NYC's MYSTERIOUS QED Subway Line

[mallorys_camera]

Still feeling fragile and teary. Real life is plodding along without incident – I even dismantled a sword yesterday that’s been dangling over my head and am now well on my way to becoming a Real Human Girl again, eight years after I lost my business and my entire identity went tumbling off a cliff.

I function when I’m called upon to function. I interact with my usual combination of aplomb, sass, and grace.

But inside I’m feeling… forlorn.

I suppose that has to do with the waning of daylight. Also cold weather exacerbates the autoimmune disease. My particular variant of the autoimmune disease attacks my joints.

I had a doctor who wanted to give me methyltrexate. This made me snort. All I need is a script for tramadol or codeine so I can pop a pill when I’m really uncomfortable. But no-o-o-o-o! The medical profession would rather poison me than risk the chance that I could become an addict.

I hurt too much to do much of anything, so I went to bed early and reread E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle.

###

E Nesbit was my favorite author growing up.

There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs forever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real, Nesbit writes in Chapter 9 of The Enchanted Castle.

And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets and the like, almost anything may happen.

Of course, all magic comes with a price. And that’s why you must be careful what you wish for.

All E. Nesbit novels have the same basic plot: A group of unsupervised children run across a magical object: a castle, a sand fairy, a phoenix, an amulet. The sole deviation from this formula in my admittedly imperfect recollection is the interesting but not altogether successful The Magic City, in which the protagonist, Philip, is an only child and he creates the charm.

These magical objects are not just MacGuffins – as magical objects are wont to be in so much children’s literature. (Including the Harry Potter novels, which is why I’ve never been drawn particularly to the Harry Potter novels.) No. They shape the subsequent action in distinctive ways.

In The Enchanted Castle, for example, a trio of children – Gerald, Jimmy and Kathleen – stumble across an underground passageway into a great and ruinous English estate. The year is 1907. The children find an enchanted ring that grants wishes to everyone who comes within its aura.

In one of the chapters, the children put on a play, and they populate the seats in the audience with creatures they devise out of coats and hangers and scarves and pillows and hockey sticks. Someone makes an unwise wish – and suddenly these creatures come alive, though the children don’t realize it until the very end of the play when the creatures begin to clap.

The creatures are fully alive, but they cannot talk since their mouths are red paint on white pillowcases. They’re able to wail but not to articulate. They communicate through vowels: Aa oo re o me me oo a oo ho el?

Until finally one of the children realizes the creature is asking, Can you recommend me to a good hotel?

This is Nesbit’s – the Fabian and lover of HG Wells – bit of fun: The creatures, assembled from banal household objects, are a perfect parody of Victorian propriety but still horrifying. And the subsequent scene as the children lead these creatures – called Ugly-Wuglies – through the town is a remarkable fusion of horror and fantasy.

In one of the very last scenes of the novel, the children find themselves in a place they dub The Hall of Granted Wishes, and they trot by a collection of scenes – when I was a kid, I always envisioned these scenes being kind of like the dioramas in The Museum of Natural History – in which every character in the book is seen achieving their heart’s desire. This is such an English Edwardian fantasy – that time before the War to End All Wars began the global equilibrium process, when there were such things as final golden visions.

The Ugly-Wugly is seen walking through the doors of a really first-rate hotel. The manager takes its umbrella and bows to it.

###

The Enchanted Castle ends with these words:

Also, if all this story is nonsense and a make-up—if Gerald and Jimmy and Kathleen and Mabel have merely imposed on my trusting nature by a pack of unlikely inventions, how do you account for the paragraph which appeared in the evening papers the day after the magic of the moon-rising?

"MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF A WELL-KNOWN CITY MAN,"

it said, and then went on to say how a gentleman, well known and much respected in financial circles, had vanished, leaving no trace.

"Mr. U. W. Ugli," the papers continued, "had remained late, working at his office as was his occasional habit. The office door was found locked, and on its being broken open the clothes of the unfortunate gentleman were found in a heap on the floor, together with an umbrella, a walking stick, a golf club, and, curiously enough, a feather brush, such as housemaids use for dusting. Of his body, however, there was no trace. The police are stated to have a clue."

It is all very well for all of them to pretend that the whole of this story is my own invention: facts are facts, and you can't explain them away.

###

In one of the subway passageways underlying Times Square, quite near that mural that contains the figure of a man who looks so much like my grandfather, there are a series of art installations set up as dioramas:



And last night I dreamed this subway tunnel was the Hall of Granted Wishes and that all the murals and dioramas were the heart desires come true of passengers who’d purchased tickets for the mysterious QED subway line.

It was a complicated dream with many intertwining lines of narrative that I can’t remember now.

Could be the backdrop for an interesting YA novel, no?

And now I must do useful work. Since I’m not hurting.