The Tower, Part II

She walked a circle around the tower, trailing her hand against the pillars. Under the leaning side the tower loomed over her, threatening as a stern parent. The carvings were watching her: angels, flowers, birds with small bones in their beaks and bulging eyes. She quickened her step and made her way around to the opposite side, where the tower leaned away from her like a steep staircase to the moon. In fact it leaned at such an angle that Ingrid thought she might, with the proper footwear, be able to climb right up the side of it. But first. First she would push.

She placed her two hands against a column and, bracing her feet into the soft earth, pushed with all her might. Nothing. She pushed again, hard enough to move a mountain, and her foot slipped in the grass. She went down on one knee with a grunt, scraping her palms a little on the stone that now felt rough and porous. She whimpered, suddenly wishing she had stayed in the hotel room, next to her older sister’s body heat and warm breath.

But she was there. She was still in bed, wasn’t she? She could go back anytime she wanted to.

Something caught her eye. It was a carving of a solemn-looking baby, swaddled and reaching its small arms up to a woman with a face full of peace. Beneath this carving was a little door, barely big enough for Ingrid to crawl through. She knelt down, placed her hand on the door, and opened it.

The room inside was dark as pitch, and her eyes went wide, searching for any small relief of light. The moonlight cut a tunnel of light through the small doorway, and slowly shapes came into focus. It was a wide, expansive room, round as the tower itself with only white stone on the walls and floor. But it was filled, as her eyes adjusted she could see - with furniture.

Old furniture, new furniture, clean and without dust, paintings, trunks and boxes stacked high. As the light seeped in she began to walk, on freezing feet, through the piles. There was a large four-poster bed, made up nicely with velvety covers, and she climbed up on it to warm her feet and look around. She felt a strange pulling, somewhere in the back of her mind, but when she tried to identify it, it darted away. She could see dressers, and tables with chairs stacked on top and desks piled with papers. Near the bed was a wardrobe with its doors open, and as she leaned closer she saw that it was full of clothes. She crawled across the massive bed and reached out, touched one of the soft fabrics. It was a coat. She pulled it down and wrapped it around her. It had a certain scent, something like Jasmine and maybe vanilla, that she couldn’t quite place. But it was...she recognized it. The pull in the back of her mind, it was something like the gentle tug of an illusive familiarity. She knew these things. She tried to think of how that could be, how here, in the base of a tilting tower in a foreign country where she was only a tourist, there could be a room full of things that she knew. She almost felt that they were as familiar as her own possessions. It must be that she was dreaming, and still in her bed in the hotel room. If she closed her eyes she could shake her sister and wake her up, and bring her here to see if it was all real.

Books were stacked near the foot of the bed, and she picked one up. She had only recently begun learning to read, but as she leafed through the pages of the book, full of words she did not know, she realized that she had read this book already. She looked around and had the sudden sense that she had read every book in the room; she could even remember some of the passages. She closed the book, put it back on top of the stack. She would not leave anything amiss. No one would know she had been here. She dug around in the bottom of the wardrobe and found a pair of shoes that fit her. In the dim light, she could see that they were her favorite color. She would return them, and the coat, on her way out.

She picked her way through piles of dishes, odd electronic devices, toys that looked too complicated to play with. She passed a baby’s bassinet lined with blue and green blankets. She stopped there, touched a blanket and imagined a dough-cheeked baby kick its legs, reaching for her. But it was only a thought. She stepped over stacks of children’s books that she had never seen before, though she knew all the words by heart. Finally, against the far wall, a staircase. Up, she thought. Keep going.

The Tower

The tower was going to fall. How could you look at it and think otherwise? It leaned into the frame of the picture like someone trying to lean into a family portrait. Or, depending on how you framed the picture, like it was trying to lean out of it. It was a wonder. No one knew how to stop it. It was too old, too precarious. Closed permanently to visitors. So Ingrid looked at it from a distance, holding her mother’s hand, and squinted through one eye. Everywhere people took pictures, forced perspective snapshots of themselves holding the tower up with their backs or their hands or their shoulders. When no one was looking she took a picture, her finger held out in front of the disposable camera, pushing the the tower against the wrong side. Push, she said to herself. Push it over. She thought she could do it. She knew she could. It would only take a little shove.

If this were true, and she pushed and sent the tower toppling, then she would be a very bad girl. That night she listened to the soft breath of her sister sleeping next to her, the quiet of the old hotel room, and imagined creeping out of bed and through the nighttime toward the tower, closer, closer than anyone had ever dared to go. As she lay in bed she could see the carved pillars adorned with flowers and shells made of stone, and she crept closer, her white nightgown grazing her bare legs in a gentle, guiding breeze, go on, go on, go on. Closer and closer as the stars and the moon looked down from their night watch, and God, asleep with his finger propped just so to keep the tower from falling in the night, would not wake up in time to save it if she gave it a good enough shove. The weeds and tall grasses around the base of the tower licked her legs with dry tongues and she wished she had thought to bring shoes, for there was no telling what she might put her foot down upon. But she picked her way through, feeling as brave as a soldier, looking back at the sleeping buildings, the quiet dark and the glowing stone painted silver by the moon.

Her hand touched a pillar. It was cold and she drew back, as if that butterfly’s touch could send the whole thing creaking, pulling, tearing toward the earth. She looked up. The tower cut a diagonal line through the black sky, bathed in white light and solid as an iceberg, a ship, a mountain, as anything that a little girl could not possibly push over with her small, soft hands. She touched the stone again, so smooth and cool, she wanted to put her cheek against it but did not. She considered going back to the hotel. What if someone had seen her and was running to get the police? She didn’t speak their language. What if a spotlight was about to blind her at any moment, dogs barking, men running, the hustle and havoc of saving her and scolding her all at once. She paused, waiting. Just the rustle of the breeze in the grass, pure thick silence of night. She moved forward, walking the edge of the stone step that led to the first level, a circular walkway lined with arches, rows of them all the way up to the top. There must have been a dozen levels. Pointing toward the moon, which hovered off to the west. Was that it? Was it not God that was holding the thing up, but the moon? But no, even the little girl knew that the moon was not always in the same place in the sky, but the tower always leaned toward the west. So the moon was just an observer. Although tonight, it seemed more directly involved.