Summerland. Michael Chabon
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I tuck your little piglet self snug back into your bed.”
In a book or a movie, when strange things begin to happen, somebody will often say, “I must be dreaming”. But in dreams nothing is strange. Ethan thought that he might be dreaming not because a nude werefox had shown up making wild claims and smoking a pipe that was definitely not filled with tobacco, but because none of these things struck him as particularly unexpected or odd.
“What kind of a fantastic destiny?” he said. He did not know why, but he had a sudden flash that somehow it was going to involve baseball.
Cutbelly stood up and jammed his pipe between his teeth, looking very foxy.
“Aye, you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” he said. “It’s a rare chance you’re to be offered. A first-rate education.”
“Tell me!” Ethan said.
“I will,” Cutbelly said. “On the way through.” He blew a long steady jet of foul smoke. It smelled like burning upholstery. Cutbelly sprang down from the bed and crept with his peculiar swaggering gait towards the window. He reached up with his long arms and dragged himself up onto the sill.
“Wear a sweater,” he said. “Scampering is cold work.”
“Scampering?”
“Along the Tree.”
“The Tree?” Ethan said, grabbing a hooded sweatshirt from the back of his desk chair. “What Tree?”
“The Tree of Worlds,” Cutbelly said impatiently. “Whatever do they teach you in school?”
WEREFOXES HAVE LONG been known for their teacherly natures. As they started down the drive from the Feld house, Cutbelly lectured Ethan on the true nature of the universe. It was one of his favourite subjects.
“Can you imagine an infinite tree?” Cutbelly said. They turned left at the mailbox that read Feld Airship, Inc., ducked under a wire fence, skirted the property line that separated the Felds from the Jungermans, and wandered west a little ways. “A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything? And whose outermost tippity fingers stretch as far as anything can possibly reach?”
“I can imagine anything,” Ethan said, quoting Mr. Feld, “except having no imagination.”
“Big talk. Well, then do so. Now, if you’ve ever looked at a tree, you’ve seen how its trunk divides into great limbs, which divide again into lesser limbs, which in turn divide into boughs, which divide yet again into branches, which divide into twigs, which divide into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million million tiny green shoots, scattered like the sparks of an exploding skyrocket. But if you followed your way back from the thousand billion green fingertips, down the twigs, to the branches, to the boughs, to the lesser limbs, you would arrive at a point – the technical term is the axil point – where you would see that the whole lacy spreading mass was really only four great limbs, branching off from the main trunk.”
“OK,” Ethan said.
“Now, let’s say the tree is invisible. Immaterial. You can’t touch it.”
“OK.”
“The only part of it that’s visible, that’s the leaves.”
“The leaves are visible.”
“The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million million places where life lives and things happen and stories and creatures come and go.”
Ethan thought this over.
“So Clam Island is like a leaf?”
“It isn’t like a leaf. It is a leaf. This tree is not some fancy metaphor, piglet. It’s real. It’s there. It’s holding us all up right now, you and me and Bulgaria and Pluto and everything else. Just because something is invisible and immaterial doesn’t mean it isn’t really there.”
“Sorry,” Ethan said.
“Now. Those four limbs, the four great limbs, each with its great tangle of branches and leaves – those are the four Worlds.”
“There are four Worlds.”
“And all the twigs and boughs are the myriad ways among the leaves, the paths and roads, the rambles and routes among the stars. But there are some of us who can, you know, leap, from leaf to leaf, and branch to branch. Shadowtails, such creatures are called, and I myself am one of them. When you travel along a branch, that’s called scampering. We’re doing it right now. You can’t go very far – it’s too tiring – but you can go very quickly.”
The werefox scrabbled up a low bank, in a spray of dead leaves and pebbles, then leapt through a blackberry bramble headfirst. Ethan had no choice but to follow. It was briefly very dark inside the bramble, and cold, too, a dank chill, as if they had leapt not through a blackberry bramble but into the mouth of a deep cave. There was a soft tinkling like the sound of the wind through icy pine needles. Then somehow or other he landed, without a scratch on him, at the edge of a familiar meadow, beyond which lay the white mystery of the birches.
“Hey. How’d we—? Is this—?”
They had been walking for a few minutes at most. Now, Ethan had done a fair amount of ranging alone through the woods and along the gravel roads of Clam Island. But he had never considered trying to walk all the way from his house to the Tooth. It was just too far. You would have to walk, he would have said, for more than an hour. And yet here they were, or seemed to be. The broad sunny meadow, the birch trees, the brackish green Sound that he could smell just beyond them.
“Now, there’s one last thing I want you to imagine,” Cutbelly said. “And it’s that because of all the crazy bends and hairpin turns, because of all the zigs and zags in the limbs and boughs and branches of this Tree I’m telling you about, it so happens that two leaves can end up lying right beside each other, separated by what amounts, for a gifted shadowtail like myself, to a single bound. And yet, if you were to follow your way back along the twigs and branches, back to the trunk, you would find that these two leaves actually grow from two separate great limbs of the Tree. Though near neighbours, they lie in two totally different Worlds. Can you picture that, piglet? Can you see how the four Worlds are all tangled up in each other like the forking, twisting branches of a tree?”
“You’re saying you can scamper from one world to another?”
“No, I can leap. And take you with me into the bargain,” said the werefox. “And the name of this World is the Summerlands.”
It was the Summerland Ethan knew; yet it was different, too. The plain metal bleachers and chain fences of Jock MacDougal Field at the far side of the meadow had been replaced with an elegant structure, at once sturdy and ornate, carved from a pale yellow, almost white substance that Ethan could not at first identify. It was a neat little box of a building, with long arched galleries through which he could see that it was open to the sky. It looked a little like the Taj Mahal, and a little like a big old Florida hotel, towers and grandstands and pavilions. There was an onion-shaped turret at each corner, and along the tops of the galleries rows of long snaky pennants snapped in the breeze.
“It’s a ballpark,” Ethan said. “A tiny one.” It was no bigger than a Burger King restaurant.
“The Neighbours are not a large people,” Cutbelly said. “As you will soon see.”
“The Neighbours,” Ethan said. “Are they human?”
“The Neighbours? No, sir. Not in the least. A separate creation, same as me.”
“They aren’t aliens?” Ethan was looking around for possible explanations for Cutbelly. It had occurred to him that his new friend might have evolved on some distant world of grass where it might behove you to work your way up from something like a fox.
“And what is an alien, tell me