Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  They trucked the cartons and bags and an ancient duffel and the lamps and rattling boxes of kitchenware down to a warehouse at the end of a muddy lane in Stonykill, put it all behind a wooden door like a stable's and padlocked it. Later Pierce lost the ticket and forgot the name of this place, and later still, the storage bills not reaching him at his changing addresses, the stuff was all thrown out and ended up in a landfill beneath tons of other similar but different things for future archaeologists to find. Now and then in aftertimes Pierce would suddenly remember some item, book or charm or trinket, that he had once owned, but by then the world (his) was accumulating new things, not only material things, at such a rate that he could hardly remember them from morning to evening, much less the artifacts of a past age that no longer had a substantial claim on actuality at all.

  * * * *

  It was a cold, retarded spring in the county, bitter and dispiriting rain in April and a thick snow in the first week of May that fell on the unfolding, near-full-grown leaves and the tulips and lilacs, breaking many limbs with its sodden embarrassed weight. We all felt chastened and hurt, as though it were our fault, or as though we were the object of it. Then it melted and the damage done was covered in green again, and everyone felt less in the wrong: that's what Roo said.

  She wore a gray man's fedora on those cold days, or on colder nights a blue watchcap pulled down low, her chapped lips still sometimes helplessly atremble. Her long narrow beak pointed into the world's wind and her green eyes narrowed often, as though she stood at a helm, or first in a line of explorers, searching for the way ahead. When she went to work at the dealership, she liked a pair of wool bell-bottom pants that might or might not have been real sailors’ wear in some navy of the world, tall morocco-leather boots, and a patchwork jester's jacket of many-colored silks that was the closest she came to finery—he would preserve a snapshot (inward, virtual) of her throwing on this garment, the quick and practiced way she did it, the way everyone pulls on clothes, with mind elsewhere pulls straight the sleeves, tugs the collar loose; and he preserved it because it was the first time he saw in her a human universal, which afterward she would embody; and that was a sign, and one he knew how to read.

  She forbade him to call the Corvino house, and instead she met him at the Sandbox or came to the motel on no fixed schedule, driving up in a variety of trade-ins from the dealership. She would break in on him, press him to bestir himself, but then when he had gone along and they went journeying together and he behaved in some way to which she objected, or (more often) he took some stance or expressed some view she thought offensive or inadequate or dumb, she might suddenly and firmly draw away, arms crossed and eyes smoldering, or turn dull, truculent, and unwilling to be pleased, as though it had been he who had done the importuning in the first place, and now she had had it with his presence. He found their incompatibility soothing.

  When they'd been seeing each other for a month he knew more of her life and opinions, her deals good and bad, than he'd ever known of Rose Ryder's. And he'd told her more of his: all of it true too. They talked about their parents; they figured out it was in the same year of their lives that their parents had parted, but where she had stayed at home with her father, he'd been taken by his mother to a far place and a family strange to him. He told her why this had happened, though it was something he hadn't known then, and how when he was grown up he'd come to know his father again, as a different person, the person he had probably somehow been all along, though a person the child could not have comprehended, any more than he could have known why he was sent away.

  "You loved him.” She seemed to know this. “You see him now?"

  "Well. You know. He's a chore. But he's all alone. He needs somebody to listen to him talk."

  "Yeah,” she said. “Yes.” Barney, glad-hander, bullshitter, genial kidder with a core of irremediable bitterness that he perhaps didn't even know about, that could hurt you badly if you weren't careful—she returned his banter but she'd stopped listening to him, a lesson long ago learned. “A guy,” she said. “You don't have to listen."

  "I'm a guy."

  She grinned at him, her snaggletooth smile. “You are so not a guy."

  They talked about their old spouses and lovers, with circumspection—each of them guarding, for different reasons, the border of a land neither had as yet received a visa to reach—but they talked about their ghost children too, and without shame: his with Julie Rosengarten, aborted before that was legal even, long ago; her own two. One the child of her husband of six months who, after she split from him and all his pomps and works, had come around to her place one night, found her alone, and coerced her into bed.

  "He was a Catholic,” she said. “I didn't tell him about getting pregnant that night. And what happened after. I wanted to, though. Just so he'd know."

  He logged both these things: that she'd wanted to, that she hadn't. It was past midnight in the Morpheus Arms.

  "So if you divorced,” Pierce said, “I guess he wasn't a good Catholic."

  "He wasn't a good anything,” Roo said. “Not a thing about him was good."

  "You were never Catholic,” he said. “Right?"

  "I'm not anything,” Roo said. “No magic helpers. It just never came up, when I was a kid, and it's too late now."

  She lifted herself on her elbows in the lumpy bungalow bed, reaching across him for his smokes. This the only circumstance in which she smoked, and soon she'd cease. Her pale body: like a worn tool, he thought, every part of it showing clearly what it had been long used for, the thickened pads of her elbows, strong tendons behind her knees to pull and foreshorten her legs, and around her neck to turn and point her head. She looked like she'd last forever.

  "Actually I've liked the Catholics I've known,” she said, holding the unlit cigarette. “There was a big family that lived near us, like six kids. They were generous. In a way that was—I guess new or different to me. Inclusive. You know?"

  "Really."

  "They took me to church and stuff. Family dinners. I slept over a lot. Then sneaking out too. A lot of laughs."

  "Uh huh."

  "Maybe it was just because it was a big family, and I was a singleton. The little ones used to line up for baths at night by age, or size. It was sweet. But that's not all. I think what I liked, or wanted, was something about their being Catholics."

  "Yes?"

  "Because Catholics,” she said, “have mercy. That's a good thing. They have that."

  "Well,” Pierce said, astonished and ashamed, ashamed for his old church, old in its countless sins and its un-mercy. “Well, yes. That's what they say.” Tears had bloomed in her eyes when she said it: mercy. He didn't yet know how easily it happened with her, at the suppressed motions of the soul within her.

  "Because justice,” she said. “You can demand justice, but there's an end to justice, when everybody gets their fair share. But there's no end to mercy."

  She looked around her at the room, the sad-clown painting askew on the wall, the gas heater, the chenille bedspread sliding to the floor. Him.

  "I've got to go,” she said.

  "Don't,” he said. “Stay."

  The first time they'd shared this bed—after a couple of drinks at the Sandbox, and well after they'd first begun to consort often—she had seemed unsettlingly cagey. She kept breaking off, or slipping away, to change the radio, or fool with the heat; and she kept talking—not about what was going on right there between them, but about other things, general remarks, questions about life, his life, his thoughts. So tell me. He wondered if it were some kind of test, see if he could keep up his concentration, or his attention to her. He was about to ask if maybe she'd rather just stop, and talk, but just then a sort of smothered fire within her seemed to burst softly, and she pressed hard into him; she ceased to say words, only sounds, sounds that seemed, somehow, like further admissions, hard to make at first and then more willingly made.

  "It's late,” she said, and lay back again on the
pillows.

  It was late, a night deep in May by now. It was still that time in a love affair (neither of them called it that or thought those words in any hollow of their hearts) when it's hard to sleep together, something always seeming to remain undone or to be continued or gone on with, that wakes you after an hour or two of sleep, to find the other's awake too in the hollow of the bed's deep inescapable center; or that never lets you shut your eyes at all, till dawn's approach at last calms everything. Maybe sometimes too a sense of fighting off something that approaches, or at least preparing to fight. Fight or flight.

  "So what was it about?” she asked him.

  "What was what about?"

  "Your book."

  "It was,” Pierce said after a moment's thought, “a historical novel."

  "Oh yeah? About what period?"

  "About ten years ago."

  She laughed a low laugh, her tummy rolling beneath his hand.

  "You remember,” he said. “You were there. You were actually here then."

  "I don't remember that much,” she said. “And I wasn't here."

  "But you came back."

  "Family's all you got,” she said, and he pondered why—it wasn't wisdom that seemed to apply to her, or to him. So many people said it: when did it become true for them? Would it ever for him? “Anyway there isn't any back."

  "That's what my book was about. How if you change the way ahead, the way behind changes too."

  "Seems kind of obvious,” she said.

  It seemed so when she said it; it was obvious, or at least a commonplace. More than one history of the world; one for each of us. A bright moment arriving when you choose a new way into the future, which illuminates a new past, the backward way, at the same time. Everybody knows. It had been true all along.

  "Because, you know,” she said. “You can't step in the same river twice. You ever hear that?"

  "Nope,” he said, pressing her now meaningfully downward to supine, enough talk. “News to me."

  3

  She had always willed her way forward: and if that was so, then what was the name of the thing that was the opposite of it, the force or quality or power that had brought her back again? It was something like will, just as forged and handmade; something not easier anyway. It was only people who had never done it that could say running away was easy; people used to say to her that going back was hard, but they couldn't tell her what the hard parts really were, or how you did them. Running away, you hurt yourself by what you did; going back, it was what had been done to you that hurt. It was like the difference between falling hard and getting up again: which is worse? She found out that what she must do in going back (and it was hard) was that you had to come to believe that the world you had left behind and all its contents really had existed, and moreover that you yourself brought it and all the obscure pain of it into being by doing that—by believing that it really had been the case (as Pierce said)—and thus you were somehow then responsible for it too, which hurt you all over again. But only by thus bringing the past into existence could you ever really turn all the way around again, and go on from there. It was so. Actually it was what everybody knew: and as soon as you learned it for yourself, you knew that too, that everybody else knew what you had just learned.

  The farthest place she had reached when she went, the place she had to begin to start back from, was Cloud City. To remember how she left Cloud City was to create the things that happened to bring her to Cloud City in the first place—it was to go forward backward, to go down the mountain, losing on the way down all the things you knew, in order to regain the things you had forgotten on the way up. You had to put yourself back on the path, just past sunset, at the same hour when you first saw Cloud City up on the bluff, itself still in the light though you no longer were: the Watchtower seeming to be silvered in mercury, as real and insubstantial as that (quicksilver) and the white wings and hyperbolic sails of the City too, colored by sunset just in the way the white clouds in the west were colored, rare shades that had no names she knew. How she had got there, on the path upward to the bluff, was the first thing that turning back would reveal, maybe, the names or faces of the one or ones who'd brought her there.

  There were such places then, places you found your way to and couldn't have imagined before you reached them, places that other people knew of and could lead you to if you said yes, places coming into being as you approached and then vanishing again as you went away. That's what it seemed like. Even some that were a million years old—mountain hot springs where in winter the naked people soaked for days, their long hair jeweled with droplets and steaming in the cold, their pale bodies distorted and fishlike down in the water and wiggling in glee—she thought even such places as that might not still exist, or couldn't any longer be found, and Cloud City had been made of nearly nothing.

  What was his name, that tall stork of a guy in his homemade haircut and his supply of old dress shirts, the one who had thought up Cloud City and seen it built, only to stop thinking about it when it was still unfinished? A last name for a first name like Watson or Hoving or Everett but none of those. He shook her hand once, gripping hard, smiling and screwing her arm around as though the handshake could produce something from her. Then she'd seen him hovering here and there in the City as though he should be standing on one leg, or he'd be meditating in a group but a whole trembling head higher than the others. It was Beau (his name she would not forget, no matter how far backward she went from there), Beau who told her that it was he, Wilson or Evans, who had conceived a city made of tents under tension, that the wires and couplings and the fabrics all existed to do this, and the sun would heat the interiors and a hundred flaps and diaphragms would vent and cool it; a city that could be rolled up and carried away to be built elsewhere, maybe over the ruins of those made of stone and steel when they failed and died. And they had experimented with a thousand shapes for their tents, the older ones still standing as the newer and bigger ones went up. All were white, not for no reason, and the light of day within them was sourceless, bright, cool, the building an idea on the point of evanescence, only the colored carpets, sun catchers, clay water pots, hanging strings of coral peppers, and dirty-faced naked children who were contained in it solid and actual. Watching one put up, all the laughing laboring people pulling gently at the wires, the fabric taughtening into curves that math described: like a barn raising in Heaven.

  It was already different, though, when she left there to go down into the plains with Beau: the City people had stopped thinking about earth and air and the properties of polyesters and the physics of stretch, because a change of heart or mind had come over many of those living there, one of those waves of sudden weird conviction that in those days could sweep over families like theirs, as someone among them or arriving among them declared a revelation, or a revival, or a long-buried new-arisen truth. At Cloud City they were mostly spending their days asleep and their nights awake, outside, looking upward, awaiting those they called the Old Ones, mild good wise beings from the stars, or the skies anyway, who were supposedly now willing to draw closer to those who perceived their existence and strove to know them in spirit. That was what the Watchtower was for, to gather and focus the spirits of the city dwellers to be projected outward in love toward those waiting great-eyed ones (some of the Cloud City family could see their faces in meditation) to bring their ships down to the wide dusty floor of the mesa, a place left empty for their landing. Beau with his faint eternal smile had watched the people and spoken to them and listened to them with a kind of attention she had never seen anyone give anyone else, at once open and untouched; and he said (not just to her) that they were right, in a way, about these Old Ones who came from elsewhere, but what they didn't know, and would be a long time learning this way, was that they were themselves those Old Ones whom they awaited; they were looking in the wrong direction, out not in.

  So they walked away from Cloud City, she remembered the way down now, Beau and some others an
d herself, following another tale that Beau had come to possess. They went down into the dry plains, and there they met the dark small people who had come on foot hundreds of miles from their homes far to the south, as they did every year just at this time—this journey, this hunt they were set out on, was the bearer and the continuer of their lives, not a thing they did to find sustenance or goods but that which brought into existence all sustenance and all goods. The ten or dozen people from Cloud City, Beau and Roo and others who had learned of their quest and come to meet them and learn from them, were permitted to accompany them on their hunt, which was a hunt for a person, a person infinitely beloved, who must be shot and killed—they had bows, decorated in feathers and yarns, and arrows remarkably long. The prey they sought turned out to be small indistinct growing things sheltering amid the rocks and cactus, and whenever found it was pierced with the long arrows and held aloft amid cries and mourning, though the hunters’ dark faces never seemed to change.

  Through that night by a fire of gray greasewood they shared the flesh of the person they had killed, which was the worst thing Roo had ever tasted, not a thing to be consumed at all, and she couldn't continue with the rest of them, and never could tell if what she knew ever after had been imparted to her by the being they had all partaken of that night or was something she would have come to know anyway. Beau had said that we, we here, are the Old Ones that were awaited in Cloud City, and she knew then what it meant to say that, though she might not ever be able to say what she knew—that she was indeed old, the result of a process ages long; that her body was hers, a thing infinitely complex and valuable, made of the rarest and most delicate materials and parts, that she would have to bear it and tend to it and keep it from harm every day of her long, maybe endless life. Wonder and weariness. She laid it on the desert floor by the fire, wrapped it gently like a mummy in her sleeping bag, fended off the enormous stars from entering too far into it.