Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  But passing down through the metropolis, he thought why these scruples, why had his feet grown cold, didn't he see which side his bread was buttered on? If there wasn't this to do, what the hell would there be? And what big crime was the metaphysical trick his proposed book was to play when weighed against the other things now jostling one another onto the best-seller lists (Pierce still kept tabs on these lists)—the sequel, for instance, to Phæton's Car, all about alien visitations in ancient times, by an author once held up to Pierce as an example of how far he might go and not be scorned; another, about Jesus faking his own execution and escaping to England, himself his own Grail, thence to Spain where he founded a royal line, his heirs still traceable today. Or You Can Profit from the Coming Last Days, twenty weeks on the list. Or—everyone was reading it, Pierce saw its glossy black covers everywhere—a long tract about fairies, and their world inside this one, and an endless winter they will turn at last to spring.

  And yet:

  "I can't write it,” he said to Julie. “I'm not going to."

  "Oh for God's sake, Pierce."

  "No, really."

  "Writers hit these blocks. I know. Believe me."

  Subtly plumper, and richer in more ways than one, Julie had otherwise remained the same: her face a direct descendant of the one he'd known, her place her place, and recognizable as such the moment he looked around.

  "Tell me,” she said.

  "I just,” he said. “I just can't go on pretending that I believe these things are possible."

  "What things?"

  "All the things. More than one history of the world. Magic. Cosmic crossroads, world-ages, an altered physics. The possibilities."

  "Possibilities are always possible,” Julie said.

  "Tell me what'll happen when I inform them I can't do the book. I've sort of spent all the money."

  "Pierce, listen."

  "I could offer them something else instead. I don't know what.” Around him on her high shelves, on her desk and on her bed, were other possibilities: mystery, horror, romance, true crime, sex advice, pathos. All of those he had suffered.

  "Just show me what you have."

  "I didn't bring it. I left it behind."

  She regarded him in some disgust. “Okay, what happens,” she said, “is that we say nothing to them. When your deadline comes we say nothing. When they ask about it we say you've run into some difficulties and are hard at work on them, and we get another deadline; we don't ask for the next installment on the advance. Time passes."

  "Uh huh."

  "Meanwhile lots of things could happen. You could change your mind, and you will, or if you don't you could change the book. The publisher could change his mind, decide he doesn't want the book, return you the rights. The publisher could go out of business."

  "The horse could learn to talk."

  "Anyway what you don't do is give the money back. For sure not yet."

  "My father owns a house in Brooklyn,” Pierce said. “I'm not sure what its situation is, but I thought maybe I could borrow against it."

  Her look of disgust had softened to a kind of amusement, with something long-suffering in it; for just a moment she resembled his mother. “Pierce,” she said.

  "All right, all right."

  "So who's paying for this trip you're taking?” she asked. “And isn't it part of the same mission? The same, I mean, project?"

  "Yes, in a way."

  "Are you going to give them back their money?"

  "Well, theirs is a grant,” he said. “It's sort of exploratory. I mean nothing necessarily has to come of it. Nothing has to be produced.” He smiled and shrugged: that's all I know. For a time they regarded each other, not yet thinking of the long-ago life they had shared, but not thinking anything else either.

  "You okay?” she said then.

  "I don't know."

  "Then that's not okay."

  "You know when all this started?” he said.

  "All what?"

  "This thing I'm doing. Or actually not doing. It was a night on Tenth Street. The night of the student takeover at Barnabas College. Remember?"

  "I remember that day,” she said. “Listen. Will you send me what you've got? Maybe I can think about it."

  "Ægypt,” he said. “That was the day, or the night, I remembered. You were in bed. It was hot. I stood at the window."

  Come to bed she had said to him, stoned and sleepy; he wasn't sleepy, though the short night was all but gone. Earlier that day the little college where he taught had been taken over by young people (some not so young) demanding Paradise now, and other things; faculty, including Pierce, locked themselves in their offices till the students were ejected by police. Pierce, released and having returned to his railroad flat downtown, thought he could still taste tear gas in the midnight air. Anyway the neighborhood around was all alive and murmuring, as though on its way, a caravan drawn on toward the future from the past, going by him where he stood. And he knew that of course you had to be on their side, you had to be, but that he himself must go back, if he could, and he knew that he could. While the others went on, he would go back, to the city in the farthest east of that old land, the city Adocentyn.

  Dawn winds rising as night turned pale. It was there that it started; and if it wasn't there it was somewhere else, near there or far off, where? If it had no starting place, it could have no ending.

  "I'll do what I can,” he said.

  * * * *

  He got off the train again in Brooklyn, at Prospect Park, to walk the rest of the way; to see the arch at Grand Army Plaza, walk west to Park Slope past the Montauk Club, where his father used to point to the Venetian arches and brickwork, talk about Ruskin, and show him the frieze that displays the history of the Montauk Indians in terra-cotta. Terra-cotta. Pietre-dure. Gutta-percha. Cass Gilbert, the architect who designed the Woolworth Building, once lived in that pleasant brownstone, built by himself. He had stopped to greet Axel one day, one day long ago, an aged, aged man; Pierce was a boy in a gabardine suit with short pants, and was given a nickel with a bison on one side and an Indian, not a Montauk, on the other.

  Was it so? He had been plagued lately by false memories suddenly occurring to him, more vivid and sudden than the real thing, unless they were the real thing, rushing in to supplant the old memories, themselves now become false.

  His own old house. All through his childhood he had carried a key to this door, his latchkey (the only one he had ever referred to so). And then somewhere he had lost it and never replaced it. He went to press the bell's cracked black nipple—beside it the little typewritten card yellowed and faint with his own last name on it, the selfsame as ever—and then he noticed that the door was not fully shut.

  He pushed it open and stepped in. On the entranceway floor a mosaic of two dolphins chasing each other's tails. A thousand Brooklyn buildings had one like it; it had made Axel talk of Etruscans and Pompeii and the Baths of Caracalla, and Gravely the super had used to wash it and wax it often. It could hardly be seen now. Gravely was dead: the last time Pierce spoke to Axel, Axel had told him that. Pierce when he was a child had always been told to call him Mr. Gravely, as though the world probably wouldn't readily grant him that honor and Pierce must remember to.

  The door of Axel's apartment on the second floor stood open too.

  Hearing laughter inside, Pierce looked in, and the laughter ceased. Three guys, stretched at their ease on his father's ancient furniture, looked upon him; they certainly seemed at home, booted feet on the coffee table and beer bottles close at hand on the floor.

  "Hi,” Pierce said.

  "Looking for somebody?"

  "Axel. Axel Moffett."

  From the bathroom in the hall there came then, as though summoned by Pierce's request, another man, barefoot, plucking at the front of his sweatpants. By their looks the three on the couch referred Pierce to him.

  "Yeah?"

  He had a gold cross in the V of his shirt, a broken nose like a thug
in the funny papers, and a watchcap on his grizzled head.

  "Where's Axel?” Pierce asked.

  "Who wants to know?"

  "I'm his son."

  "You're kidding."

  "No."

  "Well, for Christ's sake.” He scratched his head, rubbing the rough cap back and forth with a forefinger, and regarded Pierce's bags. “You come to stay?"

  "No actually."

  "There's room."

  "No. I'm only here one night. I'm flying to Europe tomorrow."

  "No shit.” The man seemed unimpressed, maybe unconvinced, and went on regarding Pierce with what seemed a hostile, reptilian scrutiny, unblinking. “Axel know that?"

  "I came to tell him."

  Two of the three on the couch now laughed, as though they found this comically inadequate, which it was. The older man looked their way, and they stopped.

  "So anyway you came,” he said to Pierce. “That's something.” He came close to Pierce and put out a large and knob-knuckled hand, unsmiling still. “Pierce."

  "Yes.” The grip was iron.

  "Good."

  "Where is he now, can you tell me?” Pierce asked. “Do you know?"

  "I got some ideas. Some of the guys started the celebration early.” Knowing laughter from the boys on the couch. “He's with them. The usual places."

  "Celebration."

  "Don't worry. It'll cycle back here. Or we can go hunt ‘em up. You won't miss a thing."

  For a time the two looked at each other as, with gradual certainty, Pierce came to understand.

  "His birthday,” he said.

  "Sixty-three,” said the watchcap. And of course it was, noble, benevolent Aquarius. He knew that. And now he knew the man before him too. This was the Chief, of whom Axel had told him: the Navy man (retired) who managed a team of young working men, who earned extra money and got away from their families on weekends by doing reclamation in Brooklyn buildings. Axel was accountant and factotum. Pierce didn't know they had moved in, apparently to stay.

  "Europe,” the Chief said, whose unwavering gaze was unsettling, and intended no doubt to be so. Pierce wondered what they had done to Axel. Or taken from him. There were so many disasters Axel could let himself in for, his misapprehensions and his grandeurs. “Whatcha want over there?"

  "It's sort of a research trip,” Pierce said. “Historical research.” He turned away then, as though this answer were sufficient, to study the battered apartment, the building materials stacked against the wall, the rolled rug in the corner. A battered birdcage lay in pieces, the bird flown or dead; gone.

  "Yeah, we're working on the place,” said the Chief. “The whole building. We got the tenants out and we're upgrading. What we're doing for Axel. I'll show you around."

  There was a pounding of feet on the stair, past the door, on upward to the third floor, leaving a mephitic trail of cheerful obscenities as it went up. The three men on Axel's couch arose as one to follow, calling out as they left. A. A.

  "You know he really shouldn't drink a lot,” Pierce said.

  "So you'll be staying tonight,” the Chief said. “He'll be glad. You know he always expects you. See, your bed's made."

  It was. The old chenille bedspread it had always worn, a new slough in its middle, though.

  "Sixty-three,” said the Chief, observing the bed with Pierce as though there were someone in it. “So you would have been born 1942 or so?"

  "Um yes."

  "I was in the Pacific then."

  "Aha."

  "Axel missed the big one. Never mind.” He scratched his head again, a habit. “You want coffee? A beer?"

  "No neither,” Pierce said. “Actually I may not be able to stay. I thought I'd get out toward the airport, you know, get a motel room out there, so I'd be close in the morning. My flight's early.” None of this was true.

  "Naw,” said the Chief.

  "And in fact,” Pierce said, “I have to go back to Manhattan for a while tonight. This evening. Shortly."

  The Chief was still shaking his head. “You'll leave the bags here,” he said, his voice harsh from a lifetime of barking orders. “You'll come back tonight. Axel will be here, you'll have a drink with us, in the morning we'll take you out to Idlewild in the truck."

  "JFK,” said Pierce.

  "Listen,” said the Chief, advancing. “I'll tell you something. There is nothing you could want that can't be found right here. In Brooklyn. In the five boroughs at the most."

  Somewhere in the building something heavy fell or was thrown down the stairs, while men laughed.

  "I guess that must be true,” Pierce said.

  "You're not shittn me,” said the Chief. Pierce now noticed that the man's right finger and thumb ticked rhythmically together. Effects of drink, or a palsy. “You know he needs somebody. If it's not you it's got to be somebody."

  Pierce said nothing.

  "The man's a genius,” the Chief said. “What he knows.” He tapped a temple with his forefinger. “Maybe you take after him."

  Nothing.

  "A good man too. He knows something about loyalty. Actually a lot."

  Pierce was uncertain how long he could stand up under these implied reproaches. He managed to nod, slightly and solemnly. On the floor above, the roughhouse (as Axel would surely call it) worsened. A fight, maybe a mock fight, punches thrown, thud of boots. Fawken A. Fawken assho.

  "So,” said Pierce. “Okay."

  From an ashtray on the mantelpiece the Chief took a business card. “You probably know the number here,” he said, and Pierce did, even the old letter exchange that had once named his neighborhood, its bounds mysterious. Only by means of the dial plates of phones could you discover what places were within it and what places were outside it; the candy store nearby was in, so was the branch library blocks away, but the movie theater on the avenue wasn't. “There's another number too. We got a warehouse space in Greenpoint."

  Pierce looked at the card, which bore their numbers, and a cartoon crown, chosen from a printer's catalog.

  Park Reclamation and Renovation

  Warehousing Fulfillment

  He thought: What if it's all all right, and they will be kind to him, and cherish him; keep him from harm, and not fall into fools’ errors, make bad decisions; will think of him and his unworldliness when they dream up their schemes? What is fulfillment, and how do they do it?

  "Okay,” he said again, and took the Chief's hand. Outside the naked windows (what had become of their lifelong brown drapes?) a short day was closing, the black skyline and the sky too familiar. “I gotta go."

  She lived up on the Upper East Side, almost under the shadow of the Queensborough Bridge, in a five-story building that was once also shadowed by the rattling El. It was ready now for the renovators and reclaimers, to turn its railroad apartments into expensive studios, but that hadn't happened so far.

  The front door was open, maybe stood open always—Pierce hadn't ever been here before, had only heard about it from her on the phone, those rare times she called. He went up. They didn't know, his neighbors up in the country, the feel of these banisters thick with a hundred coats of cheap enamel, these worn rubber treads. He had lived for years going up and down stairs like these, streets like these. And then he had left at last, impelled by her to take another way.

  He had used to call her Sphinx, softly in her ear in bed, and then later to himself when he thought of her. Not for her silence, she was a Chatty Cathy most of the time, but for her fine-boned cat's body and the gloss of her thick fur and the alien eyes in her human face. And for the riddle she posed maybe, for she was a Gypsy, or her mother was: gitana, race of Egypt once though no more. Her name had been Diamond Solitaire when she toured with a ragtag theater company of trannies and egotists, still her friends, doing improv and performance pieces in shifting venues. But back before that, when she was unfolding in her unmarried mother's womb, she needed a name (her mother thought) that such a girl as she growing up would want and need to have, a n
ame sturdy and lusterless but not plain or gray; and so she got the name that nuns and her stepfather and unemployment offices would all call her, if no one else. Her mother believed she'd made the name up herself, and in a sense she had, though it wasn't her daughter alone who bore it.

  This was her door. On it was a big decal, the red oval of the Holmes Security Agency, an armed Athena and a sunset or sunrise. Premises Protected. He doubted that; a piece of city irony. He listened at the door to what he might hear within (nothing) and then he knocked, and found that so far from being locked it wasn't even shut.

  "Charis,” he said. “Hey."

  The door opened at his push and he saw her rising from a sofa, or a mattress clothed in figured stuffs, a stricken look for a moment on her face that cut him as the same face could in dreams. Then that passed, and simple delight replaced it.

  "Oh my God! Pierce!"

  He opened his arms, hands displayed, here I am, as I am. She opened her arms too and they embraced lightly, tentatively.

  "Pierce,” she said. “My god. Back in the big city."

  "Just for a day."

  "Then home to the country?"

  "No. I'm going to Europe."

  "Gee, wow,” she said. “Europe. How fun. You'll love it."

  They stood together in the doorway a long moment, uncertain. Then she pulled him into the apartment.

  It was as he imagined it might be, just as. Here were the ad hoc furnishings made from street finds, the walls of alligatored tenement paint disguised in hangings, like a khan's tent. Here were the things she now made her living buying and selling, gathered on her daily hunts through junk shops and rummage sales and the Salvation Army store. She'd once told him that when she was young she thought the Salvation Army had been formed for just this, the salvation of your old stuff from eternal discarding: your hats and coats and sunsuits and stopped clocks and three-legged chairs.