by John Crowley
“Not now,” Val said.
“Only one way now,” said Rosie.
“Only one way now.” Pierce passed momentarily in thought again through Frank Walker Barr’s classroom, where he had acquired some of the tales he retailed here and elsewhere: Barr, who was the only man Pierce had ever known who could talk as though that door were open still, who saw the gods passing and repassing, appearing in history, then returning to the stars, to be stars themselves.
Old Barr.
The universe we live in, he’d say, is made of space and matter, but it wasn’t always. Once it was made not of matter but of time. The coordinates of our universe are places, the coordinates of that older universe were moments: solstice and equinox, the sun’s passage from Sign to Sign, the moon’s from Mansion to Mansion. And though a world made of space and matter can’t just end, to be replaced by another one, a world made of time can. A cosmic disaster can in a moment alter the measure of the dance; a hero can right the world again. Silently, unnoticeably, new measures can be given to the repetitions by which the shape of the universe is maintained; one world vanishes without a whisper, and a new one comes to be. And no one the wiser except the wise.
“We come in through Cancer,” Pierce said, and moved his pointing finger uncertainly. “Can’t see Cancer now I guess. But our souls are supposed to come down into this world by way of the door open in Cancer …”
“Starting from where?” Spofford asked.
“Well I don’t know. Just newly minted by God. From Heaven I guess. Beyond the stars.”
“Okay.”
“Your soul comes down through the lower heavens, that is through the solar system, heading for your mother’s womb on Earth. On the journey down or in, you pass through the spheres, one by one …”
“Spheres?”
“Sure, the spheres of the planets. You have to pretend now that the planets are these gigantic sort of crystal spheres, nested one inside the other, with the earth in the middle.”
“You mean they’re not?” Val said, and brayed.
“As it goes through each sphere, the soul gets a gift, or a wrapping, a sort of coat or coating of materiality, which gets thicker as it comes down. These coats or gifts are the qualities of the spheres you go through. They are the characters of the different planets, and make you what you are, make you the way you are.”
“Are you making this up?” Rosie asked. Still plucking rose hips into her hat.
“No. Nope.” He clasped his hands behind him. “It’s not made up. That doesn’t mean it’s true.”
Rosie ceased her gathering to snort at this. Spofford took the hatful from her and inhaled its autumnal odor. “So what’s it mean?”
“It just tells why we are the way we are, and not some different way instead.”
Rosie now looked up too, attending.
“What it means,” Pierce said, “is that the soul inside you, when it reaches here, when it becomes part of your little forming body, however that happens, which don’t ask me, comes already clothed in a body, which is made somehow out of stellar or planetary influences …”
“The astral body,” Val guessed.
“Yes,” Pierce said. “I guess so. Yes, exactly.”
“Sure,” Val said with an air of negligent triumph, one for me.
“So each spirit or astral body would have to be different, depending on how the planets were arranged, against what stars, in what houses, when you came down through.”
Spofford contemplated Saturn, following with his mind’s eye the baby soul’s journey. Little mite slung around by the huge planet’s gravity, awed certainly by the cold-ringed humongous wall of it. Storing up maybe as it shot past its whole lifetime’s worth of vertiginous dreams. He felt a moment’s pity. Except that it wasn’t true. If there was anything he knew for sure it was that his soul had been made right here, in these hills; that it didn’t precede the coupling that one night of those two, old folks now and gone to Florida; and that it was still a long way from being finished. He took Rosie’s hand.
“Anyway wow,” Val said, neck bent, mouth agape. “Really.”
They all looked away down that river of sky, where beasts and birds, weapons, furniture and folks were swept along. They didn’t remember, not any of them, how each had sailed it, in the boat of the soul.
Out and down into the spheres through the door open in Cancer: with that sign in fact, they say, painted on its sails. Carried down into the outermost sphere, thickening and growing real; as it passes Saturn earning Saturn’s gift, or suffering his blow, anyway laying down its Saturnian nature, however thick it might be; and then, older by that much, passing on, trimming the sails, wondering. After some æons coming into great Jupiter’s gravity, where Rosie got her generosity and sense (Val had showed her, Jupiter in her first house, the House of Life), and wrapped thereby in another wrapping; and after who knows what length of time going through the locks or the baffle into the next sphere: Mars red as rust. And maybe our soul would rather not be detained there, feeling not so fly any longer nor so full of possibility as once it did and already probably forgetful why it has set out at all, no help for it though, here are Mars’s things piled like the trophy of a warrior, sword, shield, helm.
And oh all that dark starlit waste that lies still between where it has come from and the small place to which it goes, a child off too young to school or camp, it might be fun there but it might be no fun at all. But now the Sun at least comes closer, or we on our way come closer to it, God bless the warmth; hungry, we take in as much as we are able (but what if it’s pale and far off as we go by, its face averted, in a sad house, in the winter of the year? Then won’t the soul need warmth, want warmth, fear warmth ever after?). Venus then—this is the map we are following, there are other maps—Venus next, in a good mood if we’re lucky, perhaps on Earth far away they are looking up at her just then, just as the Sun has gone to rest (so it seems to them on Earth) and she has that smile, that smile at once placid and stirring, and she has it for us too as we go by, to share in, to have. Mercury, next to her, with his caduceus, watch out, he has a smile of his own, of complicity maybe, what’s he up to? And his finger against his lips, telling us to be quiet now about it. All.
He’s last.
Only the moist Moon left to pass, bag of waters, all sorrows and birth-pangs: strange that when men stood upon her at last they found her to be dry dust, but their souls were after all wrapped in bodies by then and shut in their moon-suits, and the journey back up must be very different; whenever we make our way back anywhere, hearts and heads heavy and alive, won’t we find that the treasures have vanished, the trunks are empty?
Anyway our soul pauses there, in the Moon’s sphere, throat now full of tears; marvelling at blue-green Earth and its wrappings of air, fire, and water. It can no longer remember why it doesn’t want to go that way; burdened now with its misshapen burdens but getting used to them; restless and already homesick but thinking well maybe it’s just anticipation, the end of the journey, which has after all been long: thinking too of the warm womb and its sea. Oh let’s get it over with.
And mightn’t it happen then that, long afterward, grown up now and all this forgotten—just as the lookers-up in the side yard of Val’s Faraway Lodge have all forgotten it, and yet been shaped for good by it—you will meet another, one who took the same journey you took at nearly but not quite the same time, through similar but different heavens? Someone whose growing soul was made of just what you just barely missed, what you need but lack, which you can’t know or name but which now you recognize, feeling, even as you meet, the possibility of being, at last, filled up: knowing, knowing for sure, that the more you are in the company of this soul, this complementary soul, the more you will be repaired?
Oh then be afraid.
A quarter moon had risen and wiped away all but the brightest stars when, hours later, Rose Ryder drove in at the gates of the Winterhalter estate; the gates open, the big yellow stucco house unvigila
nt. She turned down Pierce’s drive, turning off her headlights; the tall unmown grass was white and alive in the moonlight. She cut the engine of the Asp as it topped the last rise before the little bungalow came into view, and coasted in silence (she could hear the brush of grasses against the car’s undercarriage) down to the house. No lights were lit there.
She had come to see him, unable not to, but was silent now so as not to wake him. Without her braking it the car rolled to a stop, and she stepped out. If she left it here, and was allowed to stay, then by morning dew would have covered its seats and the steering wheel, the volume of poetry (Rilke) and the Bible (King James) that lay on the floor. It was time to put the top up anyway for the year, it was time, it was time.
Rose circled what she wanted, but not always out of caution. Sometimes out of caution, like any wise animal approaching found food, why this bounty, why left here so carelessly, is there some reason to avoid. But other times not out of caution; other times she circled, approached, retreated, approached again, waited: waited for whatever drew her (she knew it would) to overcome whatever kept her away. Circled close and closer, finally close enough to be seized.
She walked up to the door but didn’t knock or open it or call at the keyhole, only stood listening for a time, more to something that might speak within her than to anything she might hear from the house. (Pierce was able to see or picture her there, her head lowered, lips parted, arms crossed.) Then she stepped back from the door and into the moon’s light, her brief red dress gone black and her eyes alight and her tawny skin pale (Pierce could see all that too, and the slim wristwatch on her wrist; could even see—if not just at that moment then certainly when he looked back in after years—the glitter of wetness on her lip after she touched it with her tongue) and she went around the house into the darkness of the pines.
Pierce lay open-eyed and still in his bed within the house, awakened by—what was it that had awakened him? Was it the car’s approach and sudden silence (we can come to know the sound of a car as we can a familiar footstep, he was surprised to learn this) or was it the close of its door, or simply an alteration of the universal spiritus that filled the space between her and him? Now she had come around to the back porch, and Pierce thought he could hear her try the screen door, as they had done together in the former world wherein they had met. Had she come in that way? There was a noise at his bedroom window, it made him start, bat or bug though, not her. He sent out his spirit herwards.
Once when she was twelve or so, thirteen, her father had burned brush on some long-neglected acres of the farm, and she and her brother had helped tend it. Maybe it was a blowy day, or the wind increased; maybe she was just inexperienced with fires, how you made a fire do what you wanted though it was so huge and dangerous, like a trained tiger: she didn’t know it wasn’t out of control, she only worked furiously around its perimeters as her males did, raking and pushing the burning brush toward its consuming mouth, feeling the astonishing burn on her face and eyelids (her eyelashes later crumbling away to black dust in her fingers) but then at last ceasing to struggle against it and only standing in its aura, her breath short and her nipples hard (her father and brother staring, stirred too she thinks now by her being stirred): her whole being held as in a hand that might close.
Pierce knew that story (or would later imagine knowing it, so vividly as made no difference), and he had a fire too in his own past. She knew that story, and had thought of her own fire when he told it to her, how he had set a forest on fire by accident in Kentucky when he was a kid. By now she had come through the door from the porch into the kitchen. It was the fire’s quickness Pierce had marvelled at, how quick it became uncontrollable, how surprising it was that it so soon could not be stamped out. She stepped into the dining room, his office, smelled the stove’s breath, the books, and from the darkness he seized her.
Hand over her mouth and arm around her body. That hand closing. He cried out at the same moment he grasped her, shouting one wordless word into her ear: and it was that shout (she told him later) that made her come.
16
Once in a medical text, another of his uncle Sam’s maybe, Pierce had seen illustrations of the body in which the sizes of the various parts and organs were drawn relative to the numbers of nerve endings each possessed: the weird homunculus that resulted remained in his memory ever after. The nerve-poor torso and shanks were shrunken and small, the calves not half the size of the sensitive feet, and the hands were larger still, with great fingertips like a frog’s; from the small skull protruded huge seeing eyes, big nose with bigger nostrils, lips like loaves, the slab of tongue protruding from between them as big as the whole of the breast. When he closed his eyes and concentrated, he knew that this fellow was the one his inner sense knew and went by, not the image in the mirror; he could feel him; he thought that the blind would have this body and no other.
A fig leaf, he remembered, exiguous surely, had in that picture covered the penis (it was only a man that was shown) but which was certainly great big in the mind’s map, big as could be desired, heavy-shafted and helmet-headed, however disappointing it might be to the colder measuring eye. Her great hand though (or his) still big enough to grasp it easily, for her parts had to be as large as his to meet him everywhere, her lips like his, her tongue etc. What was odd was that as their neural fibers fire and grow warm and the parts that are most crowded with them enlarge even further, their eyes adjust the rest in proportion, though never quite catching up; so they both grow gigantic, as measured by the details of their largest parts, the flocked and dark and blood-rich parts: the purple-brown lips filmed with shining liquid, the tender eye-corner where the great globular tear forms, the drop of clear syrup in the blind cyclops eye of.
Meanwhile they forget how to speak, they become beings of another order, or unfold those beings from somewhere within themselves, giant and giantess, who take his place and hers there on the shiplike, the prairielike bed: and that was why they did what they did. They learned what things they must do in order to become those beings and so, for a time, cease to be themselves.
Vacatio, absence from which they always returned too soon, unsustainable for long. The desire is boundless, the act a slave to limit, law of diminishing returns, in the kiln of actuality anyway, if not in the pyramid scheme of the Ars Auto-amatoria. The erotic bond wastes away, says Bruno, through all the senses by means of which it is created; which is why the lover, like a child building a castle by the sea, continually struggles to shore up his work, “desiring to transform himself into the beloved, pass through her and into her by all the portals of sense through which knowledge comes, eyes, tongue, mouth, and so on.”
And so on.
On a night as he sat on his bed waiting for her, with his impedimenta and tricks and traps around him, Pierce thought in a kind of helpless wonderment that there must be a whole different way of forging bonds or links, a way that everybody of course knows about, that’s common knowledge. Just time, probably, basically, time spent in love; the slow accumulation of shared things; life choices accepted and lived with. Husband and wife. Laughter and tears. Years go by. Whatever.
But he was sure he didn’t have those means; and if he had not these means here, he thought he would not have any; would no longer be able to draw from her, or cause her to produce, as the alchemist produces his quintessence from the sufferings of his prima materia, her spirit-stuff for him or before him. And at that he thought of what he had prepared for her this night, and his heart dilated and his loins grew conscious, experiencing in advance what he would do, what she would say and feel, as if it were already over.
In Pierce’s bedroom, the bedroom Rose called Invisible, besides the big bed Pierce had brought from the City (spoils of his life there, a life which had required and could also afford such a barge and its fittings) there stood another, narrower bedstead. It had been there from the beginning, had been the first thing they had both seen in this room in the moonlight. It was of bony iron. Somew
hen the springs had worn away or broken, and had been replaced by wooden slats. There was a bare mattress too, its ticking stained but by what, smelling more sad and old than foul; circled here and there with o’s of orange rust where buttons had come off.
On this night she asked him if he would please cover it before she. He said no.
She sat down on the bed’s edge and he gave her a small faceted glass of bitter-green liquid. It was a Catalan concoction that his former lover, whom he called Sphinx when he named her to himself, had brought him home from Europe once; it was called Foc y Fum, and the label showed a house burning down. Fire & Smoke? She was naked now except for the long socks she would not do without. He had her drink it off, regarding her kindly, speaking softly to her about this and that.
“No more,” she said.
“Finish it.”
In the room’s corner glowed a small electric fire, Moloch’s mouth, great grimace with orange teeth and constant growl. More heat, never enough.
And all these things too became part of the forming seal, impresa on the labile stuff of his spirit, on his as much as on hers, perhaps more on his than hers: the heater, and the green bottle, the narrow bed. How she held out her hands to him when he asked, watching with close attention his every move, but lifting her eyes to his now and then, her eyes from which he drank, foc y fum.
Now. Take the glass away. Begin.
When she was bound to the iron bed he went about her with his hands, an acrobat going about the ring before his performance, tugging on every rope, imagining them failing. As he did so he spoke to her. “How sweet I roamed from field to field,” he said, “and tasted all the summer’s pride; till I the Prince of Love beheld, who in the sunny beams did glide.”
“Pierce,” she said or breathed.
Pierce only answered: “He showed me lilies for my hair, and blushing roses for my brow; he led me in his gardens fair, where all his golden pleasures grow.”