Aegypt

by John Crowley

  ‘Aha.’ He was being led toward a frail and bent and seemingly very aged man who rested on his mallet by the lemonade.

  ‘And boy it’s a relief to find you,’ Rosie said.

  ‘Yes?’ The old gent far off raised his hand in greeting, and Pierce raised his too, crossing the velvet lawn and, at the same time, feeling himself step across the threshold of an invisible portal: a portal through which there would be no going back again. He didn’t know why or wherefore, but he knew that it was so, for it was a sensation he had felt before.

  FOUR

  The first time Rosie had seen it, in March wind and rain, she had felt warned away; it was like a hermit’s or a wizard’s house, lonely on a wooded knoll at the end of a long dirt driveway, almost a causeway, that curled through bare and rocky fields. And it was one of those houses too that, to the right eye on the right evening, seemed to have a face: the hooded eyes of a pair of shuttered windows on either side of the nose and mouth of a door and its fanlight, chin of curved steps, mustaches of shaggy balsam. Rosie thought of the phrase from the poem, Death’s dream kingdom, to which this seemed the gatehouse or keeper’s cottage. And beyond it the dark pines gestured, impenetrable, and the hills rose up.

  When Pierce first saw it, though, the weather had changed, and it was only a small mock-Tudor cottage, stucco and brick and timber, somehow unconvincing; the eaves were deep, and rounded like thatch, but they were of tarpaper shingle. The rosy-red chimneys and many chimney pots, the mullioned windows and rose trellises, all said 1920 and not 1520. The pines were still dark behind it, though, and the eyes still blind.

  He was to go in it, with Rosie, and see what he could see; make a general assessment, sort of, she wasn’t quite sure, but she was sure she had neither the competence nor the desire to do it alone. That was the favor. Putting in order the stuff they found, cataloguing it maybe, deciding to sell or not sell the books and stuff if they were worth it – that was the job. If he wanted it.

  ‘While it’s still light,’ Rosie said. ‘Just to check it out.’

  And so at evening (the croquet game having ended, Pierce coming in just barely last and much applauded) they climbed into the Bison with a couple of bottles of beer taken from the party offerings and tore away; Val called ironically after them, Rosie waved, the dogs in the back barked triumphantly.

  ‘I’ve put it off and put it off so long,’ Rosie said, cradling the beer between her thighs. ‘You really didn’t have anything planned?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Pierce. The huge car rolled terrifically down the roadway, as often as not taking more than its allotted half. ‘Isn’t it usual,’ he said, ‘to have a mirror to look out the back with?’ He pointed to the gob of stickum on the window where there was no mirror.

  ‘You’ll get used to our ways,’ Rosie said. She smiled sidewise at him. ‘So you think you’ll stay? Yeah? Settle down here, huh. Maybe get married.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ he said. ‘You married?’

  ‘No,’ she said, not quite truthfully. She had chosen to make no further reference to Spofford either. Not because she was hurt that he had in the end not come to play croquet, or called to explain. No. She just chose not to. No reason. No plan.

  ‘It was kinda sad, I guess,’ she said, as they went through the town of Stonykill. ‘Boney says he got almost completely deaf toward the end there. And poor. He was a dapper little guy, and he sort of never quite went to pieces, but the show got a little thin. That’s how I picture it.’

  ‘Hm,’ Pierce said, watching Stonykill pass: a mill town nearly depopulated, its mill in ruins – roofless walls pierced with ogee windows, which with the Gothic detail of chimney and clock tower suggested a ruined abbey, also unconvincing.

  ‘He used to walk into town and order his groceries,’ Rosie said, pointing to a general store, ‘and buy a bottle, and the papers. With Scotty.’

  ‘Scotty?’

  ‘The dog.’ She had turned off the main road, and sharply upward. ‘The saddest thing was when the dog died. That just about killed him. I think it was the saddest thing that ever happened to him. Oh, maybe when his mother, oh oops oops.’

  She had slammed on the power brakes, propelling Pierce into the dashboard. Craning her neck to look between the heads of the dogs who had come hurtling forward too, she backed up in a spray of gravel to a broad aluminum gate that, bolted into old stone gateposts, barred the drive. ‘Shot right past it,’ Rosie said, ‘but here we are.’

  She had been unable to find the key to the gate’s padlock, so they walked to the house along the dusty causeway. Crows making their way toward the pines cawed. The silver-gilt summer evening, daylight savings time, had seemingly ceased to pass away, and might last forever.

  ‘You want to see Scotty’s grave?’ she asked. ‘It’s around back.’

  ‘I thought you hadn’t been here before.’

  ‘I came once. I looked in the windows. I just didn’t dare go in.’

  They passed around the still and observant house to the back, for it was the kitchen door Rosie had a key to, a round-arched dutch door. ‘Listen I’m just so grateful for this,’ she said, struggling with the stiff lock.

  ‘No trouble,’ he said. ‘It’s interesting. And I’m sure I could think of a favor to ask you. In return.’

  ‘Anytime,’ she said, and the key turned.

  ‘Driving lessons.’ Not his type, no. But at least not married; at least not the girlfriend of his only friend in the county.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You can drive back.’

  She pushed open the door, and they went into the cold kitchen.

  ‘Okay,’ Rosie said when she had closed the door behind them. She felt an urge to take Pierce’s hand for safety in the stillness. ‘Okay.’

  From being long shut up, the house had the musty smell of a reclusive animal’s den, and the small light through the leaded windows made it the more cavelike. A bachelor had lived here, a bachelor once upon a time fussy about his arrangements and his surroundings but who had come to neglect them, growing used over time to the desuetude and no longer actually seeing it. The furniture was good and well chosen but soiled and even a little squalid, a lamp repaired with tape, an upturned umbrella stand to hold an ashtray by the big armchair. The animal denned here had curled up in that chair, it still held his shape; that pale path in the rug that led from chair to Magnavox to liquor cabinet had been worn by his slippered feet. Pierce felt embarrassed by the intimacy of it.

  ‘Books,’ Rosie said.

  They were everywhere, books in tall cases, books piled in corners, on chairs and beside them, open books laid atop other open books; atlases, encyclopedias, brightly covered novels, broad glossy art books. Pierce took the path of least resistance which Kraft had worked out amid the shoals and islands of them, toward a locked glass cabinet which held still more.

  He opened it with a key, which was in the lock.

  ‘We should be systematic, I suppose,’ he said. ‘More systematic.’

  Several of the items in this case were carefully sealed up in the plastic bags in which rarities are kept; one seemed to contain leaves of a medieval manuscript. The typed label glued to it read PICA TRIX.

  Pierce shut the door, suddenly shy. A man’s best books.

  ‘So,’ Rosie said. Her first apprehension had passed; she was beginning to feel oddly at home here, in this strange man’s house, with this stranger. Watching Pierce touch the books in the cabinet had made her think she had introduced two men who could not help but be friends. ‘You want to poke around down here? I’m going upstairs.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He stood alone for a moment in the sitting room. There were cigarette burns, but why, all along the windowsill by the easy chair. The whole house seemed darkened with smoke, like a Mohawk’s longhouse. He turned. The path led that way, through the asymmetrical and eccentric layout which the architect had hoped would be picturesque, and into a small, a surprisingly small room at the back of the house whose use was evident and
at whose threshold Pierce paused, even more shy than before.

  It was as crowded as a cockpit, and as thoughtfully fitted out. There was just enough room for the desk, not a desk even but just a broad surface built in not particularly well under the mullioned windows; and some tall bookcases fitted in beside the windows; and two gray steel filing cabinets labeled in a way Pierce couldn’t understand. There was an old electric heater, a stand-up hotel-lobby ashtray, an office lamp on an extensible arm which could be pulled out to shine down on that black Remington.

  There he would sit; he would look out those windows at the day. He would put on the glasses he was too vain to wear elsewhere, and light the thirteenth cig of the day, and prop it in the ashtray. He would roll into the typewriter a piece of paper . . . a piece of this paper: here convenient to hand was a ream box of that coarse yellow copy paper he would have used for initial drafts. Sphinx. Pierce opened it; the lid clung to the box beneath with the vacuum its pulling-off created; the box was nearly full of paper, but the paper wasn’t blank.

  It was all typed on, pages unnumbered but apparently consecutive, the draft of a novel. With both hands, a cake from the oven or a baby from its pram, Pierce lifted it out, and laid it on the desk before him. Out in the evening, a dog barked: Scotty?

  There was no title page, though the top page had what might be an epigraph typed on it.

  I learn that I am knight Parsifal.

  Parsifal learns that his quest for the Grail is the quest of all men for the Grail.

  The Grail is just then coming into being, brought forth by a labor of making in the whole world at once.

  With a great groan the world awakes for a moment as from slumber, to pass the Grail like a stone.

  it is over; Parsifal forgets what he set out to do, I forget that I am Parsifal, the world turns again and returns to sleep, and I am gone.

  This was attributed below (by a quick pencil-dash, as though in an afterthought, or a wild guess) to Novalis. Pierce wondered. He lifted the dry yellow sheet, fragile-seeming, its edges already browning. The second sheet was headed Prologue in Heaven, and its first words were these:

  There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, they kept pressing in one by one, always room for one more; they linked arms or clasped their hands behind them and looked out at the two mortals who looked in at them. They were all dressed in green, and wore fillets or wreaths of flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; all their eyes were strangely gay, and their names all began with A.

  A door thudded closed above his head, and Pierce looked up. Rosie’s feet crossed and then recrossed the floor above. Prying. Pierce riffled a little farther through the soft stack of sheets; he found chapter one. Once, the world was not as it has since become, it had a different history and a different future, and the laws that governed it were different too.

  At the bottom of this page was a name and a date he knew.

  A past moment of his child-being returned to him, when, where, the kind of soft surge of nameless body-memory that can be caused by a smell or a sound. He drew out Fellowes Kraft’s hard chair and sat in it; he put his elbow on the desk and his cheek in his hand, and began to read.

  FIVE

  Once, the world was not as it has since become.

  It once worked in a different way than it does now; it had a different history and a different future. Its very flesh and bones, the physical laws that governed it, were other than the ones we know.

  Whenever the world turns from what it has been into what it will be, and thus earns a different past and a different future, there is a brief moment when every possible kind of universe, all possible extensions of Being in space and time, are poised on the threshold of becoming, before all but one pass into nonexistence again; and the world is as it is and not as it was, and everyone in it forgets that it could ever be or has ever been other than the way it is now.

  And just as the world is thus turning from the what-has-been into the what-is-to-be, and all possibilities are just for a moment alight and one has not yet been chosen, then all the other similar disjunctures in time (for there have been several) can become visible too: like the switchbacks on a rising mountain road suddenly becoming visible to a climber just at the moment when his car swings far out on the apex of the turn he is taking, and he sees where he has come from: and sees a blue sedan far down there climbing too.

  This is the story of one such moment, and about those men and women and others who recognized it. They are all now dead, or asleep, or do not figure in the history which the world has come to have; and their moment appears quite otherwise to us than it did to them. Today I pick up a book, a history of those times, and what it tells me doesn’t surprise me; however these people misconceived their world (and apparently they misconceived it wildly, peopling it with gods and monsters, with non-existent lands having imaginary histories, with metals and plants and animals ditto, having powers ditto), they really dwelt in the same world I dwell in: it had these animals and plants which I know, this sun and these stars, and not other ones.

  And yet, in the interstices of such a history book, between the pages, I discern the shadow of another story and another world, symmetrical to it, and yet as different from it as dream is from waking.

  This world; this story.

  In the year 1564, a young Neapolitan of the ancient town of Nola, making the great mistake of his life, entered the Dominican monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples. It wasn’t, of course, entirely his decision; his father was a retired soldier, landless and not rich, and the boy was brilliant (so the parish priest said) and a little wild, so there was really nothing for him but the Church. Still, the Dominicans, though the great and powerful order of the Kingdom of Naples, were not the order for this boy. Perhaps, if he had joined some smaller, less potent order, some hardworking Minorite or easygoing Benedictine or even cloistered Capuchin monastery, he might have been left alone to dream his dreams. If he had made his way into the Company of Jesus, they would have found some way to turn his pride and his strange gifts and even his distaste for Christianity to their own ends; the Company was well able to do that.

  But the Dominicans: the order of Preacher-Friars, whose self-appointed mission was to keep pure the Church and the Church’s doctrines; the Dominicans, who punningly called themselves Domini canes, the running dogs of the Lord, black-and-white hounds eager to bring down heresy like prey: that was not the order in which to incarcerate young Filippo Bruno, given the name Giordano when he put on his robe of black and white. The order didn’t encourage independent thinking; it would never forgive the Nolan boy for turning his back on them, and carrying his heresies into the world; and in the end they would have him forever for their own, tied to a stake in Rome.

  But there, for the moment, he is, in the monastery of San Domenico, going slowly up the right-hand aisle of the monastery church, avoiding the loiterers and the bravos and interrupting assignations. He stops at each side chapel, each statue niche, each architectural division, and stands before it long in thought before passing on to the next. What is he up to?

  He is memorizing the church of San Domenico, piece by piece, for use as an interior storehouse or filing cabinet for remembering other things.

  A hundred years before, books had begun to be made by the new ars artificialiter scribendi, the art of writing artificially, printing. Thousands of books have already been printed. But in the great monasteries of the Dominicans the age of the scribe, the age of the manuscript, the age of memory, is not over. Printed handbooks on how to preach sermons are appearing, printed breviaries and books of homilies and Scripture quotations for priests to use, but the order of Preacher-Friars is still inducting its novices into the mysteries of memory arts as old as thought.

  Take a large and complex public space – a church, for instance – and commit it to memory, every side altar, chapel, statue niche, and arch. Mark every fifth such space, in your imagination, with a hand; mark every tenth space with an X. Now your
memory house is prepared. To use it, say to remember the contents of a sermon you are to give, or a manuscript of canon law, or a confessor’s manual of sins and their appropriate punishments, you must cast vivid images in your imagination to represent the different ideas you wish to remember. Aristotle says clearly, and St. Thomas follows him, that corporeal similitudes excite the memory more easily than the naked notions themselves. If your sermon then is the Seven Deadly Sins, cast them as evil ugly characters, displaying appropriate signs of their qualities (from Envy’s mouth a loathsome viper protrudes instead of a tongue; Anger’s eyes flame red and he is brutally armed). Then have your characters stand in their places in order around the church or city square or palace you have in memory, and as you speak each one in turn will prompt you, Now speak of me, Now speak of me.

  This was how the Scholastics had expanded and elaborated a rhetorician’s trick mentioned briefly by Cicero and Quintillian; and by the time Brother Giordano was committing the church of San Domenico to memory not even its endlessly exfoliating spaces were sufficient to hold what he was given to remember. Patristics, moral theology, summulae logicales, hagiography, the contents of compendia, encyclopædias and bestiaries, the same tale in a thousand guises – the monkish passion for collection, dissection, division, and multiplication of notions filled the cathedrals of memory to overflowing just as those of stone were filled with gargoyles, saints of glass, passions, fonts, tombs, and judgments.

  And as the amount to be remembered grew, so the means to remember it by expanded, divided, multiplied. Brother Giordano committed endless new rules of memory to memory. He memorized a system for remembering, not just notions and ideas, but the very words of the text, by substituting other words for them: so that the mental image of a city (Roma) reminds the speaker to speak next of love (amor). More: there were rules for remembering, not the words, but the letters of the words, an image for each, some corporeal similitude, so that the word Nola was formed in the Nolan’s mind by an arch, a millstone, a hoe, and a pair of compasses, and the word indivisibilitate by a whole atticful of junk. Giordano found he could do such tricks with ease; he composed a bird alphabet of his own, anser the goose for A, bubo the owl for B, and so on, and practiced with it until he could make In principio erat Verbum flutter and settle on his shoulders like a flock. The only difficulty he had was in expelling what he had once put in place, and ridding the church of San Domenico Maggiore of its birds, hoes, shovels, ladders, allegorical figures with snakes for tongues, gesturing captains, anchors, swords, saints, and beasts.