We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
Jack paused long enough to say, “First stanza.Odeby Arthur O’Shaughnessy. Always cite your sources.”
Then he returned to madly typing.
“Poetry doesn’t solve my problems,” Hugo said, almost shouting over the clacking of the keys.
Finally, Jack dropped his hands from the keys. The silence was heaven.
“Why would anyone have problems poetry couldn’t solve?” Jack demanded.
Did this man not understand the pressure Hugo was under? Jack’s publisher had said that each Clock Island book sold ten million or more copies, and there were forty of them so far. Ten million forty times over was a calculation even an artist could do in his head.
“You’re rich,” Hugo said. “I’m not about to say you should say you’re sorry about it,” though Hugo thought he probably should. “But that bag over there”—he pointed at his black duffel—“is about everything I own in this world. I can’t mess this up. You have to give me more to go on than ‘Have fun.’”
“Kid, this”—Jack pointed at the page in his typewriter—“is my art. That”—he pointed at a painting of Clock Island, tempera on paper, the one Hugo had entered into the contest—“is your art. You don’t tell me how to do my art. I don’t tell you how to do your art.”
“Jack?”
“Yes, Hugo?”
“Tell me how to do my art.”
Jack sat back in his industrial green swivel chair. The ancient wheels squeaked, sending Thurl flapping back to his perch.
“What’s the best gift anyone ever gave you?” Jack asked. “And don’t tell me something you think I want to hear like a teacher encouraged you and that was the best gift. I mean toys. Drum set. Bow and arrow. Something Santa brought or a maiden aunt with money and a grudge against your mother.”
“Batmobile,” Hugo said. He almost blushed to admit it, but he’d loved that thing too much to deny it. “Mum somehow scraped up the cash to buy me a radio-controlled Batmobile. It was used, I think. Maybe Mumfound it in a charity shop, but it was still in the box, and it worked like a dream.”
“Did you play with it?”
“Course. I, uh…God…” Hugo chuckled at the memory of his younger self. “I played with it until the engine burned up and the wheels came off.”
“How do you think your mother would have felt if you’d never taken it out of the box? Just set it on a shelf and admired it from afar?”
Hugo remembered his mother laughing until she wheezed as the little black car careened off the table, around their flat, around her ankles, even while they were eating breakfast. She pretended to be cross about it, but her eyes were always laughing. He’d even heard her bragging about it to their neighbor Carol, how she’d found a toy for Hugo, and he hadn’t stopped playing with it for weeks.
“Would’ve broken her heart.”
“There,” Jack said as if he’d proven his point. What point?
“What’s there?”
“God—or whoever is in charge of this planet—got drunk on the job one day and decided to give me the gift of writing. The way I see it, I have two choices. I can set that gift on a high shelf so it won’t get dinged up and nobody can make fun of me for playing with it.” He smiled until the crinkles at the corners of his eyes were deep enough to hide state secrets. “Or I can have fun with it and play with the gift I was given until the engine burns out and the wheels come off. I decided to play. I suggest you do the same, young man. Go paint or draw or collage or whatever you want to do. Come back when there’s smoke coming off the canvas. And for God’s sake, go have some fun. Please?”
