Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  "So I talked to the doctor yesterday,” Pierce said. “She got the reports back on the tests and everything. Do you want to go talk to her? I can make an appointment."

  "It's senility, isn't it,” Axel said. “Second childhood. Sans eyes sans teeth sans taste sans everything. Mewling and puking, plucking at the coverlets."

  "No,” Pierce said. “Or not exactly."

  "You can say it, son,” Axel said with great compassion. “You can say it to me. Don't be afraid."

  "Well,” Pierce said. “If senility means Alzheimer's disease, you apparently don't have that."

  "Ah.” He seemed uncomforted.

  "There are some other possibilities. You might have Lewy's bodies."

  "What?"

  "Lewy's bodies. It's a form of brain damage or disease.” What the doctor had called it was dementia with Lewy's bodies. “The ‘bodies’ are these deposits of some kind in the brain."

  "Help me, Doctor, I've got Lewy's bodies,” Axel said. “And he's got mine.” And he made a show of laughing gamely.

  "Anyway, it's not Alzheimer's. Though apparently Dr. Alzheimer and Dr. Lewy knew each other. They were chums."

  "And what,” Axel asked, “is the prognosis?"

  "Well. If you actually have it, more things like the things that have happened to you. Hallucinations. Sleepwalking. Vivid dreams. Paranoia."

  Axel gave a great shuddering, self-pitying sigh. And Pierce remembered Brooklyn for a moment.

  "I have not had hallucinations,” he said. “I am haunted. But by the real. The quite, quite real."

  "The girls,” Pierce said softly, “want you to tell them again about the time you got hit by a train."

  Axel's great white head turned on him, eyes full of affront. “Train?"

  "They said you said—oh never mind."

  Day grew brighter.

  "Is it,” Axel asked, “progressive?"

  Pierce said nothing.

  "Oh God, Pierce. You'll have to lock me in my room. I might commit some hideous crime. And not know."

  Pierce made reassuring noises, but Axel rose up distracted, nearly upsetting his cup. He gripped the bedpost and stared.

  "Oh Pierce,” he said. “I'm so tired. I long to die."

  "Oh you don't either."

  "I to my grave, where peace and rest await me. I do, sometimes I do."

  "Sometimes! Sometimes I do."

  "Thou thy earthly task has done,” Axel said. “Home art gone, and met thy maker."

  "Home art gone,” Pierce said, “and ta'en thy wages. Is how it goes."

  "Golden lads and girls,” said Axel. “Oh God.” He was weeping, head high now. He wept a little almost every day, and Pierce had begun to weep with him, which astonished them both. Much of the rest of the day he was cheerful; he was, he said, himself.

  "Can you get dressed? I mean, will you get dressed? We want to get going on this expedition."

  "This what?"

  "Journey. Trip. To the Faraway Hills."

  "Oh leave me behind. Leave me, leave me."

  "No,” Pierce said, softly but definitively. “No, no. No."

  * * * *

  "He says he can't tell sometimes whether time is passing, or rather how much time is passing,” Pierce said to Roo at the breakfast table. “He thinks sometimes it's days since I went up to see him. That after I've gone it's hours till I come back, when it's been minutes. Not believes. Just doesn't know."

  "Tell him to pray,” Roo said. She was doing Vita's hair.

  "Well, gee."

  "No, I mean it. He remembers all these prayers. The Hail Mary. The Our Father. The Whatever. They aren't going to go. So tell him he should pray, and keep count, and that way he'll know how much time is going by. Keep aholt of it."

  He looked at her: hair clip in her teeth, Vita's dark fell of hair in her hands.

  "Okay,” he said.

  * * * *

  "Just another day,” Pierce said, loading his car, the Festina wagon. “Another day of living and striving in the fields of the actual and the possible."

  Striving is from strife, he thought, like living from life. Wiving from wife. He called out to his children and his father. Let's get on our way. Way is from Via, and Via is Vita; we think so, because we are the beasts who know we are on the way, that we've come from somewhere and are going somewhere else, and it might be somewhere good and it might be bad, we don't know.

  "Beep the horn,” said Vita. “Bye-bye house."

  "Bye-bye."

  "Bye-bye."

  Great animals had used to roam the roads they took toward the Faraways, but they were mostly gone now, the last of them weary and slow and liable to be seen on the side of the road, hood erect or an orange sticker blinding their mirror: Cougars, Mustangs, Stingrays, Barracudas, Eagles, Lynxes. The new cars had neither beast names nor number names nor names of glamorously speedy things like Corvettes and Javelins and Corsairs; their names were meaningless syllables, which were maybe the cars’ own real secret names in the land they came from, Carland: that's what Pierce told the girls. Camry. Jetta. Jolly. Corolla. His own Festina, which he was sure wasn't Latin.

  Crows rose from the greening fields, or messed with dead things by the roadside, prancing and picking delicately. “God bless you, crows!” the girls called out, as their mother would too sometimes to the dusky tribe, the crow being her Totem Animal, because of her name, Corvino. “Have a nice day!” they called back to the retreating crows. “And we really mean it!"

  Names. Vita and Mary, reciting their own origin story, recounted their mother's name, and how it, therefore they, came to be.

  "Because her mother's name was Rose,” said Mary, “and her father's name was Kelley,” cried Vita, “and so she was named Roseann Kelley Corvino,” they said together, and they laughed, as they always did at this point in the story, hearty stage laughter. How Grandpa Corvino later came to be known as Barney and how the “Roseann” turned into “Roo” or was dropped were later chapters they sometimes wanted their mother to recount. But now they stopped listening and played rhyming games, rhythmic rapid hand-patting in a pattern too quick and complex for Pierce to follow, left hands to right hands, right hands to right hands, hands to knees and hands together, never missing.

  Mama mama lyin’ in bed

  Called for the doctor and the doctor said

  Let's get the rhythm of the hand

  Let's get the rhythm of the head knock knock

  Let's get the rhythm of the haaawt dog

  Let's get the rhythm of the haaawt dog

  "Who's been teaching your children these ribald rhymes?” Axel asked.

  "What's that mean?” Roo said. “'Ribbled?’”

  "He means dirty,” Pierce said. “Erotic. Full of double entendres."

  "Are you kidding?” Roo said. “That one's on Sesame Street."

  "It's a doctor joke,” Pierce said. “Everybody knows."

  The girls repeated that one a while—the last line had a rudimentary or vestigial hip swing or grind to go with it, Sesame Street or no—and then embarked on another, more complicated one: smiling even in their deep concentration at the jokes, but sometimes breaking rhythm to laugh, and then beginning again.

  Miss Sophie had a steamboat

  The steamboat had a bell

  The steamboat went to Heaven

  Miss Sophie went to

  Hello operator

  Please give me number nine

  And if you disconnect me

  I'll cut off your

  Behind the frigerator

  There was a piece of glass

  Miss Sophie sat upon it

  And cut her little

  "Well?” Pierce said.

  "Oh can it, Pierce."

  Ask me no more questions

  I'll tell you no more lies

  The boys are in the bathroom

  Zipping up their

  Flies are in the parlor

  Bees are in the park

  Miss Sophie and her boyfriend


  Are kissing in the d-a-r-k dark dark dark

  It occurred to Pierce that you might be able to date some parts of the rhyme by internal evidence: that operator, like the one in Bondieu, gone now forever. But more of it was universal, eternal, coded wisdom older than the old gods. Life on earth. Oh dark dark dark.

  The dark is like a movie

  A movie's like a show

  A show is like tee-veehee

  And that's not all I know.

  "There's the exit,” Roo said.

  * * * *

  They left the old turnpike, entered Skylands, and crossed the Jenny Jump Mountains; they skirted the Land of Make Believe without stopping, despite the children's pleas. At a certain point they crossed out of that state, and in not too long a time found themselves on the eastern bank of a wide southwest-flowing river.

  "The Blackberry River?” asked the girls, but no it wasn't quite; Pierce told them how it got its name, from a certain Lord Blackbury, to whom the king long ago gave a grant of land, in what was then called Ferroway County. Long, long ago.

  "Is that true?” they said.

  "It's true,” he said.

  They crossed the bridge at Fair Prospect, and since now they had been on the road some hours, they had to stop, and there ahead, as it had always been, just where those who have turned toward the Faraways are meant to stop, was the village store by the side of the road. Pierce told the story of how he had first come to stop here, when his bus had failed; he imitated how it had tried to climb the last hill like the Little Engine that Could, only it couldn't, and here had stopped.

  "Daddy, is that true?"

  "You took a bus?"

  They all exited from the Festina, small to tall, and dispersed.

  The soda machine like a long red sarcophagus was, of course, no longer there; from the dark, cold waters within it Pierce had on that August afternoon chosen a Coke, and opened it on the rusted fang by the slot where you put in the quarter that it cost. Instead, a huge glowing repository gaudy as a jukebox offered drinks twice the size for four times the money. At the register, though, stood the same rack of cigarettes he remembered, many brands the same, and he picked out his brand, the ones he'd always smoked when he didn't roll his own, back in the days long ago when he smoked. The oblong pack in satiny cellophane, the smokes within yielding to his thumb-press. But it was too small: it felt absurdly little in his hand, as though it had shrunk with distance, or stayed the same as he went on, same thing. For a long time he held it as the incurious clerk observed him: turning and turning it, intrigued by the impossibility.

  "The cigarettes?” asked the clerk, finger on his register.

  "No, no,” he said. “I don't smoke."

  "Never too late to start."

  "Ha ha.” Camel, pyramids, sandy waste. And where would you go if you found yourself lost in this desert? Why, you'd go around to the city on the back. He returned the pack to its place.

  Outside he sat down at the picnic table that was still there, going gray like himself, to wait for his women to finish in the bathroom. A great maple shaded it, its leaves begun but not done, veined damp and tender like the wings of newborn insects. Full, plush, and heavy when he'd first sat here. A little breeze had on that day stirred the leaves, and his hair. And out from that side road, beyond that now-shuttered house, had come Spofford and his sheep. Pierce sipped the Coke, and thought of those elaborately contrived fictions popular (or at least intriguing, to some) in the days he had first left the city to come here: stories that, though maybe vastly long, are shown at the end to have taken place all in a night's or a day's or even just a single moment's imagining, at the end of which the world of the beginning picks up again: the drink that was on the way to being drunk is drunk, the cigarette that was being lit is lit and the match shaken out. No time at all, thank God, has passed, except in the realm of thought, or desire: all ways (but one, for the now-chastened hero) lie still open.

  "Let's go,” said Roo beside him.

  * * * *

  Now Vita and Mary were carried past the scenes of Pierce's life and Roo's life here, before their own existence. See that motel? Daddy lived there. Daddy, you lived in a motel? And see that place that sells cars? Mommy sold cars there; well, she helped to sell cars, with her father, Grandpa Barney. Mom, you sold cars? The road had been widened, the strip repopulated with the new franchises, the dealership sold Yugos and Nissans. Barney had said once that he wanted to be buried on the lot, where the test-driven cars could ride over him every day, but he lay in a cemetery, a small brass plaque at his head noting that he was a veteran of the U.S. Army, his rank and unit: like Sam Oliphant's far away.

  Everything had grown smaller. Pierce caught himself thinking he was glad to have come back before it all became too small to enter, but when they actually came close to them, doors and roads and gates let them pass the same as ever. Relativity. See down that road? See that big yellow house? Daddy used to live there; not there, but down that way, no, let's not go down, let's go on.

  At Arcady, the Rasmussen Humanities Center, Roo parked in the new parking lot that covered a swathe of meadow where once Spofford had kept his sheep. Spofford and his truck had turned in just ahead of them, coming from the other way.

  "No more sheep?” Pierce said to him, taking his hand and then falling into an embrace. “Your Totem Animal."

  "Too much damn trouble. It was all I could think about, even when I put ‘em on the table. The damn trouble they were.” He was grinning, turning to Pierce's girls to be introduced. And Rosie was suddenly there, in the doorway of Arcady, unchanged, it seemed, not gone gray as he and Spofford were rapidly doing, bright shawl around her shoulders, and beside her a young woman Pierce didn't know, a woman who seemed to be both here and not here, graciously present, secretly absent. Self-possessed, he might say.

  "God, Pierce!"

  "Hi, Rosie, hi. Rosie, you remember Kelley Corvino, my wife. My father, Axel Moffett. And our girls, Mary and Vita, no Vita and Mary."

  Roo raised a cool hand to Rosie, and put forward the girls, who in earlier years would have hung back and hid behind her, but not now. Roo didn't know that Pierce and Rosie had once slept together, but then Pierce didn't know that Spofford and Roo had. Indeed they could hardly, any of them, exactly remember these things, only the bare names of them. Gone.

  "And you all know my daughter, Samantha,” Rosie said, and the young woman, dark brown curls and plumbless blue eyes, put out her hand to Pierce.

  * * * *

  Rosie took Pierce and his package—the photocopied typescript, which she'd said he should chuck but which he found he couldn't, and the set of little plastic squares within which the book hid, at once changed and unchanged—down the hall to the office. It was all certainly changed, clean and bright; even the floors had been bleached and varnished so that they glowed like buttered toast.

  "You haven't seen all this before,” she said.

  "No."

  "Like it?"

  "Um,” he said, not knowing how to answer. In the office, the same fruitwood bookcases anyway, filled with software manuals and file cases of white plastic. There were posters and notices of lecture series, conferences, calls for papers.

  "You'll like this one,” she said. “You have to come. We're so proud."

  The topic was “Civility and Civilization: Eastern Europe After.” Of course in that month of that year you didn't need to ask after what, though the term might puzzle the future. Photographs of those who were coming to speak. Pierce pointed to one in awe.

  "You could meet him,” Rosie said. “I mean you were there, before."

  "I was never there,” Pierce said.

  "Sure you were. You wrote me from there."

  For a moment he wasn't sure himself. The face on the poster was dark, minatory, storm-cloudy, as the man surely was not. The same picture was on the cover of a book that lay on Rosie's desk. Pierce opened it and read.

  Genuine conscience and genuine responsibility are alwa
ys, in the end, explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are observed “from above,” that everything is visible, that nothing is forgotten, and so earthly time has no power to wipe away the sharp disappointments of earthly failure: our spirit knows it is not the only entity aware of these failures.

  What other statesman, what other politician, anywhere ever, would say such a thing: would ever speak of failure, of his own failure, as inevitable as anyone's. Pierce felt a stab of desire to have been there for real, in that city, in the days of the man's youth and his own; to have learned a harder and a better thing than he had learned during the same years in his own bland land. He couldn't know that Fellowes Kraft, author and traveler, actually had once seen him—touched him even, tickled his fat belly: for the elder Havel, his father, also named Václav, had one day late in the 1930s brought his baby son to the brand-new swimming pool at the Barrandov site south of Prague where the beautiful boys used to gather on summer days. Václav Havel Sr., builder and real-estate magnate, was himself the developer of the new district, responsible for the elegant cafés and brilliant terraces and the film studios where the future was coming to be. One of the young men, a film actor, had introduced Kraft to the smiling fellow and his baby, and the proud papa had talked away while Kraft could only say Nerozumím, nerozumím, I don't understand, I don't understand, one of the few Czech words he knew, one of the few he wouldn't forget.

  * * * *

  There was more than one way up the mountain. One way started, or had once, not far from Pierce's little cabin by the Blackbury River, but the broader and more popular way, a long traverse plainly marked, began at a roadside cluster of picnic tables and featured a granite plinth surmounted by a symbolic shoemaker's last, the last that Hurd Hope Welkin had not stuck to. A plaque let into the plinth listed his attributes. They all got out from the cars that had brought them there, and paused for a minute; Rosie told them a little of what she had learned of him, his strange career, how the demons had got him and let him go, or been defeated.