The troll inside Thomas peered up through his eyes like a child pressing his face to a shop window. Tom and Tam held their breaths.
Blunderbuss’s left eye was a pearly magenta diamond-shaped button with a thistle carved on it (which had belonged to one of Gwendolyn’s spring dresses) and her right was a thick round brass button with a sailing ship stamped on it (which had come from one of Thomas’s peacoats). This meant that she always looked as though she was winking at something secret and funny. She looked that way now, and Thomas couldn’t help it—he winked back, as he so often did when the world was baffling and only something big and soft and grabbable could make him feel better.
And Blunderbuss winked back.
The chocolate-colored yarn over her magenta eye bunched up like a real eyebrow and shut. Then it sprang open again. Next, the bold blue yarn over her brass right eye tried it. Finally, the scrap-yarn wombat waggled her pea-green and tangerine ears. She waggled her maroon muzzle. She waggled her lilac tail. She pounded her gold and turquoise front feet on the bed, then her white and black back feet. She dropped her front half down and wiggled her motley, patchwork rump in the air. At last, Blunderbuss the wild and wonderful wombat opened up her cherry-red mouth, showing two long, powerful cloak-clasp teeth, and gave a chittering cry, like a pig and a songbird snorting and singing at the same time.
Blunderbuss gave a great leap, which was slightly less great than she expected it to be as wombats have quite short legs, but can never seem to remember the fact, and pounced onto Thomas, knocking him to the floor. She landed on his chest with a weight like a heap of cannonballs, her dense, muscley chest crushing him, her breath smelling like wet wool and a little, just a little, like bush grasses and a blazing hot sun beating down on dry dust.
“Troll! Troll Troll!” the scrap-yarn wombat chortled. Her voice was just perfectly rumbly and throaty and grumbly, like wool all frayed and felted together. “Yes! No! Yes. Yes. No. No. Maybe! Green. Pineapples. Gin.” Blunderbuss banged her front paws on Thomas’s chest, making him cough all over again. She beamed. “TA-DA!” the wombat cried, and, quick as a pub-dart, dove in and bit him on the neck. Thomas squealed.
“You said I could!” Blunderbuss grumbled. “You said I could gnash you. If you get mad now that’s like breaking a promise. Besides, in the Land of Wom, we bite to show we like a thing. And that we don’t like a thing. And that we think a thing is delicious. And that we think it is ours! Because anything you bite is yours, that’s just obvious! We bite when we are angry and hungry and joyful and excited to go to the cinema and frightened of wild dogs and because it is Tuesday but also because it is Sunday and especially when we are DELIGHTED but NERVOUS. Nothing says I AM HAVING FEELINGS like a bite! And I bit you so you are mine, Tom Rood. I own you. Wombat Rules. I own a troll!”
Blunderbuss sprang off of him like a firecracker, circled the room twice, snagging her worsted claws on the floorboard nails. She jumped with all her might, forgetting once again that she was not, in fact, a kangaroo, and thus missing the desk, whacking into it mid-belly and pumping her hindpaws in the air till she could clamber up and collapse on top of the red notebook with balloons on the cover, panting, her eyes shining and wet and alive.
“I’m a troll?” gasped Thomas.
CHAPTER IX
THE EMERALD THERMODYNAMICAL HYPER-JUNGLE LAW
In Which Tom and Tam Host a Very Boisterous Party in Apartment #7, Play a Game of Red Light, Green Light, and Are Kidnapped by a Baseball Thomas and Tamburlaine played for seven hours, which is the proper number for this sort of thing
It takes a span of seven, at a minimum, to make a new world.
Seven days, seven hours, even seven minutes, if one has had a very good breakfast. Less won’t do; you spend the first bit just measuring fabric and trying to find the hammer you had in your hand just a moment ago. And if you go on and on and procrastinate and sleep in weekends, before you know it you’ve spent a year on one little curlicue on one tiny blue fjord and the whole thing starts to seem less interesting than starting over with a shiny new gas giant.
Don’t look at me so suspiciously—you and I make new worlds, too. It is only that our hands are too small to manage seventeen moons at once, or a great red storm that goes on blustering for centuries. We make our worlds of stranger stuff: We choose people who do not annoy us, places of green or glass and steel that feel as alive and necessary as our brothers and sisters, houses in which everything has a place, rules such as Do Not Take Things That Aren’t Yours Unless No One Is Looking and Good Things Happen to Good People and A Year Is 365 Days are agreed upon, even when they aren’t true, perhaps especially so.
You and I have made a little world here together, a world only we know, with a lovely red door and glinting eyes peeking out from under the geraniums. A secret world all our own inside the one everyone knows about, and a very fine one, at that. A new world is always made when one creature speaks and another listens. There is no gravity in here, but oh, how everything flies!
Thomas Rood managed two worlds in seven hours. We should, frankly, congratulate him on a new land-speed record. The first one was a matter of survival. He didn’t mean to do it. No one does, really. It’s only that when nothing is as you thought it was, a body has to cobble together a new universe out of the rubbish left over when the old one burst and turned into a wombat. Nothing could be certain anymore. New gravities were necessary, new boiling points, new E’s and mc’s and squares. Why settle for the second law of thermodynamics? That’s the old world’s tune. When gramophones dance and girls grow plums like earrings, the reign of the Emerald Thermodynamical Hyper-Jungle Law has come: Everything lives and grows and thickens, nothing decays, nothing fades, nothing ends.
He didn’t
make his worlds alone, of course. No one does. Moving alone upon the face of the deep is awfully boring.
And lo, in the first hour, Thomas and Tamburlaine went a bit mad with giggling and chocolates liberated from the high cabinet and egging each other on and committed a number of crimes against Apartment #7. Thomas excavated the ancient archaeological site of his closet and unearthed several half-used tubes of oil paint rolled up at the ends like toothpaste. Tam showed him how to use a bit of egg to freshen up the colors. Together, they pushed his tall bookshelf to one side, revealing a fresh, blank patch of easily hideable wall. Tamburlaine rubbed her arm from wrist to shoulder until the dark, polished wood of her real body came up. She squirted out lines of cobalt and vermilion and custard and olive onto her forearm and began to paint, while Thomas scribbled his notes to the furniture with the fervor of a grandfather writing letters to the newspaper editor.
Dear Gertrude (my bedside reading lamp with the green shade and missing pane of glass through which you can see wires):
Please wake up right now this moment and be alive like Blunderbuss and be able to walk and talk and remember all the books you read over my shoulder from the time I was tiny and you seemed as big and bright as the sun. Please like Tamburlaine and I and never pop your bulb again and forgive me for not ever dusting you even though every night when I went to bed I thought you really needed it.
Thank you,
Thomas Michael Rood
P.S. Please do not be malevolent.
Tamburlaine drew her brush upward in a long, graceful, custard-colored stroke, a stroke that if you or I or Thomas had made it, might only have been a stripe on a wall for which we’d have been rightly scolded, but when Tam did it, clearly belonged to a tree whose leaves and trunk would soon catch up with the rest. While she did it, Blunderbuss snuffled around the kitchen until she found the bread-box, whereupon she dove into the dinner rolls headfirst, her woolly feet waggling in joy. “Wombats have to fill their bellies! Priority one! An empty belly is an angry belly. You are my very first dinner rolls! I will remember you always and sing songs of your courage!” she cried.
Scratch kicked his long brass legs like a dance-hall girl as Gertrude the Green Lamp clicked on, then off, then on again, rocking from side to side on her squat, round base, then leapt to the floor and bounced madcap round the bedroom, her light flashing on and off, faster and faster, while the gramophone sang:
How ’ya gonna keep ’em, down on farm,
After they’ve seen Paree?
Thomas ran through the house, writing with his paper propped on the wall, on the dining table, on the floor, on his knee. Dear Hephaestus, Who Is a Woodstove with One Dented Burner; Dear Ophelia, Who Is a Vase of Five Sort of Wilted Irises; Dear Grandfather Horatio, Who Is a Grandfather Clock! And Hephaestus roared in patterns of flame and dark, and Ophelia opened and closed her blossoms and bounced along with Gertrude in a foxtrot, and Grandfather Horatio bonged out seventeen o’clock. Tamburlaine looked up from her painting and tilted her head to one side. The apartment quaked with stomping and crowing.