Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  “I don’t know,” I said, though the word sounded familiar to me. “I was looking for some glass. I thought I might find some I could use here, some glass or clear plastic…”

  “Avvenger,” he said, nodding and grinning greenly. He released my shoulder and drew his hand out of its glove. The hand was pale and sparkled with rings; he held it out to me and said “Shake.” I thought he meant to help me stand up, but when I took his hand he just—shook it, quickly up and down, and let go. Was this a warning or a greeting or what? He was still smiling, but the green teeth made it hard to tell the reason, for some reason. He slipped past me, gathering in his barred skirts, and began to climb down quickly on handholds I hadn’t noticed, then turned and waved at me to follow him.

  He wasn’t easy to follow. He went like a spider or a squirrel down the wall and over the vast nameless piles of rust and collapse. Now and then a great window far above threw a block of December light over him, and his gorgeous robe shone for a moment and went out, like a barred lamp. And I remembered: “I’m not an avvenger,” I said. Then, louder, to be heard over the multiple echoes of our clambering, I shouted, “I thought all the avvengers were dead.”

  At that he stopped and turned to me, standing half in, half out of a window’s light. “Dead?” he said. “Did you say dead? You did? Do you see this National thing here?” He flung the robe wide in the light. “This National thing here has been dead since it was made, and is still as good as new; and I suppose that long after I’m myself as dead as it is, somebody’s body will be wrapped in its old glory. So don’t say dead. Just follow me.”

  SECOND FACET

  “Avvengers,” Teeplee said, “are like buzzers.”

  The room he had at last led me to, down in the bowels of the ruin, was small and lit by a harsh lamp. On the way here I had glimpsed a human face in a dark doorway, and a human back just retreating into another; and under the table we sat at, a child rummaged silently through things, learning his trade, I suppose, for the room was so full of old stuff that it was like sitting inside a carved chest, except that none of these things seemed to have any order at all.

  Teeplee had told me—besides his name—that the others there were his family, and all the children there were his. All! “My gang,” he called them. As I said, I had remembered: avvengers were men who, in the days of the League’s power, wouldn’t submit to the League, and went around taking what they could of the angels’ ruin, and using it and swapping it and living as much in the angels’ way as they could; and their chiefest treasures were women who could bear in the old way, without intercession, over and over like cats. Naturally, men who thought women of any kind were treasures were the League’s enemies, and they were mostly hunted down; so sitting with Teeplee in his den of angel-stuff I felt as though it were hundreds of years ago.

  “Buzzers?” I said.

  “You know, buzzers. Big, wide-winged, bald-headed birds that live on dead things.” He drew himself up grandly in his cloak. “Buzzers are National,” he said. “They’re the National bird.”

  “I don’t know what National is,” I said, “except that it was something about the angels…”

  “Well, there it is,” Teeplee said, pointing a long finger at me. “Haven’t you ever seen angels? All bald-headed, or as near as they could get; just like buzzers.”

  For a moment I thought he meant he really had seen angels, but of course he meant pictures; and yes, I had seen one, the gray picture of Uncle Plunkett, bald as a buzzer.

  He began going through piles of stuff in this room and the next, looking for the glass or plastic I wanted. “What an avvenger is,” he said as he looked—and I began to see that there was a kind of squirrelly order to the place—“is someone, like me, who lives on what the angels made that doesn’t spoil. ‘Doesn’t spoil’ means it’s not ’throw-away.’ See, the angels once thought it would be good to have things you would just use once and then throw away. I forget why they thought so. But after a while they saw if they kept that up they’d soon have thrown away everything in the world, so they changed their minds and made things you would only have one of, that would last forever. By the time they were good at that, it was all over, but the things still don’t spoil.… Hey, how about these?”

  He showed me a box full of bottle bottoms, green and brown.

  “I thought something bigger,” I said.

  He put them away, not disappointed. “Now I said, ‘lives on,’” he said. “That means maybe you dress in it, like this National thing, or you swap it for things to eat, or give it to women for presents and like that, or maybe”—he leaned close to me grinning—“maybe you eat it. Find the angels’ food, and eat it yourself.”

  He was looking so triumphant I had to laugh. “Isn’t it a little stale?”

  “I said, ‘doesn’t spoil,’” Teeplee said seriously. “I said, ‘Avvengers are like buzzers’; I said, ‘Buzzers live on dead things.’ You see, boy—say here, look at this.”

  He had come up with some convex black plastic, warped and scratched. “I thought maybe something clearer,” I said. He threw it down with a clatter and went on searching.

  “You see,” he said, “the idea of making things that don’t spoil is to make them dead to start with, so they don’t need to ever die. There’s dead metal, that’s angel silver, that won’t rust or pit or tarnish; and dead cloths like this; and plastics like dead wood that won’t dry-rot or get wormy or split. And strangest of all: the angels could make dead food. Food that never gets stale, never rots, never spoils. I eat it.”

  “I have food like that. I smoke it.”

  “No, no! Not that evil pink stuff! I mean food, food you eat. Look here.” He stood on tiptoe and took down from a high shelf a closed pot of metal, with a dull plastic glow about it. “Metal,” he said, “that won’t rust, and a jacket of plastic over that. Now watch and listen.” There was a ring attached to the top, and Teeplee worked his finger under it and pulled. I expected the ring to come off, but instead there was a hiss like an indrawn breath and the whole top came off in a graceful spiral. “Look,” he said, and showed me what was inside: it looked like sawdust, or small chips of wood. “Potato,” he said. “Not now, I mean, not just yet; but mix this with water, and you’d be surprised: a mashed-up potato is just what it is, and as good as new.”

  “As good as new? What does it taste like?”

  “Well. Dead. But like food. Throw it in water and you’ve got something like a mashed-up potato that the angels made, boy, a potato that’s a thousand years old.” He looked reverently within the pot and shook the stuff; it made a dry, sandy sound. “Now even a rock,” he said, “even a mountain changes in a thousand years. But the angels could make this potato that’s dead to begin with, so it couldn’t change. They could make a potato that’s immortal.”

  He sat, suddenly lost in thought or wonder. “No glass today. Come back in two, three days, we’ll see.” He set the child to guide me out. “But remember,” he said as I left, “it’ll cost you.”

  I came back; I came back often. That was a long winter, and Teeplee was good to have for company. I talked about a dark house; I talked about forgetting over time. And it’s strange: alone in my head, I would sometimes seem on the edge of losing myself altogether, but with old Teeplee I was comfortable—maybe because there’s no one so different from everything I had grown up with than an avvenger.

  What I mean about losing myself: when I was alone, still there seemed to be someone there to talk to. I would wake in my cold head (the fire long since out) and lie wrapped in my black and silver, and start a conversation with this other, and he would answer, and we would lie there long and bicker like two gossips trying to tell the same story two different ways.

  What we talked about was Boots. At the heart of the story was her letter, but I had forgotten it, had forgotten that her letter was Forget. I would get up at last, and get milk from the cow and sit and smoke, and maybe then clamber back into my cold bed, and all the while chat endl
essly with this other about something we couldn’t remember to forget.

  I really had wanted to be her, I explained; I meant that. I still do. I’m not to blame; no one is accountable, I said, not Boots, not her, not even me; I chose, don’t you see, and what is there to say? But he said: then why are you here now and not there? You must not have tried hard enough. I know you’re wrong, I replied; I can’t remember why, but that’s not it, it’s just the opposite of that; anyway, I did try, I did.… Not hard enough, he said. And we would try to turn our backs on each other; that doesn’t work.

  What frightened me was that I had failed in the attempt to become her, and that in the attempt I had stopped being me. My earliest selves frightened me when they returned to me in the moments before sleep (have I told you I learned to summon them? Yes) and I felt that rather than learning anything, anything at all, I had instead suffered a grievous, an unhealable wound; that, try as I might, I could no longer really mean what I said, nor say what I really meant. And a hiss of fear would go all through me. I would stare out my eyes and wonder if it wasn’t warm enough to go see what Teeplee was about today.

  So we would spend the day together, wrapped to our chins in indestructible angel-stuff—he in his barred robe, I in my black cloak and my hat—and clamber over the old messes, and talk about ancient things until our hands and feet got numb; and in the crackling freeze, trudge back to his hole in the ruin to unload our treasures and talk about who should take what. Since I went mostly for the walk and the company, he always got the best things, though I would put up a show of bargaining so as not to hurt his feelings. He would deal hard for dead, useless contraptions, and only abandon them after long thought and much insistence that they could be put to some use.

  Sometimes we would be gone two or three days, if Teeplee had discovered a good big stretch of Housing as he called it; sometimes he would bring along one of his boys, but never a wife. (“This is men’s work,” he would say, with his chin out.)

  He knew a lot of angel lore, Teeplee, though I never knew how much of it to believe. I asked him why all the Housing I had ever seen was the same: each little tumbledown place the same, each with its room for a kitchen and a stone place for washing. Didn’t any of the angels think of a different way of putting things together? He said that if what I had seen had surprised me, I should have traveled as far as he had, and seen it everywhere, Housing stretching as far as the eye could see was how he put it, and yes, everywhere fitted out exactly as the angels always did, so they could travel thousands of miles, from Coast to Coast, and have another box just like the one they had come from. He said some even trundled one around with them wherever they went, like a snail shell, just in case they ended up somewhere where everything was not just as they required. Think of them, he said, rushing over vast distances you won’t travel even if you have many lives, and everywhere finding Housing exactly the same, and wanting it that way too.

  Now, how could he know that? Maybe there was some other explanation altogether. Maybe it was a Law.

  One rimy day, in a huge place of great fallen blocks sunken by their own weight into the earth—it looked as though the earth had taken a big, a too big, mouthful of the angels’ works—I found a good thing: a big box of glittering screws, as good as new. “As good as new,” Teeplee said trembling with cold and envy. All the way back, he kept asking if I hadn’t lost them, if maybe it wouldn’t be safer if he carried them, and so on; and when we were once again in the stuffy warmth of his hideout, and I put them on the table between us. Teeplee ungloved one hand and dipped it into the rustling bits; he felt their clean-cut spiral edges, stuck a thumbnail in their slots. “A screw,” he said; “now a screw isn’t like a nail, isn’t like tying something on with string, boy. A screw, a screw has”—he balled his fist—”a screw has authority.” Then, as though the answer were of no real importance to him: “What do you want for them?”

  “Well,” I said, “I could use a pair of gloves.”

  He quickly gloved his bare hand. “Sure,” he said. “Of course you’d want warm, good ones, not like these things.” He raised his black plastic fingers and wiggled them. Why was there a star painted on each cuff?

  “They look good to me,” I said. “Indestructible.”

  “You say ‘gloves,’” he said. “I’ve seen gloves compared to which these are bare hands.” He looked at me sidewise. “Not a pair.” He raised his hand to forestall some criticism I might have, and went to search in his other room.

  He returned with something wrapped in a grimy rag. “There are gloves,” he said, “and there are gloves.” He unwrapped the rag, and laid on the table before me a silver glove that glowed like ice.

  Will you believe, angel, that until I saw it there—like a hand more than a glove, like the bright shadow of a hand—I had forgotten that it was with such a glove that Zhinsinura had manipulated Boots, had forgotten entirely that it was a glove like the glove stolen from St. Andy which had replaced me with Boots? It’s so: not until I saw Teeplee’s glove on his cracked table, did I remember that other—no, more: when I saw it, that moment was delivered to me again, whole, in all its wonder and terror: I saw the small room, the clear sphere and its pedestal; I saw Zhinsinura slipping on her glove, and heard her say Close your eyes. Too many wonders almost immediately succeeded that one: I had forgotten entirely.

  “I’ve seen a glove like that,” I said, when the moment had—not faded, no—but passed.

  “Seeing is one thing,” Teeplee said. “Having is another.”

  “And I know a story of one like it, a story about this one, maybe.” There was a place—a single small place, a point even—where everything in my life intersected every other. I felt my mind cross like my eyes can cross.

  “About these screws,” Teeplee said.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “Take them,” He did, slowly, surprised at my indifference, wondering if maybe he’d made a bad bargain for them. “Where did you find it?” I asked.

  “Well, well, there it is.”

  “Was there, with it, anywhere near it, a ball—a silver ball, well, maybe not silver, but this color?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe there was. Will you go there again? I could go with you.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “What about this ball?”

  “I don’t know what about it,” I said, laughing at his confusion, and at my own. “I don’t know. I wish I did. I only know I’d give everything I have to get it, not that that’s very much.”

  He scratched his bald buzzer’s head and looked down glumly at the glove. “It isn’t even a pair,” he said.

  So I had this thing then to think about. For a long time I wouldn’t put it on; it lay, stainless and impossible, amid my things, and no matter how I folded it, it took the shape of a living hand, though it was fine and nearly weightless to hold. When at last I did draw it on—it slid voraciously over my fingers and up my wrist, as though hungry for a human hand after long years—I took it off again almost immediately. I think I was afraid of what my hand within it might do. From then on I only looked at it and thought about it—thought in circles.

  There were other things, too, to occupy the nights. The other would argue that it only made me want her more, and I would concede that; anyway, my reconstructions of our pale twilight dreams were feeble, we had marked too few. Sometimes I would lie with my skirts up working furiously with the useless thing and find myself at the same time shedding cold tears just as useless.

  You really shouldn’t laugh.

  THIRD FACET

  There came a day when I understood winter was forever; though there would be days when it didn’t freeze and days when the sun shone, they would always be followed by cold and rain again.

  That day had begun fair, but afternoon dragged the clouds back over and they began again their ceaseless weeping. Toward evening the drizzle subsided to a sniffle, but the clouds hung low and baggy with further business to do. I sat smoking, letting pile up on t
he inside of the concave eyeball a little pile of rose-colored ash which the wet wind played with. No, no spring this year; the wood was slimy with despair and chilled to the marrow. Not quite dead, not frozen; there had been little snow all winter. But hopeless.

  Be thankful, he told me, that she wasn’t there to go back to. She knew you wouldn’t come back from Boots being as she was, only a poor cripple, not the one and not the other; not yourself whom she first loved, yet nothing other either.

  I don’t understand, I told him. I have understood nothing, and now I have nothing left. I overthrew my deepest wisdom for her sake, made myself a clear pool for her reflection. And now there’s only empty sky.

  Well, don’t you see? he said. You tried to become transparent, and all the while she was working to be opaque.

  Like way-wall, I said.

  She must become opaque: you must become transparent. There’s no force on earth left stronger than love, but…

  Opaque, I said. Yes.

  Transparent, he said.

  Never a moment when I revealed to her I had seen something in her but she changed it at that moment to hide further from me.

  She wanted not to know it herself, he said. There’s no blame in that.

  It was as though I went after her into a cave, marking my way with a long string; and just when I came to the end of the string, and so couldn’t follow any further, Dr. Boots snatched the string from my hand.

  It was only one way, anyway, he said. So there’s no way out.

  We agree, he said, on that.

  Well then, I said, I think it’s time to lighten that load.

  I went to the pack that held everything I had and took from it the case that held the Four Pots. I took it back to the window, unsealed it and opened it. The first pot was blue and contained stuff colored orange—the two colors of the house called Twenty-eight Flavors; it was medicine’s daughters for every sickness. The second pot was black and contained the rose-colored stuff that had dreamed me out of a knot with Seven Hands. The third was silver, and contained the black granules that lighten a load. The fourth was bone-white, and contained the white angel’s choice I had seen Speak a Word refuse (no, she said, not this year). I picked up the cigar I had left burning on the edge of the window; I held it deep within two fingers, closing my eyes against the rising smoke, and thought about them. I thought of Houd standing before that mirror which showed a tall-hatted man giving giant pots to a boy. “It confuses the dark and light,” he’d said, “and for a while you think only about the confusion, and not about everything.”