Little, Big

by John Crowley

  Sylvie & Bruno Concluded

  There are charms that last, keeping the world long suspended in their power, and charms that do not last, that drain quickly away and leave the world as it was. Liquor is well known for not lasting.

  Auberon was wrenched awake just after dawn, after a few hours of deathlike unconsciousness. He knew instantly that he should be dead, that death was his only appropriate condition, and that he was not dead. He cried out softly and hoarsely, “No, oh God no,” but oblivion was far away and even sleep had fled utterly. No: he was alive and the wretched world was around him; his staring eyeballs showed him the Folding Bedroom’s crazed map of a ceiling, so many Devil’s Islands in plaster. He didn’t need to investigate to find that Sylvie wasn’t next to him.

  There was, however, someone next to him, bound up in the damp sheet (it was hot as hell already, chill sweat circled Auberon’s neck and brow). And someone else was speaking to him; speaking from a corner of the Folding Bedroom, soothingly, confidentially: “Oh for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green …”

  The voice came from a small red plastic radio, an antique with the word Silvertone across it in bas-relief script. Auberon had never known it to work before. The voice was black, a silky DJ’s voice, black but cultured. God, they’re everywhere, Auberon thought, overwhelmed with horrid strangeness, as a traveler sometimes is to find so many foreigners in other lands. “Away! Away! For I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy …”

  Auberon climed slowly like a cripple from the bed. Who the hell was this beside him anyway. A brown shoulder big with muscle could be seen; the sheet breathed softly. Snored. Christ what have I done. He was about to draw down the sheet when it moved of its own accord, snuffling, and a shapely leg, flat-shinned, with curly dark hair, came out like a further clue; yes it was a man, that was certain. He carefully opened the door of the toilet, and took out his overcoat. He put it on over his nakedness, feeling with loathing the clammy touch of its lining against his skin. In the kitchen he opened cupboards with trembling skeleton’s hands. The dusty vacuity within the cupboards was for some reason ghastly. In the last he opened there was a bottle of Dona Mariposa rum with an inch or two of amber fluid in it. His stomach turned, but he took it out. He went to the door, with a glance at the bed—his new friend still slept—and then out.

  He sat on the stairs in the hallway, staring into the stairwell, the bottle in both hands. He missed Sylvie and comfort so dreadfully, with such a parched thirst, that his mouth hung open and he leaned forward as though to scream or vomit. But his eyes wouldn’t yield tears. The vivifying fluids had all been drawn from him; he was a husk; the world was a husk too. And this man in the bed. He unscrewed (it took some application) the cap of the rum bottle, and, turning its accusatory label away from him, he poured fire on his sands. Darkling I listen. Keats, in smoothie blackface, slid out under the door and insinuatingly into his ear. Now more than ever seems it rich to die. Rich: he drank the last of the rum and rose, gasping and swallowing bitter spittle. To thy high requiem become a sot.

  He recapped the empty bottle and left it on the stair. In the mirror hung over the pretty table at the hall’s end he caught a glimpse of someone forlorn. The very word is like a bell. He looked away. He went into the Folding Bedroom, a golem, his dry clay animated briefly by rum. He could speak now. He went to the bed. The person there had thrown off his sheet. It was Sylvie, only modeled in male flesh, and no charm: this goatish boy was real. Auberon shook his shoulder. Sylvie’s head rolled on the pillow. Dark eyes opened momentarily, saw Auberon, and closed again.

  Auberon bent over the bed and spoke into his ear. “Who are you?” He spoke carefully and slowly. Might not understand our lingo. “What is you name?” The boy rolled over, woke, brushed his hand over his face from forehead to chin as though to magic away the resemblance to Sylvie (but it stayed) and said in a morning-roughened voice, “Hey. What’s happening?”

  “What is your name?”

  “Hey, hi. Jesus Christ.” He lay back on the pillow, smacking his lips. He rubbed his knuckles in his eyes like a child. He scratched and stroked himself shamelessly, as though pleased to find himself to hand. He smiled at Auberon and said, “Bruno.”

  “Oh.”

  “You membah.”

  “Oh.”

  “We got frone outta dap bah.”

  “Oh. Oh.”

  “Boy you was drunk.”

  “Oh.”

  “Membah? You coont even …”

  “Oh. No. No.” Bruno was looking at him with easy affection, still stroking himself.

  “You said Jus wait,” Bruno said, and laughed. “That was you lass words, man.”

  “Oh yes?” He didn’t remember; but he felt a weird regret, and almost laughed, and almost wept, that he had failed Sylvie when she was Sylvie. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Hey listen,” Bruno said generously.

  He wanted to move away, he knew he ought; he wanted to close his coat, which hung open. But he couldn’t. If he did so, if he let this cup pass away from him, then the last dry dregs of last night’s charm within it would not be licked up, and they might be all he had forever. He stared at Bruno’s open face, simpler and sweeter than Sylvie’s, unmarked by his passions, strong though Sylvie had always said they were. Friendly: tears, double-distilled because there was so little water within to draw on, burned the orbits of his eyes: friendly was the word to describe Bruno. “Do you,” he said, “have a sister?”

  “Shichess.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know,” Auberon said, “where she is?”

  “Nah.” He dismissed her with an easy gesture, her own gesture translated. “Ain’t seen her in munce. She gets around.”

  “Yes.” If he could just put his hands in Bruno’s hair. Just for a moment; that would be enough. And close his burning eyes. The thought made him faint, and he leaned against the headboard.

  “A real mof,” Bruno said. With an unself-conscious languor he disposed himself on the bed so that there would be room there for Auberon.

  “A what?”

  “A mof. Sylvie.” Laughing, he linked his thumbs together, and with his hands made a winged creature. He made it fly a little, smiling at Auberon; and then made it, wings fluttering, summon Auberon to follow it.

  How Far You’ve Gone

  Fled is that music.

  Sure that Burno slept as his sister did, dead to the world, Auberon took no precautions to be quiet; he hauled out his belongings from chest and closet and flung them around. He unfolded his crushed green knapsack and into it put his poems and the rest of the contents of his study, his razor and his soap, and as many of his clothes as would go wadded in; he stuffed what money he could find into the pockets of it.

  Gone, gone, he thought; dead, dead; empty, empty. But by no incantation could he exorcise even the palest, most illusory ghost of her from this place; and so there was only one thing to do, and that was flee. Flee. He strode from side to side of the room, looking hastily into drawers and shelves. His abused sex swung as he walked; at last he drew shorts and pants over it, but it glowed reproachfully even hidden. The deed had proved more operose than he’d expected. Oh well, oh well. Forcing a pair of socks into the knapsack’s pocket he found something he had left there: something wrapped in paper. He dug it out.

  It was the present he had had from Lily the day that he had left Edgewood to come to the City and seek his fortune; a small present, wrapped in white paper. Open it when you think of it, she’d said.

  He looked around the Folding Bedroom. Empty. Or as empty as it would ever be. Bruno weighted the dishonored bed, and his coat of many colors hung on the velvet chair. A mouse, or a brief hallucination of one (had it already come to that? He felt that it had) sped across the floor of the kitchen and hid itself. He tore open Lily’s little package.

  It turned out to be a small machi
ne of some sort. He stared at it uncomprehendingly for some time, turning it in his sticky and still-trembling fingers, before he realized what it was: it was a pedometer. The handy kind that attaches to your belt and tells you, whenever you look at it, how far you’ve gone.

  Bottom of a Bottle

  The little park was filling up.

  Why had he not known that love could be like that? Why hadn’t anyone told him? If he had known, he would never have embarked on it; or at least not so gladly.

  Why did he, a young man of some intelligence after all, and of good family, know nothing about anything at all?

  He had even been able to suppose, when he left Old Law Farm for the streets of the City foul with summer and decline, that he fled Sylvie rather than merely pursuing her farther and in even less warm directions. Drunkards, Great-aunt Cloud had used to say, drink to escape their troúbles. If that was his case—and surely he had tried his best to become a drunkard—then how could it be that, not every time but often enough, he found Sylvie there, just there where Cloud said drinkers find surcease, at the bottom of a bottle?

  Well: press on. Autumn was harvest, of course, the bound wheat-sheaf, the hale fruit. And faintly in the distance, cheeks puffed out and eyebrows fierce, Brother North-wind came on apace.

  Was the girl who with a sickle cut the heavy-eared grain the same one who set out shoots in spring with a little trowel? And who was the oldster, huddled up on the earth piled with riches, brooding in profile? Thinking of winter …

  In November the three of them—he, and she, and Fred Savage, his mentor in bumhood, who had begun appearing to him as often in that season as Sylvie did, though more solidly than she—rode a park bench, somewhat afloat in the darkening city, huddled up but not uncomfortable; the newspapers inside Fred Savage’s overcoat crackled when he moved, though he moved only to lift brandy to his lips. They had done singing, and reciting drinker’s poetry—

  You know, my friends, with what a gay Carouse I took a Second Mortgage on my house

  —and sat quiet now contemplating that fearful hour before the City’s lights are lit.

  “Old Man Hawk’s in town,” Fred Savage said. “Wazzat?”

  “Winter,” Sylvie said, thrusting her hands into her armpits.

  “Gonna move these bones,” Fred Savage said, crackling, sipping. “Gonna move these old cold bones to Florida.”

  “All right,” Sylvie said, as though at last somebody had said something sensible.

  “Old Man Hawk is not my friend,” Fred Savage said. “Price of a Greyhound to outrun that boy. Philly, Baltimore, Charleston, Atlanta, J’ville, St. Pete. Miami. Ever see a pelican?”

  He hadn’t. Sylvie, from ancientest childhood, summoned them up, frigates of the Caribbean evening, absurd and beautiful. “Yas yas,” Fred Savage said. “Beak holds more than his belican. Tears out the feathers of his bosom, and feeds they young ones on the blood of his heart. His heart’s blood. Oh Forida.”

  Fred had taken the autumn off, and perhaps the rest of his life as well. He had come to Auberon’s aid, in his most need to be by his side, just as he had said he would on the day when he had first guided him through the City to the offices of Petty, Smilodon & Ruth. Auberon didn’t question this providence, or any other the City gave. He had thrown himself on the City’s mercy, and found that, like a strict mistress, she was kind to those who submitted utterly, held nothing back. By degrees he learned to do that; he who had always been fastidious, and more fastidious than that for Sylvie’s sake, grew filthy, City dirt worked itself into his fabric ineradicably, and though when drunk he would walk for blocks to find public facilities, damn few of them and dangerous too, between these spurts of scrupulosity he mocked himself for them. By autumn his knapsack was a useless rag, a cerement, and anyway had ceased to be large enough to hold a life lived on the streets; so like the rest of the secret City’s epopts he carried paper shopping bags, one inside the other for strength, advertising in his degraded person many great establishments in turn.

  And so he went on, hooded in gin, sleeping in streets sometimes full of riot, sometimes quiet as a necropolis, always as far as he was concerned empty. He learned from Fred and from ancients who had instructed Fred that the great days of the secret commonwealth of bums were over, the days when there were kings and wise men on Lower Broadway, the days when the City was marked with their glyphs whose code only the initiate could read, when the drunk, the gypsy, the madman and the philosopher had their ranks, as firm as deacon, sexton, priest and bishop. Of course, over. Join any enterprise, Auberon thought, and you’ll find its great days are over.

  He didn’t need to beg. The money he extracted from Petty, Smilodon & Ruth was given him as much to rid their offices of his noisome figure as for any right he had to it—he knew that, and took to appearing there only at his most hideous, often with Fred Savage in tow—but it was enough for a drunk’s few dietary needs, and the odd flop when he feared freezing to death pillowed in booze as some of his buddies’ buddies had reportedly done, and for gin. He never sank to fulsome wine, he gave himself credit for that, he resisted that final degradation even though it was apparently only in the transparent fire of gin that Sylvie (like a Salamander) could sometimes appear.

  His topside knee was growing cold. Why his knee should grow cold first he didn’t know; neither his toes nor his nose had felt it yet. “Greyhound, huh,” he said. He recrossed his legs and said, “I can raise the price.” He asked Sylvie: “You want to go?”

  “Sure I do,” Sylvie said.

  “Sure I do,” said Fred.

  “I was speaking to, I wasn’t speaking to you just then,” Auberon said.

  Fred put his arm gently around Auberon’s shoulder. What ghosts plagued his friends he was always careful to be kind to. “Well, sure she do,” he said, his yellow eyes opening enough to gaze on Auberon in a way Auberon had never decided was predatory or kindly. “And bes’ of all,” he said, smiling, “she don’t need a ticket.”

  Door into Nowhere

  Of all the lapses and losses of his sodden memory, the one that troubled Auberon most later on was that he couldn’t remember whether or not he had gone to Florida. The Art of Memory showed him a few ragged palms, some stucco or concrete-block buildings painted pink or turquoise, the smell of eucalyptus; but if that was all, solid and unremovable though it seemed, it might well be imagination only, or only remembered pictures. Just as vivid were his memories of Old Man Hawk on avenues as wide as wind, perched on the gloved wrists of doormen along the Park, his beard of feathers rimy and his talons sharp to grip the entrails. But he had, Somehow, not frozen to death; and surely even more than palms and jalousies, a City winter survived on the street would, he thought, stick in the memory. Well: he hadn’t been paying close attention: the only thing that really engaged him were those islands where red neon signs beckoned to the wanderer (they were always red, he learned) and the endless replication of those flat bottles clear as water, in some of which, as in a box of children’s cereal, there would be a prize. And the only thing he vividly recalled was how, at the end of winter, there were no more prizes. His drunkenness was empty. There were only the lees left to drink; and he drank them.

  Why had he been in the bowels of the old Terminus? Had he just returned by train from the Sunshine State? Or was it chance? Seeing three of most things, a damp leg where he had pissed himself some time before, in the small hours he strode purposefully (though going nowhere; if he didn’t stride purposefully he would take a header; this walking business was more complicated than most people supposed) down ramps and through catacombs. A fake nun, wimple filthy and eyes alert (Auberon had long ago realized this figure was a man) shook a begging cup at him, more in irony than expectation. He passed on. The Terminus, never silent, was as silent now as it ever was; the few travelers and the lost gave him a wide berth, though he glowered at them only to make them singular, three of each was too many. One of the virtues of drink was how it reduced life to these simple matters, w
hich engaged all the attention; seeing, walking, raising a bottle accurately to the hole in your face. As though you were two years old again. No thoughts but simple ones. And an imaginary friend to talk to. He stopped walking; he had come up against a more-or-less solid wall; he rested and thought Lost.

  A simple thought. One simple singular thought, and the rest of life and time a great flat featureless gray plain extending in all directions; consciousness a vast ball of dirty fuzz filling it to its limits, with only the hooded fire of that one thought alive within it.

  “What?” he said, starting away from the wall, but no one had spoken to him. He looked around at the place where he stood: a vaulted intersection where four corridors met in a cross. He stood in a corner. The ribbed vaulting, where it joined in descending to the floor, made what seemed to be a slot or narrow opening, but which was only joined bricks; a sort of slot, which, it seemed, if you faced into it you might peer through …

  “Hello?” he whispered to the darkness. “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  “Hello.” Louder this time.

  “Softer,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Speak real soft,” Sylvie said. “Don’t turn around now.”

  “Hello. Hello.”

  “Hi there. Isn’t this great?”

  “Sylvie,” he whispered.

  “Just like you were right next to me.”

  “Yes,” he said; “yes,” he whispered. He pressed his consciousness forward into the darkness. It folded up closed for a moment, then opened again. “What?” he said.

  “Well,” she said, in a small voice, and after a darkling pause, “I think I’m going.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I bet not, I bet not; why?”

  “Well, I lost my job, see,” she whispered.

  “Job?”

  “With a ferry. A real old guy. He was nice. But bo-ring. Back and forth all day …”He felt her withdraw somewhat. “So I guess I’ll go. Destiny calls,” she said; she said it self-mockingly, making light of it to cheer him.