by John Crowley
Blink said: “It was as though a great sphere of many-colored glass had been floated above the world by the unimaginable effort and power of the angels, so beautiful and strange and so needful of service to keep afloat that for them there was nothing else, and the world was forgotten by them as they watched it float. Now the sphere is gone, smashed in the Storm, and we are left with the old world as it always was, save for a few wounds that can never be healed. But littered all around this old ordinary world, scattered through the years by that smashing, lost in the strangest places and put to the oddest uses, are bits and pieces of that great sphere; bits to hold up to the sun and look through and marvel at—but which can never be put back together again.”
We lay stretched out in the late-summer yellow meadow and watched the solemn clouds go by. There had been a chill that dried out the woods and left them dusty and odorous, rustling and tinted brown, but summer kept on: engine summer.
“Blink,” I said, “are there cities in the sky?”
He scratched behind his ear and settled back with his hands behind his head. “The angels’ cities in the sky. That’s what Little St. Roy called clouds like those. But there’s a story. It’s said that at the time of the Storm the angels built cities covered with domes of glass, which by some means could float like clouds. I don’t know. I don’t doubt they could. And they used to say that one day, after thousands of years perhaps, the angels would come back; the cities would land, and the angels would come out and see all that had been going on while they floated. Well. Hmmm … Nobody, no angel’s returned…. I don’t know…. Maybe they got it mixed up with Little Moon, which really was a city in the sky, where angels did live, though all there are dead now, caught in the Storm they were with no way to get home—still there, I guess. Who knows? The milkweed’s breaking, see there’”
The brown seed floated near him, which looked so much like him; I thought that if I could get close enough to it, it would have a long nose, little features, like Blink’s. It rolled across his wrinkled white shirt and got off again, going elsewhere. The air would choose.
“Bits and pieces,” Blink said sleepily. “Bits and pieces.”
He slept. I watched the clouds, peopling their valleys and canyons with angels.
FIFTH FACET
Bits and pieces: a silver ball and glove. An angel picture of St. Gary’s Uncle Plunkett. A house in which two children and an old woman told about the weather, and the stone dead men in between. A false leg; a clear sphere with nothing at all inside it except all of Dr. Boots; a fly caught in plastic; a city in the sky. No, it can’t be put back together, he was right about that, and I never wanted to put it back together; but it seemed that each of these things in turn gave me a message, a sign, pointed a finger toward the next, and that somehow, at the end of the series, I would find something precious which was lost—perhaps only knowledge, but something which I wanted above all else to find.
You have found it.
Have I? Who is this I? Didn’t Mongolfier tell me that it wasn’t I at all that would come here, that what would come here was no more than a reflection, an unvanished dream, no more I than the angel picture of Uncle Plunkett, made by no human hand, was Plunkett himself? Then why do you say I have found anything at all?
Because no one else found the silver ball and glove—this silver ball and glove. No one else searched for it. No one else followed the series from beginning to end—and then took the last step. Perhaps anyone else could have—but no one did. So it is you that found us. You that I speak to now: you alone who speaks to me. Now: were you going to tell about Plunkett?
I … yes. Yes: I was going to tell how I saw the picture, and what Blink said…. Do you know this story better than I do?
Go on. It’s not for my sake you tell it.
I had asked Blink about the little house Once a Day showed me, and the four stone dead men. “I know about four stone heads,” he said, “four heads that are a mountain; but they aren’t the four dead men in the story I know. Perhaps the four stone heads picture the four dead men; or perhaps it’s a joke of Whisper cord’s. What was it she said of them? ‘Are they mad.’ Well. Who can follow Whisper? But there is a story:
“At the time of the Storm, when at last the lights and phones of the Co-op went off for good, and Great St. Roy led us away to wander, there was a boy, Gary, among us, who would become St. Gary. St. Gary had been raised by his aunt, who was a speaker, and by his uncle, who was named Plunkett. Plunkett’s work, secret in nature, was one of those last plans of the angels spoiled by the Storm: a plan for immortality. The secret slipped out through Plunkett’s wife, who revealed to Gary that although his uncle was dead and buried, which she didn’t dispute, he was also alive in an underground place near Clevelen, far west, near the place the Co-op had been.
“So St. Gary turned back from the speaker’s flight to return to Clevelen to see if he could find his supposed uncle still alive, though as he went west he passed the grave where he had seen his uncle laid. After a long search, Gary did find the place Plunkett’s wife had told him of; and by that time so had others, some desperate to learn what the angels knew of immortality, others wishing to destroy the work as they were intent on destroying all that the angels had done.
“What they had found, and now kept constant watch over and had fierce disputes about, were five clear spheres without any openings and with, it appeared, nothing at all inside them. Attached to four of these five were angel-pictures, gray and shiny, of four faces. One of them was St. Gary’s Uncle Plunkett.
“There was a lot of resistance among the others there to St. Gary taking his uncle away with him. For some time he argued with them, defending Plunkett from those who wanted to smash the spheres, if they were smashable, and from those who wanted to open them, or operate them, if that could be done. Then the Long League intervened there. Women of the League came, and said they would decide the matter—as they were just then deciding so many matters—and that no one should touch the spheres or investigate them further but they. St. Gary wouldn’t agree; and by stealth one night he made away with the sphere that was in some sense Plunkett, and fled.
“For many years and through many hazards, Gary kept Uncle Plunkett with him, though the speakers laughed at him and the sphere that was so obviously empty. He became a great saint in his old age, and lived in a beech near the camp the speakers had then near New Neyork in the days of the Long League’s power; and he lived with Plunkett at that time. And if Plunkett ever said a word, nobody heard it.
“After Gary’s death, Uncle Plunkett went into St. Andy’s wagon with other stuff, precious and useless; and like so many other things, the silver ball and glove they tell about, the spectacles to see at night with, the dream machine, it was lost eventually, or perhaps sold, no one remembers, as no one then cared much. The Long League indeed did care: rumors came that they were searching for the last of the four dead men, some said to destroy it as they had the others, or to keep it out of the hands of their enemies as others said, but the speakers had little to do with these disputes. And then no more we heard about it.”
I had questions, but to all of them Blink only shrugged and shook his head: why were there five spheres, and only four pictures? If the five spheres were all alike, why was it said there were only four dead men? How could they be what they were said to be, alive? “Ask the angels, ask the Long League,” he said. “They alone know. All I know is Gary’s story; if Whisper cord knows more, it’s their secret—but somehow I think they don’t, and their four dead men are only a game, like the three dreams of Olive, the seven wandering stars, the nine last words of Little St. Roy. There is, though, one thing; one tangible thing, and by a path I won’t describe to you, I come to have it. Look …”
And like Mbaba going to her chests to prove a story of when-we-wandered, Blink got up and searched among his belongings, and from a cranny in the wall he took out the cracked angel-picture of Uncle Plunkett which Gary had found attached to the clear sphere,
and taken away with him when he took Plunkett. In the picture, Plunkett wore a shirt with buttons and had almost no hair, only a gray burr all over his head. Under his shaven chin he held a card with writing on it. He wasn’t looking right out, but a bit to one side, as though he had heard someone call to him. The crack in the picture made white seams across his face like the scars of a terrible wound; he was smiling a big smile, and his teeth shone like the fits-all teeth. For some reason the picture made me shiver violently.
“Maybe,” I said at last, “they had it all wrong. Maybe the spheres were something else altogether, and there never really were four dead men; they’d got it mixed up with some other story, or got it wrong somehow. Probably.”
Blink smiled at me and patted my cheek. “Probably,” he said. “Let’s go look for mushrooms.”
I didn’t think that a man as old as Blink would spend the winter in a place as exposed as his house in the oak, but though autumn came on faster now he showed no signs of moving. He pottered around working in Book or staring glumly at the glass which covered his crostic-words, as nights grew colder and cold mist filled the house in the mornings so that we sat wrapped to our ears late in the Three Bears, as Blink called the sewn-together shaggies and skins we kept warm in. We wrapped up early in them too, and smoked and talked through the long evening while we watched his little charcoal fire go out. “That fire,” I said, “won’t be much help soon.”
“No,” he said. “Good thing we won’t need it.”
The woods became transparent. From the windows of the house you could see now all the way out to the pasture and nearly to where the brook ran chilly between its frosted rocks. Blink and I worked at making the house secure: we chinked cracks with mud and moss, hung the walls with thick rugs he had stored all summer. We closed up the fire’s mouth and blocked its chimney. We made a-new front door to fit over the old one, and bickered over how the two could best be fitted together to keep out the cold. On a day when the stillness and the curdled darkness of the clouds all day suggested a heavy frost, Blink drew out from where they were stored several thick sheets of plastic, unclouded, great treasures; a thickness went over the outside of each small window, and another on the inside. When this was done, he arranged the two bed-chairs so they faced the windows. “Is Jug filled right up to the top?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Then I guess we’re ready.”
In a little brazier he lit twigs and started small lumps of charcoal going; while these caught, he found a small jar made of angel-silver, tightly sealed, and opened it. From it he took a big pinch of black powder, looked at it, frowning, and shook some back in. The rest he scattered on the glowing charcoal. It didn’t smoke, but the smell was pronounced, a dense and penetrating odor like no other I have ever smelled. We made some last preparations; Blink carefully resealed the jar and put it by him; he looked around, finger to his lips, satisfied that all was ready. I had begun to feel deliciously warm and sleepy, but alert as well, as though I could go to sleep and stay awake at the same time. That seemed to be Blink’s idea too, and we crept into the Three Bears, made even warmer with silver cloths Blink had attached around them, made ourselves comfortable, and sat there for three months.
On the evening of that first day we talked little; we grew silent and still as though asleep, but watching the clear cold sunset fade behind the fuzz of black trees on the mountains beyond the pasture. Later, that month’s full moon lit the bald, still earth and we listened to the cracks and snaps of its freezing. Clouds gathered, moving fast over the moon’s white face. By morning the year’s first snow was falling, dusting the ground with a fine cold powder which the bitter wind blew around like dust.
Jug kept water as warm in winter as it had kept it cool in summer. Once a day perhaps, I would fill a pipe with St. Bea’s-bread, all flaky with cold. At full moon time, St. Blink would climb complaining from his Bear, and light charcoal, and bum more of the black powder. When there was a warm spell, we would sometimes crawl out and open the two front doors and climb down the ladder, moving with careful gravity like two ancient invalids; and then back up in a short time utterly exhausted, though having seen a great deal.
We slept a strange, utter sleep, coming out only past noon as winter truly took hold, and passing back in again as evening came; many days passed without comment, only glimpsed between one doze and another. Snow choked the woods deeply; we sat all day once absorbed in the progress of a fox across the trackless pasture, and watched the doings of jays and sparrows, falling asleep when they did. Two chipmunks of the oak at last found a way into the tree house, and would run cheerfully over us, breathing our heated breath; they slept in Blink’s lap for three days of blind violent storms that sheathed the forest in ice, which seemed to make music in the fine blue morning that followed, music too blinding to look at. The chipmunks slept. We slept, dust and loose bits of moss and spines of leaves blown up around our feet by drafts. We had become a part of Blink’s beloved sleeping oak, hearing its branches creak and snap in wind, grieving when a great weight of ice broke one fine limb. Snow fell from its branches to thud on our roof, and then slide from our roof to the ground. I blinked less often, I came to notice; and when I blinked, often I slept. My left hand lay on my right for half a month.
On a white afternoon sometime in that endless season, a warm day when Blink had struggled out to take powder from the jug to steam us into our deep hibernation again, I asked, “Where does it come from?”
“Where does what come from?” he asked, looking around to see if I meant some beast.
“The powder,” I said. “And how does it do that?” Already it had begun to do it; the penetrating smell was in the air, sharp and metallic, like the warm breath from a brass throat, and I felt my haunches wiggle more comfortably into the seat I had sat in so long.
“Ask the angels how it does what it does,” he said. “They’d tell you, but you wouldn’t understand. Can’t you tell how it does it? Listen to it work; you’ve got time.” With great care he worked himself back into his chair as I tried to listen to the powder work. I could begin to tell what he meant; and I knew that by winter’s end I would know how it did what it did, though I wouldn’t be able to explain it to anyone who hadn’t spent a winter with it.
“And where it comes from,” Blink was saying, finding a way to sit he liked well enough to stay in, “well … that’s a tale …”
I said we slept a lot; but awake, I felt strangely clear and smart, as though everything were taking its time to reveal itself to me with slow precision, to surprise me that it contained more than I’d thought it had: not only the hunting fox’s every movement, but St. Blink’s long tangled histories, unfolding meantime, twisting but patent, as the peach-colored brook was patent at sunset running through the black and white pasture.
He went on, talking about the powder, and about other powders and medicines the angels had made; about how the angels, not content with altering the world for their convenience, had altered men too to fit the altered world, paving and remaking their deepest insides as they had the surface of the earth. About medicine’s daughters: he said, “Medicine is to medicine’s daughters as a dry stick is to a tree. Medicine is like paint; medicine’s daughters are like the change of color in a crystal. Medicine changes you, fights your diseases, drowns your sorrows; medicine’s daughters make you a suggestion that you change yourself—a suggestion that you can’t refuse. A medicine lasts as long as a meal; medicine’s daughters leave you changed long after they’ve disappeared from your body.”
Four of medicine’s daughters are contained in the Four Pots, the first to cause you to throw off nearly every disease, and the last, the bone-white pot and its white contents, was made to solve a strange problem that was caused by the first. “The angels learned to heal the things that kill men young,” Blink said, “and hoped therefore that they might live forever. They were wrong in that, but so successful at keeping men alive that it seemed that soon there would be in the world fa
r too many healthy people, as good as immortal, unable to be killed by anything but their own stupidity, flowing from the wombs of women like ants from an anthill, and no food and no room for them all. Think of the fear and revulsion you feel when you kick into a nest of ants and see them swarm: men felt that for their kind, and the Law and the Gummint most of all, who most of all bore the burden of keeping the world man’s.
“And so, by a means we have forgotten, a means like medicine’s daughters but far more subtle even, they made themselves childless. It took some generations, but at last they made this childlessness permanent: it would be passed on then, from mother to child. And they made the medicine’s daughter which is in the fourth of the Four Pots to start up again the inside goings-on which their means stopped. When it’s taken, a woman can for a while conceive: but her child will be childless, until she too makes the choice to take the medicine’s daughter. It’s as though we were born without eyes, as though our eyes were not stuck in our heads but passed down from mother to child like a treasure, and every child had the choice to take them up or not.