“Good. It’s a beast’s night. On the solstice night, you know, you can hear the animals talking, and understand them.”
“I thought that was because of the animals in the stable. The story they told when I was a kid. The donkey and the cow.”
“Animals talked on the solstice-midnight long before there was a Christmas. Because of the blurring of the boundaries.”
“Okay,” Rosie said. “I’ll do it if I can. It might not be the blowout I was hoping for. And I still wish it could have been Halloween. Less explaining to do.” She looked down at Pierce, and paid him a grateful smile. “No offense,” she said.
“No.”
“Will you come?”
“Sure. Of course.”
“Disguised as what?” she asked; then seemed to see that he was preoccupied, or unready to answer, or elsewhere; she patted his shoulder once and said, “Anyway, good,” and backed away, with a gesture in Rose’s direction, a trill of fingers just like the trill Rose had made earlier.
Rose returned her look to Pierce. Why had it shut up again, her eyes wide open yet closed.
“Would you,” he asked her, “go with me to that party? If it happens?”
“Sure,” she answered. “Aw. That’s so nice of you. If, though …”
“If?”
“No fine,” she said. “Sure.”
“Are you afraid of ghosts? You know one of the funny things about Christianity or Christian societies is how they hold that the dead can be in three different places at once—in their graves, in heaven or hell, and walking around as ghosts. A sort of—”
“Christians don’t,” she said. “I don’t.”
“No? The dead are only in heaven or hell?”
“No. The dead aren’t alive now.” She drew out a cigarette, and regarded it with a sort of fear, or reluctance; then lit it quickly. “Listen Pierce,” she said. “Can we not talk about it? I guess I could explain, but it’s like. Like telling my father where I’ve been all night. There’s not really any way I’m going to, what’s the word.”
“Mollify,” Pierce said. “Convince. Convert.”
“No,” she said. “Not any of those.” She put her elbow in her hand, the cigarette pointed his way. “Can we go back now?”
It was late when at last, still restless and flushed, ashtrays full and dishes unwashed, they pulled the covers over themselves and doused the light; for a while longer they still whispered and joked, too pointedly, trying to release one another from the throes of their contention, or of his with her.
“No no I want to get this straight,” Pierce said. “So we die, okay, and we lie in our graves and rot. And after a long time—nobody knows how long—the end of the world comes …”
“Well not the end. I mean it doesn’t disappear.”
“Anyway then, at that time, we all get up out of our graves alive, alive-oh. Like do we fight our way out? Or do we just find ourselves standing there somehow?” He had never felt as intensely before how much this was a story for the night, a horror story; never noticed before how, when he thought of it, he pictured it in fact taking place at night: the grave, the dead.
“Well I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Pierce said, wishing he could stop. He tossed one way, another. “Anyway. It doesn’t matter. What Jesus actually said, of course, which of course has to be the case, right, is that this end of the world was just about to happen as he spoke. That some of those who were alive and listening to him would live to see it.”
“I’m alive,” she said. “I’m listening.”
“And what,” he said, “happened to the intervening two thousand years? What, it just stopped being true for a long time, and now for some reason or no reason it’s true again, for the people alive now?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t care. I don’t care if it wasn’t true, or when it wasn’t true, I only know it’s true now for me. Ray says we shouldn’t worry about how it’s all going to end, but that right now the Kingdom is close to us.”
Ray? “So maybe it’ll go away again,” he said. “Good. Sure. Maybe it comes and goes.”
“Well isn’t your book the same?” she said. She half-rose in the bed, gathering the small light there into her eyes and limbs. She gestured toward the dining room, where his messy typescript and notes were piled. And Kraft’s book too, still waiting to be duplicated. “Doesn’t it say that things that were true once aren’t true at other times?”
Pierce saw where his argument had led him. “Well,” he said. “Sure. That’s the theory. I mean it’s not exactly asserted. It’s a way of looking at things. A metaphor.”
“You mean you don’t think it’s true?”
“Oh I do,” he said. An awful hilarity worse than dread threatened him, a sinking balloonist who has already emptied all his sandbags, and now tosses out the lap robe and lunch basket as well, the champagne, the compass and altimeter. “I do think it’s true.”
“You do?”
“Yes. It is true. Sure it is. In there it is.”
She lay again beside him, giving up, and he, ashamed, lay still. Then she was still; she threw her arm over him, and after a time he knew that she was asleep, and was glad; he tried to remove her arm without waking her but it returned. He lay alert listening to his brain run, not all the drink he had had was able to extinguish it, until at a certain moment his thoughts turned to nonsense and he passed over too; only aware he had done so when he woke again with a start.
It was as far from day as could be, yesterday entirely gone but no hint yet of dawn. The silence was so thick he thought it must itself have been what awakened him. So deep. He became aware of a sound that had been there before but now was not, that had ceased or absconded. He knew it was bad news even before he realized what it was.
Water had ceased to flow through the overflow pipe in the basement. He hadn’t heard this sound or silence before but knew this was what it was.
He threw aside his covers and searched in the darkness for his big robe, stumbling over his shoes and hers; went to the staircase to the basement, switched on its one baleful light (an ancient round switch you turned clockwise rather than threw up or down, there had been one in the basement of Sam’s house in Kentucky) and went nearly falling down the stairs.
Yes stopped. Why. The little pump stood mumchance. He grasped the overflow pipe where it left the pump heading for the window, as though to take its fading pulse. He had to open the valve, this one, no this one.
“What’s up?”
He could glimpse her at the top of the stairs, in his overcoat.
“Stopped,” he said. “It’ll freeze. Maybe it already has.”
He turned the valve all the way one way, all the way the other; it turned only a single full turn in either direction, and neither had any effect. “If it was on too strong it emptied the cistern. If it wasn’t on enough, the water froze in the line. I don’t know which way to turn it.”
“Rightie tightie, leftie loosie,” she said.
He mounted the stairs, walking up inside his robe as he had used to do inside his cassock as an altar boy, and fell headlong; pulled his feet free and went up hand and foot to the top. Searched for his galoshes by the kitchen door, not there, by the front door; pulled them on over his bare feet.
“I can’t tell what’s wrong. Nothing should be wrong.”
“How about a flashlight?”
“Yes. Right.”
He found one on the floor of the front closet, depressed its button, amazed to see its little beam.
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
The night was shocking, the sky clear and the air dry and very cold; his first breath of it burned his throat. With some difficulty—the flashlight dimmed and brightened irregularly, as though still half-asleep—he found the black pipe and began following it up the hill toward the woods and the wellhouse. The big robe flapped around his booted feet. He realized that the nameless dread, unshakeable lately, that had seemed to forewarn or announce some disaster, really had,
and this was it. Up, past the shrouded swimming pool, into the woods beneath the black bulk of the house, four lamps lit now in four windows (set on timers, factitious residents who turned them on at twilight and off at dawn). No starlight there to give general shape to the scene, only the flashlight’s beam picking out a startled rock face or bush at every glance. He lost the pipe, found it again; he came at last, very abruptly, on the wellhouse.
The little hut or pergola, its broad heavy-shingled roof; the big stones of its half wall. Pierce put his head in; his light’s beam showed a pool deep down. A pebble that his hand brushed from the well’s lip fell far before striking it with a wet clang. He saw the ripples.
So it wasn’t empty. Or it had been emptied but was now filling again, since the pipe was now clogged with ice. But was it that cold? Yes it seemed to be. Cold enough to freeze flowing water in a two-inch pipe? How did he know? He looked, hopelessly, pointlessly, at the phosphorescent dial of his wristwatch, which only told him how long it was till day.
Anyway stuck. Somehow he had failed, or the task had been impossible. He had failed even before he began, no space of time even to be tested, to watch and ward; first hard freeze of the year, and bang.
He turned to go back, unable to think of anything he might do here. He could see, when he came out of the woods, the little house that was his, where all the lights were lit; the door open too, and she standing in it, looking and waiting.
10
When day came it was as cloudless as the night had been, and cold; but the sun’s heat, absorbed by the black plastic of the pipe, melted the ice that had indeed built up in one or two low-lying bends like plaque in old arteries. By afternoon Pierce’s water was flowing again.
False alarm, false alarm, he said to himself, not once but many times that day. What would happen though when the sun moved farther to the south, hurried across the sky weak and old and unable to do that work? He called the plumber the Winterhalters had listed on their card of emergency numbers and had a brief and unsatisfactory consultation with someone. When it snows the pipe’ll be well insulated. Yes and what if it doesn’t snow? It hadn’t rained. Hey, the voice told him, no guarantees: sounding to Pierce’s ears as though it knew this from sad experience.
Later he called Rose in Conurbana to tell her. She had left early, without her coffee, without a bath, her hair wild and undone; had hurried away, it seemed to him.
“False alarm,” he said.
“Sure.”
“Rose,” he said. “Those things I said, when you were here. About, well, God and. I hope you don’t, I mean I hope …”
“Pierce. Listen. I have to run. There’s so much to do.”
“Sure.”
A silence.
“I’m writing you a letter,” she said. “Bye.”
That night and the next he lay awake, as he had been lately doing, but now listening to the whisper of the overflow pipe, purring steadily. Or was it slackening? He would think so, would get up and fall downstairs to ponder; turn it up, or down, once turning it entirely off thinking he had turned it fully on. Rightie tightie leftie loosie. What was he doing here, he of all people.
It wasn’t just the water. He was failing in other responsibilities too, he could feel it though he could not remember or name them; when he stood in the basement staring at the pump squatting on its concrete blocks he could hear or perceive things weakening around him, and in danger of failing.
Rose’s letter came. He pulled it from his box at the Littleville post office (about all of official Littleville there was) along with a card from his mother in Florida, nearer to his birthday than she usually hit it, with a check inside, for twenty-five dollars. It too made him somehow afraid, caused him to think of things unattended to. He was to be thirty-six.
He pulled off one glove as he walked back along the blacktop to the Winterhalter estate and clamped it in his armpit so he could rip off the end of Rose’s envelope. He blew into its ragged mouth and teased the letter out. Her peacock-green ink.
Hi, she began; she told him she had got home okay and was glad his water flowed, she’d known it would be okay. She said she had been thinking a lot, nonstop she said, since she’d got back, and wanted to say so much that she hadn’t been able to say. When you were sort of ranting at me, she said. It makes it hard for me to think. He found then that he couldn’t both read it and walk, and he slid it back into its envelope and went on to his road, through the gates, to his house, listening to his heart. Then while he puttered in the kitchen he let the letter lie on his table. Until he could no longer, and took it out and scanned it quickly.
I don’t know all the things you want me to know, even though I know and believe that I will know them someday. I don’t understand a lot of things that I do know. The end of the world or whatever. I haven’t studied it and you have in your way but what I don’t see is what all your understanding gets you. What does it get you? Maybe it’s not the point, Pierce. I know the stars can’t fall down on the earth and the sky can’t burn up but maybe that’s not the point. I had a dream last night about death. I dreamed I was on a train a long train going somewhere, a train I had chosen to be on, and my father whose alive and my mother whose dead were on it and my mother was in a carriage for the dead in her coffin, with all the other dead people, and there was a coffin for me in there too, and what I knew was that we were all headed for the same place together and I didn’t feel any sadness or fear; I felt like wherever it was headed it carried us all. Isn’t there a song. And I don’t know where it is, or what it means that the stars will refuse to shine, or that we’ll be taken up into the middle of the air; but maybe there’s more than one kind of knowing. I do know this: that it’s not for everybody, and when it does come and it’s all over and the earth is done for and the rest of us have been taken away wherever it is we go, the jews will be left and I guess will suffer here terribly. And I wouldn’t envy anybody who does not have what we have and which of course I want for everybody, which does not mean I wish hell or damnation on you, Pierce, and what do you care anyway if you don’t believe it?
Pierce holding the little pages felt the world stop, and darken; he knew that a mask had slipped, and that he had glimpsed something unspeakable, without knowing what it was. What.
the jews will be left and I guess will suffer here terribly
Oh Christ, he said. Oh Jesus. Suffer terribly. Oh no.
What had they told her in order to cause her to write or believe such a thing, what obscene lies. Who was she, that she could contemplate such a thing with equanimity, he obviously hadn’t known her at all or she wasn’t any longer herself, they had hollowed her and refilled her with this, and now she had passed it to him like a contagion, only she slept and knew nothing, and he alone knew what it was.
And how could he ever talk to her again?
He would have to get away from her. Right away. How? How do you get away from women, what do you tell them? He had never done it. He was shivering violently. Why was there a kitchen knife in his hand? How had he got outside on the lawn in the cold? He lifted her letter again before his eyes, no it was not her letter in his hand but a slice of bread. He turned back to the house and to the lunch he had been making but ceased to make it, poured himself a drink instead but left it on the counter untouched.
Suffer terribly. It was just like them, Christians, always their way, to transfer their own endless spleen and self-regard to the Maker and Sustainer of the universe; to make the settling of their imaginary scores (settled in their favor a thousand times over already, never enough though) the very last thing the Infinite is to concern itself with in this world—hurting, whacking, flaying, causing pain. Your enemies your footstool. Maybe gather them all behind barbed wire, sure make them wear gray pajamas and starve them to skeletons, make them know who’s boss or whom the Boss has covered with his favor. Try to say you wouldn’t delight in it, just try to tell me you wouldn’t.
You. Not she surely though, not she but they; she could b
e forgiven, dumb bunny, surely she could. But we, us, was what she had begun to say lately, after so carefully avoiding those pronouns when talking to him about the Powerhouse.
We. Us. He had to call her, tell her. No he couldn’t do that, could not bear the sound of her voice, her small hello, the pause then into which he must put what must be said.
A letter. He’d write her one back. He sat at his desk and rolled paper into his typewriter, thinking of things. There was a right way to say this, a smart way, a way that would not drive her deeper in, that would show her that he knew whereof he spoke and that he loved her. Respected her or at least understood or. The machine impelled forward the ball on which all the letters and punctuation marks were incised, it struck and spun and struck as though banging its little head in rage. An Alphaball, a Selectraglobe: it had a name. In a few hours’ time he had written several pages that were not smart, not understanding, or were too much so; had torn them up, and written more. After an impatient search he found a stamp and an envelope large enough; he copied her Conurbana address onto it with a species of revulsion he thought he had never experienced before, not even able to name its object. What was being done to her there in that city. Then he walked again to the post office, its window closed already but the big letter box out front still uncollected. As soon as he dropped his letter into the box’s maw he felt a nauseating certainty that he had done exactly the wrong thing, and would have to wait here until the long red white and blue truck came to collect, and beg for its return. After a time this passed, and he walked home again.
He returned to his desk. It was, he thought, remarkably dark for the hour, the year had grown so late, was that it? On the desktop and on the floor around him were the torn members of the drafts of his letter; he could read words and phrases, like overheard bits of a distant furious argument or tirade. wicked lies you have accepted if you didn’t mean that what could not love someone who you can’t tell me it’s true what Gibbon said, that Christians I know very well bigoted cruel can’t you see Meanwhile the letter he had mailed lay in the dark waiting to be collected, right on top of a Dear John letter from a Littleville woman who had just left her husband for a preacher. No one would ever know of the coincidence.
DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle Page 34