Novo picked up a cup and the pattern on it glowed, almost fluorescent. His touch changed the chemical composition of everything, trailing technicolor, the space around him so much bolder and more vivid than anywhere else. He blinked slowly. All over the garden people stretched like cats and curled back into themselves, suddenly blissful, practically purring. It was as if he’d dropped a euphoric in the tap water. Faces soft as warm butter, the hard locks suddenly gone from jaws, scowls smoothed out like they were pillowcases and Novo was the iron. The woman opposite-but-one, so tightly wound, went all out of character, loose-limbed and agile, and swept like a dancer across the lawn. The knotty old couple glowed and stippled like sunlight in a forest. This little boy was screaming in his stroller and when Novo smiled at him the screaming stopped, just like that, and the boy went straight to sleep, thumb-in-mouth blissful. I wondered if anybody noticed it on me—my right smile back, my long spine, this warm-bath feel, the way everything was precisely and fluidly and perfectly itself, because of him.
He turned in a circle, and everyone in the garden turned too, exactly the same but just a beat behind him, like an echo. I saw it.
“Shall we have some fun?” he said.
“Always.”
He laughed. “Can you dance?”
“Maybe.”
“I bet you’re good,” he said.
“You reckon?”
“Sure. But are you as good as us?”
He was smiling, lifting his arms over his head, tilting his chin while all around, the assembled company copied him and lifted theirs. He turned again, a slower circle, arms out, palms flat, graceful as a dervish, and every single person on that lawn did the same. It was a natural, peaceful thing to watch, like a cornfield bowing in a breeze, or the stop-frame blooming of a rose. If Novo was the stone hitting the water, the people all around us were the ripple.
“Let’s see,” he said, and he stepped close to me and slipped his arm round my waist, and for a second, all of my thoughts were focused right there, only there, where he was touching me. All over the garden, people reached for one another the way we did, and stood joined and waiting.
“Ready?” Novo said, and his cheek was as close as it could be to mine without actually touching, and I felt the soft warmth of his skin near mine, and he took my hand.
Music started up somewhere. The piano was playing itself, and the kids with the china cups were on percussion, a yard-sale orchestra, cutlery and plates, doorstops and old telephones chinking and clattering in perfect time, an odd and delicate, off-kilter, handmade sound. Novo and I spun, and the garden spun, and even with my eyes wide open this was suddenly not a Saturday-morning house-clearance giveaway at all, but some kind of extravagant masked ball, rich with elaborate costume, the sky over our heads heavy with sparkling chandeliers. Bright anoraks became cloaks, and the women in them poured champagne out of watering cans. The knotty old couple glinted with diamonds. Mrs. Midler’s earrings caught the light as the girl wearing them leaned in closely to her partner and poured her smile into his eyes and lifted her chin to laugh. Novo held on to me and we turned with the crowd in the garden in ever-tightening rounds, the air bristling with the sweep and whisper of gowns, the flattened grass sighing, the dance pulling more and more of the world into itself like a whirlpool, quicker and quicker, snapshot and time travel and film set, until what began as a slow circle got spun out and ramped up, feverish and chaotic.
Novo turned me and turned me and that was when I saw Henry Lake at his window, watching. He was rooted to the spot, the only piece of stillness in that whirlpool, the only one of all of us and everything that wasn’t moving. I looked for him again as we spun and there he was, and a third time, and a fourth. A statue leaning out into the air, his face a dull stone, his mouth open, his startled eyes.
“Wait,” I said to Novo.
“Too much?” he said. “Too Cinderella maybe?” and the music changed suddenly to something distorted and industrial, something played on vacuum and food processor and megaphone and iron poker. Berlin nightclub, the sky low and solid as a ceiling, and the crowd changed suddenly, cornered and edgy, closing in, drawing together, hot with effort, claustrophobic, breathless, sweating. Their eyes looked like Charlie Parker’s eyes—quick black buttons, all reflective, absorbing nothing. I shook my head. “Stop.”
Novo stopped instantly and closed his eyes, and when he inhaled I felt my own lungs expand too. The yard went silent, holding itself at the top of his breath, and a cloud went over the sun so that everything was gray for less than a second, and steel-cold, like a blade. Then the blade flashed, Novo breathed out, and the world went back to what it was before. All the bargain hunters picked up where they left off—trawling through cutlery, sniffing the armpits of coats, counting out change, like nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened. All except Henry, a gargoyle at his window, his eyes the only part of him quick and alive, fixed on Novo, all recognition and devotion but also something more. Something darker. Something like pain. Or fear. I pointed up at him, “Look,” and I held Novo’s arms and turned him slightly, in the right direction, so he could see.
For a moment he was as still as Henry. The two of them were the same cold column of stone. Everything else inside that moment was still too, the crowd under his spell and also the circling birds and the ants all-day-long seething in the pavement cracks and the nodding flower heads and the leaves that should have been shivering in the breeze.
Even the breeze.
Everything stopped. And, where time is anything but linear, I think there’s a place, in or out of the known universe, where that is still happening, where Henry and Novo are still seeing each other for the first time in a garden full of spellbound strangers and a dead old lady’s things, with me as their witness. And what I’m witnessing is strong enough to bring life itself to a halt.
Novo moved first. Nothing else. He said something under his breath, like “Unbelievable,” and his searchlight eyes turned on me. I felt his fingers, light as feathers, on my arm.
“Do you know that man in your house?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Who is he? Not family?”
“No. He was already there. Kind of part of the deal. It’s Henry.”
“Henry,” he said. “Henry,” and he opened his arms then, high and wide, in something like triumph, and with my own eyes I saw Henry Lake’s weightless body float straight through the window and out into the paralyzed air in bewildered slow motion, moving more like a strung puppet than a man. He got closer, limbs flailing, until he was hovering just above us, his mouth clamped shut, his eyes burning white-hot with the things he wanted desperately to say.
“What are you doing?” I said to Novo, but he didn’t answer. “Why are you doing that to him?”
Tears welled up in Henry’s eyes and fell on my face like the beginnings of rain, and his mouth bubbled and trembled like a saucepan lid, and in the corner of the sky I caught a fork of white lightning and I counted to four before the thunder growled.