Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  He got away as soon as he could to his old room, and to his bed, which felt as though it had been slept in by many, one at a time at least, he hoped. He slept, startled awake by the comings and goings of Renovators and Reclaimers; he dreamed that he had a dream about his father, who was lost and sick and in trouble, dead maybe and in Purgatory, asking for help, but Pierce couldn't answer somehow, nor ask what was the matter; and when he woke up he found himself on a cold hillside, the house and all Park Slope gone. Then he woke up.

  There was silence in the house so deep it might have been empty. Pierce scribbled a note for Axel (one of the silent sleepers must be him) and went carefully out through the darkened rooms. He collected his dreadful bags and carried them bumping the walls down to the street. Snow was falling thickly. It was nearly an hour before he could attract the attention of a gypsy cab, and still he stepped out at the airport way too early, unshowered, unbreakfasted, afraid.

  4

  The abbey bells rang Sext, the sixth hour of the day, high noon. Pierce lifted his head to listen. What is the meaning of the sixth hour, on what then do we meditate? At this hour Adam was made, at this hour he sinned; at the sixth hour Noah went in to the Ark and at the sixth hour came out again. At the sixth hour Christ was crucified, reversing Adam's sin. Every hour of the monk's day contains a part of the day-shaped history of the world.

  Through the universe, the human world, and the year, the stories recapitulate, reverse, return. Every Mass is the story of the making, loss, damnation, redemption, and remaking of the world, the Sacrifice at its center. Adam was born or conceived on the hill that would later be named Golgotha, the center of the world, beneath the Y of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, from whose wood the Cross would in time be made; and the letters of his name ADAM name the four directions in Greek: North, South, East and West. He was born on the Equinox, the same day the coming of Jesus was announced to Mary: Ave, said the angel to Mary that spring morning, reversing the damnation that sprang from Eva.

  Blessed circularity, never done. Even the End of the World was able to be repeated in the course of every turn of the heavens around earth—or rather of earth's spin around the sun, a shift of perspective that made no difference on earth really, though it had seemed once to be an utter upset of that same circularity. Of course the Christian story at its first appearance had been not an embodiment but an enemy of circularity, a one-way street from Creation through Cross to Conclusion, and for millions (he supposed it must be millions) it still was. For Pierce and others (millions too, he was sure, though maybe a vertical millions reaching back toward prehistory, rather than the horizontal millions going to church and mosque today) the simple straight story was uniquely repellent, repellent in a way no other could be; for him and his like, the whole history of the church (his church, this church) was nothing but a process by which its original one-way progression was tamed, and turned around like the Worm to bite its own tail or tale, which would otherwise be insupportable, impossible to assert or believe. On Good Friday in the abbey church, the perpetual light above the altar, always burning night and day, would be put out: God would die, the world grow cold. Everything would be over. On Easter Sunday it would be lit again, never to go out: God lives again. The next Holy Days, the same. We live in a story with a Beginning, a Middle, and an End, but within that story is another, the same, and within that one, also another, and each is bigger and longer than the previous one, and of that there is no beginning and no end.

  It was like Adam and his navel.

  He thought this, in just these words—like Adam and his navel—and without his willing it (in fact he was surprised, his attention caught, as though he'd felt a tug just then on Ariadne's thread) he remembered several things at once.

  He remembered the great book wherein the Y and a thousand other mysteries had been explained or set for him to ponder, and the entry on ADAM.

  He remembered the day when he had first arrived in the Faraway Hills, and how at a Full Moon Party by the Blackbury River he had suddenly known he would abandon his calling as a teacher of history, and try to make a living elsewhere by other means; maybe (he'd thought in the sweetness of liberation) he'd set up shop, and for a buck apiece wrangle hard questions people had that history could answer. Like the question of how, when we get to Heaven, we will know which man there is father Adam. Not a minute later a tall barefoot woman in a glowing sundress had passed him by, and he heard someone call to her. Hi, Rose.

  And he also remembered how, near the bitter end of what began at that party with that motion of his soul or head, he lay in his small house beside the same river, and Rose Ryder was with him. The hour must have been Matins, he thought: the hour of Judgment, and the hour of the perishing of the world. They were not sleeping but talking, and the subject was biblical inerrancy. Pierce had for some weeks been spending a lot of his actually pretty substantial erudition, wide if shallow, in resolving for her sake a few of the chasms between the Word and the world, at the same time as he tried to tease her into laughing off the whole stupid thing and returning into his orbit once again, and she did laugh, often enough, at his act. So this night she had said something (this was delicate archaeology, recreating that ancient black predawn, from here where he now sat in the sun) something about evolution and the evidence for it, which he said was of course indisputable, please. And she had, what, she had demurred, or said it wasn't the point anyway. And he said Don't worry, the question could be easily resolved and nothing lost, not God's omnipotence or the Bible story or the millions of years of bones and fossils, and he knew how.

  How?

  Well, he'd said, it's like Adam's navel.

  An old trick question, very old, medieval maybe. When we get to Heaven how will we be able to know which man there is Adam? We will because he'll be the one without a navel. Because he was never attached to an umbilical cord. He had no mother, came from no womb, had no history. So there it was. But no, of course he did have a history: his own grown body was a history, and so were the plants and the animals around him, the slow-forming stars he saw in the sky. The answer is (Pierce with raised forefinger explicated this) that there is no time for God, no past-present-future, he can bring the universe into existence at any moment of its history: the universe comes to be at the moment when God wills it to be, with all its previous millennia intact. Do you see? he'd said to Rose. It never existed before that moment, and after that moment it always did. And on the sixth day he makes a man of dust, and breathes life into him: and hair has already grown on his head, and teeth in his mouth, and a beard on his face, and he has a navel on his stomach, from his nonexistent life as a fetus, his ontogeny that never happened recapitulating a phylogeny ditto.

  See how useful, how neat? That whole evolution problem rendered moot, do you see? It's all okay; it's not Mere Chance. If God chose, he could take six days to do it all in, which is what the Bible says, what Rose in the bed beside him then was committed to believing. But of course, if you like, you can think he chose to create it all, all its starry depths in all their cosmic evolution, in a single moment: say, just in that moment when Adam opens his eyes to perceive it.

  She was impressed. He thought she was. He remembered that she had been. He'd left aside the question of who, just at that moment when the lamp was lit in Adam's head, was creating whom. But he couldn't refrain from pointing out that if you didn't accept the Bible chronology, and had none in particular to replace it with, then you had no way of saying what moment God would choose in which to bring the universe into being. It could be any one; a billion years ago, or just now. Right now, this moment, he'd said, and he sat up and stretched out his arms and closed his eyes: just now, as I open my eyes. All time and history, all my own history too, right up to the very memory I have of just now closing my eyes—it all never existed before, and would all, right now, come into being.

  Now. And he opened his eyes on her.

  She was on her elbow, looking at him, bare, lost to him; and his co
ld bedroom was around them; and a huge grief or pity (but for whom?) had seized his throat; and he had begun helplessly to weep, sobbing as she looked on in amazement.

  Pierce felt in his body the bell claps of noon, each one stepping upon the trailing tail of the previous one, until no more came, and the twelfth sang alone and died away.

  He thought how, in one way if only in one way, Rose and Charis were alike. He thought that neither had ever loved any man, not in the times when he had known them, nor before. Charis had surely known this; but like a person color-blind from birth she probably hadn't regretted it very much, and had gone on (still went on, maybe) secretly believing that others had fooled themselves into thinking a valuable and useful facet of the world—color, love (or Love)—supposedly existed but didn't really. Emperor's new clothes. He hadn't seen her or heard of Charis for a dozen years or more, and wondered sometimes what deal she had struck, if she had, for what she needed, whatever it was.

  Sometimes, though, he could perceive Rose, not as she had been, as he had known her, but as she might be now. He would sometimes see with startling suddenness, as in a showstone or a confirming dream, how she lived with them still, her Bible cult, the Powerhouse; getting along, dealing with its hierarchies and its powers as she had always dealt with the world—by indirection, conditional assent, abstraction of her spirit from things she couldn't get her body out of, willingness too to try to live up to others’ standards, at least until she saw no path there for herself and her nature. It must be the case that, in any cult not murderous or psychotic, life eventually settles down and becomes like life anywhere, livings still to get, dishes to wash, rubs and hurts to assuage or nurse in secret. Self-regard to maintain by cunning or other means. Lies to tell. Of course.

  It was likely she had never been truly subject to them even back then. The God or godliness she wanted to get for herself was only a new good offered to her to pursue, not really different from health or wealth. It was only he who thought she had laid a way out of the world; only he who ever really believed or feared there was such a way. Following the path that he had made or found through her body he had come himself to be within their unreal heaven and hell, under the rule of their god and his prophets, an enchantment he had not known could happen to a human of his time and place, though common enough (he knew by report) in other times and places. It was there, in that false world, that his spirit had resided while his body walked the Old World searching for the thing lost, in his bad shoes and his overcoat from which the lining had begun to droop. Under his arm that mad guidebook of Kraft's, and the new little red notebook, made in China—still with him here, its pages foxed with London rain and Roman wine—and an umbrella for the endless drizzle, one of a series of umbrellas that he bought and lost as he went, one at almost every pensione, on every train.

  Boney Rasmussen was already dead when Pierce set out that winter to find the Elixir to make him better. So there was no one on whose behalf he could have sought it but his own. In fact, as he knew very well even then, there is no other living person for whom it can be sought: though it can only be found, if it's found, for everyone.

  What he hadn't known, and would never learn later, was that by then the thing lost had already been found. It had been found by him and others, and redeemed from the place where it was hidden and at threat, and restored to the place it should possess; and this event had stopped the decline of the whole world toward dissolution, toward frozen inanition and repetition such as Pierce had experienced in the cold halls and hot rooms of Rose. The world—"the world,” all this, day and night, self and others, things and other things, inside and out—had been coasting to a stop, and just in time had been put back in a forward gear again. And then it could continue, and would, until all traces of that moment of redemption were erased from all hearts and memories (But you remember it, don't you? Night, and the woods, and the lights put out, and one light restored?). New-wakened Adam would then open his eyes again, the beautiful circle would close, and roll on forever into the future and the past at once.

  5

  So:

  The snow had continued to fall, and grown steadily fiercer, till the airport, great-winged white bird, was wrapped in it. Outside the wide windows, airplanes were ghostly, moving to their assigned runways with lights burning. Then not moving. Pierce, ticket in hand, heard that his flight was to be delayed. Then further delayed. Then canceled. New arrangements to make for the night flight, if there was to be one.

  At evening, Pierce and his fellows arrayed themselves on hard benches designed only for a brief alighting in passage, not for the comfort of the benighted and delayed; there was no way Pierce could twist his big frame into more than a moment's repose. He gazed in envy at men and women and children who had tucked up nearby with their coats up to their chins or their heads under their wings, breathing softly as though enchanted. The short day turned toward darkness.

  Maybe he wouldn't go, after all. He thought this, and grew still. Maybe he'd sit here as the snow flew and covered the world, sit for days, for months; he'd sleep and dream, fill his new red journal with what he might have done but finally did not do, and go farther inward than he would ever dare to go outward.

  And just then in the limbo-like procession of snowbound souls through the great space, a figure attracted his attention, and at the same moment the figure seemed to notice him: a man not large but somehow big around, in a jaunty feathered fedora and a fur-collared coat, a leather document case tucked under his arm and a small suitcase on a little trundle he pulled along.

  It was Frank Walker Barr, once Pierce's professor and advisor at Noate University. His eyebrows rose, and he stepped or rolled toward Pierce with an air that seemed to suggest he was conscious of illustrating the ancient wisdom about coincidences—that if you run into someone you haven't seen in years, it's certain you will very soon run into him again, and then a third charmed time. For Pierce had, not two months before, walked and talked with Barr in an obscure resort in Florida, and been told truths, and tried to listen. This after he had not seen his old mentor for a decade.

  "Hello again,” Frank Walker Barr said to him. The plump coat over his tweeds made him a Humpty Dumpty, the same chummy, threatening smile cleaving his great face almost in two, hand held out to shake. “You're traveling?"

  "Yes."

  "Abroad?"

  "Well, yes. Britain, then Europe. Italy. Germany."

  "Research."

  "Um in part. And you?"

  "I hadn't been planning on it, but yes. In part,” Barr said, regarding him with interest, “because of the conversation we had in Florida."

  "Oh?"

  "Your book."

  "Oh."

  "Soon after we got home. I decided to go to meet some colleagues instead of resting at home."

  "Colleagues where?"

  "Taffy worried, because she couldn't come. Family matters. She worries too much. She thinks she needs to be near me at all times. To take down my last worlds maybe. I mean words."

  "Aha."

  "Egypt,” Barr said. “A small conference of paleographers."

  "And you're delayed as well?"

  "Oh hours. We'd better have a drink. Come along."

  "I think they closed the bar."

  "The Olympic Club. For frequent flyers. Just down here,” Barr said.

  An awesome refusal broached in Pierce's soul. He already suspected that he had entered into one of those chain narratives where an innocent is handed on from one garrulous interlocutor to another, follows fingerboards to the next who points him to the next. Until he refuses to play anymore. And so wins. You're nothing but a pack of cards.

  After a moment, though, he gathered up his shabby impedimenta and followed his former teacher, who had begun to roll away purposefully through the crowd.

  * * * *

  It was his mother whom Pierce had gone to Florida to visit, on the first leg (as he would come to see it) of this his way away: the little motel where she and her frie
nd Doris now lived and made a living, where she had gone after Sam Oliphant was dead. Pierce came to make her speak, to answer him at last, to explain why it was that everything that happened to him or ever could happen to him seemed to have been fixed by his twelfth year, why he could somehow never go onward but only turn back: a fate like one of those diagrams in the Boy Scout manual he had once cherished, bowline on a bight maybe, a rope following minute arrows, inward, around, out but always back in again, strong and un-undoable.

  For instance, there in that little Florida resort town, on the esplanade, he'd met Barr. He'd first read a book of Barr's in his twelfth year. Barr had afterward been his advisor at Noate University, and had used his long pull to get Pierce his first teaching job, at Barnabas College. There was apparently no life passage he could make without Barr standing there, or nearby, amused and foresighted.

  "Now tell me all about it,” Barr had asked him, there in the sun-warmed Florida evening. “Your concept."

  He had brought Pierce to his own little condo on the beach, to have a drink with him and his wife, Taffy. Second wife. Over the last dozen years Taffy had been appearing more and more prominently in the forematter of Barr's books, moving up from the Acknowledgments page (where she had first appeared under her own last name), to a Dedication, to a line beneath Barr's own on the title page (though in smaller type), lastly to full partner, not in smaller type. By Frank Walker Barr and Taffy B. Barr. The books themselves seemed unchanged.

  "Well,” Pierce said, sun through their window impaling the promised drink in his hand. “It was something you said. Once when we met in New York."

  "Ah yes."

  "You talked about how someone might do history even if there weren't universities and tenure. How you could go to work answering questions, questions about the past that people have."