by John Crowley
Ray explained to them what he was going to try to do, and why he thought it was necessary, and he looked around at their faces as though to garner their assent. He asked them for their prayers. Then he got up, with some effort, and Sam watched him grow big and come to stand over her.
“Sam’s not going to understand everything that happens here tonight,” he said to them, looking down on Sam, “but it’s going to make a very big difference to her, I think, if God wills.” He said this in that masking way grown-ups have of smiling and looking into a child’s eyes and at the same time saying things the child is assumed not to get or even really to hear. “We have to be prepared for some difficult manifestations. But we know no real harm can come to us, or to this child.”
They moved in their chairs or in their places, and some made soft noises.
Sam, understanding that she was the sole focus of their attention, became alarmed.
“Daddy.”
Mike held her shoulders and bent to kiss her head. Ray put his hand over Mike’s.
“Daddy’s going to go out for a while now, honey,” he said. “Because we want to talk a little alone. You and I.”
Mike raised his head, but didn’t release Sam. “No,” he said. “Of course I’ll stay.” He said it to Ray, not to Sam. “Of course.”
“Mike, this is something I don’t think you can witness. Mike.” The soft iteration of his name silenced Mike. No one there in the lounge was looking at him except Ray: he saw that.
“Well is there a reason?” he asked, trying for a voice as low and firm as Ray’s, where had all his strength gone, where.
“Yes there’s a reason,” Ray said. “We’ve talked about this.”
Mike took his hands from Sam’s body.
“Mike, I want to work with you on this,” Ray said. “There’s nothing that can’t be lifted from you, from your soul: nothing. And I want to help you to ask for that. But this child’s need is more urgent now.”
Sam had begun to shudder intermittently, the cold in the lounge intense. Mike wanted to take off his own down vest, wrap her in it, but he couldn’t.
“He can stay,” Sam said. “I don’t mind.”
“Mike,” Ray said.
They all waited, and Mike looked at none of them; he wanted to say to Sam I’ll be right outside honey but he couldn’t do that either, if it was he who had once hurt her so dreadfully he couldn’t say that, it would sound like a threat or a warning, it sounded like that to him even as he heard himself think of saying it. He couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t say he loved her.
“You’ll be all right,” he said. “Ray loves you. You listen.” He stood, pulling away from her hand that reached for him, but not able to avoid Ray, who moved to him more nimbly than Mike would have thought he could, and took him in a big embrace, and holding him laughed a small and kindly laugh, these things aren’t so important; but Mike knew they were; then Ray let him go, and turned to Sam.
“Daddy?”
“It’s okay,” Mike said, and half looked back but not so far as to see her, putting out his hand toward her as he went away. He went out through the big arched door and down past the bathroom where Sam had had her seizure and down the hall to the window that looked out to the golf course and the hills. He could hear voices from the lounge, prayer maybe, but not the words.
It seemed to Mike that only as Ray spoke of them did the things he referred to (whenever it was, maybe more than one time) come into being; and that when they came into being they came into being as Mike’s own secret, things that no one knew but he. It wasn’t so, he knew it hadn’t been so before, but he felt it now coming to be so: and therefore to have always been so.
Like wishes come true, huh, Rosie had mocked him once, when Mike had tried to tell her about prayer, tried to tell her that the physics isn’t final, that maybe we can have what we want.
He thought these thoughts, but could hardly attend to them; the voice was his own and what it said was true but at the same time had nothing to do with him, like the voice in a train station announcing trains when you know your own has already gone, already long gone, and there is nothing to be done.
You don’t have to wait till Judgment Day to go to Hell, Ray had once told him. You can start right now if you want to.
He had been there a long time, maybe, when a voice spoke, very near him, he had heard no one approach:
“Mike, man.”
He turned. A wraithlike person was coming to touch him, a person entirely white, a human person. The remains of Mike Mucho nearly flew apart in terror, but the man’s touch when it came was annealing.
“Mike, can we talk, man? It’s important.”
Something caught Mike’s eye down at the broad hall’s other end, a mouse maybe crossing the floor or a bat awakened by the furnace’s heat and flitting at eye level down and into the lounge, no it was nothing. He thought of Beau Brachman’s mocking smile.
“What about?” he asked.
What those gathered in the lounge saw—ceasing to pray and rising—was a small man in an Afghan shepherd’s coat, long Jesus hair and a face like his too (they had seen it in prayer, all of them, not all the same face but always with this smile, this dread calm and beauty) who asked Ray too a quiet question.
“So why’m I here?” Val asked.
The moon was faintly gibbous now, and there was nothing else for Spofford and Val to look at. Beau had told her she was necessary to the thing he had devised with Rosie, but he couldn’t tell her why, and only from Beau would she accept such an assignment, on such terms; usually by this time of year she had already ceased to leave her rooms above the Faraway Lodge except for groceries and cartons of Kents when the supplies ran low. “Why am I here?”
“So I don’t go nuts,” Spofford said calmly.
Beau, Cliff and Rosie had gone up the hill to The Woods in Beau’s car, leaving Val and Spofford at the point where the road up Mount Whirligig became The Woods’s private way, and a big rustic but grand sign stood in the middle of the road, obstructing and welcoming at once: The Woods Center for Psychotherapy. Wait here, Beau had said, and rolled his window up.
Now Spofford and Val sat in the truck together looking at the sign. Brent Spofford had spent time in more than one such place in the bad years after Vietnam, places of compassion and help, so fearsome and repellent that he didn’t like being so close to one. The Beetle was beside the truck, but its heater was, of course, useless; Val’s breath was as white as cigarette smoke.
“You,” Val said. “Nimrod the mighty hunter. Ice water in your veins.”
“That’s what it feels like right now.” He turned up his collar. “Well. They also serve.”
He too did not understand what had been asked of him in Beau’s plan; there was nowhere else he would have wanted to be now but here, and he thought that if he were in some sense too late and had not done for Rosie and for Sam what he could have or should have done, then. Then what? He wouldn’t answer even to himself. He was no hunter; but he knew darkness, that was true, and he knew waiting in the cold for what you didn’t understand, or couldn’t quite believe in. He had done a lot of that this year.
He thought all that, and was quiet for a while; but then he pulled on his cap and opened the truck door. “I’m going to walk a ways up there,” he said.
“No. Beau said we wait here.”
“I can’t.”
“Listen,” Val said, starting to climb out too. “You’re not leaving me alone in this woods.”
“Just a few steps up the road,” Spofford said. “To anticipate what’s coming. I won’t get out of sight.”
But he hadn’t gone more than a few yards upward when he saw, and Val from inside the truck also saw, a person coming down the road: at first only a progressive distortion of the moonshadows of naked trees, but then definitely a person. Soon Spofford could hear footsteps on the dirt.
Two people: Rosie, with Sam in her arms wrapped in a sleeping bag.
Distances walked are
greater than distances driven; walked in the winter woods at night carrying a frightened five-year-old much greater; Rosie kept putting her feet one in front of the other without seeming to get any farther, expecting to see headlights or hear pursuit. As though entirely disconnected from her circumstances her brain went on buzzing along about its own concerns, going through its files; Rosie noticed it—she had nothing else to do—but she paid no attention. Plot, she thought: she’d sometimes wondered if lives, her life maybe, had plots in the same way books do, like the novels of Fellowes Kraft: courses that turn halfway or two-thirds to the end and proceed back through the events or conjunctions that formed them, reversing each one in turn, or most of them, to bring about an ending. How far can you go into the woods? Halfway: then you start coming out again. No, no plot: you never got halfway; astonishing things or nothing or new things would go on and on, never returning you to resolve or tie up the threads, tie up the beasts once let loose. You just went on.
How far? Way beyond here; beyond death maybe. She thought of Sam grown, grown old, dead, past death. She saw Spofford coming up the road toward her at last, at last.
“Cliff brought her to me. And told me to go on, not wait.”
Spofford took Sam from her, who cried aloud in delight to see him, climbed up to his neck to circle it with her arms cooing and laughing. Val laughed too. Spofford carried Sam to the truck, bundled her into the cab, and Rosie climbed in too.
“Val, you got to go on,” she said. “You go on in your car. Drive all over hell. If you see somebody sticking behind you, just keep driving. Then go home. Don’t go to Boney’s.”
“Where’s Beau?” Val said.
“Beau said to go on,” Rosie said, and now in the light of the truck’s instrument panel coming on Val could see she wept, or had wept. “He said he won’t be coming back. He said he’ll be all right, and don’t look for him. He won’t be coming back.”
None of them believed that, not even Rosie who had heard him say it. But they said nothing more. Spofford doused his own lights and turned around in the roadway, and by the moon’s light set off ahead of Val; at the first road he turned down again, not certain where it led but sure it led somewhere.
“Mike put up no fight?” he said at last. Rosie hadn’t spoken. “What happened in there?”
“We went up in Beau’s car,” Rosie said. “They wanted me to wait. They said they didn’t think it would be long. They told me to lock the car doors till I saw Cliff again. And Beau said.” She wiped her face with the flannel of Sam’s sleeping bag. “Beau said he could win her back, he said he thought he could, but might not be able to come back himself. That’s all. A while later Cliff came out with Sam.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
The small bundle of Sam between them on the seat. She put out an arm and made a soft gesture in the air. “Beau made the lights go out,” she said. “Do you know Beau?”
15
When the world ends it ends differently for each person then alive to see it, each person who chances to see it among all the other things to be seen and felt and understood around us all the time; and then very soon it begins again. And almost everyone persists, almost unchanged, into the new world, which is exactly like the old in almost every respect, or seems to be in the brief moment when the old world can still be remembered.
Almost everyone.
The creatures of the passage time do not persist, who only came into existence for the length of time the world wavered undecided over what shape it would take next; they dissolve or are dismembered like the Golem, or they vacate their bodies and leave only bones, like the beings of the night sky who have left only bright dotted lines to show where once they were. And there are those who cannot persist because the new age was made out of their substance; the world ended in their knowledge that it would, and the new world was born of their ignorance of what it could be.
When the West was endless, a sea reaching into the sunset, that was where the beasts and heroes of an old age went at last, stepping aboard a ship restless at anchor, the sign of Cancer painted on their sails. After it had all been swept into the unrecoverable again, Rosicrucian brothers fleeing, the Stone, the Cup, the Rose all blown away again like leaves (so Pierce on a May morning had once imagined the unwritten end of Kraft’s last book); under a fuliginous and pitchy sky (dawn due to come, but otherwhere and elsewhen than there and then) they would be gathered up, the heroes of that age that would already be growing imaginary, gathered up one by one by an old man, his beard white as milk and a star on his forehead. Gathered up. Come along now, for our time is past.
So now too.
Beau Brachman unfolded his map. No West any longer for the heroes and beings of the old age to depart into? There is always a West. There will be room enough in the 88 for them all, all those whose time is now past or passing: the huntress-spirit Bobby and her spirit-father Floyd, drawn out from the land they have gone into; and Plato Good-enough the more perfect gospel bearer; leontocephalic Retlaw O. Walter and his animal angels; Mal Cichy and his: the creatures of the passage time, some of whom will persist into the time to come but will not be who they have been, will not remember even what they did and suffered there, or where they journeyed. Overcoming seemingly insuperable ontological difficulties, Beau must separate those persons who will continue from the very same persons who will not, and then turn back with the ones who will not, away from the what-is-to-be, toward the what-has-been. There they will be hidden, unable to be discovered even by those who knew them, for when the passage time is over, there is no passage time; when the next age has settled and begun to unfold there are no “ages,” and those who never believed in them are right.
So they are for Adocentyn, white city in the West, in a country once more without a name. Come along now for our time is past. It may take long, it may be years still, but Beau will gather them all up, as leaves are gathered: as leaves, or pages, for as the generation of leaves so is that of men, and of the making of many books there really is “when all is said and done” an end.
16
On the green table of turned and painted wood in Pierce Moffett’s dining room in Littleville, atop a staggered pile of other books, humped slightly by a pencil he had closed up inside it marking the last page he had used, there lay a tall ledger bound in gray cloth with leatherette corners. Impressed on the cover of this book was a net of geometrical decoration, and the word RECORD in attenuated capitals. He had bought it on a spring day when he had first moved from New York City to Blackbury Jambs, at the little variety store and soda fountain on River Street.
The first pages record, or once did, the gleanings of his reading and notes to himself sometimes so cryptic as to be useless. Here he had put down his plan to arrange his book according to the twelve houses of the Zodiac, four Books, three Parts to a Book, Spring Summer Autumn Winter, Air Fire Water Earth. Astonishing the crust he was then capable of, the nerve. Here also he copied out possible epigraphs, for chapters, for parts, for the whole book. Pierce loved collecting these, seeming to himself to have done a good day’s work when he found an aptly gnomic one, and he was ready to write or rewrite a chapter if needed just to reveal its compact meaning, wrapped suggestively in italics. The last one entered was from Isaiah (though not found there, found quoted in some other book, which one? He would not remember):
Behold: the former things have come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them.
A bit farther on are the pages where Robbie is recorded; Rose too, more cryptically, needing fewer words, because present otherwise to Pierce, in her flesh, and he quite sure he could not ever forget what his rows of exclamation points and brief ejaculations signified, what acts, what initiations. He was already beginning to.
He had just returned from his mother’s house in Florida, had not unpacked, nor did he think he would. He shivered and jigged where he stood looking down at the open book, and from his nostrils cam
e plumes of condensing breath. The radiators of his little house were cold iron, the steam that should animate them unproduceable; the wood and paper he had fed into the stove had not yet heated even the stove itself, and the little potbelly would never get the whole house warm. His bedroom, beyond the frozen bath, was a Yukon where he would not go.
Lying misstacked beside the journal or record book on the green table was the pile of his writings, appearing to him as strange and unlikely there as the droppings of some huge intruding animal, moose or rhino. He felt a deep reluctance to touch any of it; if he picked up a page and brought it before his eyes and saw what it said, began to hear in his ear the voice he had laid down there speak, he might faint in dread and disgust, as though a corpse’s jaw were to begin to wag, its gray tongue to make words. That sudden strange spasm of production, he could see it now for what it had been, the unreal phosphorescence of an ignited firework spending itself, dying in its spending. A show, a logorrhea, always pretend and over now.
Well so what. He would get a job, pay back the money somehow. He was unfitted for much but maybe if he humbled himself he could use what he knew for someone’s benefit somewhere, teach high-school kids maybe to write a decent sentence or parse one. Almost he imagined himself in such a circumstance, his restless class, the chalkdust on his fingers, the diagrammed sentence on the greenboard; but he quelled it. No more imaginings, never ever. Do it first, then imagine it.
He was going to have to find somewhere else to live, too.
The long drought was over, and the land was deep in snow. The first big snowfall had come while Pierce was in Florida, he had watched it fall on the TV at his mother’s house; more was beginning to fall now, he could see it in the windows, a few messenger flakes come calling, the big army on the way. It would fall and fall, thicken into a great white pelt over all the county; in the spring it would melt from the mountains and feed the brooks and streams that fed the Shadow and the Blackbury, and the water meadows would flood and the vegetables grow. But it hadn’t fallen soon enough to swaddle Pierce’s water pipe; either that or the temperature had fallen sooner. His water, his alone in the neighborhood, was frozen fast.