by John Crowley
There was so much to learn, or to relearn, the names of plants and flowers and the order of their coming forth, the usual greetings to be offered between citizens and the usual replies to them; the streets and alleys of the town, its stores, customs, history. Pierce sighed deeply. The world is so full of a number of things, he thought, that I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
As happy as kings. He had turned from Maple Street down River Street (had the founding families pondered a long time before choosing these simple self-evident names, Maple, River, Hill?) and then down to where River Street meets Bridges Street, and the town’s chief buildings faced the fast brown river and the spring sky. There on the corner he went into a small store whose red-and-white tin sign said VARIETIES. He asked for a pouch of his usual cheap tobacco, and noticed that there were magazines here as well as candy, gum, and cigarettes, a good selection in fact in a tall wooden rack, including one or two fairly abstruse journals Pierce had supposed he would now have to subscribe to, but no. Good. He wandered farther down the dim length of the shop. There was a brief soda fountain with a real marble top and three or four stools, he turned one with a hand as he passed and it grumbled as such stools should. There was a notice posted beside the stacks of today’s newspapers, stating that those who wanted a Sunday New York Times must sign up for one in advance.
Well.
For a long time Pierce had stopped taking that immense wad of newsprint; he had become convinced that what gave Sunday the particular character it had for him—a character it retained in all seasons and every kind of weather, a headachy, dreary, dissipated quality—was not Jehovah claiming his own day and poisoning it even for unbelievers, not that at all but a sort of gas leaking out from that very Sunday Times, a gas with the acrid smell of printer’s ink, a narcotizing, sickening gas. And in fact the symptoms seemed to have been at least partly relieved when he began refusing to buy it. But out here its effect might be neutralized. How anyway were Sundays spent here? Maybe he’d have to start going to church.
Still farther along (the shop was longer and more full of a number of things than it had seemed from the street) there were counters of stationery and school supplies, pens and pencils, tape, glue, and stacks of long pads just the yellow of those flowers he had seen. There were typewriter ribbons too, and small bottles of white paint for painting out errors; there were erasers, both rhomboid and cockade style. There were in fact all the tools of his new trade, everything seeming to be of the best quality and just unwrapped.
“Anything I can help you with, there, sir?” asked the lady at the front counter, whose cat’s-eye glasses were fitted with a beaded chain that hung down behind, and swung when she turned her head.
“Oh, just looking.” From a row of different-sized account books, he pulled a tall slim one, its corners and spine bound in maroon leather or leatherette, and the word RECORD in tall serif letters impressed on its gray buckram cover. How was it that antique designs like this continued to be produced? Perhaps only to keep the accounts of stores like this one. The edges of its pages were marbled, and it was surprisingly expensive.
He decided to buy it, and to record in it his new life in the country. He was not as certain of his prose as he ought to be now that his living would be depending on it, and he had often heard that keeping a diary was a way of keeping the tools edged. And he might welcome something to do, these long evenings after they rolled up the sidewalks of Blackbury Jambs.
Outside again in the pale sunlight, he looked up and down the street, toward the Shadow River bridge one way (narrow and of stone) and the Blackbury River bridge the other way (wide, black iron). The broad water out beyond sparkled and shivered; it almost seemed to Pierce that he could see, if he half-closed his eyes, the different waters of the two commingling rivers, cold and clear, slow and dull—an illusion, doubtless. Just behind him, when he turned away, was the library.
All right.
It was a sort of shingle-style Romanesque concoction, surely the most inefficient style ever adopted for public buildings; quite a bit of it went to hold up a large and functionless cupola. There was a piece of native slate embedded in the wall of the foyer, with a leaf and possibly an animal track impressed on it. Inside was cool and bright, that cupola in fact let in the sun pleasingly; the oddly shaped wings and galleries had each a function; it was a nice place. Another old woman with a chain to her glasses (they would be important, apparently, to his life here, these women; he had already been served by one at the bank) presided at the central desk. He would ask her for a card. If for nothing but to pick up the odd entertainment: for here close by the door, for those who didn’t care or dare to penetrate farther, was a rack of current best-sellers, colorful blocks wrapped in plastic like chocolate boxes.
One among them was the book Phceton’s Car, whose huge success Julie thought might presage the success of his own. Pierce pulled it out. A paper strip inside the plastic said it was a ONE WEEK BOOK, not nice for an author to be told that even if it was true.
He knew the book, of course, its contents were mostly containable in its blurbs and its premises were unavoidable on talk shows. Once long ago starships from Elsewhere had landed here, and alien intelligences had dwelt among us; they were responsible not only for most of the titanic and inexplicable earthworks of prehistory (Stonehenge, etc.) but had also left traces of their visit in the corpus of world myth, and even their portraits on cave walls and tombs. A bizarre kind of euhemerism. The old gods weren’t really gods, no that was silly; what they were, really, were folks from outer space.
A lot of his students had liked this explanation for history too.
He opened the book to the middle. There was a photograph of a bare tor surmounted by a tower. Glastonbury “lighthouse”? asked the caption. The ley-lines from all over Britain center on “Avalon” (p. 195). Pierce flipped through to that page.
“The fact that mappable straight lines of enormous length traverse the whole of the British Isles, connecting churches, old standing stones, mountain peaks, and ‘holy’ sites of all kinds, was first established by researchers in the 1920s.” Pierce always enjoyed the “researchers” and “investigators” of books like this one; readers were to imagine disinterested scientists, possibly in lab coats, and not the collection of cranks and odd numbers who actually compiled “research” like this. “At the same time, in the neighborhood of Glastonbury, gigantic astral figures were discovered in the earth, forming a circle many miles in diameter, and unable to be perceived except from the air. What purpose could the ‘Star Temple of Glastonbury’ serve? A sort of star map, guiding visitors who came by other means than land or sea … ?”
Good lord, Pierce thought, snapping shut the book and reinserting it in its row. Star temples and ley-lines, UFOs and landscape giants, couldn’t they see that what was really, permanently astonishing was the human ability to keep finding these things? Let anyone looking for them be given a map of Pennsylvania or New Jersey or the Faraways, and he will find “ley-lines”; let human beings look up long enough on starry nights and they will see faces looking down at them. That’s the interesting thing, that’s the subject: not why there are ley-lines, but why people find them; not what plan the aliens had for us, but why we think there must, somehow, always have been a plan.
Julie would get it. She must. She had to.
He turned away into the central atrium (irritated, excited, seeing in his mind green hills and blue streams as from a height). Fiction, biography, science branched away. Meaning. He thought there were five basic needs a human being had: for food, and shelter; clothing, if that wasn’t shelter; for sex, or love, if that was different; and for Meaning. Deprived of meaning a man might wither and die as surely as if deprived of food or water.
Not noticing where he walked, he had gone into the fiction stacks, casting his eyes over those mostly unwanted things, they seemed sadder somehow than neglected science or thought. Down the way a young woman pulled one out, glanced within it, smiled, and ca
rried it away; what, he wondered. Norton. Norris. Nofzinger. The Way’s Far Turning, by Helen Niblick. Mitchell, well that one of course, in many copies. Mackenzie, Macauley, Macdonald. Ross Lockridge. Joseph Lincoln.
And well look at this.
When, just out of curiosity, he had gone to the New York branch library nearest him, he hadn’t found a single one. And here were dozens, or a dozen anyway at least. The Complete Works. How do you like that.
Here was Bitten Apples, wasn’t that the one about Shakespeare? And here was The Book of a Hundred Chapters, which had frightened and awed him as an adolescent. And a bunch more that he had not read, or didn’t remember having read. Now why, he wondered, would a little library like this one have all these? Kraft had never, after all, been a Shellabarger, or a Costain. He touched one or two spines, drew out a volume, remembering the rich anticipation the arrival of one of them would start up in him when it showed up in the monthly box from the state library; how he would settle to it, as to a long meal, accompanied by milk and cookies.
Somewhere in these too, as in the book on Bruno, he might have come across matter, surely must have come across matter, that he had used to make Ægypt. Though he felt pretty sure that whatever he had found in them had only confirmed the existence of that country, and his discovery of it predated his discovery of Kraft. He was pretty sure.
How anyway had he discovered Kraft?
Once, one of these books had got into the box, filling some request of his or Sam’s or Winnie’s, though Winnie’s taste was for escapes of a different order. What had he asked for, “stories of history,” that had brought him Kraft? And which had been the first he got, was it Bruno or one of these fictions, which caused him to ask for more? Had he asked for more, or had they just arrived?
He pushed back the one he had drawn out.
When he had a card.
There were other resources he discovered; this cupcake building was raisined with good things. The DNB. Cambridge Modern History. Catholic Encyclopedia, a good old one filled with oddities that later editions were ashamed of or knew better than to include; a fine field for browsing in. And there were many huge and lavish old folios of prints and albums of pictures, multivolume botanical atlases and bird books bound in leather—the wealthy summer residents of other days must have bequeathed these things to their local library. The tall shelves around the reading room were full of them. Pierce was standing at the entrance of this pleasant room (tables of light wood, green lamps, dark portraits) when a woman who had been kneeling at a case on the far side rose, a thick volume in her arms, and turned to see him, or rather turned her dark eyes his way unseeing, and went to sit with her book at a table spread about with other books and papers.
Could it be? Of course that night had been dark and brief, and months ago. And it would be strange if very nearly the first person he came across in this town were one of the only two or three he had already met. But it seemed to be her. He went on looking at her, and when she glanced at him again, he smiled, but she made no sign of recognition.
Got to be her.
He made his way around the room’s perimeter, and came up near her table. Besides the book—it was a biographical dictionary, open at Emerson—she was equipped with graph paper and pencils, and a calculator; she seemed to be casting curves of some kind, one axis of which was marked off in years.
“Hi,” he said.
She looked up at him, pleasant face for meeting possibly bothersome undeniably male stranger.
“Mrs. Mucho?” he said.
The face changed. “No,” she said.
“My name is Pierce. I’m sure we’ve met.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Your name is …”
“My name is Ryder.”
Good heavens. “Oh.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I’m new in town, actually. You just look a lot like someone I know.”
“Sorry,” she said, her face now definitely closed, as though she had decided a trick was being played on her, or a move made, and she had had enough.
“Well,” Pierce said. “My mistake.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
He bowed a goodbye and moved away smartly, not to seem a masher. In some ways not really like her at all, or not like the picture of her he retained within, which the months had no doubt heavily altered. And yet that dark rope of hair down her back, which he had seen her wring the river water from.
Negotiating with the lady at the desk for a card, he glanced once back at her, and caught her looking at him. She returned then, not instantly, to her book, and to whatever the work was that engaged her.
It could be, of course (he thought, climbing up the town home) that the partly jocular “Mrs. Mucho” he had greeted her with didn’t strike her as a bit amusing and she had decided thereupon to cut him dead. Ryder—was that the name she gave?—might be the maiden name by which she now wanted to be called.
Or it might be—it was a thought that had occurred to him before, usually when he had just called one of his loves by the name of one of the others, a thing that he and all men did and that no woman that he knew of ever did—it might be that there was only one woman in the world to whom he was attracted, one woman for him, and she kept showing up in his life in different forms, with different names, disguised as herself.
En ciel un dieu, en terre une déesse, and here she just was again.
Not that it mattered much, of course. His vow was taken, and a year’s long work was before him. When he arrived at No. 21, an ungainly chocolate-brown van was offloading boxes and boxes of his books, which had been much delayed in transit, and were here at last.
“You don’t belong here,” Beau Brachman said to Pierce.
“No?”
“No.” Pierce stood with his neighbor in the sunlight of Beau’s lawn; just for this moment the lawn was tender green, and from every twig-tip of every maple on Maple Street yellow-green baby leaves were extruding themselves. The problem of how these small but perfect jewellike leaves grow into identically shaped but very much larger leaves, a problem Pierce had left off pondering on a day in April some years ago, occurred to him again. In amid the leaves were bunches of those winged seeds that maples bear, which you could (he remembered) wear on your left breast as aviator’s wings, or break carefully open and clip to your nose. Or both, for that matter.
“Even though you’ve forgotten it,” Beau said, “you’re really from somewhere else. This is not your world, even though it seems to be. This cosmos. You arrive into it, come from a long way away; sort of stunned from the long journey, you forget you were on a journey at all. You started out an astral body, but during your journey you come to be clothed in material reality; in matter, like an overcoat. Inside is still the astral body. But now bound and asleep.”
“Uh-huh,” Pierce said. “And from where did you start out then? Where did you come from?”
“Lifetimes ago?” Beau said.
“Lifetimes ago. Initially.”
“Well suppose,” Beau said, “that we, we souls, came from outer space. The stars. Suppose we lost our way; stopped here; adopted a form that would fit with this planet’s like low level of evolution. And suppose we lived so long like that that then we forgot.”
“Hm.” These stars, Pierce thought, would be the same stars the kindly aliens came from in Phceton’s Car, who taught men arts.
“Back there they remember,” Beau said, seeming to be improvising. “They think of us; they wait for us to remember, and turn homeward. They might even send messages, which can be heard by the astral body.”
“Which is asleep.”
“That’s the message,” Beau said. “Wake up.”
A little red sports car had turned the corner at the end of Maple Street and was coming toward Beau’s.
“But beyond all those stars,” said Beau, “in this story, is God. And no matter how far back we travel, we won’t reach home again
till we reach God. From where we started.”
The car at first shot past the lawn where Beau and Pierce sat, and then stopped abruptly. Out from the passenger side came a child of two or three, who ran toward Beau, already holding out to him the doll she carried, and calling his name. Sunlight in her golden hair, clear eyes happy, she struck Pierce as singularly beautiful. After her, struggling from the miniature car’s bucket seat, came a dark and thickish man, who called after the child: “Sam!”
“Hi, Sam. Hi, Mike,” Beau said mildly, not choosing to rise from the stump in the sun where he sat.
“H’lo,” said the dour man, Mike, seeming burdened with thought or care. “Her mother will be by for her. Hey, bye, Sam.” This a trifle reproachfully to the child, who was clambering into Beau’s lap. She clambered down again and dutifully up her father, for a kiss; as she was given it, her father’s doubtful eye fell on Pierce, and he nodded noncommittally.
“G’bye, Sam. Mommy be here later.”
“Later,” Sam echoed. From the red car now had come a tall woman, with thick dark hair; she was pushing back the canvas top of the car. First day of the year warm enough. Her eye—noncommittal also—looked sidewise momentarily behind her at the lawn, the child, Mike, Beau. Pierce.
Her man turned from his child and hurried down to where she struggled with the car, maybe inconvertible after all.
“His name,” Pierce ventured, “is Mike Mucho.”