The KING IN THE WINDOW By Adam Gopnick Chapter One A Stone in the Street, a Boy in the Window If Oliver had simply smiled and joked with his parents while he was wearing the gold paper crown, or if he had just remembered to take it off after dinner, as he had always done before, the window wraiths might never have mistaken him for royalty. Instead, because he was a born worrier, and because he had homework to finish for the next morning, and because he was exasperated with his parents for being so childish, and just because (as he explained much later to Mrs. Pearson) he pretty much forgot that he had it on, he wore the crown all through dessert and washing up. He had even kept it on his head at the end of the evening while he sat at the kitchen table and practiced making shadow puppets. And so that night, because Oliver wore the crown, the boy in the blue doublet appeared in the window for the first time. It was the night of Epiphany, during a bitter and freezing winter in the city of Paris, where Oliver lived with his mother and father. It is often said that Paris is a happy and beautiful city, where people in love like to walk hand in hand and stare at each other, and, although this description is mildly goopy, it is also mostly true, at least beginning with April and ending in October. But in the winter Paris is another place. It is dark and cold and sad and mysterious. If you begin the school day, as Oliver did, at eight in the morning and ended it, as Oliver did, at four thirty in the afternoon, then six months go by in which you never once see sunlight. The sun has set by four thirty, and the streets are often empty by eight o'clock, with people crowded inside the golden-lit apartments and cafés and restaurants. In the evenings, the gray-violet skies always look as if they are about to snow, and never do. Just that afternoon, for instance, right after school, Oliver had kicked a pebble home alone from his school on the Right Bank to the Left Bank, where he lived with his parents, and at every corner he had turned, he saw only streetlights and long shadows -- trees with black limbs silhouetted against the twilight -- and crowds of people with their scarves pulled tight around their throats, looking down as their heels went clack! as they wove in and out against the narrow stone pavement, and looking up at the charcoal sky above, which was still not snowing. It had been a very cold and lonely walk home for Oliver that day. Oliver had been born in America, in New York City. His parents had moved to Paris with him when he was only three, and when he visited New York now, he found it exciting but a little frightening. Paris was his home, although he didn't always feel quite at home there. Oliver was often very lonely, but he had never been as lonely as he was this winter. For years his father had met him every day after school on his way home from his office on the rue Fleurus. They would almost always find a perfectly smooth stone on the street in front of the school, and then kick it all the way home together -- all the way across Paris, across the Jardin des Tuileries and the rue de Rivoli and the bridge to the Left Bank. But last year his father's office had closed, and now he worked at home, and he didn't come to meet Oliver after school. "You're a big guy now," he had said. "You can find your own way home." It was true that he could find his own way home. But he didn't want to find his own way home. He wanted company, and conversation, and he almost never had any of either, from his Parisian schoolmates, who had their own lives to lead, and led them without Oliver. Ideally, he thought to himself, ideally he would have walked home every day arm in arm with a chain of very fashionable people, exchanging jokes and confidential secrets. And even if his father wasn't fashionable or witty, at least he had always answered his questions. What's the most expensive thing there is? Why are there so many languages in the world, and where did they come from? Why is there an infinity of numbers and not an infinity of letters? Why does it never snow in Paris? . . . How had Oliver's father answered that one? Oh, yes, it never gets quite cold enough in Paris to turn the rain to snow. . . . Sometimes Oliver would ask so many questions that his father would just laugh and say "Ollie! Trust me." Tonight, Oliver had tried to lift his spirits by kicking a pebble home himself. This stone wasn't even perfect -- it was beautifully smooth, but it had a kind of weird white blemish on it -- and he hadn't felt his heart lift one bit as he kicked his stone across the city. Up and down the narrow streets, and across the great gray violet boulevards -- kicking a pebble home alone felt, well, empty, and Oliver had been so unhappy that he had at last kicked it right off the Pont Royal, one of the many bridges that runs across the river Seine and connects the Right Bank of Paris to the Left Bank. Or rather he had tried to kick it off the bridge. He had struck it with all his might -- but then the pebble must have hit a part of the bridge railing that Oliver couldn't see. Somehow it had bounced right back at him and lay there on the pavement before him, like an eager puppy. Oliver was so annoyed by this that he had kicked it again, toward the water, from the other side of the bridge. But this time, too, it must have struck someone's ankle -- "Hey, that's enough from you!" a man had barked reprovingly, looking at him in anger as he stood among a crowd of Parisians, staring up at the new lights that were being strung up and down the Eiffel Tower and there the pebble was again. And the odd thing was that he thought that he had heard the man bark at him even before his toe had struck the stone. This third time he had really kicked it hard and watched it fly off the bridge and land with a barely audible plop! in the water. It was twilight, and dark -- but he was sure that he saw the pebble skim right across the water and come back up on the other side of the bank, along the quai, the paved walkway that ran by the river on the Left Bank. Oliver was astonished. He must be getting much better at kicking than he had thought . . . probably all that soccer practice, even though he wasn't big enough to make the school soccer team. It was so peculiar that, after he crossed the bridge, Oliver took a detour down the stairs to the quai to pick up the pebble, and had then kicked it home, as hard as he could, pretending to be Thierry Henry, the great French soccer star. But no matter how hard he struck the pebble, this time it just flew lightly along the pavement, a few feet at a time, and then almost seemed to be waiting patiently for Oliver to kick it again, as though it wanted to go home with him, until at last he and the pebble both arrived at the courtyard of the building where he lived with his parents. Leaving the pebble in the courtyard, he had taken a deep breath to drink in the Parisian winter air: in Paris in the winter, there is a special kind of keen, smoky smell that penetrates everywhere. It seems to be made up of strong cigarettes, black coffee, scalded milk, and burning wood. Then he walked up the narrow stairs to their third-floor apartment, to be embarrassed one more year by celebrating Epiphany with his parents. One of the ways that people try to cheer up through the dark months of a Paris winter is at the feast called Epiphany. "Christmas isn't such a big deal in France," Oliver had once explained to his best, unfortunately faraway, friend, Charlie Gronek, of Allendale, New Jersey. "I mean, it's a big deal, but it's not the whole world, the way it is in America. Epiphany is just as big, really." Epiphany comes on January 6, and it celebrates the night when the Wise Men reached the stable at Bethlehem. ("If they were so wise, how come they got there so late?" Oliver had asked his parents when he was four, and they had laughed and repeated it to everybody for weeks, even though it had been a perfectly sincere question. What was worse was that they were still telling it now, eight years later, as though he had said it yesterday.) So on this Epiphany night, Oliver was sitting with his parents in the kitchen of their apartment on a little street called the rue du Pré-aux-Clercs. Although they had a dining room on the other side of the apartment, they almost always ate dinner at a little round blue table in the kitchen next to the window. "They make wonderful almond filling at Saffray," Oliver's mother was saying as she looked admiringly inside the cake that they were about to have for dessert. At Epiphany in Paris, everyone shares a cake called a galette des rois -- the cake of the kings. A galette des rois has puff pastry outside, with a little design of leaves or wreaths on the top, and inside it is filled with almond cream. There is always a prize hidden inside the cake -- a bean, or sometimes a tiny toy, or a golden angel. Whoever finds the prize in his slice of cake becomes the king, and gets to wear the gold-paper crown that the ladies in the bakery hand out when you buy the galette des rois. "What beautiful almond filling . . ." his mother said, intent on the cake. From years of experience, and because he really was not a complete idiot, Oliver knew perfectly well that she was really searching to see where the prize was, so that she could make sure that it was in his slice. Oliver would have to pretend to be startled when he found the prize in his piece. "It's funny," his mother said as she peered at the almond filling. "I had ordered a galette for six people, so that Oliver could have extra, but they only had this small one left. They said that someone else had come in and taken ours, by mistake. And you know who it was -- it was Madame Farrad! Neige came up here to look for you --" Madame Farrad was their gardienne. A gardienne in Paris is someone who looks after the building, and usually lives in a small ground-floor apartment. He or she collects the mail and watches the doors and takes out the trash. Madame Farrad was their gardienne -- and she was a gloomy and suspicious woman, with a beautiful daughter. Neige was her daughter's name. (Neige is the French word for "snow.") She was just one year older than Oliver, who had been playing with her since he was little. She was extremely beautiful, Oliver thought privately, but a bit, well, extremely difficult. "Neige came up here?" Oliver asked. Missing Neige was one more thing that made today utterly lonely and rotten. They had had a stupid quarrel about six months ago, and she had hardly spoken to him since. "Yes, darling. But I told her that you hadn't come home yet. You two don't seem to talk together as much as you used to. Is something wrong?" Oliver was thinking about whether to tell his mother about the quarrel -- it had been really stupid -- when his father looked up from the paper. "Did you offer to exchange them back?" he asked Oliver's mother sharply. "Are you joking? That would have been a real crise. I was glad to let her have our big one," his mother said. Madame Farrad was a very argumentative and sullen lady, and Oliver knew that his mother hated to get into long discussions with her, much less have an argument about the size of an Epiphany cake. "Ty," she said. Oliver's father was staring off into the window, as he often did these days. "Ty," she repeated. "What is it?" "I better go check my e-mail. Something may be coming in. Be right back," he said, and dashed out of the room. His mother sighed. She hated it when people interrupted family occasions. She lived for family occasions, and more and more often his father seemed distracted when they took place. Oliver's father was a writer for a newspaper in America, and every day he disappeared into his "office" -- really, it was just a little room near the dining room -- and Oliver would hear the keys of his computer clacking away. Faxes would come in from America in the middle of the night, and often Oliver's father would get up to read them, and then reply on his computer. When Oliver was little, he had loved the brrring of the faxes as they arrived, and the sound of his father clacking the keys, because both sounds seemed exciting. But now that he was older he thought that they made his father sad, and tired, and when he heard them in the middle of the night, he went back to sleep. "It's that story about Gil," his mother said quietly to Oliver, shaking her head. "He's sort of obsessed with it." "You know how he is about his work, Mom," Oliver said, trying to reassure her. "Especially now that he's trying to write about Gil." Oliver knew that his father had been working for sev-eral months on a story about the great computer tycoon Gil Hornshaw. Gil was his father's oldest friend. Back in college, many years ago, he and Oliver's father had been roommates. "He was like Thomas Edison in a tie-dyed T-shirt back then," his father had told Oliver once. Then Gil had been hurt in a skateboarding accident, his father had explained to Oliver, and it had left the right side of his mouth paralyzed; ever afterward his face was set in a sarcastic-seeming half smile. Gil Hornshaw (Oliver knew the story by heart, he had heard it so often) had offered to make his father a partner in the little computer company he had started. But Oliver's father had refused, because he wanted to go to France and write, and Gil's company had become a computer giant. Now Oliver's father and mother often joked about how much money Gil made every day compared to how many years it would take for his father to earn the same amount. Only a few months before, Gil had announced that he was coming to Paris to demonstrate a "breakthrough," a strange and special project that would be based in the Eiffel Tower and somehow "be a quantum leap in engineering," and he had called to ask Oliver's father to write about it. "It would be an exclusive, Ty," Oliver had heard Gil say kindly to his father over the online connection. Gil often would send streaming video of himself, answering questions, over Oliver's father's computer. Peering through his father's half-open door late at night, Oliver could see Gil Hornshaw's famous crooked half smile and open shirt, sending itself, in that herky-jerky way of computer videos, all the way from Seattle to Paris. Oliver even kept a little snapshot of himself with Gil, his arm around Oliver, in his wallet. It had been taken during the one visit he had made with his father to Seattle. "Yes. Your father is obsessed with Gil and his project," Oliver's mother said now. Then she just looked away. "But it's not just the project, whatever that is. It's his whole way of looking at --" She caught herself, and then turned away and went over to the counter where the cake waited. Oliver knew that she hated for him to think that his parents were unhappy. Oliver quietly walked over to the window and looked out into the courtyard. There was nothing there, just Madame Farrad, staring up at the window, and disappearing into her tiny house in the courtyard. Oliver heard her speaking sharply to Neige from inside. When his father came back from his office, Oliver's mother placed the cake on the table with great formality and lifted the slices onto their plates. Then they all bit in. Oliver poked around in his slice with his fork, and soon found something hard and bright inside it. The prize, of course. He withdrew it with his fork. It was a shiny, small gold key -- the kind of old-fashioned key with two stubby prongs that you see jailers holding in cartoons about medieval dungeons. As his mother exclaimed, pretending to be surprised, Oliver held the key up for a moment and examined it. He had to admit, they had done a very good job at Saffray. The key was much heavier than you expected it to be, more solid and actually keylike. The two prongs of the key were even grooved and worn, as if they were ready for a lock. Well, Oliver guessed, galette prize-making must be a very competitive business these days. . . . Then his parents did what they always did. They both stood up and his mother very ceremoniously placed the crown on Oliver's head while his father saluted him. To anyone looking in from the window, it would have looked like a very solemn coronation, even though Oliver was twelve years old. "God, Dad," Oliver muttered -- but he didn't say it very loudly. "Oliver, darling, do you remember how the first time you ever got the crown, you wouldn't take the crown off for three whole days --" his mother began to say. She seemed much happier now. He was glad for that but he had been three years old, for God's sake -- and then they were talking as though this were something that had happened centuries ago to somebody else, and not to a living, breathing person who happened to be sitting at the table that very minute, and was being embarrassed. His parents, Oliver thought, had sort of, well, fallen out of time a little since they had moved to Paris. They still acted as though he was three, which was what he had been when they came here. They went on chatting, while Oliver sat with the crown on and looked out the window. But, in a weird, exact-opposite-of-what-he-intended way that Oliver didn't have a word for, it was just because his parents had so exasperated him with this tedious behavior that he forgot to take the crown off this time, too. And so the crown was still on his head when Oliver sat down with his French history homework -- in French, homework is called devoirs -- at the kitchen table, while his father disappeared into the living room to read another newspaper and wait for the ten o'clock news to come on. This sixth of January would have been, for Oliver, One of Those Days, if all of his days recently hadn't been One of Those Days. Oliver went to the Ecole Fontenelle, a very hard, serious French school, which is saying a lot, because all French schools are hard and serious. All the students had to memorize long lists of things: the number of continents, and the races of man, and the departments of France -- those are sort of like the states of America -- and their chief products. Once, when he was visiting Charlie Gronek in Allendale, New Jersey, Oliver had gone to Charlie's school, and he could hardly believe how different is was. The kids all wore whatever they wanted to wear -- mostly sneakers and big T-shirts that fell outside their pants -- and they called the teacher Joni and they gave reports on Madonna videos. By three o'clock, it was all over. The teachers at the Ecole Fontenelle were perfectly nice, Oliver explained to Charlie, but they wouldn't even look at you until you had recited the principle products of the department of the Gironde, and you certainly couldn't call them Joni. Tonight, Oliver had devoirs to do on many subjects, but most important of all, he had a paper due for his rhetoric class. That was the class he hated most. Rhetoric is the study of ways of saying things: if you say something as though you're talking to a crowd, that's one kind of rhetoric; if you say it as though you're talking to a friend, that's another. It's an important subject in France, but all it did was confuse Oliver even more completely than he was normally confused by school. In order to settle his nerves before he sat down at the kitchen table to actually write that paper, he decided he would drink a bottle of Orangina and practice making shadow puppets in the pleasant warmth of the kitchen. The kitchen was a comfortable place to be in the evenings. The dishwasher and the dryer would usually both be running, and they made a nice sound. When Oliver visited Charlie Gronek in Allendale, New Jersey, he was shocked to find that Charlie's parents had a whole room, like a garage, for the washing machine and dryer, which made a racket like the Paris metro coming into a station. The French dishwasher at Oliver's house just made a nice, throaty gurgle, and the dryer hummed and expelled sweet warm air into the kitchen. Often, he would sit and hum, or even sing to himself, while he heard the homey sounds and read a good book. The windows of the kitchen looked out onto the courtyard of their building. They were the kind of old-fashioned windows -- the kind that open like doors -- that American people call French windows and French people just call windows. The glass in the windows was slightly rippled, and thick, and antique. After dinner, his mother usually let down the blue-and-white-striped blinds that she had bought for the kitchen windows. Tonight, Oliver kept them down and turned on one of the kitchen lamps straight up so that it was like a spotlight. He had learned to make shadow puppets with his hands when he had been in bed for two weeks after he had his appendix out, a few years before, and he had become quite expert at it. He could make a bird that flew, a dog that opened and shut its mouth, and even a dolphin that rose from the sea and dived back down. Oliver was still struggling to master the hardest shadow puppet in his instruction book, which was of a bird that rose up with two immense fluttering wings, like an eagle's. In his book it was called the King's Sign, and the diagram showed that you were supposed to weave your fingers together until your wrists practically broke from the strain. It didn't explain why it was called the King's Sign, though Oliver assumed that if a king wanted to play with shadow puppets, he would naturally want an impressive-looking one, like an eagle rising. Tonight, he worked on it for about five minutes, but it didn't look anything like an eagle rising -- more like two porcupines arguing -- and so he stopped and pulled the curtains up again. Oliver often liked to pull the blinds up and look into the courtyard while he was reading. You couldn't really see much -- just your own reflection, in the black night, coming back at you from the window. Sometimes, when Oliver was little, and the three of them were having dinner in the kitchen, he liked to wave to the family in the window -- his mother and father and him. They seemed so close and near, but somehow still like another family, right there. He looked down in the courtyard now, past his reflection in the window for a second, and was surprised to see Neige wearing her winter coat, and staring up at his window. He looked down again, and thought about opening the window, but before he could she was gone and he was staring only at his own stupid reflection. Stupid, he thought -- he still had the crown on. He must look foolish. And then he whispered, with a slightly bitter smile on his lips, because he was really so grown up now and his parents didn't know it, "Here I am. The King in the Window. . . ." For a moment, he thought he heard a gentle knock on the window, but he was sure it was just the January wind. And then a moment later, he heard it again, and he turned and looked toward the window and his own reflection. But where his own reflection should have been, he saw, looking back at him, a boy in blue, with lilies on his clothing and long hair to his shoulders, gazing gravely at him. Oliver caught his breath and his heart felt as though it had raced into his throat. The boy was there, where his own reflection should have bee -- he was looking at him right now with pale, gray-blue eyes, and his body was somehow floating in front of the second-story window. Oliver also saw that he was wearing the kind of ancient cloak that is called a doublet, and that the lilies on it were fleurs-de-lis, the tiny flowers that are the old symbol of the kings of France. He reached out a hand and rapped against the window lightly with the little golden key. The boy in blue reached up his hand, too, and touched Oliver's through the glass, just as though he really were Oliver's reflection, and not another person on the other side of the window. For half a second Oliver thought that he must be the victim of an illusion, and he looked down at his own clothes to be sure that there was nothing there that he could mistake, in a window, for a doublet covered with golden fleurs-de-lis. But he just had on a navy blue T-shirt, as he had thought. He noticed that the boy looked down, too, when Oliver did. So he is my reflection, Oliver thought to himself, only somehow not. Oliver raised his head again, and he saw that the boy in blue did the same. This time, though, their eyes met, and locked. Then the boy stared directly at the little golden key that Oliver had found in the galette and his eyes seemed to widen and -- Oliver was quite sure of this -- his lips formed the beginnings of a wide and relieved smile. Then the boy began forming words with his lips, though it seemed to take great effort to do it. Oliver pressed his ear against the window to hear what the boy in the blue doublet was saying, but as he did, he saw that the boy -- almost as though he didn't want to -- pressed his head and ear against the window, too, so that it was touching Oliver's, on the other side of the window. Somehow he has to act like my reflection, Oliver thought, even though he isn't. He straightened up again, so that he could look directly at the boy. And this time, the boy moved his lips again. He heard words, so faint and hollow that they were barely audible; the wind whistled outside, and even the sounds of the dishwasher seemed like a roar, so that Oliver had to strain to hear. Yet now, very faintly, but very clearly, like the church bells that rang on Sunday morning from blocks away but whose chimes you could still hear in the kitchen, Oliver heard a distant, pale, drawling voice -- a voice like a flute, no, like a recorder, playing far away -- speaking French in a nasal accent that Oliver had never heard before. "O Roi, reviens chez toi! Retourne dans ton royaume!" the boy said. "O, my king -- come home! Return to your kingdom." And then he said it again; only this time, very slowly, as if moving his lips independently of Oliver was taking great effort. "Come home, my king!" Then he crooked his finger, and made the beckoning gesture with his finger that means, in every language and at every time, Come. Come with me. The boy held up his hand, and in it was the little pebble with the white mark that Oliver had kicked into the river. Oliver could see the boy's lips move again, effortfully, too, and once again, only more clearly, thrillingly as though they were reverberating around the dark room, he heard the words again. "We call you, O King." And then quite clearly, "Come to battle! Bring your sword!" Come to battle? What sword? Called him where? Oliver was trying to clear his throat enough to ask, as he stared into the deep sad eyes of the apparition of the boy, when suddenly he heard footsteps in the corridor down the hall, and then his father was in the kitchen just behind him. "Dad. Look!" Oliver finally got the words out, in a strangled voice. He glanced back over his shoulder to summon his father, and then turned again toward the window. Now there was nothing there except his own reflection, and that of his father, looking over his shoulder. His father put an arm around him. "The family in the window," he said, and he gave Oliver a quick, absentminded squeeze, and then he went to turn on the radio. He fiddled with the dial, cursing a little under his breath, and in a moment Oliver heard the sounds he usually found so comforting: Big Ben booming, and then the cheerful music that meant the BBC news was about to begin, and then a voice saying, "This is London . . ." But Oliver just sat still and rapt, and stared and stared out the window, wondering what he should do, and where he should go, and who he should tell. "Dad . . ." Oliver began. His father shushed him with a finger. "The American software entrepreneur Gil Hornshaw has arrived in Paris to begin preparations for a project that he promises to launch one week from today, from a platform within the Eiffel Tower. Details of the project remain a closely guarded secret . . ." the announcer began, in plummy British tones. His father moved closer to the radio to listen. It was three thirty in the morning when Oliver finally fell asleep. Before he shut his eyes, safe in his own bed, he got up and looked in his father's office. He found his father asleep at his desk, bent down in front of his still-humming computer, the blue-gray light on his face. He was online again, Oliver saw, and he had typed his own name -- Tyrone Parker -- into a search engine, as though he were looking for himself. Oliver shut off the computer, but his father remained asleep. He tiptoed back into his own room, still feeling extremely spooked and shaken, and wondering if it had really happened, and if it had, who he should tell, and most of all, wondering why anyone was calling him a king, and asking him to come home.