Gold Dust by Chris Lynch Read Free Book Online Page B

moments when you could have been pulled all the way in, when he talked about somebody named Lovelace, and some mad-sounding book with dragons and carnivals and when he was whipping it up you thought, Get me that book. Until you realized Dr. Ellis was performing, selling little bits of a thing like they did in commercials, and the thing itself was going to wind up meaning all but nothing to the likes of you, so reading an entire book of it was out of the question.
    You wanted to believe him, you wanted to care, and you could, if you didn’t worry too much about the message and just listened to the way he would swing through certain words, like “forward,” which came out like far-ward, and “the minister of finance,” which rolled out as dee meeneestah of fee-naanse. It sounded very slick to me, and I noticed somehow his hands did a sort of mime version of the same thing as he sang the words accompanied by a fluttering of those hands—birdlike toward the ceiling, then a quick loud clap, then a challenging long finger in somebody’s face, then all our faces as he spanned the room asking, “You think so? I think so. You think so?” to one obscure literary idea or another.
    I had never heard anybody like Dr. Ellis before. Right, I was sitting next to his son, but just the same, I felt as if I had never heard it before, in any form. Why? I looked over to Napoleon. “He’s great,” I whispered.
    Napoleon nodded. He smiled, and I could tell he was proud. But then the smile slipped away. If it was me I would have held it a little longer.
    I went back to listening to sounds instead of ideas, and found myself so lulled by him that I was caught flat when he asked for questions. There was a bit of a silence, followed by the whispering, as people tried coming up with questions that had some thin connection to what the doctor had been talking about for the last half hour. I looked up at the small box of a window at the front door of the class to see framed in it the soft and kind but not-too-pleased face of Sister Jacqueline. It was considered terrible form not to ask our guest speakers a slew of informed questions, and if we didn’t, the scene after he left would not be pretty.
    Miraculous Manny rescued us for a start.
    “The way you speak, it’s almost a singsong, more like a little kid than an adult.”
    Dr. Ellis was pleased. “I am not an adult, I am a writer.”
    “Hah,” Manny said. Manny was developing a new hero. Unfortunately he was not developing any follow-up questions.
    “Ask him what forms he writes in,” came the quiet, island-inflected voice on my right. Again, it made me think of the differences in their speech, father and son. Napoleon was so much more... controlled.
    “I write realism,” Dr. Ellis said, “until realism wearies me. Then I write fables, allegories, plays, songs, verse, essays, and letters to my friends. But in the end, I write about the same two things. The same two things, I think, that everyone writes about. I write about my dreams, and about my doubts. Dreams and doubts, they will keep a person’s mind occupied for a great long while.”
    There was silence then. Sister was smiling, pleased, in her window, like a big canary in a small cage.
    “And mulligatawny,” he added.
    More silence.
    “Mulligatawny. It has a lovely sound, does it not? I have always loved the sound of mulligatawny, the very loveliness of the syllables, the play in there. And it is a very fine soup. As words, it is beautiful, mulligatawny, as food it is beautiful, mulligatawny, so it fills me twice. I write about mulligatawny whenever I can because that is what it is all about. I keep a can on my desk even, for inspiration.”
    After a brief pause, Dr. Ellis thanked us and we broke into applause. “Really, Napoleon,” I could say louder now with the cover of hands clapping, “he’s great.”
    Napoleon Charlie Ellis was smiling again, but still looking not too sure about it. “Yes, well, you would be less