Aegypt

by John Crowley

  He had come back, after all. But now he was to leave again.

  At dinner he made his announcements, beginning with the sale of his book, for a figure he inflated somewhat. Axel responded with awed congratulations; there was no higher vocation he knew of than to write; he himself, for all his wide and random learning, found it enormously difficult to express himself on paper, or to compose so much as a letter. Then came the decision to leave Barnabas. That drew mixed reviews; teaching ranked only just below authorship on Axel’s scale. Pierce assured him that, if he ever had to go back, Barnabas would be only too eager to take him back, and that anyway there were other schools, in other places.

  ‘Other places,’ Axel said, ‘Oh, well. Other places, yes.’

  The decision to leave New York entirely fell heavily. Axel was shocked and dismayed, his rubber face falling dreadfully. At first he chose to regard it as a bizarre speculation merely, a wild thought of his son’s, which gentle contempt would help cause to pass; it was ludicrous, if he were embarking on a book, to forgo the greatest libraries, galleries, archives in America and languish in the sticks (here Axel gave impressions of the country drawn perhaps from Marjorie Main pictures, goat-bearded yokels astonished by book-larnin’). But Pierce as gently insisted. And at last Axel grew quiet.

  ‘It’s not as though I see you all that much,’ he said. ‘Now I won’t see you at all.’

  ‘That’s not so,’ Pierce said. ‘Hell, it’s not much more trouble to get from there to here as to get here from Manhattan. In real time and effort. I’ll be back. Often. To use those libraries. We won’t lose touch.’

  Axel remained uncomforted. ‘Oh no, Pierce, no. Oh where’s that waiter, Moselblümchen. Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new. Pour, pour.’

  There is a way in which even the most self-preoccupied of eccentrics can know themselves to be eccentrics, know that a set of commonplace connections between themselves and the world has been severed, or was never made. Axel knew it. He knew that his channels of communication were dim, and clogged with static, and he mourned his isolation. His son’s return to the city as an adult who found Axel interesting and amusing, and not as a child who was puzzled and embarrassed by him, had been an unexpected gift for Axel, unexpected and precious. He had exploited it hard, bending Pierce’s ear in long rambling phone calls, insisting on afternoons for museum visits and organ recitals, undeterred by strings of refusals. Pierce meant a lot to him: he said so frequently; less as a son – for all his seriousness about the role, he found a paternal attitude impossible to sustain for long – than as an understanding, or at least patient, friend.

  Pierce tried to be patient. He tried to make room for Axel in his life, a life into which Axel fit only with difficulty. He found an exasperated fascination in the fact that this strange man – a whole head shorter than himself, barrel-shaped, with delicate tapering hands and feet he was proud of – was his father; he didn’t remember him being this sort of person at all when he was a child. The two of them together on an outing like this reminded Pierce sometimes of that mild little boy and the insect-winged cigar-smoking fairy godfather who used to accompany him in the funny papers, what was his name again, McFeeley, Gilhooley, he never remembered to ask Axel. Axel would know, for sure.

  ‘Take me with you,’ Axel pleaded, mostly in jest. ‘On your back like old Anchises.’

  ‘You can visit. I’m sure I’ll have a spare room. Or anyway a sun porch.’

  ‘A sun porch! A sun porch. And how do you get to this place, and back? There are buses, I suppose. Buses.’

  ‘There are buses. And I’ll eventually get a car, I guess.’

  ‘A car!’

  Pierce’s single attempt at fiction in his grown-up life had been a portrait of his father. He’d wanted to call it ‘The Man Who Loved Western Civilization,’ and he worked for some time over it, but his transcriptions of Axel’s table talk rang false, they made Axel sound like a pompous autodidact and a phony, they were empty of Axel’s passion and engagement. And the lurid details of his life, when written down, sounded unbelievable, totally fictional – just as they did when Axel, pure of heart and nearly incapable of a deliberate falsehood, related them to Pierce.

  Pierce had to suppose it was a real world Axel lived in, for all that it was not Pierce’s. For a time after Pierce and Winnie had gone off to live in Kentucky and before the TV money put Axel back on his small feet again, there had been some years of near-destitution, on the streets, on the bum; and there had been times since, too, when Axel had charitably visited or awkwardly slipped for a while back into a halfworld populated by tough but kindhearted ex-Navy chiefs, by nonagenarian Broadway actresses expiring among their souvenirs in low hotels, by scholarly Jews in dusty bookshops who perceived Axel’s true qualities beneath the shabby clothes; by worker-priests he admired, manly and clean, and smarmy Salvation Army hypocrites to whose tender mercies (Axel’s words) he had once been subjected.

  ‘Tender mercies,’ Axel would repeat, with a touch of Ming. ‘Tender mercies.’

  For all Pierce knew, all of them, and the plots they acted out, were just as Axel described them. For all he knew, the men of the salvage operation Axel was now involved in really did run their hands through their hair and shuffle their feet shyly, as Axel described them doing; perhaps they really did say things like, ‘When a feller’s down he needs a friend to pick him up,’ and in general act like characters out of Boys’ Town not much grown up. Anyway Axel was far less innocent about his city than the dreamy scenarios he spoke in sometimes suggested; less innocent in certain ways than Pierce. He could still shock his son with what went on after hours in the back rooms of working-class bars frequented by cops and firemen. Pierce had learned a lot from Axel in recent years, and not only within their shared interest in Western Civ; well outside it, too.

  And so, though Axel’s long and impassioned wooing of him had been often irritating; and though it was in general impossible to have actual conversation with someone whose stream of consciousness scoured the banks and overflowed the channels of any temporary subject; and though all of Pierce’s friends and lovers had found Axel pretty well unbearable for anything longer than a brief visit, still Axel held Pierce’s attention. On the whole he genuinely liked his father, which he found, sometimes, strangest of all. When late at night, ‘exalted’ as Axel said by wine, weaving distractedly through the Brooklyn streets he knew and loved, Axel would sing Thomas Moore songs in a sweet clear tenor, Pierce even loved him.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Axel said, this Christmas full of misgivings, ‘tomorrow to fresh fields, and pastures new.’

  ‘Fresh woods,’ Pierce said. ‘It’s fresh woods.’

  ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods. And pastures new.’ They had come along, after dinner, arm in arm, to the Brooklyn Heights embankment, to look out over Manhattan – the final part of their recently evolved Christmas ritual, every part of which had become instantly precious to Axel. Here, usually, they observed poor Hart Crane’s apartment, now owned, to Axel’s annual disgust, by the Jehovah’s Witnesses; usually, Axel expatiated on the skyline, spoiled, he thought, by the two titanic cigarette cartons far downtown, they every year offended him anew. Tonight he seemed not to see them; he had drunk more than usual, Pierce unable to deny him a second bottle. ‘Oh Pierce. You must promise me. That you won’t abandon me.’

  ‘Oh, now Axel.’

  ‘You mustn’t abandon me.’ With a dreadful hollow tone. And then mitigating it with forced insouciance: ‘Your old dad.’ He took Pierce’s arm again. ‘You wouldn’t cast off your old dad, would you? Would you? We’re buddies, aren’t we, Pierce? More than father and son. We’re buddies, aren’t we?’

  ‘Sure we are. Of course we are. I’m telling you, it’s not that far.’

  ‘And so the youth arose,’ Axel said, with a sweep of his arm, ‘and twitched his mantle blue.’ He laughed and camped the gesture: ‘Twitched his mantle blue. Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new. Oh see me home, Pierce, just see me home
, it’s not that far. I beg you.’

  He did love his father; he was a burden but Pierce was not very often truly ashamed or wearied by him; and yet he did wonder, as he rode the train back across the river toward Manhattan, the city’s fiery parcels all undone, how much having Axel for a father had to do with that vow he had felt himself compelled to make on the night of his birthday: did wonder (cold hands thrust deep into his peacoat pockets, cold heart just for the moment empty) how much the effects of that strange and unhealing wound which Axel had somehow long ago sustained had descended to him, and how much it might have to do with the wound that Pierce had begun to know was open and unhealed within himself.

  Well. Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

  And so in the spring Spofford came down from the Faraway Hills in his old truck, and he and Pierce loaded it with the contents of Pierce’s apartment, except for three dozen cartons of books sent separately. Spofford’s truck was an open pickup, and they both looked anxiously at the sky as they loaded, but the day stayed fine. They hung in the elevator the brown rugs the super insisted they use, and in this padded cell, two busy madmen, they rose and fell accompanied by Pierce’s desk, typewriter, bed, dishes, pictures, bibelots, and an ornate broad mirror heavy as a tombstone, all of it looking misplaced and somehow tawdry and ashamed when taken out into the spring sun.

  Pierce had made all his goodbyes, dinner the night before with the Sphinx the most lavish of them. She had got herself, she said, a tiny old-law apartment, one of the few still left in a chic neighborhood uptown where some of her old customers lived; she wasn’t yet able to afford electricity, lived by candlelight and ate out, and wanted no telephone. She had begun to make a kind of living going around to thrift shops and rummage sales, acquiring knickknacks, printed souvenir scarves and hand-painted ties, costume jewelry, ephemera, ‘art drecko’ she said, laughing and lighting another cigarette. Her resale prices of these items were inflated to reflect the sureness of her taste and the skill of her hunting; she hawked them to acquaintances, often those same old customers of hers, their desires for such stuff were strong and their wallets were full. A floating antique store.

  Maybe (he said, at the brief evening’s end, exhausted for some reason but compelled to go on, no doubt for the same reason) he could see this little candlelit place. His own place being in such chaos tonight . . .

  No, she didn’t think he could. It was a dump really. Maybe when she got it fixed up.

  ‘I’ll be gone by then.’

  ‘You’ll be back. And I’ll come visit you.’

  Pierce, imagining her high heels on his front walk, her perfume beside the Blackbury, thought that unlikely. And yet it was probably no more unlikely than that he himself should have done – or come a few quick steps from the verge of doing – what he was about to do: move. He had gone one recent evening full of spring odors on a walk down University Place and around Gramercy Park, peering into the locked park where the grass was green and the tulips opening. He walked the park’s perimeter, looking into the tall windows of spacious apartments that bordered it, paneled places he had always coveted. He thought: Maybe if a place like that one, or that one, were mine; a key to this park; enough income to support it – then maybe I’d stay. The Sphinx remote uptown notwithstanding. ‘Make me an offer,’ he said to the city. But it made none, and neither did the Sphinx, she only kissed him smokily and without tears and told him to write.

  And now he was packed and departing.

  Never liked this place anyway, he thought, looking around his bared apartment, bleak-looking with Pierce’s life taken out of it, the oblong ghosts of his pictures on the walls, the few good and many strange things that had befallen him here either swept away with other detritus or packed to be taken. He shut the door on it forever, and clumped away down the corridor in his new country boots, carrying the last of his belongings, a tall red kitchen chair. This item crowned the pile in the truck, and with it waggling unsteadily above, he and Spofford rattled out of town, looking, Pierce supposed, like Okies fleeing a drought. And on the next morning Pierce stood on his sun porch watching dark and silver lights come and go in the Blackbury River beyond, his hands thrust into the sleeves of his sweater and an unbidden grin on his face.

  Okay, he said, not exactly aloud, speaking to all powers whatever that might bear his three wishes in their hands; okay, come now. Come now, ’cause I’ve made my own fortune, I’ve saved myself, I can make it from here: come now so I can turn you down. ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘right now,’ for he did not know how long this moment or this strength would last.

  NINE

  At about that hour, Beau Brachman across the street came out onto his balcony in the sun, the first morning sun strong enough to tempt him out; and he lay on the little platform he had built there a prayer rug. Moving with thoughtful care, but feeling inwardly a little of the glee of a journey undertaken after long confinement, he mounted the platform and folded his legs beneath him. He placed his hands on his knees, as on a belvedere or the rail of a ship. He looked outward, over the roofs of town and the sparkle of the river.

  He would go only a short excursion, he thought, being out of practice; would only go out to see, like the woodchucks also now newly abroad, like the hawks returning, what had become of the world since he had last got a clear look at it.

  Twenty minutes passed, twenty minutes measured by the clock in a teapot’s belly that stood on a kitchen shelf at Val’s Faraway Lodge, twenty minutes on Boney Rasmussen’s selfwinding Longines with the lizard band.

  Turning, carefully, on the somewhat unsteady prayer rug, Beau aloft looked back down at his abandoned self still sitting firmly on its prayer rug on its balcony. He turned away then, and looked over the northwestern mountains, which from his balcony facing the river he had been unable to see: Mount Merrow, clad in birch woods; Mount Whirligig, with a girt castle on its top; Mount Randa chiefest of them all. Turning further that way, Beau saw the Monument on its brow, like a unicorn’s horn.

  Upward. The valleys of the Faraways, seamed with roads and rivers, all pale in the spring sunlight, the roads still dusty with winter’s sand and salt and the meadows puce and lifeless. A few cattle abroad: there, he noted without surprise, was Rosie Mucho’s great Bison station wagon, lumbering toward town and an appointment with a lawyer or a judge; there, a little more unusual, was Val’s Beetle, out and about, nearly meeting Rosie at the Fair Prospect bridge. A dozen other trucks and cars were revealed as up we go, a little red convertible, a rattletrap pickup. Beau lifted his eyes: he was ascending the hills.

  Up high here the air was clearer, the center of the sky darkening to cobalt as the pellucid sky above a desert does, and the reticulated mountain ridges were sharply cut and clear to him. Mount Merrow where the rich lived, in glass houses on steep slopes, looking outward; taller Mount Whirligig, in motion now – it was apparent to Beau as he approached it – like a clockwork toy. The castle on its summit came and went, as though it were two-dimensional, invisible when edge-on, visible face-front, visible, invisible. Two-dimensional or not, though, it had a dark within, and Beau sensed a kind of forcing going on in there, a forcing as of a winter bulb: as though a foetus were being painfully articulated in the darkness limb by limb. Beau felt a sharp disgust. What was it? This far from earth, Beau apprehended not sights so much as meanings, imports, symmetries and discordances, and he apprehended them the more intensely the further away he got and the darker the air grew: as though he went progressively blind, and meaning, like a flavor he tasted, grew that much stronger to his senses.

  Mount Randa then, its bald brow and its wrinkled face bearded in trees patiently waiting to green. Hawks banked restlessly in the troubled air around the cliffy cheeks. On the slopes Beau could see, making his way up a steep track as of an old tear, a pilgrim, amazed with weariness and longing for the summit: toward which Beau himself now spiralled lazily, hawks falling beneath his flight-path. The summit. And – as the hills bent their gaze on him, as the
sky took notice – Beau sped toward the Monument.

  What it was, or seemed to be as Beau came closer to it, was a stone pediment, carved with crowded letters; and on the pediment a stone elephant, inelegant and strong, who lifted his trunk and bent his thick neck to squint at Beau approaching; and on the elephant’s back an obelisk, cut with hieroglyphs, bird animal and thing. Strong elephant! As Beau circled him, the obelisk swung beneath Beau, a pointer, a gnomon; he hovered there until the Monument was still, and then, with delicious vertigo, he felt himself spilled from his rug.

  His sure, bare foot, extended, touched the tip of the obelisk; his knee bent, and with all his strength he vaulted upward, elephant and obelisk shifting and straining behind him in compensation, nearly toppling but not toppling. Beau shot a vast distance into the darkening sky.

  Stars were visible. And he was visible to them.

  His vault had pushed him to escape velocity, and now he traveled with undiminishing speed; but there was not, or did not seem to be, an infinity to travel in. The vastness resolved itself into nested spheres, like the wings and drops of an old-fashioned stageset, containing him and constraining his flight. There were spheres of air and fire; beyond them the spheres of the seven Archons coming and going like mechanical racehorses in their tracks. Beyond them, arm in arm in arm like paper cutouts, twelve vast figures girdled the topless and bottomless heavens, Æons, six of them below the horizon and six above, the six who had seen him leap. They really looked down on him now: and their eyes were not kind.