Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  I will say Boots said this, I will say that this was what her letter said; I will say even that at her words the stone tension went out of me, I fluttered like a banner in the wind, and wept and smiled at once. I will say so: but the secret, oh the secret is that Boots has nothing, nothing, nothing at all to say.

  SIXTH FACET

  Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. That’s what time is like.

  I know that at my center now is the time I was not there and Dr. Boots was. That’s the kiss. The letter came, not then, but in the first step I took away: when I returned, as though new-born, to the place I had always lived: Rush and this world. Yet Boots is there, at the center; sometimes, in a moment that makes my heart beat slow and hard, or a dream shatter, or a present moment fall to bits, I can remember—taste, more nearly—what it was to have been Boots. I think that if I had lived on at Service City, and every year repeated that kiss, I would have come to be as much Boots as myself, to share Rush with Boots—as all the List shared themselves with her. And even as it was I knew, as I sat on the pier waiting for the raft to return, that I would carry Boots forever.

  I say waited: I did for a moment try waiting, but couldn’t for long; I became instead a pier man, who waited for nothing. I had no meanwhile.

  “Can someone pole?” Zhinsinura said to some others who sat there with me. “He can’t.”

  Slipping through the brown current the raft came to the pier; it struck, wet wood on stone, and swung about. The two on board stood up with its motion and looked at me from beneath their wide hats; one flung a white rope to me, and I stared at it where it lay without taking it. I heard them laugh, and I laughed too, but then forgot why in the task of watching the long poles laid up with a great wood sound. I sighed a huge sigh, as though I had just done sobbing; a sigh for the vast richness of it all.

  They put me on the boat, and Zhinsinura came on; and the turning of it upstream turned the world in my eyes dizzyingly.

  I suppose it was they, the two in the boat, who brought Zhinsinura the news about Once a Day. I think I can remember them talking with her, and they all three turning to look at me. If I heard them say her name, I could not then build a house large enough to hold it; and watched instead the ripple of the water by the boat, the sun’s countless bright eyes in the leaves overhead. I couldn’t have known, wouldn’t have guessed, that to be absent for a time, to be for a time inhabited by a creature simpler, less confused, more simply wise than I, could so alter me, could so alter the world that I am made of: but with growing joy I learned. I learned, as the raft moved and I slid through the day, as the day slid through me, to let the task be master: which is only not to choose to do anything but what has chosen me to be done. Without any suffering every cat knows how, every living thing but man, who must learn it. Letting the task be master is a hard task for men, hardest of all for the angel’s children, however distantly descended. But it could be learned: learned is the only way it could be learned, for I am a man. Far away and long ago the angels struggled in great anguish with the world, struggled unceasingly; but I would learn, yes, in the long engine summer of the world I would learn to live with it, I would. It was after all so simple, so harrowingly simple. I felt my sweet taskmasters multiply, and from my eyes the salt tears fell, even as they do now from yours.

  Zhinsinura crossed the raft and sat by me. Unable to speak to express my gratitude to her, I only laid my head in her lap. She stroked my hair. “Once a Day,” she said, “has gone this morning with some who are gone trading, to the west. She wasn’t chosen to go; she chose herself. She said to Houd: I won’t return until Rush is gone, and gone for good.”

  Doubly and for good. There are houses outside houses over time, far, far harder to live in than the million small ones within them; just then I was enjoying a little one about the intersecting ripples of the water skiers in the river shallows.

  “If I had known this,” Zhinsinura said, and then no more; for what is there to say? Then: “Rush,” she said, “you must stay as long as you have to; but we want her to come home, sometime.”

  How wise of-her to say it to him then! For I was light, and she knew it; and though I felt for sure a distant dark house begin to assemble itself around all I did, I was light then, and watched the water skiers. I sighed, and perhaps it was for a vast and hopeless burden in this way lifted from Rush’s back, and from Once a Day’s back too. I thought, content, how sad it would be never to be able to go home again. I think I slept.

  I’m very tired, now, angel. I have to rest.

  Rest.

  Take out your crystal, there’s nothing, nothing more to tell.

  Only the end. That won’t be long.

  The moon has risen. It’s crescent now. It was full when I chose to come here. Is that how long I’ve been here?

  No. Longer.

  The clouds are thick. I suppose, below, they can’t see the moon.… Oh, angel, take it out, stop, I can’t any more.

  THE FOURTH CRYSTAL

  THE SKY IS GRASS

  FIRST FACT

  … And begin again with another, the fourth.

  Perhaps you shouldn’t waste them. We didn’t finish the last.

  It’s all right. Can you go on now?

  Did you tell me why you need such things, these crystals I mean? If you did I’ve forgotten.

  Only to see… to see how strong you are. I mean whether the story will change, depending on who…

  Depending on who I am.

  Depending on who tells it.

  Has it changed?

  Yes. In small ways. I don’t think… I don’t think any other loved Once a Day as much as you, I mean as much as in this story. And I never heard of the fly caught in plastic before.

  Will you tell me about him, the one who I am? Is it a man?

  It is.

  Do you love him?

  Yes.

  I wonder why I thought so? Because you remind me of her?… No, well, I’m not to know, am I? Well. I’ll go on.

  I’d tell you about how I passed the time at Service City with Once a Day gone, except that I remember almost nothing of it, and that’s not surprising. I remember only how it seemed at once empty and full. And I remember the cats: changing places around the floor, arguing and forgetting arguments, stepping down (by steps that were clearer to me than words) into rest, and from rest into sleep, and from sleep into deeper sleep. Watching them made me sleep too.

  And then I left. I don’t remember how I chose a day, or if I was dark or light; or how I chose a direction, except that it wasn’t west. I do remember, in July, sitting on a rock far from Service City and making friends with a cow.

  My beard was longer; I hadn’t clipped it short in the warren’s way. Beside me was my camp: a big square of something not cloth but like cloth, which Zhinsinura had given me out of the List’s treasures. It was silver on one side and black on the other, and wrapped in it, though it was as fine as their finest cloaks, I was warm, and dry on wet ground. In my pack was bread, enough to last a year almost if I was careful, in a dry pouch the List makes; and Four Pots and some other doses; and a handful of fine blue papers made by hands I knew of Buckle cord; and matches, that fizzled out as often as not, not as good as my people make. And on my silver camp next to my pack Brom sat, watching the cow warily and ready to run.

  Would you have thought Brom would have followed Once a Day? I would have. But he followed me. Or I followed him: it’s easier that way with a cat, and I had no place to go; he was the adventurer. We ended here, in July, in grasslands,
good for walking in, where there were mice and rabbits for Brom to chase, and cows seen far off. I wore a wide black hat. In all the time I had lived at Service City, I hadn’t worn a man’s hat, but the day I left Houd took this one off his head and put it on mine. It fit. It wasn’t as though I had earned it, though I hadn’t worn one because I felt I hadn’t earned it. It fit, is all.

  The cow had seemingly lost her kid. Her great teated breast was swollen, and she made lamenting sounds because of it. Because I had camped there quietly for a few days, or because of Dr. Boots, the cow came close to me. I didn’t move, but sat and smoked, and Brom hissed and she moved away. She came back and went away again in a little dance. Well, I thought, there’s no way I can suck for you, friend. She came close enough finally for me to touch, though she threw off my hand when I tried. She had amazing eyes: great, liquid, and brown, like a beautiful woman’s in a way that was almost comical, and long silky lashes.

  After a day of this (Dr. Boots’s endless patience!) I learned, and the cow allowed me, to stroke and squeeze her teats so the milk ran out. Once I started, she stood calm as a stone and let me, must even have sighed (can they sigh?) for relief at it. The milk ran out in quick, thin streams. As she was running dry, I took off my indestructible hat and laid it on the ground below her, and the last of the milk made a little pool in the bottom of it, and with some misgivings I tasted it. Warm, thick, and white it tasted; I wondered if I would remember the taste from when I was a baby, but I didn’t, or perhaps I did, since I liked it. On my way to the brook to wash my hat I thought that if she stayed around, it would make a nice change from bread and water, and I supposed it wouldn’t hurt me; it tasted good, and that’s the best sign.

  She did stay, and Brom stopped hissing when she came close, though I can’t say they ever became friends. When I moved (I mean when Brom moved, and I followed) she followed me. I named her Fido, which Blink had said was a name the angels gave their animals in ancient times. Traveling with the two of them was a little tedious, but have I said I was patient? If I lost them, I would stop and sit, and in an afternoon or a day they would both have returned to me.

  You would think I would be dark, darkest then of any time. It’s not so. I was happy. It was summer, and a fine hot dry one; the sea of grass was endless, and ran silver in little winds, as though fish darted through its pools. For companion I had another cat, Brom, and a cow for milk; for amusement I had Rush. In the hours when Fido ate grass and Brom hunted or slept, I would walk along his paths, which Boots had showed me. I liked him. There seemed to be endless insides to him, nooks and odd places where he attached to the world and to words, to other people, to the things he knew and liked and didn’t like.

  It was only later, in the winter, that I grew afraid of him.

  When October or so (without the List’s calendar, I was back to my old judgments) made the grass sea brown and rain fell in banners across it, I began to look for a place to spend the winter. It was the first thing I had chosen to do since I left Service City; I thought perhaps I had forgotten how. Anyway, the place really found me: all I did was to find Road, and walk it for some days, and then go off on a little spur that (I knew) would lead back to Road again; and found myself looking into his face.

  He was-a head only, about three times my height, and his thick neck sat on a small square of stone cracked and weedy; all around the woods grew rank and full of falling leaves. Perhaps he had once been painted, but now he was a dull white save for dark streaks of rust that ran from his eye-places like grimy tears. Since he grinned from great ear to great ear, it seemed he wept from some unbearable joy.

  It was for sure a head; there were two bulging eyes, and a ball of a nose; the grinning mouth had once been an open space, the lower lip ran broad and flat like a counter, and the rusted metal plates that filled it were like a mouthful of bad teeth. Only, for a head, it was absurdly, perfectly globular. Standing before it, I had the impression I had seen it before, but even now I can’t remember where.

  There was a door of metal in the back, rusted as thin as paper, and I broke through it. Inside it was dark and close, with the smell of a place closed for who knew how long, and of small animals that had found a way in; they fled from Brom and me, who took possession. With the door open, I could see what Sort of place we had: it had been, of all things, a kitchen. It looked like a miniature of the one in Twenty-eight Flavors. And for what, here, in the middle of nothing, where only Road ran? Maybe the angels had wanted to show they could build one of their kitchens anywhere…. A ceiling cut the place in half, at about nose level, and there was a door in it, and by piling up things I clambered up through it. Very dark, but I could make out the curve of the skull, which I stood inside, and the concave eye sockets. After a lot of tripping through ancient mess and new nests, I found a length of something metal, pipe perhaps, and with it I whacked out both great round pupils and let in light.

  It took a day or two to pitch out all the ancient junk, and find the floor was sound and the skull leakless. I built a stair for Brom and me to climb up into the skull, and fixed the door in the neck, and made shutters for the eyes, to close at night. I have some skill in ancient ways, you know, and I knew enough to spend some days gathering in what dry grass and other eatables I could for Fido when winter came. (Of course I gathered in too little.) It surprised me that though for sure the time must be past when any child she had would be grown, still as long as I plucked her milk ran.

  Downstairs in the tubs of angel silver I could make fires; there was even a hood of angel silver over them, and a hole to the outside, so it wasn’t too smoky; the heat rose up, and up above I made a bed of boughs and leaves and pine needles, covered with my black and silver. And so I had my hat hung up there as winter began.

  If you had been there, if you’d stood at the bottom of the woods and looked up through the leafless trees slick with rain (it seemed to rain every day now), you would have seen the head we lived in, bone-white in the drizzle, grinning idiotically with rusted teeth; and looking down at you (but not at you; at nothing; at no one) would have been Brom, in his left eye, and me, in his right, peeking out. I had a lot of time, as I sat, to think about what my head could possibly have been for. I was alone for all that winter there, and many explanations occurred to me. Once I scared myself dark by coming to the sudden conclusion that what I lived in wasn’t something the angels had made but one of the angels themselves, buried up to his neck in stone in this desolate place, dead grinning weeping with a kitchen in his mouth and me in his brain—it was all I could do to keep from running-out in terror.

  Well, I got over it. I had to. I had no place else to go.

  It was in this winter that I took up avvenging for a living. In a way, everyone who lives now is an avvenger; certainly the List with its treasure house of angel stuff, and the warren with its chests; Blink was an avvenger if you count knowledge. But there are some whose sole occupation it is: like Teeplee.

  There was a day when I thought I would see if I could find some glass to replace the wooden shutters I had made for my eyes, or perhaps even some nice clear plastic. I had passed a great ruin coming to the head, and I took the day to go there and see if I couldn’t find something I could use. It was a warm Decembery day, clear and brown and cheerful; I had just passed my birth-time; I had turned seventeen.

  The ruin had been one of those places the angels made countless thousands of something in, a place huge enough to raise its head or heads above the woods that grew around it. One tall wall stood alone, like a cutout, all its windows empty; strange, but though the sunlight passed more easily now through all those windows, it seemed only more blind. Big trees had gotten fingers and toes inside the walls of other fallen buildings, though they had left the wide stone plaza (which all must have) mostly alone; spiky brown grass grew over the odd hillocks made of fallen walls. It was no more still there, I suppose, than any place; jays screamed at me, and chipmunks whistled; but it seemed stiller. You could see where paths had crossed
between the buildings at proper angles; the broadest of these led up to the largest and least ruined of the buildings, and I went up to its wide dark mouth. I almost went in, but stopped to blink in the darkness—and saw that the place had no floor. I stood on the edge of a drop several times my height. Far down, something scurried; one of the animals that had found living room there. The tiny sound echoed hugely.

  The dusty shafts of light from the empty windows didn’t illuminate the dark tangle below, but I made out that there were ways to climb down. I had got some way down when I wondered if I could get back up, and stopped. I kicked something off the ledge I stood on, and listened to it clatter down in the depths; I sat and brushed away something that had fallen on my shoulder.

  I turned. What had fallen on my shoulder was a glove, and inside the glove was a hand. I cried out, but couldn’t stand, because the ledge was too narrow. The hand was attached to a whole long body topped with a pale face, whose curly-browed eyes looked down into mine bright with suspicion.

  “Now,” he said, and his grip tightened on my shoulder. The glove his hand was in was shiny black plastic, with a big stiff cuff from which plastic fringe dangled. On the cuff was printed or painted a dim white star. I didn’t know whether to be afraid or astonished: head to foot he was cloaked in a thick, shiny stuff caught in a hood with string; it was broad-striped in red and white, except over his shoulder where there was a square of bright blue crossed by even rows of perfect white stars. From out of the red and white hood snaked his long neck, so long it bent in the middle as though broken; his hair was a fine stubble of metal color, cropped nearly off. In spite of myself, I smiled; and though his grip didn’t lessen, he smiled too. His teeth were even, whole, and perfect; and as green as grass.

  “Avvenger?” he said.