Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  Old women and children and nuns on their knees and aged men with whiskery jowls and canes trying to get up these steps one at a time, steep and narrow too, and I was at last overcome, why do we have to do this to ourselves, why do we spend our treasure and our time and our tears like this, why does it have to be so? A place into which you can't go, but only peer, led to by stairs you crawl up on your knees. Ah no, no. When the Labyrinth of the World comes disguised as the Paradise of the Heart, that's when it becomes terrible.

  His last morning in the city, Pierce woke late, the desk at the pensione had forgotten his wake-up call or he hadn't made himself clear; then it was a long way across the crowded and complex city to the Stazione Termini, and the cab, one of those that had always seemed so fleet, so crazily speedy in the circling streets, was held back as though in some thick substance or gum and unable to make lights, get across intersections, through indifferent and clotted crowds. When Pierce at last got out, thrusting into the hairy outstretched hand the remains of his tens of thousands of lire, he found that he wasn't exactly in front of the station, and began walking, circling the great building. Like half the city it was scaffolded, clothed in great blue billowing plastic sails; the way around it narrowed to muddy paths, duckboards, then debouched into open areas without fingerboards or any help.

  Somehow he found his way within. Vast dark dome like the Pantheon's. Crowds eddying around the great central clock, gilded and eagle-topped. Gentle loudspeaker giving admonitions and advice, whose echoes canceled each other out. And the signs and notices in an unfamiliar font, something European and proprietary, he couldn't read it though he could guess at meanings. He guessed he could sit and wait. He turned, orientating. A man coming toward him stooped to pick up something from the floor, examined it, dropped it again, his lips moving slightly in private speech. It was his father.

  "Axel."

  "Pierce. Oh wonderful. Wonderful. This is what I hoped. Just what I hoped and prayed for."

  "Axel."

  "Wonderful wonderful and again wonderful,” Axel said. Pierce supposed he was drunk. “Here. Here in the Eternal City. They say Rome fell. Rome never fell. That thug Mussolini tried to pretend he had resurrected it. But its spirit. Its spirit."

  "Axel,” Pierce could only say. Axel went on talking, seeming to be unaware of the scandalous impossibility of this, which was all that Pierce could think of. “How do you come to be here?"

  "Well, it was the Chief,” Axel said. “He's right around. He went to the pissoir, I believe. Oh, Pierce. Rome."

  "What do you mean? The Chief? Is he here?"

  "He brought me. A birthday present. Because you see we're doing so well. You know it was always my dream. Oh son."

  "What do you mean, doing well?"

  "Pierce, the most remarkable thing. The boys found something. You know, fishing around in their buildings there. Well, you know they bring me these things, pretty things, some of them quite valuable. Oh but this. This."

  "Axel, are you okay?"

  "It's all all right now. From now on."

  "Axel."

  "You see, you didn't have to go at all,” Axel said. He was white and obviously ill, unshaven gray bristles on his cheeks. “Oh you did the right thing, setting out, and you've learned so much. Yes. But you don't have to go on farther. Because it's found. All along it was right there in Brooklyn."

  "Axel, no."

  "Right there all along. Down there at the very bottom.” He put his hand in one blazer pocket, then the other, rooting around with a face that made Pierce's heart fill with terror.

  "Axel!"

  "See,” Axel said. “See?” The thing in Axel's pocket began to come forth, it was large or small or bright or dark but it shouldn't be here or anywhere, and of any place not in his father's hand. Spirit forces filled the air; their horripilating hands were on him. Pierce cried aloud again as the thing was shown him, the thing at last, and then he woke in his bed in his pensione hearing his own ghastly moan.

  * * * *

  No, he took no cab; after his first night in Rome when one had apparently pitied him he never snared another. He wouldn't learn till he came back to the Eternal City years later that taxis weren't really allowed to stop when hailed but only when called, that's what the phones at taxi ranks are for. In a stiff rain he trundled his bags aboard the Number 64 bus, which was hurrying away from St. Peter's to the far city gates, as he was himself.

  The Stazione Termini, which was not at all the place he had dreamed of, unlike it in every respect but most unlike it in being real, its stubbed cigarettes and ads and the smell of coffee bars and engines. No odors in dreams.

  He shuddered, ghost mice up his spine, remembering. Axel. You didn't have to go.

  He had his Eurailpass, somewhat greasy and weary, less from being much used than from being so often sought for, make sure it's not lost. The morning direttissimo to Bologna, then Venice, Vienna, then north and west to Prague. The way Bruno might have gone if he'd really escaped; heading for Rudolf's city by way of Venice, where he had once had friends, the bookseller Ciotto had actually defended him as best he could before the Venetian Inquisition. He would have skirted imperial Vienna, though, maybe going instead by way of Budweis and Pilsen, seeking for Giordanisti among the Budweisers and Pilsners; and on to kindly Prague.

  He studied the guidebook, measured with thumb and finger the thickness of pages through which he must make passage. In Venice he might be able to go into Ca’ Mocenigo, the palazzo on the Grand Canal where Bruno first came after returning to Italy from his adventures in the north, summoned there to train a young man of the Mocenigo family in memory arts, and other arts too, a weird young man who thereupon turned him over to the Inquisition. But of course it would likely be chiuso. He knew the word for closed in four languages now.

  He turned pages. Could it be that Prague's most popular brand of gas, with stations in many places, was Golem gas? Hadn't such enterprises perished with socialism? And could it be that on a hill above the high castle (how could there be a hill above the high castle?) there was a maze, as this guidebook said, and in the maze a suite of distorting mirrors, and a vast painted panorama of armies fighting for the bridge below during the Thirty Years’ War? That's what it said.

  A maze, armies, mirrors, a bridge.

  The once-vast imperial collections in Prague are now largely dispersed, and those seeking the paintings of Hofnaegl, Spranger, DeVries, the famed collections of medals, stones, and maps, to say nothing of the automata, weird mandrake roots in the shape of persons, portraits done in fruit or meats or books or kitchenware, nose saddles, carved cherrystones, etc., etc. will have to go elsewhere. After the Battle of White Mountain the victorious Maximilian of Bavaria is said to have carried away fifteen hundred cartloads of plunder from Rudolf's city, and the Saxon armies continued the spoliation later in the war. The Swedes took whatever of worth remained, including several of those surreal portraits; Queen Christina received an itemized list of the appropriated valuables in 1648, just as the long war was at last ending. The Number 22 tram will take you to the battlefield, not a mountain at all but a low chalk hill amid pleasant suburbs (five crowns.)

  It was Kraft's story that whatever it was that came to be in Prague city in the reign of Rudolf, whatever was concealed in Oswald Kroll's black trunk that the emperor and Prince Rozmberk both chased after, whatever drew the fated couple thither in 1618, it must have been later lost or carried off by captains and camp followers in the awful depredations of thirty years of war. Whether you were Protestant or Catholic you evenhandedly looted church and castle, took whatever of value you could carry, pyxes and chalices, reliquaries, jeweled caskets, vestments sewn with gold thread, until they grew too heavy or the plague or the fever weakened you and you dropped the stuff by the side of the road or were killed for it. And this thing too, perhaps, probably; it was just one more among the countless refugees, it was disguised as something else, it changed ignorant hands over and over, was bought and sold, suffered
, died, and was buried. Gone. The best we could do now was learn its name.

  But he had sent a telegram to Boney from there to tell him that he had found it himself, his own anyway, and was bringing it home.

  He was lying, though. Pierce with a dream-sure certainty just then came to know it. It hadn't been taken away from there, and Kraft hadn't found it there either.

  It was never lost. It had been overlooked in those days, missed by the unwise, untouched by the wise, its presence unsuspected by the victors, kept secret by the defeated. Hidden in plain sight, from then on. But it was there. Nowhere else it could be but there. Pierce was sure.

  And there it would still be, now, there in the Golden City that it created around itself, Pierce's own Golden City as it was everyone's; the best city, toward which we all strive and which we never reach, because it is the city only of the past and of the future, where the labyrinth of the world is exactly coextensive with the paradise of the heart, and how then could it ever be traveled to? In this time, this week, from this terminus?

  He had always known the secret of those stories in which heroes set out in search of precious hidden things; everybody knows it. The journey is itself what brings the jewel or the stone or the treasure or the prize into being; the act of seeking is the condition by which the thing sought comes to be. In fact the search isn't different from the thing sought. Which is why you go, why you must. He knew. Everybody knows.

  Except that it wasn't so. Or rather it was so in other instances—in every other instance, maybe—but not in this one. It was just the opposite. The stone was there, it had been there all along, infinitely precious and sturdy, and he wanted it and needed it more than anything—oh yes, he did, that was clear now, as it should have been from the start. There it was, eternally, right there, and the only way to keep it in existence was not to seek it.

  He laughed, and laughed again, and those passing by—Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Austrians—turned as they passed to see if they could tell what he laughed at. After a while another express came in and was announced, its passengers summoned by far seraphic voices flitting beneath the glass and iron sky. Pierce sat still on the bench, trying now and then to lift himself up and move himself toward the gates, and failing—or perhaps succeeding in staying put. He laughed, wet to his shins with foreign rain. More trains came in during that afternoon, and set off to Milano, Napoli, Firenze, Praha, Budapest, Istanbul; still he sat, fat bag between his legs, and nothing could move him to get up and go.

  7

  When he was at work on his first novel—it was called The Court of Silk and Blood, about the fearsome Catherine de Médicis and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve—Fellowes Kraft began to understand for the first time certain things that Dr. Pons had set out to teach him long before in the house on the hill. For the book he had written—not this book in particular or anything that was done or said within it, but the fact of it, its coming into existence—was just like the appalling universe that man described.

  Except for brief moments of ontological doubt such as anyone could have, Kraft had always known that the physical world—this earth and its universe of stars, its gravity and mass and elements, its living and dying stuff—was the base layer of reality. What we think about it is mere evanescence and spindrift; what we hope dies with each day; we impose our inexistent notions and grids upon it, but earth and the flesh abide.

  According to Dr. Pons, though, it was actually just the opposite. To him, physical matter had no real existence at all; it wasn't different from human, or divine, ignorance. It was an illusion, in fact a hoax. The slightest and smallest human emotion felt by the inward incarcerated soul is more real than any aspect of materiality. And more real in turn than all those emotions, all tears and laughter and love and hate, are the conceptions of the mind—Beauty, Truth, Order, Wisdom—which give to materiality whatever form and worth it has. Most real of all is the world beyond nature and even Mind: the realm Without, utterly out of reach, the realm of the Fullness and God.

  What Kraft learned, in his first joyous labors of imagination, was that, different as Dr. Pons's inverted universe might be from what is in fact the case, it is necessarily very much like the world inside a work of fiction.

  All the myriad material things that we, in our universe, touch and use and love and hate and depend on—our food, our flesh, our breath; cities and towns, roads and houses, dogs, stars, stones and roses—in a book these things have no true reality at all. They're just nouns. But emotions are quite real; there are tears of things, and they are really shed, and real laughter laughed. Of course. And in a book intellectual order is the most real of all, the governing, sustaining reality—the Logos, the tale issuing from its absent, its hidden Author.

  They, those pretend people in their factitious world, they owe their embodiment, their circumstance of being caught in unreal souls and bodies, to an upheaval that happened before the beginning of space and time (their space and time): a dissatisfaction, a troubling of the Pleroma of a single soul's primal economy, a soul startled into awareness by a girlish or a boyish question: if things were different from the way they are, what would they be like?

  More, even more: the most precious and only truly real thing within each of the conscious beings who had been made to inhabit Kraft's little world (well, not the hylic mob, the mere names, the spear carriers and extras) was their share of the original undivided consciousness from which they sprang—that is, his own. Into which, when their work is done, they are gathered again at last: when their false world is closed up as a book that is read.

  He had laughed aloud in the midnight to think it, wherever he was then (a Paris garret, a rickety table, a kerosene stove), filled with a kind of hilarious pity for them in their pickle. Which was somehow more strait, and more pitiful, because so many of them had once lived in the world Kraft and his fellow humans lived in, out here. Catherine de Médici. Bruno. Nostradamus. Peter Ramus.

  In subsequent years and subsequent books he had sometimes wondered if he might somehow send them a message, one of them or some of them; awaken them to their own condition, to this peculiar reversal of what we out here, most of us anyway, call reality most of the time. To speak into the ears of one soul at least the commandment, the suggestion, the hope of waking.

  Like Dr. Pons leaning down to him, the tassel on his fez aswing and his hand by his mouth to call: wake up.

  Of course most of the time authors are busily not noticing these things, and trying to keep readers from noticing them too, just as Ialdabaoth and his gods and demons are supposed to be busily at work to keep us from ever noticing their impositions and frauds. But if his, Kraft's, people could just for once get it. If they could awaken from that dream, the Red King's dream; awaken even from the dream of awakening: arise, and go into the limitless common day, into the spring and the rain and the beating of their hearts. Was that possible?

  Yes; yes of course it was. But only in fiction.

  Day had reached noon in the Faraways. Kraft thought he would have a whisky soon, not a great drink with ice but only a dram, enough to cover the bottom of a cut-glass tumbler and refract the light. Four Roses. He ought to look into the refrigerator too, get himself something to eat, but at that thought his stomach turned, it actually did, one of those old figures that if you live long enough, or too long, you find aren't figures at all.

  He drank the whisky, though: more beautiful and encouraging in the glass than in his mouth or heart. Oh well.

  The telephone rang.

  "Old friend,” Boney Rasmussen said, sounding almost as far away as he really was, in his big house a couple of miles and more from Kraft's. “I wondered if you were up for a game of chess tonight."

  "Ah well."

  "I'd be glad to come to your place.” Kraft had nearly ceased to drive. His vanishing competence or what he believed to be its vanishing had begun striking fear into his heart at odd moments, causing him to brake suddenly on the road, nearly causing thereby the awful coll
isions he envisioned.

  "Mon empereur,” Kraft said. “I have a question."

  "Anything."

  "A question. Not a request."

  "All right,” Boney said. “Shoot."

  "Suppose I were very suddenly to make an exit. I mean drop dead. I'm afraid I haven't prepared very well for this eventuality."

  "No need to hasten things,” Boney said after a funny pause. “Of course we must get all your ducks in a row."

  "Ah yes. Ah yes. The very largest duck of course comes first, and that we have really firmly in place."

  "You mean the books, the copyrights."

  "Yes. They'll be yours. I mean the foundation's. And this house."

  "Maybe I should come over,” Boney said. “It's actually a beautiful evening."

  "There are masses of things. I have kept diaries. I have covered paper with writing, more with typing. I wouldn't want just any-old-body going through it. Though boredom would no doubt keep person or persons from going far."

  Boney was silent for a long moment. The thoughts of age are long, long thoughts.

  "You could,” he said at last, “destroy it yourself. Whatever of it you thought was too—too..."

  "Somehow I can't do that,” Kraft said. “It would be a little like putting an end to my own messy and overstuffed consciousness. I have profound horror of suicide."

  More silence.

  "Of course they're valueless. They're just mine. I'm like a bum on a park bench, his clothes stuffed with newspapers to keep him warm."

  "Is any of it,” Boney asked, “recent?"

  "Oh, some.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling, just as though Boney could see him do so. “Some. And there are things, too."

  "Things, yes."

  "A loathsome rummage sale. What to do. Is it a comfort to think we will carry our secrets to the grave, simply because others can't find them in the litter?"

  "Old friend,” Boney said. “Your house is not as large as mine. Or as full of this and that. I have a few years’ collecting on you."