NOS4A2

“She had gone looking for her mother’s bracelet in her imagination, and somehow she had found it. She had never gone out on her bike at all. Probably her parents had never really fought. There was only one way to explain a bridge crammed into an alley.”

Even as a child, Vic tells herself that she is either dreaming or her perception is breaking from “reality.” She will talk herself out of the reality of her Lost and Found trips. As an adult, before the phone calls begin, she no longer believes that it ever happened. She believes that the staff at the psychiatric hospital helped her see her delusions for what they were, rather than believing her own experience.

“He had no idea where or what Christmasland was, had never heard of it. And yet he instantly felt he had wanted to go there all his life…to walk its cobblestone streets, stroll beneath its leaning candy-cane lampposts, and to watch the children screaming as they were swept around and around on the reindeer carousel.”

Bing reacts to seeing the advertisement for Christmasland in the issue of Spicy Menace. His internal monologue—as well as his boyish exuberance—immediately cast him as a “disturbed,” “emotionally stunted” man with many childlike qualities. Manx will exploit Bing, as well as the pleasure Bing takes in cruelty. Bing becomes another of Manx’s children, although he will never see Christmasland, because he is an adult.

“Everyone lives in two worlds…There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact.”

Maggie explains how the tiles work. As a lover of fantasy, reading, and adventure, she is not as well suited to the real world as she is to the world of the library. She and Vic share the ability to use what she calls an inscape, like Manx. However, Manx is the only character in the book who is shown using the inscape for evil purposes. Even though his perception is distorted, Maggie’s quote makes it clear that he can create facts from his own ideas.

“When Vic thought about what she liked best in women, she always thought of the soldier’s wife, of her certainty and her quiet decency. She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone.”

After escaping from Manx, Vic will associate the best qualities of mothers with qualities that she lacks. She cares about Wayne, but she is not always able to be present for him, particularly when her mental stability is divided between the real, practical world, and the world in which she receives the calls from Christmasland. Much of her character arc is an evolution toward being the kind of mother she admires.

“Maybe she could not bring forth the bridge because there was nothing left to find. Maybe she had found everything the world had to offer her: a notion very like despair.”

The children in the novel are characterized by their capacity for surprise and joy. Vic equates the prospect of a life without more surprises to find as a dejected, depressive state. One thing the Shorter Way Bridge always guaranteed was a sense of exhilaration in its unpredictability. Traveling across the Bridge was always surprising.

“Sooner or later a black car came for everyone. It came and took you away from your loved ones, and you never got to go back.”

Nathan Demeter accepts his fate in Bing’s basement. His demise mirrors that of everyone who has come to the House of Sleep, until Vic breaks the cycle. His fatalistic—but realistic—worldview is exactly what Manx believes he is sparing the children from. They never have to grow old, and by taking a ride in his literal black car, they can avoid the metaphorical black car that is represented by death.

“You had to know when it made sense to untangle something and when to just cut the motherfucker loose.”

Vic chooses to cut a knot with a knife rather than spend more time fumbling with it. The metaphor of the knot extends, in her mind, to many other circumstances in her life. Vic has always chosen to struggle against things with negligible results, rather than simply breaking ties and moving on. However, she believes this is the result of her weak will and her unwillingness to accept love, rather than the influence of Manx and her attempts to self-medicate.

“Was there any urge more pitiful—or more intense—than wanting another chance at something?”

Lou is embarrassed by how he imagines that Wayne perceives him. He wishes that he could go back in time and find ways to show that he is brave, and assertive, and that he is the kind of man he hopes that Wayne will become. He also realizes that it is a futile wish, and only makes him feel more pitiful about the fact that he dwells on it.

“Aren’t remembering and knowing the same thing?”

Lou doesn’t understand when Vic says that she remembers what happened with Manx, but she doesn’t know what happened. She says that the story she remembers unfolded in two different ways, and she believes both. Both stories feel true to her, except that one version fits into the reality that most people inhabit, and the other could not exist within the rules of the normal world.

“It was incomprehensible that her entire life had been a carousel of unhappiness, drinking, failed promises, and loneliness, all turning around and around a single afternoon encounter with this man.”

Vic has been trapped by her past, which defined the greater trajectory of her life. She spent only a few hours dealing with Manx, but his evil was so potent that it infected her and rendered her nearly incapable of optimism. Her home life was not perfect before she encountered him, but she was at least only dealing with the relatively normal struggles of any teenager.

“Blood will never come out of silk.”

Manx complains about the blood on his silk shirt. His monologue is slightly comical, but it is the inverse of what Vic says to Wayne with her final words. If Wayne listens to Manx, he could view himself as a damaged piece of silk that could never be pure again. However, if he listens to his mother’s statement that he will always be okay, because the good in him cannot be taken from him, then he has reason for optimism.

“Everyone you lost still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.”

Vic realizes that Chitra reminds her of her mother, but in a positive way. Manx frequently states that he keeps children in his head, and that is how they stay safe. Vic acknowledges that her memories make it hard to move on from trauma, but also that they maintain her connection to the sentimental, positive pieces of her relationship with her mother. However, she later understands that if she were to lose Wayne, the fact that she would never be able to let go of his memory is an excruciating prospect.

“There was no such thing as arguing with delight. Like seeing a pretty girl with the sunlight in her hair, like pancakes and hot chocolate in front of a crackling fire. Delight was one of the fundamental forces of being, like gravity.”

Wayne imagines the moon as a key to Christmasland. In children, delight is pure reaction. In adults, it may be something akin to the absence of thought, or a kind of pleasurable flow state. Wayne’s description of delight as a fundamental force can be read as the need for adults to maintain the best part of children’s temperaments as they age because delight is what helps children feel hopeful, rather than hopeless.

“Men spend most of their lives being passed from woman to woman and being pressed into service for them. You cannot imagine the life I have saved you from! Men cannot stop thinking about women. They get thinking about a lady and it is like a hungry man thinking about a rare steak.”

Manx tells Wayne about his difficulties, which usually started with a woman. His marriage was obviously unsuccessful, but it is telling that Manx believes that part of sparing children from suffering is sparing them from the emotional and physical pleasures of romance and sexual desire. He does not entertain a reality where men are anything but enslaved to women, who weaponize sex against them. His view is archaic to the point that it is comically old-fashioned but is also a reminder of how old Manx is.

“It is all right to cry but don’t give up on laughter. Don’t give up on happiness. You need both. I had both.”

Vic finds the note that Demeter left for his daughter, Michelle, before Bing killed him. It is similar in tone to Vic’s final comment to Wayne, when she says that the good in him will always be good. Demeter does not want Michelle to suffer more than is necessary to grieve him, just as Vic wants for Wayne. They each make it clear to their child that life has enough good in it to look forward, not backward.

“Adults had a harder time with it than children did, and Vic had gradually realized that this was because grown-ups were always trying to see their way through to the end, and they couldn’t do it because there was too much information.”

Vic thinks about her situation as a Search Engine puzzle. Like the coming-of-age novels of Stephen King, Hill’s characters are often starkly divided between the worlds of children and adults. It is the insistence of the adults in the story to view the big picture that frustrate and paralyze them when confronted with smaller puzzles. Children solve the Search Engine puzzles intuitively, while an analytic adult like Hutter might miss obvious clues.

“It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world’s chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words.”

Maggie prefers listening to talking. Her sentiment about the struggle to make sense of chaos through words serves as a metaphor for the struggles and joys of storytelling to express truths. It is an insightful meta-commentary on what it means to write fiction, or to choose the medium of words over visual or purely aural mediums.

“She wanted to believe that information brought clarity. Not for the first time in her life, she had the disconcerting notion that it was often the opposite. Information was a jar of flies, and when you unscrewed the lid, they went everywhere and good luck to you trying to round them all up again.”

Hutter starts to doubt her faith in information. As an investigator and a psychiatric evaluator, she relies on systems and data to bring order to problems. Vic’s situation is, on its surface, so irrational that each new piece of information threatens to dismantle any case or profile that Hutter could build. She cannot impose order upon a system that she cannot access.

“She wished she were not so aware of the vast gulf between what the men in her life thought she was worth and her actual value. She had, it seemed to her, always asked and expected too much and given too little. She seemed almost to have a perverse impulse to make anyone who cared about her regret it, to find the thing that would appall those people and then do that until they had to run away as a matter of self-preservation.”

When Vic sees Lou at her father’s house, she contemplates the amount of love that men have offered her over the years. Because she doesn’t think she deserves to be loved, Vic pushes people away to prove to them that she doesn’t deserve them. Lou is the man who never leaves, and Chris McQueen will admit his failings before he dies so that she can save Wayne.

“Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.”

Vic compares her use of the fantastic bridge to other artists that bring their ideas into being. Musicians, for instance, hear sounds in their head that no one else can hear until they make them reality. At that point, the song has the potential to affect anyone who hears it. Fantasy is the artistic, enriching version of the inscapes that Manx abuses.

“I wish like hell you’d met someone better than me. But I’m not sorry we had a kid together. He’s got my looks and your heart. I know which one is worth more.”

Vic tells Lou that she loves him before they begin their final attack on the Sleigh House. This quote is the inverse of what she hears her father tell her mother during their initial fight before she finds the bracelet. Even though she does not like herself, Vic can admit that she and Lou made something beautiful together. Wayne is the product of an authentic love, despite his parents’ struggles together.

“Manx grabbed the little girl and shrank back toward the open door, the protective gesture of any father. In that gesture Vic understood everything. Whatever the children had become, whatever he had done to them, he had done to make them safe, to keep them from being run down by the world. He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.”

According to Vic’s observation, Manx may be a monster, but he is not a pure sadist. The atrocities he commits serve his warped code of protectiveness. Whatever suffering he may cause to the parents of the children he abducts, he may believe that he is legitimately protecting the children from suffering. He weighs his actions scrupulously against his moral code, but it is a code that appears amoral to people with empathy and humanity.

“What’s good stays good, no matter how much of a beating it takes. You’re okay. You’ll always be okay.”

Vic says this to Wayne, the last time he sees her alive. She seems to intuit that he will struggle with the aftermath of his time at Christmasland, just as her time with Manx underwrote the years after she escaped from him. She believes in Wayne’s inherent goodness, and that will win out over his trauma. She does not pretend that he is entitled to a life without suffering but wants him to believe that he can survive and thrive regardless of what he will face. This is a selfless, authentic act of parenting that will help Wayne as he struggles with his experience in the year after her death.