by John Crowley
"You'll be in my prayers,” he said. “Be certain of that."
* * * *
After a certain time, as it was meant to do when it had had no command from him, Pierce's Zenith computer shut its eye and went to sleep. Pierce returning from Brother Lewis's room looked at the blankness of it, not sleepy himself. He regarded his bed, his chair, his open bag not yet and never to be unpacked. A pint of Scotch beneath the extra jammies. His watch told him it was near nine, or Compline. He drank from his bottle, shuddering. Then he took his coat, checked for his keys and wallet, went out into the hall, closing his door softly behind him, not knowing where he would go but unwilling suddenly to sit or lie. All silent; distant sounds of washing up in the refectory. Brother Lewis's door now shut.
The ironbound door to the outside was huge. The night was clear and cold. Orion, though tumbling over slightly now, was still aloft. Pierce saluted him: Hey, big guy. You'll be gone soon. Gone to sleep in the nether waters, while Scorpio rises every night and the year grows, from leaf to flower and flower to fruit. All the same as always.
He got in his car, the number two car; the capacious new wagon had been left for Roo and the kids; this one irremediably filthy, cookie crumbs and worse down in every crevice too deep for any vacuum.
The long drive down the mountain was easy and broad, and completely dark; no habitations but the monks’ for miles. Not until the road leveled and debouched onto a state highway did the world begin again.
And the flesh. And the devil. Pierce taking a left onto the highway came almost immediately on a neon-lit roadhouse: the Paradise Lounge. On its sign a palm tree and a pineapple, a pair of conga drums, and a female figure as iconic as an African sculpture, all breast and behind, but with a cheerful smile and Barbie ponytail. The Paradise Lounge offered Exotic Dancers.
Surely this place hadn't been here at the mountain's foot when he arrived. But surely it looked different in daylight. He turned in, and parked his car in a row of mostly pickups and older sedans, and sat for a moment hearing faint drumbeats and wondering if he actually meant to go in.
He had, always had had, a squeamish and sheltered boy's fear of squalor and affront, and never had liked joining his sexual feelings with those of other men in public places; maybe he didn't like thinking that his were like, even interchangeable with, theirs. So he hadn't often gone into places like this even when he'd lived in the city and they were common.
He went in.
They—places like this—had changed, it seemed, or maybe the country edition or version was different. The Paradise Lounge was a long low room with a bar at one end and a raised platform like a fashion-show runway, around which men sat as at a banquet, with their drinks, looking up, bathed in a pinkish light. He was asked for a five-dollar cover charge by a polite but large man, who then offered him the place with a hand. All yours. Smells of smoke and sweet liquor, or something. On the runway a naked woman moved with a kind of acrobatic lasciviousness to characterless rock. Entirely naked, even to her shoes, which he thought always remained. A silver stud in her navel the only manmade thing upon her. Her pubic hair removed. She seemed very young, and shockingly beautiful, nothing he had expected.
He ordered a beer from another woman, clothed, who approached him, smiling in welcome. For a time he only watched, standing at a narrow counter that ran around the room's perimeter, meant for the shy, it seemed, and now and then lifted the bottle to his lips. A vast emotion filled him that he couldn't identify. He observed that there were precise rules for what went on between customer and girl. She came on her circuit before each of them, but if you put down a bill on the counter for her, she stayed a while longer before you, made her motions for you, as the rest waited; she came close with her nakedness, brought it calculated inches from your face, front and rear; smiling and answering if you spoke, bending over you and offering her breasts like fruit, even draping over you her hair. No one else spoke, and no one, not the object of her attention nor any of the other men, called out any of the coarse exhortations Pierce supposed he might have expected: on some faces there was a beatific grin, on others a perfect sweet mammalian blank. And no one touched. No one—not at this hour on this day anyway—so much as lifted a hand from the brown bottle it held. The rules and the reasons were otherwise. But what were the reasons? Why pay to be offered and at the same time forbidden? No, something different or other than that.
A small dark man in a wool shirt and gimme hat vacated a seat at the runway, and Pierce took it. Now he too looked upward into the body of the woman displayed, or would when she came to him. He took from his wallet a wrinkled bill—how much? It seemed, strangely, that a single would do; it was all that others had put down.
Edenic. Maybe what he felt was awe. It was so shameless as to precede shame, to precede Eros even, like playing doctor, which the bare pubes also suggested. Show me yours. He and all of them swallowing down the sight of her so utterly offered. Pierce's brain, spinning along somewhat independently of his full soul, tried to think of that word, a vowel-less Sanskrit word, that Barr in one of his books said meant the entirety of nature, expressed in the revelation of female nakedness to awestruck males.
The eye is the mouth of the heart. What they were all shown here wasn't temptation followed by privation; no. What they saw fed them, he just didn't know how.
Here she was before him, his turn.
"How are you?” he asked.
"I'm real good,” she said gently. “I want to know how you are."
"I'm forty-nine years old,” he said, astonishing himself.
"Well. You thinking of quitting?"
She turned before him, squatting and extending gracefully. It was possible to study, in her actuality, those soft spreadings and minute tremblings that were absent from the glossy near-naked women whose images were ubiquitous now on television and in magazines, their flesh honed, machined, like something put on over flesh rather than flesh itself. Smoothed with unguents and depilated this body was, but there was no denying (why would he be tempted to deny?) that this was flesh.
"I do,” he said. “Sometimes I do."
"Betcha you won't,” she said, turning. “Not for years yet."
Her hair fell over him, odorous and fine. Her dark eyes on his, most unashamed of all. He felt a wave of gratitude and immense privilege, like great good luck. “You're so nice,” he said. No tax on asininity here.
"I'm not nice,” she said. “I'm bad."
"No,” he said. “Nice."
She gazed at him from beneath her black brows, and, smiling, shook her head minutely, what's to be done with this guy; meanwhile she had begun to move away from him, his meter on empty.
"When you get to Hell,” she said, “mention my name. You'll get a good deal."
"I'll remember that,” he said.
"No, you won't,” she said.
She was done, pretty soon after that, with her set or stint, and after a few vacant moments another woman began hers, inserting into a boom box on the stage her own special recorded selections, little different to Pierce's ear. She wore cowboy boots, a hat, and a rudimentary vest, but these last were soon discarded; the ecdysiastic art was reduced here to a gesture or two. Softer and less defined than the earlier dark pale woman, her parts smaller and more secret, she reminded Pierce of the first woman he had been naked with, how he had felt faintly embarrassed for her, so undressed, which had not caused him to cease his attentions to her; no more than to this one, striking poses over them in her boots, soft thighs quivering a little. Beyond her at the stage's edge a third woman sat waiting on a stool, bare legs crossed, cigarette in hand, a sort of vampiric or devil-doll one, but really no different, just another young woman. Pierce folded his hands before him. Since there was no end to it, only repetition, there was no reason to leave at any time, and no reason to stay longer than now. He thought of waiting till his original friend came around again, and it occurred to him that it was after all possible to spend a lot of money here. At last he was lifted
up as by some external hand, and propelled toward the door. He passed the first woman, sitting at the bar, drinking with chums, now minimally clothed; she lifted her dark brows and trilled her fingers at him, so long. And when thou descendest to Hell, where thou shalt see me shine in that subterrene place, shining (as thou seest me now) in the darkness of Acheron, and raigning in the deep profundity of Styx, thou shalt worship me, as one that hath been favourable to thee.
He felt oddly triumphant, faintly atremble, erect generally but not specifically. He was as though rinsed in something, something delightful and right yet equally unfamiliar. He wondered if this was what the ancient Gnostic worshippers felt in their chaste naked prelapsarian orgies: that by this nakedness the rules, the iron rules of the Archons who made the world, could be broken, shuffled off, and the world and the self experienced, if only for that moment, as though the rules didn't exist. Not just the social or cultural rules that any outlaw can flout but rules a lot deeper than that: species-specific rules of courting, mating and bonding, male and female, competition and procreation, the million-year-old mammalian rules that can't be broken, that underlie endlessly mutating human culture and all society, tight or loose.
That was what Rose Ryder wanted, he thought. To be carried, by the breaking of the rules, by the making of other rules absurd in their strictness, to that limit beyond which everything could be forgotten, every physical constraint and fear; there to be naked and enwrapped, filled and hungry, at once and endlessly, beyond will, beyond pleasure, beyond even the limits of the flesh that bore it. He hadn't had her wild mad courage, but what he had sought in her for himself, and not only in her, what he had bent his heart and strength toward in all the multiplying beds and hearts and cunts in all his former life, what he had so often traded whatever he had for, without any deal, it was the same—not to overpower or win or have or achieve or succeed or know or even love but to escape, to reach escape velocity, flee through the only cleft or crack (!) that was open in the closed universe he found himself in.
But no, of course it was foolish, there wasn't any escape, there hadn't ever been an escape, for there was nothing to escape from. All human journeys, all flights and fleeings, can only be inward, farther into the world, no matter which way they point or where they lead, to whatever heavens or hells: because there just isn't anywhere else. That's all.
He stopped, in the cold spring air of the parking lot, with his car keys in his hand, in the chartreuse light of the Paradise Lounge girl.
And yet there is a realm outside.
There is a realm outside.
It wasn't a thought or a notion arising in his heart or head, it was as though presented to or inserted within him, something that wasn't of or from himself at all. He had never felt even the possibility of it before, and yet he knew it now with absolute plain certainty. It wasn't even a surprise.
There is an enveloping realm, beyond everything that is and everything that might be or can be imagined to be. It was so.
Not Heaven, where the Logos lives, where everything is made of meaning, or better say, where meanings are the only things. That realm, of any, is deep deep within. But beyond the realms of meaning; beyond even any possible author of all this, if there was one, which there was not; outside or beyond even Bruno's infinities, outside of which there could be nothing; outside all possibility, lay the realm in which all is contained.
It was so. He knew it, without any wonderment; he knew it by its total usefulness.
It answered.
It provided all that was needed for this world to be, but it touched nothing here. It made nothing, altered nothing, wanted nothing, asked nothing, urged nothing; the fact of its existence beyond existence had nothing to do with what went on here, didn't shine through it as through a dome of many-colored glass. No. This world shone with its own light, and its light is all the light there is.
It made no difference to the world, it didn't even know of our world's existence. All knowledge went only outward, toward it. The only part of it that could ever be in this neighborhood of ours was the knowledge that it existed. And yet that made all the difference.
Pierce knew: and now that he knew, nothing was ever going to be the same again. Here at this place, existence divided in two, before and after, though nothing, not an atom, had changed because of it, nor would.
Here at this parking lot, in this electric light, this spring night. The dancers’ music returned into his ear, and he realized that for some time he had not been hearing it or anything. He looked down at the car keys he still held in his hand, three thick keys with their own golden or silver sheen, the tips of their teeth alight, so real and irrefutable. For an unmeasured time he had stood here with them in his hand.
How had he come to know this? Had he labored to learn it, without understanding that he was doing so, and here at last it was, or was it a gift, or just a random collision here of this soul with the secret? The knowledge was as infinite as the thing known, it was infinitesimal, it dwelt at the root of himself, not different from the root of being, and always had.
He opened his car door and folded himself within. The door of the Paradise opened and the music grew loud for a moment; men came in and went out; around him pickups were lustily revving their engines. He turned his lights on and drove out of the parking lot and upward again.
Well how do you like that, he thought, not shamed by his own inanity. How do you like that. In his rear-view mirror he saw the spot of light that was the Paradise grow smaller, and vanish into darkness around a curve of the road. He supposed he would soon forget this thing that he now knew, or rather he would cease to truly know it without forgetting that on this night he had for a moment been certain of it. He had begun to forget it already. He wished—he even prayed—that, now and then, it might come again to him, a whisper or a call in his ear, though he supposed it couldn't be compelled: once was more than he had known was possible, and was enough. He knew why there are things, endless things, and not nothing. And as though they had all forever been waiting for this, all leaning forward eagerly or impatiently and fixing on him, waiting to see if he would finally get it, those things now sank back, and let go, and letting go they went comfortably to sleep. It was all right. Pierce yawned hugely.
The never-closed gates of the abbey came before him and he drove in, dousing his lights so as not to disturb, or alert, the housemaster or porter, and rolled to a stop. He thought of his bed, his desk, the work on his desk, the unfinished finished thing. All the same as always. He felt entirely whole, as he had never quite felt before, and at the same time no different at all. He wondered if he could ever tell anything of this to his wife. He thought of going to knock on Brother Lewis's door, just to tell him not to worry, it was all okay. Would Brother Lewis understand? Maybe they could sit a while together, in silence: for there was finally nothing to say.
Down at the Paradise, things did get a little wilder and not so Edenic as the night met the morning. The stolid Mexican migrant workers who had quietly filled the seats when Pierce was there were gone, asleep in their dorms even as Pierce was asleep in his, and another bunch had come in, louder and richer and wanting more, getting it too. Women came along with some of them, shrinking back or shrieking, in delight or maybe defensively. Guys climbed to the runway and some, wide eyed and bleating, were ready to show themselves along with the girls, who managed them with skill and wisdom, gave them their money's worth too, the bouncers drawing close just in case and a sharklike police cruiser drifting slowly past without stopping. Orion set, or seemed to in the turning of the world. Dawn was green and calm when the abbey bells rang for Prime, and the men there arose to pray: the first hour of day, the hour at which the manna fell on the Hebrews in the desert, when Christ was brought before Pilate, who asked him What is truth? At this hour too, Christ sat down, back in his body after his Resurrection, to eat fish and honey with his disciples. In the silent Retreat House refectory Pierce sat down before his own breakfast, a more lavish meal surely than
the monks were given, retreatants not expected to attain the same levels of abnegation as the parfaits. But then he decided that he would go to Mass instead, as he had not done since coming here. He would receive Communion. Then he would gather up his papers and his disks, clean and close his room, and go home.
11
In the Free Library on River Street in Blackbury Jambs, they will give you if you ask for it a small brochure or pamphlet, published some time ago, about the life and work of Hurd Hope Welkin, “the Educated Shoemaker.” In the .900s on the lower floor, they have several of his once-popular natural history books, such as The Daughters of Air and Water (about clouds) and Ancient as the Sky (geological formations). In an alcove of the main reading room is the well-known last photograph (a Santa with fluffy beard and laughing crow's-feet) next to a framed letter of commendation from Louis Agassiz.
He was never really a shoemaker, as he's often described; he owned a small specialty boot manufactory down the Blackbury River from the Jambs, a business he inherited from his father, who really had started as a cobbler. He was self-educated, though; he never went to high school, and taught himself botany and biology and ornithology when those were branches of knowledge that could be mastered one by one, and he did come late in life to be nominated for membership in several learned societies, and (the pamphlet will tell you) campaigned to have scientific journals exempted from international postage and pass freely around the world. The pamphlet lists the four species of local wildflower he discovered and named, and has somewhat muddy reproductions of his own drawings of them. There's a picture of the big plain house on West Plain Road that burned down in 1924; he lived alone there all of his life after his parents’ death (a double suicide, but the pamphlet doesn't mention that) and died on the lawn in a kitchen chair on a warm spring afternoon in 1911, aetat seventy-five, no age he had ever expected to reach—so he once said.