Sylvia’s Journey

Jennifer Maxwell

 

At twelve minutes past three – give or take thirty seconds or so – Sylvia saw a small elephant squatting in a fruit bowl on the dining room table at number forty-two, sucking the tip of its trunk. It was the trunk that gave it away.

Sylvia knew what time it was because she had left home, as always, five minutes after the Science Alive! programme had ended. She knew it took her fifteen minutes to walk up the road to the Garden of Tane and fifteen to walk back – thirty minutes gentle exercise, as recommended by the health and fitness expert who spoke each fortnight on the radio on the subject of active aging. Number forty-two was approximately halfway up the road.

The creature was, Sylvia observed, too small to be an elephant, even a baby one – but it was not inconceivable. At some point between her house and number forty-two, between five and twelve minutes past three, she must have entered a temporal anomaly, a parallel universe in which small pachyderms were as commonplace, and as socially acceptable as cats.

She sincerely hoped this was the case. Sylvia did not fit into her usual universe. But in a world of pachyderms she would blend in rather well. Pachyderms, that is to say, elephants, lived to a great age. They were wrinkled from head to foot, had only four teeth to chew with and slept for only two hours per night, presumably without the benefit of the concert programme to keep them company. They communicated at a level below the frequency available to the average man – as she apparently did – and they died standing up.

Sylvia would like to die standing up. To simply freeze right here, an obstacle in the middle of the footpath that nobody could fail to notice. In her usual reality she was expected to do it unobtrusively, alone in her bed.

The dining table on which the elephant was perched was flanked by two seated figures – Sylvia bent down and squinted at the letterbox – by L.T. Lubrinsky and No Circulars. But when she raised her eyes again, No Circulars was lowering the venetian blinds. Sylvia signalled to the woman that she wanted to study the animal further. But the blind snapped shut.

Sylvia continued on her way, dismayed – but not surprised. Circulars were a gift. They offered glimpses, not only of the world as it was, but of the world as it yearned to be. To ban circulars from one’s letterbox, without so much as a by your leave demonstrated a lack, not only of manners but also of the imagination. Indeed, it was quite possible that No Circulars was completely oblivious, both to the presence in her fruit bowl, and to what that presence implied. It was also possible, Sylvia conceded to herself, that the elephant had been a trick of the light, or the consequence of eyesight, eroded by time.

Anything was possible.

 

The Science Alive! programme on pachyderms – Walking With Giants - had preceded a series of four on The Theory of Relativity. Sylvia had found these alarmingly complicated but was encouraged by the last, in which it was revealed that the Theory of Relativity was by its very nature inconceivable. It pleased her to think that somewhere in the world, intelligent people took the inconceivable seriously.

And, as she had learned this very day before her walk, the Theory of Relativity made small elephants in suburban dining rooms entirely plausible. Time, of the variety that began smooth, young, lithe and beautiful and ended stiff, wrinkled, invisible and eighty-four, was an illusion. Time could move backward. It could tie itself in knots. The universe was divided into as many different times, as many variations as there were possibilities. At any moment one could slip sideways into a universe where pint-sized pachyderms were the norm.

 

And when Sylvia crossed the road to the entrance of the Garden of Tane she found conclusive evidence that she had indeed achieved a superluminal connection. Curled up in the rusty Victorian scrollwork of the gates was another small elephant. It eyed her sleepily and flapped its ears in an endearing fashion. But delighted as Sylvia was to see it, she knew better than to be sentimental about the gesture. The creature was merely cooling its blood in the time-honoured manner of its kind.

She did, however, allow herself a brief, restorative flight of fancy – herself, curled up in the extravagant ironmongery of a different age, cooling her blood in a curve of time – keeping watch at the edge of the universe.

 

Sylvia was exhausted. Thirty minutes daily exercise would, according to the health and fitness expert, make her live longer. But at this point in time Sylvia wasn’t sure that this was a wise ambition. The health and fitness expert did not, she suspected, have eighty-four year old legs. On the other hand, she was fairly certain that Science Alive! would not feature in the afterlife. It was a vicious circle.

She peered through the gates. The old god Tane had become as irrelevant as she was. The trees were mostly European, as were the weeds that strangled the Pittosporums. And the children that played in the rough clearing inside the gates were not the dusky children of Tane but the three, pink, white and dirty offspring of the woman with red streaks in her hair who lived at number sixty-seven. One of them, the smallest, was sitting on the only remaining park bench.

Too bad.

Sylvia sat at the end of the bench and observed the child. She looked like a stroke victim, her small untidy head thrown back, mouth open, exposing – or rather not exposing – her missing front teeth, her eyes half-closed. Sylvia copied her, tilted her head and observed the playing children through slitted eyes.

It was a complicated game.

“Say I’m Slifer the Sky Dragon,” one of them yelled and spread his arms menacingly.

“And I’m Sword Stalker,” shouted the other.

“Watch!” they cried imperatively. “Watch me!”

Sylvia watched, could almost see them, half human, half animal, silver-scaled and armoured with light. She could smell the spoor of pachyderms.

 

“See ya!”

Sylvia opened her eyes just in time to see the children disappear through the gate, the little one casually stroking the elephant as she passed. Its wrinkled skin would be, Sylvia knew, soft and warm. Pachyderm meant thick-skinned. But it wasn’t true.

*

Sylvia listened intently as Doctor Dick Ritchie explained the Theory of Morphic Resonance. Morphic resonance, as she understood it, was the cattle-stop effect. If one cow worked out that cattle-stops could not be negotiated by cows, then all the other cows in the field would instantly know it too. Morphic resonance was collective knowing. This was nothing new to Sylvia. The women of her generation had all known, without spending years studying the matter and without ever feeling the need to broadcast it to the nation, that exercise was good for you, that manners maketh man and that time, like space has its own elasticity.

Morphic resonance and morphic fields did, however, explain the mystery of Sylvia’s isolation. Sylvia was the only one of her kind left standing in her particular morphic field. She had no one left to morph with.

*

The child was seated on the bench, head back, eyes narrowed, as if she had never moved from there, as if she existed only to witness the playful transformations of two small, scruffy children – and possibly, thought Sylvia, of herself.

“What are you doing?” Her voice surprised her. She hadn’t heard it for a while.

It didn’t surprise the child. “Watching,” she said fixing Sylvia with a baleful eye. “You’re old.”

This was, thought Sylvia, who had morphed with quite a different generation, rude. Nevertheless rudeness was an improvement on being invisible or worse, being smiled at charitably, as if she’d been disqualified from battle on the grounds of age.

“Why don’t you go and play with the others?” she said tersely.

“Because I’m out.” The little girl examined Sylvia frankly. “You’re going to be dead soon,” she observed. “My mother said.”

“Yes,” said Sylvia. She raised a combative eyebrow at the child. “And I should like to do it standing up.”

“Here?” The child grinned with sudden, vampirish interest.

“Perhaps. But not today.” Instantly the grin was crushed, flattened with disappointment. Sylvia felt she owed her an explanation.

“There are still a few possibilities I need to explore in this world,” she said. “For example, next Tuesday there’s a programme on the radio…”

*

String Theory – The theory to end all theories. The Theory of Everything.

Sylvia sat, glued to her radio. String Theory explained everything, and explained it moreover, in words she understood. The tiniest part of absolutely everything – of elephants and old people, of children and trees and loneliness and desire – of all forces, all matter, all emotion and all living things was a vibrating, dancing, musical string. All strings were equal, yet each made its own, unique music.

Sylvia could picture it perfectly – all those vital strands of nothing at all singing their hearts out; gathering together in small harmonious communities, creating entire continents of living sound. String Theory, according to the expert of the day, made the Theory of Relativity conceivable and parallel universes possible and morphic resonance indisputable – and Sylvia could well believe it. The idea was not, after all, new – her generation had known it and all the generations that came before – not only scientists and mathematicians, but storytellers and children and old people – but they didn’t call it String Theory. They had called it the rhythm of life, the harmony of nature – the Music of the Spheres.

Perhaps, thought Sylvia, in some small and indestructible part of all of us – in some tiny, tuneful thread of our being, we already know everything.

*

The road hummed gently, in tune with the telegraph poles.

Discordant notes issued from number forty-two. Sylvia hoped the elephant was not in residence. Elephants have acute hearing.

The Garden of Tane sang joyfully through the mouths of all its birds, and below their voices Sylvia could just discern the rumble of history, the deep voice of the old Maori god. She sat down beside the child, tipped back her head, closed her eyes.

 

“Can you hear it?” she said softly, not expecting a response.

“Uh huh,” grunted the child.

Sylvia opened her eyes. “Why are you always out?”

“Someone’s got to be.”

“Why?”

The child shrugged, her whole body rising exaggeratedly, collapsing with a huff - a nicely judged mix of disbelief and impatience. “I already told you. To watch, see?”

“Perhaps you could show me,” said Sylvia.

The little girl turned, thrust out her jaw and studied Sylvia – expertly, ruthlessly – every line and fold and lumpen joint, every liver spot and limp grey hair.

“I know,” said Sylvia. “I am old…”

And the child smiled, unabashed, radiant. “…and you forgot,” she pronounced.

“Exactly.” Sylvia smiled back. “It’s been a long time.”

“Hey!” screamed Sword Stalker. “Watch this!”

Abruptly the child turned, tipped her head and screwed up her eyes. “See that Slifer,” she said authoritatively. “See when he does that.” Her small hand performed an arc that rose above the treetops and paused there, her whole body engaged in the gesture. She cupped her hand and rotated it as if adjusting a lens, all her concentration directed at the figures in the clearing – Sword Stalker, armed with a stick, Slifer the Sky Dragon, his woollen jumper tied around his neck, his hair in disarray.

“Now!” she said urgently. “Look.”

And Sylvia looked. She tilted her head and squinted, focused her mind – a beam of light, clear as glass, cutting through time and knowledge and circumstance – saw. She saw the armoured figure leap above the treetops and hold there, wings outspread – the slow tongue of fire, the blazing sweep of the Stalker’s sword. She saw them fly at each other – the scripted chaos of dark and light and she heard the triumph of the trees as Tane rose, resplendent in his borrowed coat; thunder in the undergrowth – the small stampede of pachyderms.

Sylvia saw that without a witness, without someone to hear its rhythms this world could not exist.

And suddenly, morphic resonance and parallel worlds and pachyderms and oscillating strings – all Sylvia’s knowledge, all her lonely journeys through time and space and possibility came together in a single harmonious thought. She looked down at the child.

“If I was out instead,” she said, “if I watched, maybe you could play.”

“I’ll ask.”

There was a brief consultation with the other children. They turned and stared at Sylvia. Without a word a decision was reached.

“Say I’m the Dark Rabbit,” shrieked the little girl and darted, small and soft and subversive, into the undergrowth.

 

And Sylvia sat within a morphic field of four, in a temporal anomaly called the Garden of Tane, in a world where she might – if she chose – die standing up and watched the children play; listened to the Music of the Spheres.