Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  Pierce Moffett missed that first conference, though its subject was one he would have been glad to hear about. A paper was read there in the freshly painted music room entitled “Sophia prunikos and Snoopie Sophie: Gnostic Persistence in Popular Culture.” But he and Roo were not in the Faraways then, or in the country: they had returned together to the little Utopia on the green mountaintops, to adopt a girl child.

  9

  All Pierce and Roo's great efforts to produce a child of their own had failed. She thought that it was the old abortions, those refused children, that were the cause, though doctors couldn't locate any harm she'd suffered; she imagined that no baby soul was willing to take a chance on her again. And since there was no organic reason to be found, it did seem some deep reluctance on the part of their children to materialize: they seemed to hover just beyond the physical, just not paying attention maybe, or maybe trying their best to turn that way and set out but failing, just as their parents were failing, despite the recipes they followed, ancient and modern. It was profoundly frustrating and saddening, to Roo, thus to Pierce.

  So it was a good thing—and Pierce spending his working retreat among the barren celibates of an abbey could see how good a thing, when he thought of his daughters waiting at home—that Roo was the kind who could set out on the way to finding a child for herself by other means, and begin to compile the files of agencies, and type up at night the notes she had made in the day, and call phone numbers and go to the agencies and state with great firmness what she wanted, what she was prepared to do, and what she needed therefore to know. It was a process as arduous and vivifying and scary and uncomfortable, and just as long, as any pregnancy, and the outcome just as doubtful.

  Until at length they came down out of the skies, holding hands, to Cloud-Cuckoo-Land again.

  The little country had a social welfare system it was proud of, especially the efforts it made on behalf of mothers and children, and in front of the modern building where Pierce and Roo went first to be greeted and (once again) interviewed and given forms to fill out, there was a great statue of a mother and child. The rules for foreigners adopting the country's abandoned or orphaned children were strict: whenever Pierce and Roo were asked for some further information, or made to vow some vow, or supply some required proof of their intentions or their identities, they were made to think of how many wrong things might happen; had happened no doubt in the past, not so long ago.

  They were taken from there to a city orphanage to meet Maria, their prospective girl child. Her mother had died in giving birth to her, their guide said (black hair in a severe bun but her arms soft and plump). Toxemia, Roo said, you can never tell who'll develop it. Roo had admitted to Pierce that it was easier that the child was orphaned rather than abandoned or given up: she wouldn't at least feel guilty about stealing a mother's child, who might one day. Though she did feel kind of guilty, she said, that she felt that way. They drove through the grid of streets and out to the suburbs; their guide, in an English that she pronounced with a ferocious effort at correctness, told them other stories, of how the country's children came to be given up: the common panoply of human griefs and wrongs, poverty and drink and desperation and incompetence. So the country had changed, or wasn't just what they had thought it was before. That's what Pierce said. “Well, of course they've still got troubles,” Roo said. “They always did. All the usual ones. There's nowhere people don't. And this isn't nowhere."

  "Just not extra ones."

  "Yes."

  "War. Tyranny. Displaced persons."

  "Yes. That's all."

  The place they were taken to—one of many to which the national placement agency was connected—was a Catholic orphanage, but as plain and white and simple as though run by Quakers; nuns in white smocks with only a workmanlike suggestion of a veil. They were given over to one, who took them inside. Soccer practice in the courtyard; the children stopped to watch them go by. In the nursery, Disney characters painted hopefully on the walls, the preternaturally quiet children of the country in a miscellany of chairs and cribs.

  "Why is she crying?” Roo asked in undertone.

  "Who?"

  "The nun."

  She was: a tear and then another formed in her eye and hung on her fat cheek; she looked devastated. “Maria,” she said, with a kind of sob, and picked out and lifted to them the child who would, or might, be theirs.

  All infants, almost all, can do what this one did when Pierce and Roo looked down at her and she up at them with her great eyes: the thing they do to new mothers, but can also do to strangers, to flinty maiden aunts, to the crusty bandit or miser in stories who unwraps the mysterious blanket, looks inside. If they couldn't do it—most of the time anyway—we wouldn't be here.

  "Ask her why she's crying,” Roo said sidewise to Pierce, who shook himself from Maria's eyes to see that yes, the nun was still brimming, unspeaking but uncomforted, and regarding them.

  "Estas lagrimas,” Pierce said to her, guessing, and pointing to his eye. “Que esta es?"

  She looked at them a moment as though in wild hope or fear, and turned away, and went out, and then in a moment she came back from the adjoining ward and in her arms she held another baby, wrapped in the same blue and white blanket, with the same huge eyes full of what surely seemed to be wonder and love and happy expectant need, that's the trick of it, and she brought this baby before them, and placed it in Pierce's lap, right next to the one in Roo's lap, Maria.

  "Jesusa,” she said.

  Any two babies can look very much alike. Roo and Pierce both thought that thought, for a moment. Very much alike. The nun wept quietly, her hands clasped before her.

  * * * *

  "I never thought of two,” Roo said to Pierce. “I didn't imagine. I never once thought of two. Did you?"

  "No. Never.” He had not, in any practical way, been able to think of one; had dreamed and imagined, had seen himself in some conceivable future holding the hand of a small black-eyed girl—as though in a movie, himself and her, on their way to, oh, school or the candy store—but he knew this wasn't thinking of the way Roo meant it.

  They sat with coffees in a soda, back downtown now. The place was open to the street like a stage set with the fourth wall missing. Ancient cars of kinds no longer made in the land they had come from, Studebakers, DeSotos, went by slowly; Utopia is a country of slow drivers. The table they sat at—had been sitting at a long time, stunned and silent mostly—was red, white, and blue enamel, with the word PEPSI written on it in swirling blue letters, a message from his youth.

  "I don't know what to do,” Roo said, devastated. “I can't think. I can't take one and leave the other. I can't."

  "No?"

  She looked at him as though suspecting he could, and shocked by the suspicion. “No. No, I don't think I. I couldn't."

  They sat silent. He thought of Jesusa appearing in her towel or wrapper. Was that even real?

  "Maybe it was just a terrible dumb idea,” she said. “To come here to this country and dig around for what we want, not knowing anything. How could that go right.” She stared at empty futurity. “We should just go home."

  There are some silences and stillnesses that we remember afterward with greater vividness than acts: as though even after a long time, after years, our souls can still flow out of us and into them. As Pierce's did then.

  "No,” he said then. “We won't go home."

  "Pierce."

  "We'll take them both."

  She clapped her hand to her brow, staring down at the coffee spill on the enameled table. “Pierce. Don't say that. You don't have to. You're a good guy, I know you want this for me, I know it. But don't be stupid. Don't."

  "No,” he said. “Not for you. For me. It's what I want. I want this to happen, I want to take both of them home. It's the only way, and it's what I want."

  "No."

  "Yes."

  "Pierce,” Roo said. She had grown still, ceased to comb her hair with her fingers and slap
the table; was only regarding him. “Think about it. What it's going to be like. This is years and years of commitment. All your life. Two, not one but two, and it may be that even one you could be sorry about, and think later you'd made a mistake, in a way you never could if it was your own, you see? Have you ever thought about that?"

  He hadn't, really; she could see that in his silence; and in his silence she could see him understand that she had thought about it, which she had never plainly said before.

  "I mean can you see what this is going to take? Can you? I mean just the money."

  "No, Roo,” Pierce said softly. “No, I can't see."

  "Can't?” she said.

  "I can't, no. I can't really imagine. You're right. I never have been able to imagine the future, or see what's going to come of what I do, or of what anybody does. I can't do it. I don't know why. I try to work it out, practically, but I never really can."

  "Yes."

  "You know."

  She said nothing, but of course she knew it was so, had always known, and from now on (he thought) she would know he knew too.

  "So I can't tell what this will be,” he said, “or what it really means, no. But it's what I want. I know that. And if you'll do it with me, then I'll do everything I need to do, whatever it is. But just step by step. Just step by step."

  The soda was filling up with men and women, men in white figured shirts, women with children.

  "Really?"

  "Yes. I want to do this."

  "I don't know how you can say that without knowing."

  "Well, I'm saying it. And you don't know everything anyway."

  She wouldn't smile; he wished she would, and he refused to think that she didn't smile because she truly saw all that lay ahead, for him and her and them.

  "Both,” she said at length. “Oh my God."

  He waited.

  "We could go back there, at least,” she said. “Arrange another visit. We could ask, ask what, what..."

  "Okay,” he said. “Okay then. Come on.” For a brief moment the soda around him, the poster for Emu cigarettes and the coffee machine and the Pepsi tables and the street outside lurched or sank as though preparing to vanish, but that was only because of his own rising to his feet, his own lifting of himself by his legs and arms, which changed his Point of View and the world with it. Relativity. It all settled again peaceably in an instant, and he felt in his pocket for taxi fare.

  * * * *

  Maybe it was only because Roo had been so well prepared for the future she had previously cast for herself that the different future she was offered had unsettled her so badly. Pierce thought this later, when not having the two of them was inconceivable. She wept in the taxi, she shook her head to shake him off when he asked why, but shook her head too when he offered to turn back.

  Strong and clear, though, and fearfully gentle to take one and then the other in her arms, then to do what had to be done. Come on, she said to him, and he did. It meant starting all over again, as she had known and he hadn't, because the forms, stamps, seals, permissions, visas, authentications, oaths couldn't simply be copied exactly, alike as they would need to be; they were identical yet unique, as Jesusa and Maria were. And there would be a journey home alone for one of them, Pierce the one, and back again, as the unbearable days and weeks slid away.

  But then on the airplane together, going home bringing them both, looking down at them as they looked up or slept or woke; bigger already than they had been when the four of them had first met.

  "What'll we do,” Roo said, leaning over close to him, “about their names?"

  She'd asked before. “I don't know,” Pierce said.

  "Their names are their names. New ones would be so ... fake."

  "But."

  "Well, I mean you know. Maria, okay. But together with Jesusa?"

  "I know. Why are we whispering?"

  "You can't just change one name; that would be terrible."

  He thought it would be too, and thought maybe he knew why. “Well, we'll change both. Maria can be Mary. Mary, Mary, sweet as any name could be."

  "Okay and?"

  "Jesusa. Jesus. Hm. Well, he said I am the way the truth and the life. Via Veritas Vita. How about one of those? An epithet."

  "I thought an epithet was a cussword."

  "No no."

  "Say them again?"

  "Via. Veritas. Vita."

  "Vita,” Roo said. “I might actually have a relative by that name."

  "Vita,” Pierce said. “Life."

  It's what I want, he'd said in the soda. He felt again, with huge, calm pride, himself saying it, as though it had been the first time in his life he ever had, and in the deepest way it was: the very first time. And he had felt his soul thereupon coming back to him, double.

  "This isn't going to be easy,” Roo said, and that too she'd said before.

  * * * *

  It wasn't easy, though sometimes it was delight, the unspeakable delight that's in hymns and songs, the valley of love and delight. Sometimes it was atrociously hard, hard as a rock face he climbed toward a retreating summit, he'd had no idea. Once, with two babes asleep in his arms, a working wife asleep in the couch's crook, he watched on TV in pity and fellow feeling a climber, defeater of K2 or some such peak, who told how he was once benighted in the midst of scaling a sheer wall, and he had a little sling hammock he could string up on his pitons and sleep there in a crevice, like a bug on a window blind. And all night he hung there? Yes. It was cold and lonely, he said. Often he cried. Then in the dawn light he went on.

  Stressed out, they said to one another, to the other parents they inevitably came to know, who marveled at their fortitude, two at once. Stressed out, as though they were metal members of some machine at the limits of its endurance, heating up with torque and tension, about to fail. Only now and then in the midst of uproars and disasters to be granted a blessing by the cold moon as he stepped outside his door, a charisma of blessing, a pause anyway for an eternal moment.

  With so many things to do each day that must be done without fail—a circumstance he had never been in before, except for his own transmuting dreamworld imperatives and curses—Pierce found that not only could he not foresee real futures, he couldn't remember the present; he was, very likely had always been, absentminded to an almost pathological degree. He had lived mostly alone, and his disremembering had not come much to the attention of others, and so he always supposed that he could pay attention and keep his business straight if he really needed to; the problem, however, was apparently a part of the great flaw he had discovered on the streets of Rome: it was beyond the reach of his will, and though it could be mitigated, still he would forget his children at day care, leave their dinners in the grocery cart when he went to cash the check that he then found he had forgotten to bring. He would leave the children themselves in stores or public places, wander off, and then, when in horror he remembered them, be unable to find his way back—but that was only in dreams, all fathers have those.

  He was proud when he seemed to be mastering the basic arithmetic of a life lived with schedules, a mortgage, twin children, and a couple of aged cars, but Roo was meanwhile doing higher algebra with the same quantities; he felt himself to be in the doghouse, often for reasons he couldn't entirely discern. I'm not a saint, he thought angrily, at the sink after a round of impatient reproaches, and all in a moment—glass and towel in his hand—he thought that though he surely wasn't a saint he was, or maybe could be, or had been, a hero, and if that was so, then he knew where and with whom he stood.

  He laughed out loud. She turned, babe in arms, to shoot a baleful or warning look at him from the door, thinking maybe she was mocked, but he shook his head, no nothing, go go, doctor's waiting.

  The third person of the trinity, last in the sequence or story. She who came after the Mother, who bore the hero, and the Beloved, whom he sought with pure heart and willing sword. (He'd just been reading about her in an old book of Barr's, Time's Body, wh
ere Barr in fact dismissed the triune figure as synthetic.) She was the Crone, the one who buries and bears away. Also appearing as the Ill-Favored Lady, who humiliates and challenges the hero and charges him with interpreting her commands and unriddling her harsh riddles, to labor under her sanctions until liberated. He makes no complaint, nothing he can't bear, but it's not just about bearing, suffering, patience: it's about the creation of a new self, one without grievance, longing, regret over the self's old hurts.

  So with her the hero enters into a new stage of life, the last. And the goal would be to win a death: so to behave as to have a right to die.

  He had put down neither dishrag nor polished glass. The house was all still around him, just for this hour, and for a long time he only stood; the water babbled softly from the faucet. It was so: anyway it made sense, which is the same thing, as far as some matters go, matters like this one. He had been young, and now was not; he had been given daughters into his care, his four-eyed anima, and the Crone to obey, to learn from. To learn at last both how to act and how to yield; how to be both agent and patient, and be changed himself by working to change another; how to grow old, how to die.

  "Oh that is such bullshit,” Roo said to him, not unkindly, when on a later night Pierce (in purely abstract or mythopoeic terms, nothing personal) described this tripartite scheme to her. She pulled her flannel nightie on over her head, got into bed with her wool socks on. “You don't believe that stuff."

  Bullshit it exactly was. Roo beside him was no avatar; she was of this earth; more than anyone he knew she belonged nowhere else, on no other plane. Which was strange, because she had felt herself kept out of this world for so long, and finally had to break in, and find a way to stay. Just as he had needed to be chastened and cajoled down or up into it, into here where everybody, everything, was. One world, where they could both only be: which she had had to break into, which he had tried so hard and so futilely to break out of.