Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  She knocked, perfunctorily, then opened, and looked within: lamplight from inside fell on her face, and just for a moment she reminded him of an illustration in a novel, peeking around the door of the room wherein the author has laid her fate; then she took him within.

  The room (absurdly high-ceilinged, for it had been split off from a bigger room of proper proportions by a blank wall) could be read instantly, like a page: the single chair was by the window, its green velvet seat concave from being sat on; the lamp was on the table, and the book beneath the lamp, and the stool before the book; the towel hung above the washstand, the scrap of rug lay under. Coal smoldered in the grate; more filled the scuttle. The person who as it were projected all this around himself stood in the center of the carpet in a wadded dressing gown and a fez, hardly taller than the boy he looked at.

  "This is Dr. Pons,” his mother said, and that was all. Dr. Pons seemed to have a board jammed into the back of his dressing gown; soon his visitor would determine it was the man's own spine, severely twisted out of true. It gave a sort of spiral motion to his walk that was at once painful and fascinating to watch, a walk that Kraft had later on assigned to more than one character without ever (he thought) quite communicating its effect.

  On that first day, his mother stayed there with him and the doctor (of what? Kraft had never asked) and listened; she drank pale tea that the doctor made on a gas ring, and so did the boy. On other days she would only take him to the door, or to the bottom of the street; at length he was left to make his way to this place himself.

  How did his instruction begin, when it began? Going up to the Heights was a duty he did because she told him to, and he made little effort to remember the days or the hours. Was he told stories, or was he first asked questions? Was there a text, pages to turn and touch with a pencil tip; or did they only talk together, about his days and his life, his life on this earth; a lesson pointed up, a moral drawn?

  Whatever it was, it couldn't have been really news, nor would he have been surprised or appalled by what Dr. Pons had to reveal to him. He knew about religion. There were churches at each end of his block on Mechanic Street: Precious Blood on the south, Reformed E.U.B. on the north, and his mother had explained to him their function; and at Christmas when on the steps of the Catholic church was set forth the little tableau, the chipped plaster figures of sheep and shepherd, camel and king and babe, she told him the story: how the son of a far-off invisible king came to be lost in a wide dark winter world; how he came to learn who he was and how he had come to be there, what task he had come to do, and who his real father was. The Christmas Story.

  And now and then, at no fixed interval, a little group had used to gather at his mother's house and tell that story in other forms, or tell other stories with the same form, for it was thought to require many iterations, until one or another telling awakened the selfsame story lying coiled and unsuspected in the hearer's own heart.

  The story, he would come to learn, was the one that Dr. Pons had to tell, and it was from Dr. Pons they had learned it, if they had not learned it from Dr. Pons's own teachers. When they told it in the house on Mechanic Street, the parts were acted out by abstract nouns that behaved like personages: Wisdom. Light. Truth. Darkness. Silence. Wisdom fell outside the Limit that was Spirit, and in her fall the Darkness came into being; so she was the Light caught by the Darkness. And she wept: and her tears became the world we live in. If he listened—which usually he did not—the big words would flicker into life in his mind for a moment as they were spoken of, only to go out again, like the terms in a physics lecture, Velocity, Force, Mass, Inertia, featureless balls and blocks colliding in no-space and not-time, which are yet supposed to contain the answer to the hardest question, or the second-hardest actually: why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead?

  They were a funny-looking bunch, Kraft remembered, most of them a little off-kilter or oddly shaped, hairless or wooly, with round soft stomachs or asymmetrical eyes or lumpy brows; they stuttered and fidgeted and sat without ease: as though their spirits had long lived uncomfortably within their swollen or shriveled bodies, which showed the signs of the struggle for dominance, still undecided. Some of them he would come to know pretty well, for they were later his mother's tenants, taking the two upper apartments briefly, living and sometimes dying up there, visited in their extremity by some—not all—of the others. They all seemed to die young of unlikely diseases or live to terrible old ages, burdened with bodily needs that they, and his mother, were contemptuous of but patient with. Mrs. Angustes has to go, son. Silently laboring toward the purgatorial john on his arm. How is it (he would come to wonder) that the adherents of a cult can elect to have, out of the common life we all must undergo, just those experiences that confirm them in their exclusive vision; how do they make themselves into people such as their cult believes all people to be?

  For it was a cult he had grown up in, as he later understood, as he had understood in the simplest terms of specialness and exclusivity even when he was a kid: a small, a practically infinitesimal cult, but an old one, he was amazed when he learned how old, a thin but unbreakable dark thread unwound through the world for ages. The complex equations of suffering and scheming abstractions that his mother's friends talked of, and which Dr. Pons would in his serene whisper school him in, were an ancient answer to the truly hardest question of all: why is there anything at all, and not just nothing?

  Once, before the beginning of anything, a number of great beings, angels with limitless, inconceivable powers, gathered together, driven by restless dissatisfaction that they could not account for. To distract themselves, they began to play a game of their own invention. They divided themselves into the various players, constructed parts and appendages for themselves by which they might play.

  Though it never wholly assuaged their profound boredom, they became caught up in the game they had invented. The rules, continually elaborated to make the play more interesting, entangled them in limitless possibilities. They played on, forgetting why they played, forgetting themselves, their origins, forgetting finally that they played a game. They came to take their own idle construction—which we call Time and Space—for actuality; they forgot they had themselves devised the rules, and came to assume they had always been subject to them.

  So the game has gone on being played, Dr. Pons said, from that time-before-time down to this; except that now and then some subdivided entity, some mirror fragment or mask piece of the original players, a pawn in the game, will stop in his tracks, seized by a restless dissatisfaction he can't account for: longing, boredom, and a certainty of belonging elsewhere. For those great beings who invented the game of time and space, the Archons: what they had done was simply to reduplicate themselves and their quandary over and over, dividing and redividing their infinite substances into all the things that are, animal vegetable mineral, and all the representations of those things, in an effort to fill their own emptiness.

  That was to begin the story in medias res, but in fact there was nowhere else to begin except in medias res. For what was being told was not so much a story as a situation, a circumstance endlessly elaborating itself without ever unfolding any further, like an infinite carpet in which the central figure is surrounded by the same figure in a larger size, and that by the same figure in a still larger size, over and over.

  And all those figures, Dr. Pons taught him, earthly and heavenly and above the heavens, are wrapped around a single infinitesimal spark of light at the center of being, like the layers and layers of pearl with which an oyster coats the grain of sand that irritates him so. That grain of light, irreducible, eternal, infinite even in being infinitesimal, is simply the centermost point of your heart.

  Here Dr. Pons touched the corduroy above the boy's own heart.

  And not until the last grim furious Archon remembers this, not until she surrenders her stake and tosses in her cards—and with them the hopeless delusion she has labored under (that s
he is ruler, that there is something to rule)—will that vast game board be folded up at last and put away, and the Players, knowing themselves to be incomplete, turn again toward the Pleroma, the Fullness, God: whose lack is all they really are.

  God. Who is like a mother whose child has decided to run away from home, a child who packs his paper sack with lunch and his knapsack with things and then sets out never to return, and gets farther than he ever has before, the borders of lands so large and far he can't comprehend them; and thereupon forgets why he got so sad or angry or disgusted or impatient, and remembers his mother at home; and so he turns, and goes back, to find his mother in the kitchen, who only smiles at him and takes his hat from his head and tells him to wash up, unaware that he was ever gone, so long gone.

  "We,” Dr. Pons would say (and the boy he spoke to thought he meant you and I, and then later on he thought that Dr. Pons meant we human persons, and lastly he knew he meant we few, our kind): “We are the ones who remember. We are the latest and littlest of the replications of divine forgetfulness: and yet in our remembrance lies the salvation of all. For as we are the lowest and the last, farthest from the light, so we are also closest to the center, and the spark of light is near within us: the spark that, once awakened, we can fan into a flame."

  * * * *

  Well. Kraft could recite the weird catechism still today, though he could only in the briefest moments (reminded by a smell of coal smoke, or the feel underfoot of cinders on ice) experience the drama Dr. Pons told of, and the limitless darkness in which as a boy he had always imagined it taking place.

  His mother called it Knowing, but as he got older it seemed to him that it wasn't Knowing so much as it was Knowing Better, a kind of universal I-told-you-so that could be astonished by nothing. Mocking, cynical about human sentiment, except that what she mocked was not human pretensions but human humility: human trust in the goodness of life and the giver of life, human groveling before contemptible and shoddy nature. Ma always acted as though there were some metaphysical guarantee that a thing would do or be just what its name said it would do or be: if glue didn't stick two things together satisfactorily, she took it not as a sign that the things and the glue weren't suited or that the weather was damp; she saw (with mixed disgust and triumph) that the universe had (once more) failed to act on its promises, proving (once again) that it was not the place it purported to be. She was a tourist in a shoddy tourist cabin, only willing to put up with the inconvenience for the length of a brief vacation, and the weather turning wet.

  "Son,” she wrote to him, the year the Second War ended. “I read all the time now about the new Einstein bomb made out of atoms. They talk about how this terrible responsibility has fallen into our hands, that we can misuse this power, and blow up the world. And we will all have to control ourselves because of it. As though this bomb were the fault of people, when it isn't at all. The fault is in those atoms, isn't it. Going off in our faces like a trick cigar, or like that gimcrack Japanese jewelry box I had, that nipped my finger every time I opened it."

  She no more credited human science with discoveries about the world than she would credit a man who fell down a well with having discovered it. She thought the duty of science was to provide us with a guidebook for getting safely around nature, a guidebook that could never be complete: there were always nasty surprises awaiting. Ma certainly had no conception of physics and assumed the rules could suddenly change in subtle ways, water at any time begin to flow uphill. He remembered how not long before she died, she had seen put up somewhere, inscribed on a pseudorustic board in comical lettering, what was called Murphy's Law: If Something CAN Go Wrong, IT WILL!!! How she had laughed, who hadn't laughed in a long year of sickness and pain. If something can go wrong, it will: the only law she would recognize in a lawless universe.

  Somehow, despite her, he had himself grown up an optimist, expecting and even assuming the best would come to him, or at least a fair deal. He could remember a day lying, high up on a hill, looking over the city cleft by its busy waterway, whose distant reaches fought free of the city and wound far through autumn haze into pale imaginary hills: how he had understood that day for the first time that he loved the world, loved his own sensations of it, its weathers and its sights and tastes. He felt a deep pleasure in the discovery, and did not yet know that his consciousness of his pleasure in things was the beginning of his division from them. The pleasure could diminish, but the division, once begun, could never be healed.

  Not such an optimist then after all, maybe possibly. Autumn too now outside his windows, outside his house from which he did not often venture. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. His mother couldn't abide Keats.

  He hadn't often seen it at the time, but he came to see his mother's efforts to bring him up alone as a great heroism; strange and nearly mad as she was, she had apparently got up every day and willed herself to make a life for him that was not wholly unlike the lives lived by others, not so wholly unlike anyway that he would never find a place among them, and have only her. Clothes cleaned and pressed. Nourishing meals got up. Manners inculcated, cautions and reassurances made, his achievements and fears and hopes taken seriously if with some bafflement. He in turn had avoided, just barely, breaking her heart and emptying her life entirely in his struggle to climb up or down into the rooms and streets and public places where most of life was lived; even now, she dead many years, he could groan aloud or feel sweat break on his brow when (in the vacant middle of the night, reviewing his life, as he must now do) he thought how close he had come.

  She had got him through high school—there he was in the class photograph in cap and gown; then she put on her hat and coat and was gone for a day, and returned haggard and proud, able to tell him that he would be able to go to the college that had accepted his smudgy application, she had got some concession out of Guess Who, and so if he worked and lived frugally. And he had gone, and stepped into Western Civilization as though it were the family firm, where a place had all along been waiting for him, which wasn't the case at all.

  At college he turned to the past with hope and appetite, as though it were the future; and soon after he graduated he set out to make a living from it. The only residue left in him (he thought) from the peculiar childhood he had been subject to was the conviction, which only came to him rarely over the years but which was unrefusable when it came, that it is not unreasonable after all to believe that one's own subjectivity is bound up in the nature of things; that really we have no independent evidence of how the world is; that if our consciousness contributes to making the world, then our consciousness can alter it. Suddenly, in an Italian garden, on a winter day, knowing that it made perfect sense to think so, and feeling himself grow in an instant into a being inconceivably huge.

  * * * *

  "Guess who's dead,” Ma had written to him on September 1, 1930, here was the date, she usually dispensed with that. He knew by then a little more about his father and her relations with him: he was her mother's sister's husband, into whose house she had come as an orphaned girl of seventeen, to be something between adopted daughter and servant, and starting (by her sublime inattention partly, her son imagined, partly by her freedom) a foolish passion in her uncle's heart. Which he then thrust upon her apparently, repeatedly, taking dreadful chances, hand over her mouth in the pantry (so Kraft imagined it) and always reproachful of her afterward. Rich enough, though, to pay for the eventual consequence, which was a son, Kraft himself. Able too, it seemed, to bear a lifetime load of secret guilt, which, like fascination, she seemed to have generated in his heart by her almost inhuman indifference.

  Poor man. She never felt sorry for him either.

  The money he left his son, passed to him by discreet and disapproving lawyers, was enough to get Kraft to Europe and allow him to live in a kind of penurious luxury inconceivable at home, and spend something on treats for friends who were even poorer than he, in order to receive their gratitude—he would later learn better wa
ys of winning them but still would never entirely trust his own charms. Before the money ran out he had written his first book, a life of Bruno.

  Bruno, who really knew the world was made of one stuff everywhere, whether you called it Atoms or Soul or Meaning or Hylos; Bruno who proved there was no Down, no Up, no Inside, no Outside; whose gods were Lucianic bumblers, and the history of the universe the record of their crimes, follies, and misfortunes, and yet we love them, our love conquers them in its lover's welcome of every manifestation of their endless, pointless creativity. The gods take pleasure in the multiform representation of multiform things, in the multiform fruits of all talents; for they have as great pleasure in all the things that are, and in all representations made of them, as in taking care that they be, and giving order and permission that they be made.

  Going down drunk to the Campo dei Fiori the July day he wrote the last pages of that book, where there stood a bronze statue of the man, incongruously robed in the Dominican habit he had long before discarded, hood shadowing his gaunt martyr's face. Buying roses from the flower sellers there to put before this effigy anyway, as the boys and girls courting and kidding on the fountain's lip watched him curiously.

  The book—Bruno's Journey—was on his shelves now here, more than one edition, each though retaining the original's photograph of himself on the back. A pretty ephebe if he did say so himself, shock of pale golden hair and cheekbones bronzed by the Neapolitan sun, a look at once self-satisfied and sly. It was a young man's book, aphoristic and smart, not really wrong maybe but so insufficient it might as well have been.