The Sublimity of the Imagination

“Haven’t we got bigger problems?” asked my wife, as she returned from the restroom.

“We’ll get a divorce,” I said, my mind racing already with the possibilities.

“I meant that thing in our house,” she said.

“What thing?” asked Llorena.

Robert began narration of the whole story, from where they had left us to the present. He was helped in this endeavour by the others, with a few corrections and comments from myself. He focused mostly, of course, on the book I had written, but I did steer the conversation more towards the fact that some kind of shadow, some kind of spirit was inhabiting our household and we needed to rid ourselves of it somehow.

“I don’t think we’ll be staying in Nevermore,” I said, “but I don’t want to go back there without being able to dispose of that-- that shadowman, that thing that is there. I don’t know if burning the doll was enough to destroy the presence.”

“It probably isn’t,” said Llorena. “And I don’t mind being in your book. I just wish you wanted to be me, not her.” She nodded at her partner.

“Nothing wrong with a little safe exploration,” Lily agreed. “Still, you should probably get permission next time, or change the names.” She said this slowly, with a Ron Funches-like delivery.

“That’s not the most important thing, here,” I protested. “We have to get that shadow out of the house.”

“I thought you said you knew how,” said Roman. At that point, Miss GIlda returned from the restroom. I said that I did, but that it required something I learned from the Emperor of Nothing. Miss GIlda again screamed, and returned to the restroom, teardrops streaming from her eyes.

“What’s her problem?” I asked the assembled crowd. My wife shook her head.

“That book scared her as a kid. Not just the way the gnomes were through most of it, but especially the way that the Emperor looked. Didn’t it look just like the thing we saw earlier?” I had to think back to that absence of color, that absence of any light that had lately tormented and controlled me. When I thought about it, and thought about the depictions drawn in the book that Lily had read to us, I had to conceded that looked more than just alike. They looked exactly alike, if something that looked like nothing could look the same as anything else. Here, again, I felt sick to my stomach, and I suspect that all the rest of the gathered crowd did as well.

“I’ll look after he,” Lily volunteered. “I wouldn’t be any help anyways, in my condition. I mean, I can still run and do what I’m supposed to, but she really needs sympathy.” So it was agreed that everyone except for Lily and Miss Gilda would return to Nevermore. My wife excused herself to the telephone, and made a quick call. Meanwhile, the Chef, whose name was Artur, decided to join the commotion. He had always wanted to see the inside of the house, it seemed, and also was skeptical of everything was had said. He had been listening as he seemed to be asleep. He volunteered to go with us, though he would not look myself, Robert, or Roman in the eye, whispering something under his breath about us being more female than male. We took it, I suppose, in stride, supposing his demeanor exactly that sort of backwards thinking that left that portion of the country undeveloped for so long. We readily agreed, especially given that he volunteered he would proceed before us, carrying an old shotgun that he had named Bert’a. Whether he could not or would not pronounce the H in the name, which he had carved along the stock, puzzles me to this day, as he seemed to have no trouble in calling all of us gathered “homos”. Oh well, I reasoned, any port in a storm. So artur came with us, in my car-- which Roman drove. I rode Officer Cox back to the household and tried to explain my plan, though it was lost on her.

“If what we encountered was that kind of spirit,” I said, “we need to defeat in a similar way. What better than to use gnomes?”

“What do you mean gnomes?”

“It’s the new toy idea I have been looking for. A friendly little protector toy. We’ve always made the plastic dinosaurs, airplanes, dolls, and stuff of that sort. But there’s older kinds of toys. There’s a reason the best rocking horses are carved out of wood.”

“What about those realistic ones?”

I shook my head. “They’re fine and all, but the do the imagining for the child. That’s better left for a carousel, the movement of which gives those verisimilitudinous horses the momentum needed for the child to imagine grand adventures even further than those they picked up from a re-run of Mary Poppins. The wood horse has a certain kind of character.”

“It seems like we’ve drifted into Velveteen Rabbit territory,” Cox I said. I nodded again, as she swerved wildly around a truck transporting goods from my factory. I tipped my hat at the driver. He tipped his hat back, and took a moment to realise who I was. Then he wave, and sped up a little. We passed him and hurried back to Nevermore.

“I guess. There’s this idea about toys being real that children need to believe in. This idea that they can interact, play back with you. We adults forget that, often. We’re so caught up in our worries and our cares that we often even tell children they need to grow up. But growing up is an act of forgetting.”

“You mean, like Peter Pan?”

“Yes,” I said, but before I could explain, Llorena Cox explained the whole thing, bringing the ideas shared with my friends the first day at nevermore full circle. Nothing ever exists, is heard, or remembered, without it eventually proving useful, I suppose. You just have to know how to apply that knowledge.

“Didn’t Peter Pan remember how to fly his whole life by refusing to grow up? Wasn’t that part of the magic? How Neverland worked. When you stopped being able to see what might be and got bogged down in the adult stuff, you forgot the joy that really is flying, you stopped being able to?

“I used to fly, myself. Back when I was a little girl. I used to jump off high places. I even built wings for halloween, once. Went as a bat. But I kept the wings after Halloween and I used them as wings. I would draw, too, with chalk, endlessly tracing out my ideas of cities, as if I was far, far above them. And, as I jumped from high places, like my porch, and my roof, the little chalk outlines seemed exactly to be cities below me. I even once made an inside version of the farmland, it looked a lot like the area here, using different spices to be different crops, on a piece of cardboard. It really did look like the view from an airplane. I put a little plastic barn on there and would play at flying over my imaginary country for hours. And I always, always, loved to play at being Peter Pan. Isn’t there a reason it’s usually a woman that plays that part?”

“Well, who would want to be Wendy?” I asked.

“She’s a problem, all right,” said Officer Cox. “She really wants to stay behind in childhood, but she knows she has to grow up. She has to be a matron, eventually. That’s why Peter speaks to her the strongest. He’s not even fully male, after all, he’s just a boy and of course he wants both her and Tiger Lily and Tinkerbell, but he’s like one last childish hope before she has to truly wake up to the realities of the world around her. One last time to be a child before truly growing up.”

“Sometimes I wonder if that is such a bad thing.”

“I don’t think it is, but that’s why we need Peter, and Wendy.”

“Why’s that?”

“Like all stories, it helps us deal with something. It helps us deal with the unknown. Neverland actually doesn’t represent endless childhood. After all, if it did, why would Captain Hook and Smee, both adults, be there? Neverland is the place which is everyone is trying to escape to, but never can. It’s the idealized adventure into the unknown: the childish understanding of growing up. One cannot truly grow up before practicing it, and that is just what Wendy does.

“But I was asking you how you were going to defeat this thing, if it is real--” she swerved again, this time along a mountain road, before taking a dirt side road I had never seen before. She informed me this was a short cut. My car, filled with everyone else, followed close behind.

“It is real,” I said, “you’ll know it when you see it. It’s every fear you’ve ever had that someone beyond this world is the one tapping your back.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to believe in the power of the Gnomes,” I said. I explained what I had deduced from the story her wife had read. I had learned that the idea of something triumphing over evil usually held it at bay. Evil could never truly leave the world, and there would always-- always-- be those that lusted after it. I was one of those people, I explained. I had my factory, my success, and yet I believed that I needed more. That’s why I came to Nevermore in the first place. To prove that I was even more of a genius than I already believed I was. And that fact, that very pride, like the pride that had taken the vampire Chaldea to his downfall, had allowed that evil spirit to break into my mind and control me. That’s what let the voice take me over and guide towards obsession.

I just needed something, some talisman, some other portion of existence to ground me. To bring me to the realization that I was not the great god I had begun to believe myself. I needed something humble and goofy, something strange that would detract from my seriousness. The worst thing, after all, in a toymaker, is a sense of seriousness. I was not having fun making my toys, which meant that I could never expect a child or even an adult playing with their children to have fun with my products. I was thinking with the cold bottom line of profits instead of the real reason for making toys: to spread joy and help children learn how to navigate the world.