Nix and Mr. Firkin were the first to move, and the others quickly followed, even the little dog madly barking at the commotion. Kay and the Good Fairy brought up the rear, trailed only by the Queen, who seemed to glide, her robes flowing like a bridal train. They found No? gnashing her teeth, wailing uncontrollably at the stubborn bar. As soon as she saw them, she banged her skull against the wood. “I’ll go mad if I don’t get out.”
Reaching over the tops of their heads, the Queen grabbed No? by the scruff of her neck and silenced her. She lifted her as if no more than a rag doll and wrapped her tightly in her arms. No? sobbed against the Queen’s bosom. Trembling, No? tried to catch her breath, but the attempts to stop herself only exacerbated the emotions. The others watched, wondering whether the Queen would crush her wire and paper body or offer comfort.
“There, there, child,” the Queen said. “We must have none of this. You know better. You know there is no way out by yourself.”
“I want to go home,” No? said.
The Queen stroked her face, ran her fingers over the bristly stubble on her bald head. They all waited for the sobbing to subside, reluctant witnesses to her despair.
“I want … I want…” And No? lost control again and buried herself more deeply in the billowy largeness of the Queen.
Kay could not bear to watch the suffering of her friend. She moved away from the pack, leaned against the wall, and peered through the crack between two boards. Another day approached. In the yellow and lavender light and shadow, she could see the frost coating the grass. In the jagged starlight under the setting moon, the ground sparkled and danced. Theo would have been mesmerized. Gathering her in his arms, he would have stood behind her, holding her until the night gave way. She, too, would go mad if she never saw him again.
*
Aboard ship on the Atlantic, Muybridge looked back at the United States of America for what would be the last time. Going home at last, back to England, back for good. He was sixty-four, but felt like an old man with a young man’s ambition. Turning toward the east, Helios, god of the sun, going back to its rising. The year before, his zoopraxiscope had played motion pictures at the world’s fair in Chicago. He had met with Edison and étienne-Jules Marey, worked in Philadelphia with the painter Thomas Eakins. He had toured the country, gone to and come back from Europe, lecturing to enthusiastic crowds enchanted by his moving images. The foundation had been laid for his two masterworks, Animal Locomotion and The Human Figure in Motion, but all he could think about on the wild gray sea was his wife and her lover, Harry Larkyns, and the bullet to the heart. And all that might have been.
“Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of complete existence,” Muybridge once wrote. Each moment part of a series, yet separate and complete somehow, the motion but an illusion, the way to mark time. He could see his wife twist her neck, the realization of what was to happen clearly marked on her face, the recognition in that split second of all that had passed and all that was to come. That scoundrel’s eyes bore a permanent regret. All in the space between the smile and the squeeze of a trigger.
New York harbor receded on the horizon. Muybridge rubbed his great white beard and spat into the ocean. He had stopped time, yes, but it could not be unwound, reversed, replayed. There was only one direction: forward.
Theo added the final page to the manuscript and put down his pen. Finished, but for the last revisions. When Kay first disappeared, he had blamed that man from the circus, that seedy old ringmaster, and Theo would have shot that roué had he a gun. But now he was not so sure. Now he had convinced himself that she had made it to the Quatre Mains puppet shop that night and had vanished from there.
She had disappeared once before.
They had been dating three or four months and had arranged to meet at the Central Park Zoo on a Sunday afternoon. She had wanted to see the penguins. He had wanted to see her. So much so that he arrived an hour early and settled in on one of the benches facing the circular pool where the sea lions cavorted on the rocks, the feeding routine drawing in the young families and children like magic. Theo watched the people come and go, idly speculating about his future with Kay, the prospect of bringing their own children to the zoo, to the park. And on the bench in that hour, he decided that one day soon he would ask her to marry him.