Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  "Be ... as thou wast wont to be,” he said. “See ... as thou wast wont to see. Dian's bud o'er Cupid's flower. Hath such force and blessed power."

  Many nodded, as at wisdom, which this sounded like it surely should be; some laughed indulgently; those who had only half heard lifted their glasses anyway. Pierce thought of his own eyes, unanointed or unwashed as yet, maybe probably, and a troubled dissatisfaction with himself and everything he knew and didn't know arose in him. Rosie, though, knew she didn't understand what had been said, and decided she would go ask, but on her way to do that she got distracted, and after a time sat down on a white chair with pale champagne in her hand. Everyone just for a moment had left her, or turned their backs to her. She drank her drink, golden fresh and cold, as though poured in Heaven, or the sky, and thought of a thing that had happened to her almost twenty years before. She remembered it not for the first time since then, nor at all fully, for it was one of those we don't need to fully open to remember, we only need to pat its cover and glance at its frontispiece and there it all is as always, though changed in import maybe.

  It was how once when she was a kid, when she still—for just a while longer—lived in this county with her mother and father, and was sent to play at a big farmhouse with a girl she hadn't known before, whom she found she didn't like after spending the day with her in her big bare yard and barn. At last she decided she'd had enough; she'd earlier determined that if she took a dirt road or path through a wood beyond the house, she'd eventually come out on a road she knew, and could walk home. With the other child's cold imprecation following her, she went into the wood, and the way was clear; she expected that in only a little time, not half an hour, the open land on the far side would appear. But in a while, when the way back had grown occluded by trees, the path she followed dwindled away to a track, became less clear (as the other child had warned her it would, trying to keep Rosie with her); she seemed to see its continuation ahead amid the lichened stones and wood plants, but when she struck out to reach it, it somehow snuck away—what had seemed a weed-and-sapling-bordered path was only weeds and saplings when you got there, or seemed to have got there. But it couldn't be far anyway through this middle part before the track picked up again to lead out on the other side, if she just pressed on straight ahead. She went on a long time. She put her foot into a swampy spot and wet her sneaker and sock, which seemed like a bad sign, and the wood did seem to be gazing on her or looking away from her with that unsettling indifference that accumulates in wild places as marks of human habitation get left behind, but Rosie wasn't scared—she was only growing aware that in a while she might start getting scared—and at that point the woods, as though relenting unwillingly, really did thin in the distance, and show sky and space ahead. Then the path reappeared, as she certainly knew it would; she wouldn't have to wander for hours lost in the trees and undergrowth or, worse, have to turn back and face that mean and needy girl again. The track became a path and then a real road, divided into two wheel ruts and a grassy hump between, and she could see where it went out through an arch of trees. She came out. She wasn't at the paved road, as she expected, but at the edge of a ragged field, across which she guessed the road must run. A small field. On one side of it a frame farmhouse, on the other a gray barn. A truck in the drive that led to both. A doll's baby carriage in the drive too. All these things were at once intensely familiar and entirely foreign, foreign because of the impossibility of their occurring here, at the path's far end. The mean girl in her striped shirt appeared, and looked Rosie's way, squinting and uncertain.

  Later on she'd read in books how people who are lost wander in circles, and could explain to her mother or whoever she might tell about this (she told no one) that she had proved or illustrated it. But then on that day she didn't think that. She thought (she knew) that she had kept straight on, and that therefore the farmyard and barn and house (reversed as in a mirror by her coming at them backward) were actually not the same ones she'd left behind; she had in fact gone through to where the same things occurred in a different place, and that was the place she now was. She almost turned, to go back the long straight way she was sure she had come, but just then her mother's car appeared too in the drive, come to collect her (as her mother put it), and that evening at supper Rosie was told that they, she and her mother and her father, were moving away from this place and this state, going west to live—told by the two of them leaning close to her and smiling their nicest smiles, touching her shoulders and taking turns to speak softly to her—and so it seemed to her that the path she had taken into the mirror world would just continue, as the backward worlds in mirrors do or must though we can't see them.

  Look now, though. She had finally found that path's extension: had gone straight on far enough to have come around again to the unreversed world, and this was it.

  Far off she saw Sam, sitting alone on an iron bench. The car salesman's daughter sat down beside her.

  Where anyway was that farmhouse, would she recognize it now? That girl, who stood at both ends of the path, in and out again, the same hostile anguish in both her faces? As old now as herself, and gone on as far. A joyous pity struck her, for that girl (Margie!) and for herself. Only one world after all, here where it had always been, like it or not. She had thought a summer ago that she and the county and everybody in it lay under a spell, and somehow it was hers to break it, but she'd come finally to see that of course she never had been, and neither had they or anyone and that's how spells are broken.

  "That's a pretty dress,” Roo said.

  Sam smoothed it with her hand. “We have the same."

  "Sort of. I think it's called eyelet lace.” She smoothed hers too.

  "I have seizures,” Sam said.

  "I'm sorry to hear that,” Roo said. “Do you have them a lot?"

  "I had the last one,” Sam said. “The last."

  "Good.” They looked at one another for a moment in quiet stillness. “It's nice for your mom, getting married,” Roo said.

  "I made them a song,” Sam said. “Do you want me to sing it?"

  "Yes,” Roo said. “Definitely."

  "I made the tune,” Sam said. “But God made the words."

  "Okay."

  She began to sing, and the tune was long and lilting, without shape or repeat, an endless melody; Roo guessed it was never the same twice. The words God had made up were not for human ears, apparently, or not for other humans, for they were only Sam's voice put forth in a single vowel or call, shaped by the melody and the movement of her mouth and slim throat—Roo could see it move as she sang. Pierce and Val and Rosie and Spofford heard it too, and Rosie took Spofford's hand, laughing, as though she'd had the gift before, maybe in another form though not different.

  Sitting beside Sam, on her left hand as Roo was on her right, was the last of the great crowd of small brothers and sisters Sam had once known well, inhabitants of her old house; he was a girl as well as a boy, he was the mean one who laughed and smiled and whispered in her ear to tickle her until she made him stop. Stop! And for the first time, on this afternoon, he did: he stopped, and he began to go away. He wasn't angry and he surely wasn't sorry, he just went away. And since for Sam whatever departed from her into the past seemed (would seem, always, all her life) not to have gone outward or into the distance or even behind, but to have gone in—to have been swallowed by her, or passed away in the direction of her innermost inside (which seemed to her endless or bottomless, containing all of her own self and all of everything that had gone before her as well)—then he remained a part of her, though he was no longer with her, and soon wouldn't be remembered by her at all. The last.

  Sam couldn't know all of that; nor could she know that the song without words that she sang was the last breath to be breathed, the last spirit exhalation of the previous age, or the first of the new, same thing. What I tell you three times is true: it was the Hieros gamos achieved in her own small person, and thus achieved for everyone; it was the final rec
onciliation, too, of Wanting and Having, Having and Giving, kind Wisdom and hard Knowledge, if only for the space of one afternoon in one faraway county. Never mind; in her singing and our listening was completed the renovatio and atonement we all needed, whether or not we knew we had longed for it and sought for it, or would ever recognize we had it. It was the Great Instauration of everything that had all along been the case, the last part of the work set out for all of us to do, never to be finished, as it never has been nor ever will be.

  5

  After that things would roll forward swiftly and without further contradiction or hesitation, though no one could actually tell the difference. Before long one of Pierce's letters of application got a response; and when a couple of further letters had been exchanged, and a brief visit made, he received an offer of a teaching position at a private school for boys called Downside Academy.

  "It would mean leaving,” Pierce said. “Leaving here. The Faraways."

  She laughed. “Well, that's possible to do,” she said. “The roads lead out. As well as in. I,” she said, as though imparting a secret, “have been out before."

  Here wasn't all he meant, of course, and she knew that too, and he knew she knew. He read the letter again, as though it were hard to understand, needed study; rubbed the paper, felt its watermark.

  "How's the pay?"

  "It's not good. No. But they give you a little apartment. You have to manage a dorm or something."

  "Oh."

  "If you're single. If you're married you get a house. Or a House. It's full of kids too."

  "You like kids?” she asked.

  "Well. I have experience with them."

  "You do?"

  "Yes. I was one. For some years, actually."

  "So go,” she said with sudden force. “Go."

  That night she lay still but sleepless in his bed. He had never known, among all the women he had lain beside, one who could lie so still, faceup on her pillow like a funerary sculpture, and yet project such a ferocious wakefulness. He tried to match her stillness, and his thoughts were addling into nonsense when she spoke.

  "So do you get health insurance?"

  "I don't know."

  "You didn't ask?"

  "No."

  Deeper stillness, baleful.

  "Pay scale?” she said into the dark. “Like is there a way of figuring raises?"

  "I don't know."

  "You didn't ask."

  "Um no."

  "Don't care?"

  "Um well."

  "What did you talk about? If it wasn't this stuff."

  "Latin. Could I teach Latin."

  Her scorn was so deep that at last it lifted him to his elbow to look into the mystery of her face. “Listen,” he said. “If you know so much about this, about about. Life. All the questions to ask. Then why are you, why. You yourself. I mean."

  She didn't move or speak for a long time. He had no way to take back what he'd said.

  "You mean,” she said, “why should I talk. Because I haven't got shit."

  "No. Come on."

  But it was so. He could see it even in her still body and the eyes that looked into the dark vacuity of the room; he could almost hear her thinking it. Like him she had somehow come to nothing. She had gone away and not come back, not anyway to the crossroads where she had turned aside; but nothing had become of her out there either, nothing that stuck or stayed. She lived in a room in her father's house, but that didn't mean she'd returned to him, or to it, not really. She had no job but selling cars part-time, which she usually got out of doing, preferring to sweep the floors and file; but she never looked at want ads, not as seriously even as himself.

  "Just because,” she said, “you know how to get to the future. Just because you know it's real. Doesn't mean you think it can happen to you."

  He had the illusion—maybe the soft passing of great trucks at regular intervals, like falling surf—that his cabin was beside the sea.

  "But how can you know that it is, or could be, or anyway,” he started to say, meaning futures, their metaphysical or ontological unreality all he really knew about them; but she too now rose on an elbow and put her face pugnaciously close to his.

  "You're a dope,” she said. “What made you such a dope?"

  The way she said it made it seem not a mere rhetorical question, insult or upbraiding, and staring at her, searching for a comeback, Pierce for the first time in his life wondered if indeed there were a reason why he was such a dope, one reason, and if it could be known, and if so how, and if known at last, could be wrestled with, dragon or worm or slug at the base of his being, and defeated, or ousted. Would just knowing be enough? Probably not. Necessary, maybe, but not sufficient, and inaccessible to him anyway, right now and always so far, if not forever.

  She had watched and waited for his answer for long enough, and turned back to her pillow beside his. She crossed her arms as though she were standing upright and confronting something, him forgotten.

  "Any future that gets too close to me better watch out,” she said. “If it knows what's good for it."

  He laughed then, at this, and after a moment and a sidelong glance at him, so did she. “Shit you know,” she said. “I have a really bad attitude."

  "Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I like that in a woman.” And he and she laughed more together.

  Later though, very late, he rolled over toward her in the melancholy bed, and—as though she had not slept at all—she turned immediately to him and put her long arms around him and clung with the single-minded silence of someone who can't swim clinging to someone who has come to pull her out, clinging so fiercely that they might both drown if they don't both make shore together.

  * * * *

  After Downside's letter had sat beneath the ashtray on his pressboard dresser for a week, he suddenly (Oh well) wrote to accept. For some time he didn't tell Roo, for reasons he couldn't say, even to the other side of his self, the one that didn't show; that he thought didn't show. When he did tell her, she only regarded him for a long time without speaking.

  "So when are you quitting at Novelty?” she said then.

  "Oh God,” he said.

  "If you quit they have to give you your vacation pay. A week's worth. Ten days. Maybe you should take a vacation. Before you start this job."

  "Sure,” he said. “Take a jaunt to a tourist spot. Get a motel."

  For a moment he perceived her head, like Oz in the movie, as though engulfed in affronted flames, and expected an awful curse. It might actually be nice to get away, he thought then, run and hide someplace right now, if there were someplace.

  "Okay, well,” she said. She left with a curt goodbye.

  When she came back a couple of days later, she said, “I got an invite.” She held out a typewritten letter, airmail stationery. “I'm going to Utopia. Maybe you'd like to come."

  "To Utopia. That's Noplace, you know."

  "It's real,” she said. “Really Utopia. The best place. I've wanted to go there for years."

  "Me too,” Pierce said. “Years. So does everybody."

  "Well, it can't be for everybody,” she said.

  "No?” said Pierce.

  "That's what ruins it."

  "Ah,” said Pierce.

  "The masses,” she said. “Then you get the Big Brother thing."

  "Plus ungood,” said Pierce.

  "You'll see,” she said. “If you want to come."

  "You know how to get there? I thought there was a lot of uncertainty about that."

  "I do,” she said. She took a thick book from her bag. “I've got a guidebook. See?"

  A book, another book. A map, directions, commands. But this was a new paperback, and bright with color, and it said Let's go! in happy letters, and she proffered it with guileless delight, and the world right then unfolded and laid out the land that the book described, brightly colored and as real as real.

  * * * *

  You got to Utopia by flying there; it lay in another
direction he had never traveled far in, on the wry neck of the continent, very near the peaks of Darien.

  "I can't go to the tropics,” he said, even as they drove to the airport. “I hate beaches. I have beachophobia."

  "What!"

  "I get burned,” he said. “I lie on the bare shingle staring at the sun. Me and a hundred naked others, each on his towel square. It's like going to existential hell. And the pointless sea repeating itself."

  "Oh for heaven's sake.” She wore sunglasses already, in the wintry light. “You don't just lie there. And you don't try to read. I bet you try to read."

  He didn't admit this.

  "Hard books. Small print.” She changed lanes, the airport turn ahead. “No. No no. You've got to get up, and walk."

  The capital of Utopia was, surely still is, called the City of Eternal Spring. Not its name, but what its name is called. To reach it they would fly to Florida first, and cross the state in a rented car, and fly again from the Gulf Coast. She'd found out it was the cheapest way.

  So on the way they stopped in that small and largely bypassed resort town where Pierce's mother and Doris, her partner of many years, kept a small motel.

  "You're going where?” his mother said in bewilderment. “You're doing what?” Having been asleep till late, she stood in the kitchen of her small house and office in her rayon negligee (could this be one of those that she'd had when he was a boy? Or was she still able to find and buy them somewhere?) and looked at their swollen backpacks—Pierce's borrowed—and at him, and at Roo. “You hate the beach,” she said.

  "It's not just beach,” Roo said. “It's mountains."

  "Jungle,” said Pierce.

  "Rain forest,” said Roo. She put her arm around his shoulder, as though she were the taller of them. “He can do it."

  That night, though, she stayed far from him in their double bed in their cabin, which he had insisted on paying for—the same cabin he had once suffered in, you remember—as though a sword had been laid between them. Next day she bade goodbye to Winnie cheerfully, almost euphorically, as Winnie did too back to her, and on the road again, silent beside her in the rent-a-car, Pierce understood in amazement that he, or he and Roo, had started an emotion in his mother, the first new one he had witnessed in decades, and it was jealousy.