Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

"Don't hurry."

  He smiled. It's what he told her: don't hurry. What he had told her so often, as though he knew she had a lot of time, when she didn't feel she did: no time at all.

  When Spofford first brought her here, Cliff hadn't been at home. It was the Fourth of July, emblematic summer day; it was the day of the night Boney died, leaving Rosie (though Rosie wouldn't know it for some time) in charge of his house and his family foundation and all the business he had refused to finish. So that day nothing of what Spofford said Cliff could do was done to her.

  Once, when Spofford was at his lowest, coldest, saddest, Cliff had bent over him, placed his mouth against Spofford's breast and made a sudden loud noise. A noise like a shout or a bark. Hey! Wake up! And Spofford had felt the whole of his being shaken, and startled tears had rushed to his eyes.

  She too, when he had done the same to her: like one of those machines they start a stopped heart with. He had done it only twice.

  He made her tea, which she didn't really need but which she thought he had his own reasons for wanting to occupy himself with. His house smelled of the fires that had burned all winter in his tall stove—his wife, Cliff called the stove, because of its matronly hourglass figure maybe, and its merry warmth. He asked Rosie about herself, about Sam.

  "Sam's away,” she said. “Did I tell you where she's going?"

  "No."

  "The Antarctic,” Rosie said gravely. “Can you imagine?"

  "That far."

  "It's a university research trip she was selected for. Two months. She ought to be there by now."

  Cliff took no notice, but she knew he listened.

  "So, Cliff,” she said softly. “Do you ever think of that night."

  "That night."

  "When Beau and you and I went to The Woods.” She took the cup he gave her, and put her hand around its warm body. “That night in winter. When Sam was there."

  He sat before her, sliding onto his stool with that wasteless motion, and bending toward her as though she had not asked for a memory or a story but offered to tell one.

  She didn't need to, of course. Cliff knew it. How Sam's father, Mike Mucho, had joined a supposed Christian group, the Powerhouse, and they'd helped him to get legal custody of Sam. How then on a night in December Beau Brachman had gathered them, she and Spofford and Val and Cliff, like a SWAT team or band of brothers, and they had gone up to The Woods where the Christian group was squatting, and Cliff and Beau went in, and in a while they came back out, with Sam. And never after had that group or Mike complained or tried to get her back or sued to recover her. Why? No one could tell her that either. Mike went away to the Midwest where he'd come from, just a trip, he'd said, and then to California, where eventually he'd married a Christian wife; he'd sent long letters to Sam telling her stories about God and prayer that she liked at first and then grew bored with, then angry at: like a tiresome old aunt who keeps sending you babyish clothes or cheap jewelry long after you've got too old for it, because she can't really imagine you.

  He loves you, though, Rosie would say.

  He doesn't love me, Sam said simply, a fact. How can you love somebody you don't know?

  Rosie had never decided if Sam had really ever been in danger from those people; it might be (she thought later, not then) that they were well intentioned and kind enough in their way, but only narrow and self-deluded, their conceptions driving them to cruelties they couldn't even perceive or count as cruelties. Maybe. But what she remembered—it was all that she could remember now with any of the intensity she'd felt then—was how Sam was returned from dark to light, danger to safety, like a lost child in a fairy tale rescued from an ogre who had imprisoned her and meant to eat her. It seemed at that moment, that winter night, as she took Sam in her arms, that the world ceased rocking in its socket and settled down to turn equably again.

  Even the weather. Hadn't a drought, one that had lasted for months, ended the very next day—well, it might have been a week later—in a series of vast and heartening snowstorms all over this sector of earth? Heartening, exhilarating, alarming finally as the ploughed snow piled over Sam's head and nearly over her own, as it had when she was a kid herself; she watched Sam incorporate it all, the felt physics of frozen water, bluejay on the seed-speckled snow-clad pine, unforgettable even if you never exactly remembered it either.

  The time she had spent there with them in The Woods, too. She'd had a seizure there, before Beau and Cliff and Rosie had arrived. Rosie used to ask her, with care, then and later: Sam, what happened? Do you remember? Do you remember being there? And she always said she forgot, or wouldn't say what she remembered.

  The two profoundest words there are: remember and her brother forget.

  "She's okay then,” Cliff said, as though that were his answer to her question.

  "She's good."

  "Beau,” he said. “Beau asked me that night to go up there with him. He said it meant everything."

  "He told me that too. But not why."

  Beau also told her, that night, that she wouldn't see him again, but not why, or where he would go, and thereafter no one had heard of him again, or if they heard of him, what they heard was that somebody else had heard of him, or seen him. But he never came back.

  "Where is he? Don't you wonder? Don't you want to know?"

  "If he wanted me to know, I'd know,” Cliff said. But he didn't try to show in his face that this made it all better. “You know some people think he'll come back, maybe after a long time; that things will come back around, and so will he. Sometime. But some other people think the world is made differently; that it doesn't go around in circles or in spirals, that it splits."

  "It splits.” Rosie was content to listen to these things, not questioning or even doubting them, as she never had when Beau talked about them. She only thought they didn't have anything directly to do with her, or the world she inhabited: they were like travelers’ tales, tales of lands from which the tellers had come, to where they were going.

  "It's like a Y,” Cliff said. From a cluster of pencils and pens in a cracked mug he took out a black wooden pen with a chisel point affixed, a Speedball: Rosie had one like it. And a paper from a pile of scraps. “If the world is like a Y, then you can never go back. He can never come back.” He dipped the pen in a bottle of India ink, and drew the letter on the paper: where the pen's point struck the paper flush, it drew a wide vertical bar, the upright, and then another wide bar, the left-hand way, the pen pulled toward him to intersect with the upright's top. And last the right-hand way, the edge of the pen point sliding upward from the intersection, leaving only a slim trail.

  Y

  He turned it to face her. “If the world without Beau in it goes the big way, and he took the narrower way, then he only gets farther away the farther on we go."

  Rosie studied it, the great brace or crotched tree he'd drawn. She thought: if it were drawn by a left-handed man, the left way would be the narrow one. And she thought of The Woods, and the night. Suppose it was we who had left the main way then, and he'd gone on. Without us. “Is that what you think?"

  "No,” Cliff said. “I don't think there's one big Y in the road, where the world turns off. Parts company. No. I think there's a Y every single moment we're alive."

  "Did Beau think so?"

  "I don't know,” Cliff said. “He and I. We start from different places. It's why we could work together, sometimes. Sometimes not."

  "Different places how."

  "Beau knew—he thought, he believed, he saw—that everything begins in spirit. He thought reality was spirit, and the physical things and events of life were illusions, imagination. Like dreams. And he wanted us to wake up. He knew he couldn't just shake us awake: for one thing he knew he was dreaming too, most of the time. What he thought he could do, what could be done, is go down into dreams, the dreams we share, the dreams we call the world, and alter them. Or he could teach us how to alter them ourselves. He said that he could be leaven, like Paul in the Bi
ble says we can be."

  "And then."

  "And then, if we could do that, we'd know they were dreams. All hopes and fears, power, pain, but also all gods. Ghosts. Earth, nations, space and time. It's not that they don't exist; they exist as dreams, and people are bound by them. They exist as much as anything can. But none of them is final, even if everybody shares them."

  "And you don't think that?"

  "I know what he means. I listened. I heard.” He looked around himself, and ran his hand over the surface of his table, smooth and varicolored wood and not quite level, like a plain or a body's back. “I think I'm from here,” he said. “I think this is so, this is actual. I think that all we do and can do and will do arises from it. I just think we don't know all of what it is. We learn. We learn by doing what we think we can't, and when we can, we share, and so we find out more of what it is, or can be."

  "So spirit's made of this too,” Rosie said. “Made here. Home-made."

  "I think so."

  "But not Beau."

  "No."

  "Do you think,” Rosie said, “he could dream a place for himself to go off into and be lost? Lost to us, I mean."

  "Maybe. Not something I know."

  "You used to say"—Spofford used to quote it to her, so that it became her truth too over time, to be used with a thousand meanings—"you used to say that life is dreams, checked by physics."

  His great broad smile at once shy and cocksure.

  "Beau I guess wouldn't say that."

  "No,” Cliff said. “But Beau's not here, and I am.” He took away from her the cup he had given her. “Do you want to do some work?"

  * * * *

  At the post office in Stonykill Rosie emptied the Rasmussen Foundation's big box, a slurry of stuff, it never stopped coming, glossy announcements and posters and news of other conferences elsewhere, in other centers here and abroad, a great circuit or intellectual circus entertaining itself. Among the stuff was a letter for her, though, in a hand she knew: not a postcard but a real letter.

  Mom—I've got some bad news, bad for me anyway but not bad bad. I tried to get away with something and it didn't work, and now I'm in trouble. Here's what happened. I didn't tell the captain of this boat, ship I mean, or the director of the program, that I'm taking seizure medication. I know I should have, I know it was the right thing to do, but you know sometimes I get tired of telling people, sometimes I want to just not, and be like everybody. Don't tell me there's no “everybody.” I know. I just want to be like everybody. You don't know the feeling, but you don't need to know. Anyway I got separated from the damn pills, and I couldn't go searching for them, and what do you know, after five years okay, that very night I get hit with a biggie. Wet the bed and all. I still might have got away with it except that my bunkmate was awake and saw it and freaked. O God they were mad. Ranting at me for concealing a serious medical condition, breach of trust, impossible for me to go on with them.

  No oh no. Oh poor babe.

  So there I was like the Ancient Mariner and I've got to go. We had to turn back so I could be put ashore. I thought they were going to leave me on an ice flow or floe. At least we were only a day out of Rio Grande on Tierra del Fuego, where by the way the phones aren't working this week. There's a plane out tomorrow to LA, I'll get Dad to get me there maybe. Mom I'm so hurt and ashamed. I wanted so badly to be there. I get why they said what they said but I wanted to be there and I wanted them to take a chance, and they wouldn't. So I'll call. I'm coming home.

  Life is dreams, checked by physics: and physics made or ruled biology, and so also our brains and the flaws in them, and also the medicines that sometimes fixed them, which were dreamed up by other brains, their dreaming limited by physics too, which they therefore had to learn. And they did learn, and kept dreaming, and so did Sam, and only stopped where she had to. For now. Because maybe physics has no end, no end we know, any more than dreaming does.

  Oh my dear, oh my dear dear.

  But she was coming home anyway. The thought filled Rosie with an expectant hunger, a wondrous craving to see and touch her again. Almost scary to want something—no, someone—that much, but more wonderful than scary: wonderful that you could so much want to have what you actually had. The thought of Sam called down into her heart as Cliff's yell had done long ago when it was asleep or cold: woke it, and started quick tears in her eyes, as though it was, itself, their source.

  She drove out through Stonykill and took the turn now marked with a new sign that pointed discreetly but plainly to the Rasmussen Humanities Conference Center up the tree-lined way.

  It was the smartest thing Rosie had done as executive director of the Rasmussen Foundation, and she was still proud of it, and it still made her heart clutch in panic sometimes when she thought back on it, of the nerve it had taken, the chance of screwing up. Allan Butterman, in the course of some dealings he had with the state university, had first noted the possibility and alerted Rosie to it, but it was she who'd done the work, gone back and forth to the university to meet deans and alums and the president, a fearsome woman whom Rosie could actually call not so bad in the end to Allan when the deal was done and the press release sent out. So “Arcady,” which was the name a nineteenth-century Rasmussen had given to his new shingle-style fairy castle in the Faraway Hills, was now the university's Rasmussen Humanities Conference Center, and the university was responsible for it, for its plumbing and its boiler and its pretty multicolored slate roofs, for the professors and scholars who came and went there in season, like migrating owls or hawks. Rosie was greeter and facilitator and majordomo, and ran the foundation's business from an office under the eaves in what had been the attic before the splendid renovation. Fellowes Kraft's little villa too had been included in the deal, also now renovated and rearranged and repainted, new windows punched in the old walls and new floors laid. From there and from this great house the proprietary ghosts had vanished gratefully, like old ulcers healed or old errands run at last; their only reality had been their persistence. And every workday evening Rosie pulled a plastic hood over her computer and went home to her own handmade house at the verge of an old orchard up on the slopes of Mount Randa, to the man she still called by his last name (Spofford) and not his first, which would have been odd if she had changed her own name to his on that June day when they swapped rings and those vows at once so profound and so unenforceable, but she hadn't, she was Rosalind Rasmussen, as she had been when she first learned she had a name.

  The first conference at the Rasmussen Humanities Center that Rosie oversaw when the renovations were done was entitled “Wisdom and Knowledge: Gendered Hypostases in Western Religious Discourse.” How scholars were to spend days in discussion of a topic even whose name she could not understand was a mystery to her, but she was new to the game, and she'd learn.

  There were three scholars bound for that conference who met at the Conurbana airport, coming from three different cities. They were a large round one, a tall lean one, and a very old one; two were acquainted, the third they knew only by reputation. They each were to be greeted there by someone from the conference center, but each had neglected to notify the organizers of their arrival time, and now, finding themselves together and alone, they decided they would take the initiative and rent a car and drive themselves the fifty miles (it couldn't be more) to the center. It was Rosie Rasmussen's constant grief, the way these academics would get up to things like this. The car was a Caprice, and the large round one took the back, the other two the front. Bloom, Wink, Quispel.

  "Since the Renaissance we have believed that man is making up these stories, that we ourselves are the authors of the tales we live within. That's the ultimate arrogance of power, the arrogance of the gods: for all the gods believe themselves self-created.” That was the tall thin one at the wheel speaking. Old Route Six wound through winter fields, and night fell.

  "Man is projecting his own illusions on the patient screen of eternity. This solution is so simple that it can't
be true,” said the very aged one. He rubbed the frosted window with the back of his gloved hand.

  "All thought is necessarily sexual,” said the large one in the back. “Except in the case of those few great souls who can liberate themselves, and bear the terms of freedom."

  "And this is done by...?” asked the driver.

  "This is done,” said the man in back, “by remembering."

  Night had fallen when they reached the turnoff to Blackbury Jambs, and there they misread the brief instructions they had, brief because it was thought they wouldn't need them. They wandered into the village, and asked at the Donut Hole—just closing its doors—where the conference center was, and received directions; went up the Shadow River road, all wrong, past the closed cabins and camps, through Shadowland and past the Here U Are Grocery, the three of them silent now and wondering: but at length they came to a tall lightless sign. The Woods Center, they made out in their headlights, and turned up that way.

  The Woods Center for Psychotherapy had long been closed by then. No buyer had been found for the great pile, full of defects obvious and subtle. Once that pseudo-Christian cult the Powerhouse had gone so far as to make deposits and sign binders but in the end had failed to meet the stiff conditions that the owner (the Rasmussen Foundation) had set for a purchase, God not choosing that way for them. There could have been no mistaking the fact that the place was shut up, and yet the scholars were drawn to park their little car and get out—the two in front, anyway, the third in back looking on with anxious care. They went up the path of wrinkled ice, arms outstretched for balance, to the great central portal. From there, doors led into each wing. The tall scholar went to one door and pushed on it; it was locked; the other scholar went to the other door, and it, incredibly, was not locked, not even latched, and it swung open at his touch. A strange desire or fear entered him. He called down into the darkness, the other beside him now and also looking in. There wasn't any answer.

  How long they waited there they would not remember clearly (when at length they got to the Rasmussen Humanities Center at Arcady, and had company around them and drinks in their hands before the fire in Boney's old study). Laughing at themselves, perturbed and exalted, they told their tale once again. A charisma, said the oldest of them. None of the three said that it was a light burning in a window of the large lounge on the main floor that had drawn them on, a light that had been burning a long time, and was now seemingly going out; but it was not a light you could name to others, even if you had seen or known it yourself.