Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

by John Crowley

In the spring, discharged from the hospital, Hare was given a paper with an address on it, an address in an older part of the city where he had used to go often, to look at buildings.

  It was strange to be once again alone on the street. Not often in the last months had he been alone at all, and never on the street. Except that a thin rain was falling, cold and hastening, he might have wandered for a while through the squares and alleys of the quarter; they seemed at once new and familiar to him, and the sensation of walking there was both vivifying and sad: the mixture of emotions made him feel painfully alive, and he wondered how long it would persist. But he turned up his collar and went on to the building to which he had been sent.

  It was an old one, and one he remembered. He had stood before it more than once, feeling with his sight and his sense of proportion the curves of its stonework and its iron window grilles. He had used to look in through the barred glass doors, down a long marble-floored hall bordered by columns, but he had never dared to go in. He went in now. There was an aged doorkeeper who took Hare’s paper, made a remark about the rain and shuddered as though it were he who was wet and not Hare, and entered something on the terminal before him. He waited for a reply in the display, and when he had it, he left the little cage or box that was his station and led Hare down the long hall, past the columns pinkish and blue-veined like the legs of old people, to a tall open door. He waited for Hare to enter, then closed the door behind him.

  The big room was empty. There was only a workstation—a desk and two chairs, a terminal, a pile of printouts and other papers—which stood in the center of the floor, or not quite in the center, as though whoever had placed them there hadn’t known that the room had a center. It did, though: it was clearly marked by the radiating diamonds of the parquet floor; it was plumb with the central diamond-shaped pendant of the chandelier, a multitiered forest of swagged lights and what seemed to be strings of jewels, that hung from the center of the ceiling above. Hare looked up at it as he crossed the floor to the desk; it swung around its axis, or rather seemed to swing, as he moved. He sat down in the chair beside the desk, crossed his hands in his lap, and waited. He didn’t know who it was he waited for, or what disposition would be made of him now; he only supposed, with a sort of automatic humility he hardly even recognized in himself any longer, that whomever he waited for would be wiser than himself, would be able to see him clearly and know what was best.

  That was one thing he had come to learn, over the last months—not how wise others were, but how unwise he was himself. He had learned to trust those who trusted in the world in a way that he could not: that way he hoped he might once again come to trust in the world himself. And even if he could not—even if there remained in him always some fatal mistrust—still there was no better thing that he could do: nothing else at all that he could do.

  It hadn’t been easy, learning that.

  In the first weeks of his stay in the hospital, he had mostly been aware of the difference between himself and others, both those in difficulties like himself, and those attempting to help them. It seemed to him important, desperately important, to make those differences clear: to explain what it was in him that made him unlike others and unable to be as they were. It frightened him to be among so many who were bewildered, hurt, angry, or sad, not because he was not all these things himself, but because he felt himself to be unimaginable to them; and it frightened him more to be with the staff, because he could not define for them, in any way that he felt they could truly grasp, the perplexities within himself that made him unlike them: made him unwise, unwhole, divided and in pain, as they were not.

  They were not even cadre for the most part, the staff, not anyway in the wing to which Hare was moved after a series of tests had determined there were no metabolic disorders at the root of his condition. (He had briefly hoped that some such disorder would be discovered, to relieve him of the awful burden of finding the explanation elsewhere. But there was none.) In his wing were those whose troubles were unanalyzable, and the staff there were only kind, only experienced and sympathetic, only set to watch the disorders take their course, and give what common help they could. And how could Hare explain to them—heavy women who nodded and patted his hand, male nurses who spoke in banalities—about act-field theory, its unchallengeable truth, its danger to him?

  He knew so much. In his long, long silences his own explanations were his only occupation, and seemed to him all that sustained him over an abyss. He knew, with great precision, what stood between him and happiness; he knew quite well that he did not need to feel as he did, that just beyond his feelings, just past his really quite simple and explainable error, lay the real world, which he could reach if he could only stop making this error, or even stop explaining the error to himself: but when he tried to say these things aloud, to explain this predicament to the nurses and the staff or the other patients, the explanations hurt him; and the real world, as he talked, grew more fearsomely remote.

  The explanations broke, in the end, like a fever. Then there were tears, and shameful incontinence of grief, and helplessness; no help at all but kindness and attention, the help of those who knew how little help they could be.

  He had not believed it was possible to fall out of the universe: yet he had experienced exactly that. He had fallen out of the universe into explanations of why he could not fall out of the universe. And he had to reach for the hands of those who could not even envisage such a thing and be drawn back in. In the common rooms, with their old furniture worn and stained as though by the sorrows of those who used it; in the kitchens, where he clumsily helped with meals; in the winter yards and the crossing paths of the grounds, he would be swept by waves of healing integration, unwilled, as though some severed part of him were drawing back within him: waves of feeling that left him weak and still afraid of the strange things he contained. When those diminished, too, like the terrible explanations, then he was empty. He looked around himself at the world and saw that though he did not know it, it knew him. He ate its nourishing breakfasts, blinked in its watery winter sunlight, joined its talk tentatively, washed its dishes with humility. He could not fall out of it.

  Willy, who had visited him weekly, bringing good food and (what Hare hungered more for) stories of the people Willy knew, came on a spring day to take him away. In his dossier, encoded now with thousands of others in the hospital’s records, the course of his illness and its resolution were charted, he knew; and when the magnitude of his difference from others was accounted for, his absolute otherness factored in, they were exactly as act-field theory predicted. It was all right.

  All right. He sat, hands folded in his lap, waiting beneath the chandelier.

  When a dark woman in Blue of about his own age came through the far double doors, Hare stood. The woman waved to him apologetically across the vast room, picking up a folder from a cart of them by the door; smiling, she crossed the geometrical floor to where Hare stood.

  Among cadre there was no rank, and therefore no marks of rank beyond the simple clothes of Blue they all wore. But subtle distinguishing marks had nevertheless arisen; Hare knew that the cluster of pens in this woman’s pocket meant heavy responsibilities. There was more, though. In the last months the faces of those he met were often charged for him with intense but imaginary familiarity; and yet about this woman he was sure.

  “I know you,” he said.

  She raised her eyebrows. She didn’t know him.

  “Yes,” Hare said. “Years ago.” He named the study camp where in the summer of Hare’s seventeenth year they had known each other, studied together, hiked together. As he spoke, he remembered the summer darkness of the common room where late at night they had talked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, I remember now. A long time ago.” She smiled, remembering. “A long time.”

  She had opened Hare’s dossier, and now drew out the drawings of buildings and the calculations of their geometries that Hare had made. The last time Hare had se
en them was when he stood before the committee: so long ago.

  “Do you know why you do this?” she asked. “Copy these things?”

  “No. I like them, I like to look at such places, old places and wonder how they came to be; what the people thought and felt who built them.”

  “History,” she suggested. “The past.”

  “Yes.”

  “That interests us, too,” she said. “My project, I mean.”

  “Oh,” said Hare, not knowing what else to say. “Is yours…is it an Applications project?”

  She smiled. “No,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  She rested her cheek again in the palm of her hand. “I think,” she said, “that long ago there was another time like this one, when people lived in places whose history they didn’t know, whose history they had forgotten. They had lost history because they knew so little. They called that ignorance ‘darkness,’ and when they began to relearn history, they called that knowledge ‘light.’ But we’re in darkness, too. Not because we know so little, but because we know so much. It’s not different.”

  “Knowing everything is not different from knowing nothing,” Hare said. “Is that what you mean?”

  She quoted an old principle of act theorists, one that had become an adage of Revolutionary cadre: “We seek no solution—only knowledge of the problem.”

  She turned to the drawing of the building opposite the cathedral, whose lettering Hare had copied out. Her finger touched the words.

  “Do you know what they mean?” Hare asked her.

  “No,” she said. She folded her hands before her. “When you went out to do these things…”

  “It was always on my own time,” Hare said. “On free days.”

  “Did you tell anyone where you were going, what you were doing?”

  “Not usually. Not all of it.” Hare stared down at the hat he held in his hands. He felt, like an old secret wound, his taste for history, like a peasant child’s taste for eating dirt.

  “It must have seemed,” she said, “that you were leading a double life. Did you feel that way? That you were leading a double life?”

  At her words hot tears rose to Hare’s eyes with awful quickness, and he felt for a moment that he would sob, as he had sobbed so often at just such small remarks that winter. A double life: a life inside, and another outside, between which Hare was pulled apart.

  “Will you go on doing this, now?” the woman asked gently, her eyes watching Hare’s evident distress.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He looked up. “I want to help,” he said. “I want to do useful work. I know that I haven’t been much help for a long time, but I’m stronger now. I want to be of use.”

  She turned over the picture, and pushed the pile toward Hare. For a moment he didn’t understand that she was giving them back to him. “I think your project made a mistake when they removed you from the work you’d been doing,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “I think the better thing would have been to release you from cadre altogether.” She rested her cheek again in the palm of her hand. “What do you think?”

  A storm of shame arose within Hare, a storm that made the dreadful imploding roar he had first heard in the truck returning from the country. It broke so quickly over him that he had to suppose he had all along been expecting precisely these words to be said to him. Through its great noise he could not hear his own answer: “I’ll do as you think best,” he said. “Whatever you think.”

  “Go to the people,” the woman said.

  Hare covered his eyes. “I’m not good for much,” he said. “There’s not much I know how to do.”

  “What I suggest is this,” the woman said. “You’ll get a ration card and find a place in the city. Then—go on with what you did. I mean the drawings and the investigations you liked. History.”

  Hare listened.

  “If you would,” she said, “I would like you to come back here, now and then, and talk to me—to my project—about what you are doing.”

  “That would be all right?” Hare said. “I could do that?”

  “You can do as you like,” she said. “You can go back to your project, too.”

  “No,” Hare said, feeling a strange warmth at his breastbone. “No. I’ll do as you say.”

  “I don’t know what we can learn, but I think…well.” Her humorous eyes regarded him steadily. “Anyway there’s probably nothing better for you to do. You are an oddity, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Hare said.

  “Did you think the Revolution was not large enough to contain you?”

  “No,” Hare said, “I didn’t think so.” But he had: he understood at that moment that he had thought exactly that.

  She took a card from his dossier and handed it to him. “Take this to Applications, in the old cathedral,” she said. “They’ll tell you what to do. Come back here when you like. I’ll be glad to see you.”

  She stood; Hare’s interview was evidently at an end. He twisted the hat he held in his hands.

  “I was remembering,” he said, “something you told me. That summer, when we met at study camp.” He felt his heart fill with a familiar apprehension. “You said…We were talking about act-field theory, which I was working on then, and you told me you believed that there was no such thing really as act-field theory at all; but that so long as everybody believed there was such a theory, and cadre believed that it worked, then it did work.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” Dreadful as the danger Hare felt himself to be in, narrow as the ledge he stood on, he had to ask: “Do you still think that?”

  “No,” she said. Her smile hadn’t passed, but it had changed, as though she shared not only a memory with Hare, but a joke as well; or a secret. “No, I don’t.”

  Hare walked through the old quarter of the city, not feeling the thin rain soaking through his shoes. He seemed to himself to be naked but warm, to be already not in Blue, and walking in the world for the first time, as though his feet created it step by step: the world he had fallen out of, the world into which Eva and Boy had gone. He laughed, in fear and hunger for it.

  His desire was not what he had thought it to be: his desire for history, for Eva, for Boy, none of it was what he thought it was. He knew nothing, nothing of the world he walked in; but he might learn.

  What a strange, what a foolish error for him to have made, Hare thought. If he were called again before the local committee to make restitution for the trouble he had caused, he could tell them: he had come, without knowing it, to see the world in hierarchies. He, with his years of training, his excellent education, had built hierarchies in his heart. He had not known it until he had been asked to resign from cadre and had been overcome with shame: as though to be in Blue were better than to be not in Blue, to be cadre better than to be among the people.

  He had believed act-field theory governed the act-field, and not the reverse. But the act-field governed. In the computers of the Revolution, as in the corridors and hollows of Hare’s heart and mind, there was only a virtuality, after all; a virtual real-world, and not a whole one. He was inside the act-field and not it inside him; so was the Revolution, and all its work.

  “Oh, I see,” he said aloud. He had stopped walking. At the end of the street the great square opened, crossed by a single person on foot, a single bicycle. The obscure huge buildings that bordered it were soft in the misty rain. Hare, for the first time, yet not as though for the first time, but as though coming to remember some commonplace thing of enormous, of vital, importance, saw the act-field. Still; calm; with no face, not kind, not cruel, not anything. He reached out with his mind to touch it, but everywhere he touched it, it parted, showing him spaces, interstices, emptinesses formed by the edge of himself facing the sparkling edge of the world.

  Hare cried out, as though stung. He felt the sensation of an answer, a sensation like a physical shock. The answer was an answer to a figure-ground problem, the simples
t figure-ground problem, a problem solved long ago. The answer was an emptiness, formed by the edges of two questions: but the sensation of the answer was like a bit of light, a point of light lit, flaring fiercely and burning out: a physical sensation, a brief coincidence, an act.

  Then it was gone. Hare set out across the square.

  MISSOLONGHI 1824

  THE ENGLISH MILORD took his hands from the boy’s shoulders, discomfited but unembarrassed. “No?” he said. “No. Very well, I see, I see; you must forgive me then…”

  The boy, desperate not to have offended the Englishman, clutched at the milord’s tartan cloak and spoke in a rush of Romaic, shaking his head and near tears.

  “No, no, my dear,” the milord said. “It’s not at all your fault; you have swept me into an impropriety. I misunderstood your kindness, that is all, and it is you who must forgive me.”

  He went, with his odd off-kilter and halting walk, to his couch, and reclined there. The boy stood erect in the middle of the room, and (switching to Italian) began a long speech about his deep love and respect for the noble lord, who was as dear as life itself to him. The noble lord watched him in wonder, smiling. Then he held out a hand to him: “Oh, no more, no more. You see it is just such sentiments as those that misled me. Really, I swear to you, I misunderstood and it shan’t happen again. Only you mustn’t stand there preaching at me, don’t; come sit by me at least. Come.”

  The boy, knowing that a dignified coldness was often the safest demeanor to adopt when offers like the milord’s were made to him, came and stood beside his employer, hands behind his back.

  “Well,” the milord said, himself adopting a more serious mien, “I’ll tell you what. If you will not stand there like a stick, if you will put back on your usual face—sit, won’t you?—then…then what shall I do? I shall tell you a story.”

  Immediately the boy melted. He sat, or squatted, near his master—not on the couch, but on a rag of carpet on the floor near it. “A story,” he said. “A story of what, of what?”