country.
The first time I saw one, it was battling—have you ever seen one of those spiders that looks like it’s made of wood? Well, the fairy had a thistle spike and was parrying the picket legs of that arachnid, bravely lunging for its soft underbelly. I took it all in stride, though. I didn’t get excited. I certainly didn’t go and tell Lynn, who would think it nonsense. Let the fairies do their thing, I thought. I had way bigger problems to deal with, like trying to breathe.
I know what you’re thinking. They weren’t a figment of my imagination. For instance, I’d spotted a band of them running along the kitchen counter. They stopped near the edge, where a water glass stood. Together, they pushed against it and toppled it onto the floor. “Ya little bastards,” I yelled. They scattered faint atoms of laughter as they fled. The broken glass went everywhere, and I swept for twenty minutes only to find more. The next day, Lynn got a shard in her foot, and I had to burn the end of a needle and operate.
I didn’t see them constantly. Sometimes a week would go by before I encountered one. They watched us and I was certain they knew what we were about in our thoughts and acts. I’d spotted them—one with a telescope aimed at my nose and the other sitting, making notes in a bound journal—on the darkened porch floor at night when we sat out wrapped in blankets and candlelight, drinking wine and dozing in the moon glow. I wondered, Why now, as I trundle toward old age, am I granted the “sight,” as my grandma Maisie might have called it?
A few days ago I was in my office at the computer, trying to iron out my thinking on a story I’d been writing in which there’s a scene where a guy, for no reason I can recall, just disappears. There’d been nothing strange about this character previously to give any indication that he was simply going to vanish into thin air. I can’t remember what I’d had in mind or why at some point it had made sense to me.
The winter illness had stunned my brain. Made me dim and forgetful. Metaphor, simile, were mere words, and I couldn’t any longer feel the excitement of their effects. A darkness pervaded my chest and head. I leaned back in my chair away from the computer and turned toward the bookcases. I was concentrating hard not to let the fear of failure in when a damn housefly the size of a grocery-store grape buzzed my left temple, and I slapped myself in the face. It came by again and I ducked, reaching for a magazine with which to do my killing.
That was when a contingent of fairies emerged from the dark half-inch of space beneath the middle of the five bookcases that lined the right wall of my office. There was a swarm of them, like ants round a drip of ice cream on a summer sidewalk. At first I thought I wanted to get back to my story, but soon enough I told myself, You know what? Fuck that story. I folded my arms and watched. At first they appeared distant, but I didn’t fret. I was in no hurry. The clear, strong breath of spring had made of the winter a fleeting shadow. I saw out the window—sunlight, blue sky, and a lazy white cloud. The fairies gave three cheers, and I realized something momentous was afoot.
Although I kept my eyes trained on their number, my concentration sharpened and blurred and sharpened again. When my thoughts were away, I have no idea what I was thinking, but when they weren’t, I was thinking that someday soon I was going to go over to the preserve and walk the two-mile circular path through the golden prairie grass. I decided, in that brief span, that it would only be right to take Nellie the dog with me. All this, as I watched the little people, maybe fifty of them, twenty-five on either side, carry out from under the bookcase the ruler I’d been missing for the past year.
They laid the ruler across a paperback copy of Angela Carter’s Burning Your Boats. It had fallen of its own volition from the bottom shelf three days earlier. Sometimes that happens: the books just take a dive. There was a thick anthology of Norse sagas pretty close to it that had been lying there for five months. I made a mental note to, someday soon, rescue the fallen. No time to contemplate it, though, because four fairies broke off from the crowd, climbed atop the Carter collection, and then took a position at the very end of the ruler, facing the bookcase. I leaned forward to get a better look.
The masses moved like water flowing to where the tome of sagas lay. They swept around it, lifting it end over end, and standing it upright, upside down, so that the horns of the Viking helmet pictured on the cover pointed to the center of the earth. The next thing I knew, they were toppling the thick book. It came down with the weight of two dozen Norse sagas right onto the end of the ruler opposite from where the fairies stood. Of course, the four of them were shot into the air, arcing toward the bookcase. They flew, and each gripped in the right hand a rose bush thorn.
I watched them hit the wall of books a shelf and a half up and dig the sharp points of their thorns into dust jackets and spines. One of them made a tear in the red cover of my hardback copy of Black Hole. Once secured, they hitched themselves at the waist with a rope belt to their affixed thorn. I’d not noticed before, but they had bows and arrows, and lengths of thread, no doubt from Lynn’s sewing basket, draped across their chests like bandoliers. I had a sudden memory of The Teenie Weenies, a race of fairies that appeared in the Daily News Sunday comics when I was a kid. I envisioned, for a moment, an old panel from the Weenies in which one was riding a wild turkey with a saddle and reins while the others gathered giant acorns half their size. I came back from that thought just in time to see all four fairies release their arrows into the ceiling of the shelf they were on. I heard the distant, petite impact of each shaft. Then, bows slung over their shoulders, they began to climb, hand over hand, using the book spines in front of them to rappel upward.
Since their purpose seemed to be to ascend, I foresaw trouble ahead for them. The next shelf above, which they’d have to somehow flip up onto, held two rows of books, not one, so there was no clear space for them to land. They’d have to flip up and again dig in with their thorns and attach themselves to the spines of books whose bottoms stuck perilously out over the edge of the shelf. When I considered the agility and strength all this took, I shook my head and put my hand over my heart. I wanted to see them succeed, though, and went off on a trail of musing that pitted the reliability of the impossible against the potential chaos of reality. A point came where I wandered from the path of my thoughts and wound up witnessing the smallest of the fairies nearly plummet to his death. I felt his scream in my liver.
The poor little fellow had lost a hold on his thread line and was hanging out over the abyss, desperately grasping a poorly planted thorn in the spine of Blind Man with a Pistol. His compatriot, who I just then realized was a woman with long dark hair, shot an arrow into the ceiling of the shelf. Once she had that line affixed to her belt, she swung over to her comrade in danger and put her left arm around him. He let go his thorn spike and swung with her. I was so intent upon watching this rescue that I missed but from the very corner of my eye one of the other tiny adventurers fall. His (for I was just then somehow certain it was a he, and his name was Meeshin) minuscule weight dragged the book he’d attached to off the shelf after him. This was the thing about the fairies: if you could see them, the longer you looked, the deeper you knew them; their names, their motivations, their secrets.
I only turned in time to completely see that he’d been crushed by the slim volume of Quiet Days in Clichy. I watched to see if his compatriots from beneath the bookshelf would appear to claim his corpse, but they didn’t. The loneliness of Meeshin’s death affected me more than it should have. It came to me that he was married and had three fairy kids. His art was whittling totem poles full of animals of the imagination out of toothpicks. I’d wondered where all my toothpicks had gone. I pictured his wife, Tibith, in the fairy marketplace telling a friend that all Meeshin’s crazy creatures could be seen, like in a gallery, way in the back of the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. Last I saw him behind my eyes, it was night and he lay quietly in bed, his arms around his wife.
Next I caught up with the climbers, the three had gathered to rest on the top edge of a book back in the second row of that dangerous shelf. I shifted my position in the chair and craned my neck a bit to see that the volume in question was Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, a book I’d never read and one of those strange additions to my library I was unaware of how I’d acquired. My favorite essayist, Alberto Manguel, had said that he’d never enter a library that contained a book by Coelho. I thought that on the off chance he might travel to the drop edge of yonder, Ohio, I should get rid of it.
I knew them all by name now and something about their little lives. The woman with the long dark hair, Aspethia, was the leader of the expedition. I wasn’t sure what the purpose of their journey was, but I knew it had a purpose. It was a mission given to her directly by Magorian, the fairy queen. Her remaining companions were the little fellow she’d rescued, Sopso, and a large fellow, Balthazar, who wore a conical hat with a chin strap like something from a child’s birthday party on his bald head. Aspethia spoke words of encouragement to Sopso, who cowered on his knees for fear of falling. She went into her pack and pulled out another rose thorn for him. “Now, if we don’t hurry, there will be no point in our having come this far,” she said.
The next shelf up they found easy purchase at the front, as there was only one row of books pushed all the way back. It was the shelf with my collection of the Lang Fairy Books, each volume a different color. That they all stood together was the only bit of authentic order in my library. I watched the fairies pass in front of the various colors—red, violet, green, orange . . . and wondered if they knew the books were more than merely giant rocks to be climbed. Did they know these boulders they passed held the ancient stories of their species? I pictured the huge boulder, like the egg of a roc, sitting alone amidst the golden grass over at the preserve and daydreamed about the story it might hatch.
The afternoon pushed on with the slow, steady progress of a fairy climbing thread. They moved up the various shelves of the bookcase, one after the other, with a methodical pace. Even the near falls, the brushes with death, were smooth and timely. There were obstacles, books I’d placed haphazardly atop a row, pretending that I intended to someday reshelve them. When the companions were forced to cross my devil tambourine, which had sat there on the fifth level since two Halloweens previously, it made their teensy steps echo in the caverns of the shelves. The big one, Balthazar, skewered, with a broken broom straw, a silverfish atop one of the Smiley novels, and they lit a fairy fire, which only cooked their meal but didn’t burn, thank God. Those three remaining climbers sat in a circle and ate the cooked insect. While they did, Sopso read from a book so infinitesimally small it barely existed.
I closed my eyes and drifted off into the quiet of the afternoon. The window was open a bit, and a breeze snaked in around me. Moments later I bolted awake, and the first thing I did was search the bookshelf for the expedition. When I found them, a pulse of alarm shot up my back. Balthazar and Aspethia were battling an Oni netsuke come miraculously to life. I’d had the thing for years. Lynn had bought it for me in a store in Chinatown in Philly, across the street from Joe’s Peking Duck House. It was a cheap imitation, made from some kind of resin to look like ivory—a short, stocky demon with a dirty face and horns. He held a mask of his own visage in his right hand and a big bag in his left. He tried to scoop the fairies into it. Sopso was nowhere in sight.
Seeing an inanimate object come to life made me a little dizzy, and I think I was trembling. The demon growled and spat at them. What was more incredible still was the fact that the companions were able to drive the monster to the edge of the shelf. The fighting was fierce, the fairies drawing blood with long daggers fashioned from the ends of brass safety pins. The demon’s size gave it the advantage, and more than once he’d scooped Balthazar and Aspethia up, but they’d managed to wriggle out of the eyeholes of the mask before he could bag them. The little people sang a lilting fairy anthem throughout the battle that I only caught garbled snatches of. They ran as they sang in circles round the giant, poking him in the hairy shins and toes and Achilles tendon with their daggers.
Oni lost his balance and tipped a jot toward the edge. In a blink, Balthazar leaped up, put a foot on the demon’s belly, grabbed its beard in his free hand, pulled himself higher, and plunged the dagger into his enemy’s eye. The demon reeled backward, screaming, turning in circles. Aspethia leaped forward and drove her dagger to the hilt in Oni’s left testicle. That elicited a terrible cry, and then the creature stumbled out into thin air. Balthazar tried to leap off to where Aspethia stood, but Oni grabbed his leg and they went all the way down together. Although the fairy’s neck was broken, his party hat remained undamaged.
Aspethia crawled to the edge of the shelf and peered down the great distance to see the fate of her comrade. If she survived the expedition, she would be the one responsible for telling Balthazar’s wife and children of his death. She sat back away from the edge and took a deep breath. Sopso emerged from a cavern between The Book of Contemplation and Harry Crews’s Childhood. He walked over to where Aspethia knelt and put his hand on her shoulder. She reached up and grabbed it. He helped her to her feet and they made their way uneventfully to the top shelf. As they climbed, I looked back down at the fallen netsuke and saw that it had regained its original form of a lifeless figurine. Had there been a demon in it? How and why had it come to life? The gift of seeing fairies comes wrapped in questions.
On the top shelf, they headed north toward the back wall of the room, passing a foot-high Ghost Rider plastic figure, the marble Ganesh bookends, a small picture frame containing a block of Jason Van Hollander’s Hell Stamps, Flannery O’Connor’s letters, and Our Lady of the Flowers shelved without consciousness of design on my part directly next to Our Lady of Darkness. A copy of the writings of Cotton Mather lay atop the books of that shelf, its upper half forming an overhang beneath which the expedition had to pass. Its cover held a portrait of Mather from his own time and faced down. Eyes peered from above. His brows, his nose, his powdered wig, but not his mouth, bore witness to the fairies passing. For a moment, I was with them in the shadow, staring up at the preacher’s gaze, incredulous as to how the glance of the image was capable of following us.
Eventually, they came to where the last bookcase in the row butts up against the northern wall. Aspethia and Sopso stroked the barrier as if it had some religious significance. She leaned over and put her arm around Sopso’s shoulder, turned him, and pointed out the framed painting hanging on the northern wall about two feet from the bookcase. He saw it and nodded. The painting in question had been given to me by my friend Barney, who’d painted it in his studio at Dividing Creek in South Jersey. It’s a knockoff of a Charles Willson Peale painting of the artist’s sons on a staircase, one peering from around a corner and one ascending. Barney’s version is green, with but one figure—a ghost with the acrimonious face of John Ashcroft, President Bush’s attorney general, looking back over his shoulder while rising.
She shot an arrow into the northern wall just above the middle of where the painting hung. She leaned forward, and Sopso climbed upon her back. With the line from the arrow tight in her hands, she inched toward the edge of the bookcase. She jumped and they swung toward the painting, Sopso screaming, and crashed into the image where Ashcroft’s ascot met his second chin. Once they’d stopped bouncing against the canvas, she told her passenger to tighten his grip. He did, and she began hauling both of them to the top of the picture frame. Her climbing looked like magic.
For some reason, right here, I recalled the strange sound I’d heard behind the garage the last few nights. A wheezing growl that reverberated through the night. I pictured the devil crouching back there in the shadows, but our neighbor told us it was a fox in heat. It sounded like a cry from another world. My interest in it faded, and in a heartbeat my focus was back on the painting. They had achieved the top of the frame and were resting. I wondered where the expedition was headed next. There was another painting on that wall about four feet away from the ghost on the staircase. It was a painting of Garuda by my younger son. The distance between the paintings was vast in fairy feet. I couldn’t believe they would attempt to cross to it. Aspethia showed it no interest, but instead pointed straight up.
She took her bow, nocked an arrow with a thread line in place, and aimed it at the ceiling. My glance followed the path of the potential shot, and only then did I notice that her arrow was aimed precisely into a prodigious spiderweb that stretched from directly above the painting all the way to the corner of the north wall. She released the arrow, and I tried to follow it but caught only a blur. It hit its mark, and that drew my attention to the fact that right next to where it hit, that fly, big as a grape, was trapped in webbing and buzzing to beat the band. I looked along the web to the corner of the ceiling and saw the spider, skinny legs with a fat white pearl of an abdomen. I could see it drooling as it moved forward to finally claim its catch.
It surprised me when, without hesitation, Sopso alone climbed the line toward the ceiling. He shimmied up at a pace that lapped the spider’s progress, the rose thorn clenched in his teeth. The fly was well wrapped in spider silk, unable to use its wings, its cries muffled. The pale spider danced along the vibrating strands. Sopso reached the fly and cut away enough web to get his legs around the insect’s back. Too bad he was upside down. The spider advanced while the fairy continued to hack away. I was able to hear every strand he cut—the noise of a spring sprung, like an effect from a cartoon. The way Sopso worked, with such courage and cool, completely reversed my estimation of him. Till then, I’d thought of him as a burden to the expedition, but after all, he had his place.
I was at the edge of my seat, my neck craned and my head tilted back. My heart was pounding. The spider reared back, poised to strike, and Sopso never flinched but worked methodically in the looming shadow of death. Fangs shut and four piercing-sharp leg points struck at nothing. The fairy had cut the last strand and he, legs around the back of the fly, fell upside down toward the floor. At the last second the fly’s wings started to work, and they managed to pull out of the death plunge. They shot up past my left ear toward the ceiling. Aspethia, the spider, and I followed their erratic course. They zigzagged with great buzzing all around the room, but when they passed over the bookcase near the window of the west wall, the fairy, afraid the dizzy fly would crash, jumped off and landed safely on a copy of Albahari’s Leeches.
Sopso was stranded. He and Aspethia waved to each other across the incredible expanse of my office. They might as well have been on different worlds. Each cried out, but neither was able to hear the other. Her arrows could not reach him. He had with him no thread bandoliers, nor even a pin-tip knife. Without them, there was no way he could climb down from that height, and by the time Aspethia returned to the fairy village and could mount a rescue party, he would most likely die of starvation. Still, she set out quickly to get back home on the slim chance he might survive long enough. He watched her go, and I could see the sadness come over him. The sight of it left me with a terrible chill.
What was I to do? My heart went out to the lost climber who was willing to give his life to save an insignificant fly, not to mention brave Aspethia. I thought how easily I could change everything for them. I stood up and stepped over to the bookcase by the window on the west wall. I reached out to gently lift Sopso in order to place him down on the floor across the room near where the expedition had begun. My fingers closed, and for no good reason, he suddenly disappeared. A moment of silence passed, and then I heard a chorus well up from beneath the bookcases, each voice not but a pinprick of laughter.
Later that evening, as Lynn and I sat on the porch in the last pink glow of sunset, she reached across the glass-topped table that held our wine and said, “Look here.” She was holding something between her thumb and forefinger. Whatever she was showing me was very delicate, and what with the failing light, I needed to lean in close to see. To my shock, it was a cat whisker with a postage stamp affixed to the end, like a tiny flag.
The mischievous expression on her face made me ask, “How long have you known?”
She laughed quietly. “Way back,” she said, and her words cut away the webbing that had trapped me.