by John Crowley
Not Joe Boyd, though, Sam’s oldest son. When Pierce came to live there, Joe Boyd was already too old to be compelled to go to school with Miss Martha any longer, too old and mean to be compelled to do anything at all he chose not to do. He was a fox-faced boy who rolled the sleeves of his short-sleeved shirts above the lean muscles of his arms; he was supposed to be taking a course of reading with Sam, but he was coming to love only cars. He frightened Pierce.
And Hildy, the year after Pierce arrived, left Miss Martha’s tutelage too, to go attend Queen of the Angels School in the mountains above Pikeville, five days a week, gruel for breakfast and patched sheets and litanies. The fact that years later she became a nun herself, of the tart, disparaging, at bottom selfless and brave kind, never kept Hildy from relishing and retelling the horrors of that red brick mansion.
So classes from then on were for Pierce, and quiet, private Roberta, called Bird, and then Warren the baby, a shapeless lump to Pierce when he arrived, who only later grew a stolid, intelligent character. They sang for Miss Martha, recited for Miss Martha, they listened to Miss Martha remember their sainted mother Opal Boyd, they fled Miss Martha at noon into games Miss Martha would never hear of, and could not have imagined. Pierce’s mother, Winnie, when she came, tried to get them all together to teach them French in the afternoons a couple of days a week, but they soon wore her down and out. From noon to morning, from May to October, they were free.
Such was the family Pierce was to make his way in; in their isolation they were like some antique family of gentry, in the specialness of their circumstances like foreigners living within a pale. It was only the Oliphant children who were taught by the priest’s sister; only the Oliphants (as far as Pierce knew) who every month received from the state library in far-off, bluegrass-green Lexington, a box of books. Opal, Sam’s wife (herself once a schoolteacher, and formerly her children’s indulgent tutor, they cherished her memory fiercely), had found out this was possible to do, to request that boxes of the state’s books be sent to this bookless fastness, and Winnie continued it: every month the read books were packed up and shipped back, and on receipt another box would be sent, more or less filling the vague requests on the Oliphants’ list (Mother West-wind, more horse stories, “something about masonry,” anything of Trollope’s) and picked up at the post office, and opened in excitement and disappointment mixed, Christmas every month. Pierce remembering his confusion and contempt before this bizarre system—bizarre to a child who had had the vast, the virtually illimitable reaches of the Brooklyn Public to wander in, his father went every two weeks and Pierce had always gone with him and could have any book he pointed at—Pierce remembering those battered library boxes wondered if perhaps it had been they, those librarians or whoever they were who had filled them, who by sending him some book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography had first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country, that far old country that was sort of Egypt but not Egypt, no not Egypt at all, a country with a different history, whose name was spelled too with a small but crucial difference: it was not Egypt but Ægypt.
On an impossible city night, too hot to sleep, too hot and loud with sirens and music and the parade endlessly passing, Pierce stood at his window with a handmade cigarette between his fingers, and that country once again seemingly before him, still there in the past: Ægypt.
Why do we believe Gypsies can tell fortunes? Because they came not really from Egypt, but from Ægypt, the country where all magic arts were known. And still carry with them, in however degraded a form, the skills their ancestors had. Pierce laughed aloud to think of it.
And why were they wandering the earth, and why do they still wander? Because Ægypt has Fallen. It exists no longer. Whatever country occupies its geography now, Ægypt is gone, has been gone since the last of its cities, in the farthest East, failed and fell. Then its wise men and women went forth carrying with them their knowledge, to remember their country and yet never speak of it, to take on the dress and habits of the countries they went out into, to have adventures, to heal (for they were great doctors), and to pass on their secrets, so that they would not be lost.
And so these Gypsies (’Gyptians! Sure, the same word) were probably not really from there, only pretending to be, for those who were really from there were vowed to silence and secrecy.
Which is why it had been so hard for Pierce to discover them, hidden in history, in the upside-down adventures they had got themselves involved in down the centuries since then. Seen from the outside, dressed in mufti so to speak in the dense pages of the encyclopedia, in Miss Martha’s history textbook, they blended into the background, their stories could be misread; seen from the outside, they didn’t seem to be mages, or sworn knights of Ægypt.
Seen from the outside, neither had he and his cousins seemed to be: in old snapshots they were just scruffy kids in a degraded landscape, eastern Kentucky, coal trains chugging endlessly past their mountaintop, their mountaintop not different from any other mountaintop, not obviously quartered and labeled by secret geometries. Of course not. You had to be inside to know; you had to be told. And they too were sworn to secrecy.
The Invisible College.
Why, Pierce wondered, if they were all alone there and never out of one another’s company, had they always been making up clubs, associations, brotherhoods, pledging their faith to one another? When he had first come from Brooklyn to live among them he had had to wait long for initiation into Joe Boyd’s Retriever’s Club; Joe Boyd, the eldest of his cousins, its permanent president. The Invisible College was Pierce’s own invention, to counter that exclusion; wittily, with careful vengeance, he had not excluded Joe Boyd from membership, but instead had elected him president—his presidency, his membership, the very existence of the Invisible College however being kept a secret from him, a secret to which all the other Invisibles (all the kids but Joe) were pledged forever.
His own invention? No, the Invisibles had always been; Pierce had only learned, from hints in books, of their immemorial existence; they were knights older than Arthur’s; Arthur’s had in fact, perhaps, probably, been only a chapter of theirs, as all the wise and good and brave were in some sense chapters. Who else through the ages had been members? It was difficult to know for sure, but Pierce when asked by his cousins seemed able to decide, from a certain response he himself (general secretary after all to his own chapter) had to them. Gene Autry, almost certainly, knew much that his moon face concealed. Sherlock Holmes and Sir Flinders Petrie. Ike? He thought not, though considering the question raised a problem he had never been able to solve with certainty: it was possible, of course, to be of that College without anyone else knowing it, without the fact ever coming to light, not for centuries; but was it possible to be one of the Invisibles without ever knowing it yourself? His cleverness about Joe Boyd’s membership seemed to prove (especially to Hildy, legalistic and logical of mind and somewhat skeptical about Pierce’s College anyway) that it was.
Well, perhaps it was. It wasn’t for him to decide, as it might have been if he had in fact made it all up; but he had not, he had only entered into it, as into an empire, and was himself as surprised to find out its shape and its stories as his cousins were: it wasn’t make-believe but History. Once the initial discovery had been made—that there was this country, had once been this country, which was somehow the country where the pyramids were and where the Sphinx was but not exactly that country—then it was a matter of decoding what further facts came to his attention, to discover whether they descended from de Mille’s Technicolor country of pharaohs and suntanned slaves and Hebrews, or from the other shadow country: Ægypt: the country of those wise knights, country of forest and mountain and seacoast and a city full of temples where an endless story began.
An endless story: a story that continued in him and in his cousins, a story that continued in Pierce’s discovering it and elaborating it in the meetings of the Invisible College at night after they were all supposed to be as
leep, arguing questions which that story raised, questions his cousins put to him in the dark. Would they still be in this story even when they were grown up? Of course they would; it was a story about grownups. Would they ever go to Ægypt themselves, and how? They might, if the story ever came to an end. For in the end of the story (as Pierce heard it or imagined it) all the exiles would return, to the city in the farthest East, gathering there from every clime and time, coming upon each other in surprise—You! Not you, too!—and reconstituted at last, to tell over the story of their adventures. And why not they, then, he and his cousins, and maybe Sam and Aunt Winnie, Pierce’s mother, and yes Axel his father too, going by boat or train or plane secretly to
“Adocentyn,” Pierce said aloud.
Looking out his slum window he felt a funny gust, like wind in his hair. He hadn’t heard the name of that city spoken for years, years. When he went away to St. Guinefort’s the game had come to a sudden end. There were no more stories. He had outgrown them, put them away, his younger cousins dared not ask him—newly serious in a school tie and a crew cut—to continue it. Did they ever think of it now, he wondered. Adocentyn.
Now how by the way had he come up with such a name? Where had he stolen it from, what book had yielded it up for him to adopt into his imaginary country? It sounded to his grown-up ear as totally invented as a name could be, as outlandish as a name heard in a dream, a name that, in the dream, means something it doesn’t mean at all when you wake.
He wondered if he could find out where he had got it. If some index to some book (what book?) might yield it up. If there were other stories like the Gypsies, stories that he would discover had also proceeded from his own shadow-Egypt, Ægypt. There might be. Must be: after all, he had got the stories he had told from somewhere. From History, he had told his cousins; since the time he had stopped thinking about it all, he had begun to assume that he had simply made it all up out of his own big head, but perhaps he hadn’t. That is, for sure his Ægypt was imaginary; only perhaps it hadn’t been he who had invented it.
If he could return there, and find out; somehow turn back that way, and return.
“Pierce?” Julie’s voice, from within the dark bedroom where the fan whirred. “You still up?”
“Yup.”
“Watcha doing?”
“Thinking.”
Not that it would be easy to find again; no, it was just the sort of country that, once left, is not easy to return to. The effort seemed immense and futile, as though it weren’t he but the world itself in its socket that would have to be turned against the thread.
“It’s the dope,” Julie said sleepily. “Come to bed.”
Adocentyn, Pierce thought. O Ægypt.
A breeze was rising now at last, as dawn approached, a wind from the sea; Pierce inhaled its brackish coolness gratefully. He would turn back: go on by turning back. Perhaps, like Hansel, he had dropped crumbs along the way he had come; perhaps those crumbs had not all been eaten.
Set out, then, Pierce thought. Set out.
His cigarette had burned down to a brown fragment, and he pitched it into the street, a brief meteor. On the fire escapes of the building opposite him, people had made up beds, hung with colored cloths and lit with candles. Down the street, a fire hydrant was open, and gushed into the gutter, washing out beer cans, condoms, matchbooks, newssheets. Wind chimes, camel bells, dogs barking, a tambourine idly shaken. The sweltering caravanserai all awake.
If he thought there was no story in history, just one damned thing after another, Barr had said, it was only because he had ceased to recognize himself. He had ceased to recognize himself. And yet every story that he had once been inside of lay still inside him, larger inside smaller, dream inside waking, all there to be recovered, just as a dream is recovered when you wake, from its latest moments backward to its earlier.
He began by looking into Egypt: poking into the ruins, lugging home from the Brooklyn Public big folios, sniffing at indexes, settling down to browse. In none of them was what he was looking for. The topic was vast, of course, and Egyptology took up long shelves at the library, having its own Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms: antique multivolume studies from whose ancient silt poked up etched plates, and then newer mythographical analyses clinker-built and obdurate as pyramids, and lastly decadent popular works chock-full of color photos—in none of them was the country he sought. He felt like someone who had set out for the Memphis of crocodiles and moonlit temples and wound up in Tennessee.
Why do we believe that Gypsies can tell fortunes? Because we thought once they were Egyptians, even though they aren’t, and it was natural to suppose they would inherit, in whatever faint degree, the occult wisdom that everybody knows the Egyptians possessed. And why on our dollar bills do we put Egypt’s pyramid, surmounted by its mystic eye? Because from ancient Egypt issues the secret language of spiritual freedom, illumination, knowledge, the geometries by which can be cast the New Order of the Ages.
But it isn’t so! These real Egyptians Pierce was reading about had been the most hard-headed, materialistic, literal-minded bureaucrats of the spirit he had ever encountered. So far from being able to imagine spiritual freedom, spiritual journeys, they had concocted the disgusting procedures of embalming because of their certainty that only the physical body, preserved like a fruitcake in its box, could withstand the dissolutions of death. The more Pierce grappled with their mythologies, oppressive in their endless elaboration, the more he came to understand that they meant exactly what they said: these tedious stories weren’t allegories of consciousness to be interpreted by the wise, though even Plato had thought that to be so; they weren’t magic emblems, they weren’t art, they were science. The Egyptians just thought the world worked this way, operated by these characters, acting out this grotesque dream. Pierce concluded that the ideal condition, for an ancient Egyptian, was to be dead; short of that, to be immobile, asleep and dreaming.
None of it was what Pierce had meant, not at all. He just about decided that he must have made it all up, for the noble history he had known could not have been suggested by this stuff; just about decided.
Then, along another road, unfrocked, in trouble, fleeing, Giordano Bruno appeared, like the White Rabbit—or rather reappeared, for Fellowes Kraft’s little book had risen to the top of the stack like a thought to the tip of Pierce’s tongue; and Pierce went where it pointed—which was not toward Egypt at all but back toward where Pierce had started out from, the Renaissance; not Pharaoh’s age but Shakespeare’s, whose near contemporary Bruno was. And by and by he found himself once again at frontiers he recognized.
Oh I remember. I see. Now how do you like that …
He began to abandon—by degrees, and without ever quite admitting it to himself—the attempt to construct an account, a vade-mecum for his kids on their pilgrimage; anyway that account had grown suddenly too huge to be squeezed into the compass of an ordinary daylit history course, it needed a course no a college of its own. He went on teaching, but his path had forked; he followed Bruno, and was led down long avenues under emblematic arches, past columned temples; he lost his way amid the suburbs of a Baroque city both unfinished and ruined; found a geometric pleasure-ground; entered a dark and endless topiary maze.
But Pierce, pioneer, knew a thing about mazes, had picked up along his way one crumb of information about mazes: in any maze, of yew or of stone, of zoomorphic topiary or made of glass or of time, put out your hand and follow the left-hand wall wherever it leads. Just keep to the left-hand wall.
Pierce put out his hand, and followed; and traveling so (in his street-salvaged plush armchair, the books piled beside him) began to find that what he followed, what he had entered into, what at every turning grew that much clearer to him (Oh I see) were the lineaments of his old question answered. Why do we think Gypsies can tell fortunes? When at length the Sphinx in her mother’s white bathroom put the same question to him, he had his account: the whole bizarre, unlikely, even hilarious story. He had hi
s account, though how much of it she ever actually listened to, how much of it sank into her busy brain, he was not sure. He knew why people believe Gypsies can tell fortunes; he knew why that pyramid and that mystic eye appear on every dollar bill, and from what country the New Order of the Ages issued. It was the same country as the country from which Gypsies came, and it was not Egypt.
Not Egypt but Ægypt: for there is more than one history of the world.
In the heavy August morning, Pierce walked down from Spofford’s cabin along the dirt road that led to the asphalt highway that wound beside the Blackbury River and through Fair Prospect. Full of breakfast and ready to rededicate himself, he would still not have minded a day’s grace before he had to head on to Conurbana; it had been years since he had been in country of this kind—he and the Sphinx, carless, had mostly spent their summers air-conditioned in the city—and he felt his childhood returned to him as he walked: not so much in concrete memories, though many of those too, as in a series of past selves whose young being he could taste in the breaths of air he drew. It was the day and the country, though there was little here but summer and verdure to remind him of the shaggy and tunneled hills of the Cumberland Gap; it was enough, seemingly.
Maybe, he thought, maybe it is given only to wanderers, to the displaced, to remember in this way, when suddenly they find themselves in air like the air of the country they have left. Maybe if you live all your life in one place, and grow up as the same year turns in the same way again and again, then things don’t get left permanently behind, preserved untouched like pressed flowers that bloom again whole and unchanged when immersed in the old water. If that was so, then it must be for his cousins as it was for him, for all of them were now displaced; Hildy in foreign parts, Joe Boyd in (last Pierce heard) California, Bird in a midwestern city, Warren selling cars in Canada. Funny if all on one day, this day, they were each to happen on a stretch of dusty road like this one, or an old book, or a pattern of raindrops or sunlight, or simply a chance disposition of internal chemistries, which brought each of them back in this sudden and complete way that he was just now brought back: because if they did, they would be brought back all to the same place. A family reunion all unknown to them dispersed across the continents. The Invisible College meets again.