The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  By making talismans, as Marsilio had hinted: only here were exact instructions, what materials were to be used, what hour of the day was best, what day of the month, month of the zodiacal calendar; what incantations, invocations, lights were to be used, what perfumes and songs would most attract the Reasons of the World, the Semhamaphores, all mind, who fill up the universe. There were long lists of images to be used on talismans, and Brother Giordano, who had no materials to make them of, no lead for Saturn, tin for Jupiter, could nonetheless cast them inwardly and unforgettably:

  An image of Saturn: The form of a man, standing on a dragon, clothed in black and having in his right hand a sickle and his left hand a spear.

  An image of Jupiter: The form of a man with a lion’s face and bird’s feet, below them a dragon with seven heads, holding an arrow in his right hand.

  Better yet, and more potent, were long lists of images for thirty-six gods of time, nameless, vivid, of whom Giordano had read in Origen and in Horapollo’s hints: horoscopi, the gods of the hours known to Ægypt and then forgotten or ignored by later ages. They were called decans also, because each one ruled over ten degrees of the zodiac, three decans to each of the twelve signs. The images of the thirty-six, Picatrix said, had been cast by Hermes himself, as he had cast the hieroglyphs of Ægypt’s language; Giordano hardly needed to memorize them, they stepped off the crowded page directly into his brain and took their seats there, where they had all along belonged, though he hadn’t known it:

  The first decan of Aries: A huge dark man with fiery eyes, holding a sword and clad in a white garment.

  The second decan: A woman clad in green, and lacking one leg.

  The third decan: A man holding a golden sphere, and dressed in red …

  He imbibed this weird congress like food, like a fiery liquor, and almost as soon as they had entered within him he began to dream of them and of their doings. Who was he who had discovered them, this Hermes?

  There are among the Chaldeans very perfect masters in this art of images, and they affirm that Hermes was the first who constructed images by which he knew how to regulate the Nile against the motion of the moon. This man also built a temple to the Sun, and he knew how to hide himself from all so that no one could see him, though he was within it. It was he too, who in the east of Ægypt constructed a City twelve miles long within which he constructed a castle which had four gates in each of its four parts. On the eastern gate he placed the form of an Eagle; on the western gate the form of a Bull; on the southern gate the form of a Lion; and on the northern gate he constructed the form of a Dog. Into these images he introduced spirits that spoke with voices, nor could anyone enter the gates of the City except by their permission. There he planted trees, in the midst of which was a great tree that bore the fruit of all generation. On the summit of the castle he caused to be raised a tower thirty cubits high, on the top of which he ordered to be placed a lighthouse the color of which changed every day until the seventh day, when it returned to the first color; and so the City was illuminated with these colors. Near the City there was an abundance of waters in which dwelt many kinds of fish. Around the circumference he placed engraved images and ordered them in such a manner that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous and withdrawn from all wickedness and harm.

  The name of the City was Adocentyn.

  The name of the city was Adocentyn.

  Pierce pushed back the wheeled chair he sat in, and with the page (Adocentyn!) still in his hand he started out of the room. Then he returned, and put it back. He went out again, got lost in the toils of the tiny house, came into a second parlor matching the first, and thought for a bad moment that he had only imagined that glass-fronted bookcase and its key and its contents, for it was nowhere to be seen; got straightened around; went into the first parlor, opened the bookcase, and took from it the plastic envelope marked PICATRIX.

  Absurdly, his heart was beating hard. But the thick vellum leaves he pulled out, covered top to bottom in double columns of manuscript, were in a dense black-letter script unintelligible to him, curt monkish Latin, or code for all he knew.

  He locked it up again, and went through the house to the front hall and the stairs, calling Rosie’s name.

  “Up here!”

  “I’ve found something,” he said mounting the stairs. “Rosie?”

  Down a corridor at the top of the stairs, a corridor whose walls were covered with framed etchings, people places and things, so many of them that the colorless paper behind could hardly be seen. He turned in at the door of a bedroom.

  She stood with her back to him in the stuffy dimness, drawn blinds making a nighttime in the room, someone else’s bedroom. Pierce felt suddenly caught in the toils of an awful pun, a misunderstanding, a rebus, a palindrome. Rosie turned; what light there was in the room gathered in her eyes.

  “Satin sheets,” she said, gesturing to the big bed with her bottle. “Check it out.”

  SIX

  “It’s a novel,” Pierce said to Boney Rasmussen.

  “Unfinished, apparently. It seems to end with a bunch of notes, and hints about further scenes.”

  “You’ve read it all already?” The rainy day outside the library was so silver, the sparkle of the new greenery so various, that it made a vague darkness inside, and Boney at his desk was hard to see.

  “No,” Pierce said. “No. I’ve started it. But we didn’t want to move it.” Like a corpus delicti. “So I quit reading when it got dark yesterday.”

  Boney was silent.

  “Rosie’s pretty sure it’s not just a draft of one of the ones he published. It’s all new.”

  Still Boney said nothing.

  “It is,” Pierce began, and halted; he wasn’t sure he should make the claim, or the revelation, which he had thought to make, or reveal, when he was shown into this room; but then he said, “It is really a very strange and remarkable thing to find and a very unlikely coincidence.” He fell silent himself then, and they both sat amid the tick and pop of raindrops outside as though under a spell, Boney thinking thoughts Pierce could not imagine and his own mind filled with the wonderment of what had befallen him.

  Adocentyn.

  “I,” he said at length, “am at work on a book.”

  “Rosie told me.”

  “Well what’s remarkable is,” he said, “the things and the people in this book are things and people I’d been thinking about and studying for a long time, in a completely different way. Doctor John Dee, for instance, the English mathematician. Giordano Bruno.”

  “He’s written about them before.”

  “Well. Not quite in this way.”

  “What way?”

  Pierce crossed his legs, and took his knee in his interlaced fingers. “This book begins,” he said, “with John Dee talking to angels. Now in fact Dee left extensive records of the seances he held with a person named Talbot or Kelley who claimed to see angels in a kind of crystal ball. All right. Only in this book of Kraft’s he’s really seeing them, and talking to them.”

  Boney waited unmoving; but Pierce had begun to feel a kind of intensity of attention growing in him.

  “Next comes a chapter about Bruno,” Pierce said. “And all the biographical details are right, I think, and the milieu; only the reasons for everything happening are not the reasons we would give now.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “What reasons then?”

  “It’s as if,” Pierce said. “As if, in this book, there are angels but not laws of physics; as if theurgy could work, and win battles; prayer too. And magic.”

  “Magic,” Boney said.

  “Glastonbury’s in this book,” Pierce said. “And a Grail. The book might be about a Grail, somehow hidden in history.” Leafing forward with the same horrid yet eager fascination he might feel if allowed to leaf through his own life to come, he had glimpsed Kepler’s name, and Brahe’s; he had seen kings, popes, and emperors, famous battles, castles, ports, and treaties:
but he had seen also the City of the Sun, and the brothers of the Rose; the Red Man and the Green Lion; the angel Madimi, the Death of the Kiss, a golem, a wand of lignum vitœ, twelve minims of best gold in the bottom of the crater.

  “And your book,” Boney said. “It’s the same?”

  “Not the same. This is fiction. Mine is not.”

  “But it deals in these same matters. This same period.”

  “Yes.”

  And maybe it wasn’t so different, no not so different. Kraft’s was only going to be the strong wine undiluted: no subtleties of qualification, no might-it-not-seems, no it-is-tempting-to-thinks, no it-is-as-thoughs. None. Only this extraordinary colored toy theater of unhistory.

  “You would notice then,” Boney said slowly, “if there was anything in this book about an elixir. Not medicine exactly, but.”

  “I know the concept,” Pierce said.

  “Anything about that?”

  Pierce shook his head. “Not so far.”

  Boney rose from his desk, and helping himself with his knuckles along its edge, he went to stand looking out the window.

  “Sandy knew so much,” he said. “He joked all the time, and you never knew when he meant what he said. He knew so much that you were sure that behind the joke was something he knew. But he wouldn’t tell.

  “He said. He often used to say. What if once upon a time the world was a different place than it is now. The whole world I mean, everything, well it’s hard to express; so that it worked in a way it no longer does.”

  Pierce held his breath to hear the small old voice.

  “And what if,” Boney went on, “there remained somewhere in this new world we have now, somehow, somewhere, some little fragments of that lost world. Some fragments that retain something of the power they used to have, back when things were different. A jewel, say. An elixir.”

  He turned to look at Pierce, and smiled. The Fabulous Monster. So Rosie had called him. “Wouldn’t that be something, he used to say. If that were so. Wouldn’t that be something.”

  “There are such things,” Pierce said. “Unicorns’ horns. Magic jewels. Mummified mermaids.”

  “Sandy would say: they didn’t survive the change. But somewhere, somewhere there might be something. Hidden, you see; or not hidden, just overlooked; hidden in plain sight. A stone. A powder. An elixir of life.” Standing had caused him—so it seemed to Pierce—to sink ever so slightly, as though his spine were slowly melting. “He was teasing, I suppose. I’m sure he was. And yet in the Giant Mountains once. …”

  Nothing more followed. At length Boney left the window, and climbed into his chair again.

  “So it’s a good book?” he said.

  “I’ve only begun it. The first chapters. Bruno. John Dee at Glastonbury. I think Dee and Bruno are going to meet, eventually. I doubt very much they ever did. But surely they could have.”

  “Maybe you should finish it,” Boney said. “Finish the writing of it, I mean.”

  “Ha ha,” said Pierce. “Not my line of work.”

  Boney pondered. “You could edit it. For possible publication.”

  “I’d certainly like to read it,” Pierce said. “At least.”

  “I’m too, it’s a little beyond me now,” Boney said. “And I’m not sure I’d recognize it if I saw it there. But you. You.”

  Through the open door just then there came a bouncing rubber ball, a large one painted with red and white stripes, and white stars on blue. It bounced twice and rolled to a stop, vivid on the rug.

  “Does it,” Boney asked, “have a title?”

  “It doesn’t have a title page,” Pierce said.

  He thought he knew, though, what title it might have been intended to have; what title he, as editor, would be tempted to give it. He thought: there is not only more than one history of the world, one for each of us who studies it; there is more than one for each of us, there are as many as we want or need, as many as our heads and wanting hearts can make.

  Rosie put her head into the room. “Ready?” she said.

  “I won’t go in with you just yet,” she told Pierce as they went toward Stonykill.

  “No?”

  “I’ve got another house to break into,” Rosie said. “Some errands. I’ll drop you off, and come back.”

  In rain, Stonykill was hangdog, exposed and unhappy-looking. Someone stood by the gas pumps of the little store, under the sagging marquee, wiping the drops from his spectacles. “Anyway,” Rosie said. “You know what you’re looking at in there. I don’t.”

  “Maybe yes,” Pierce said, “maybe no.”

  They coasted to a stop at Kraft’s barred drive, and for a moment sat in silence looking out the rain-speckled windows toward the shuttered house and the dark pines. “You know,” Rosie said, “in his autobiography? Kraft said he wanted to write just one last book.”

  “Yes?”

  “He says: a book he could die before finishing.”

  “And when,” Pierce asked, “was it that he died?”

  “Oh six years ago or so. I think. About 1972.”

  “Oh. Hm.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing, really. I was just thinking about this book, coming to be. I suppose it could have been in the works for a while. And then abandoned. I was just wondering.”

  Rosie extracted the key to Kraft’s kitchen from her ring, and gave it to Pierce; he opened the great door of the wagon and put out first his black umbrella, which Rosie had laughed at when she had seen him with it; he in turn had claimed to think it was funny that no one around here had any use for umbrellas, and dashed through the rain bareheaded, a matter of pride it seemed.

  “See ya.”

  “I won’t be long,” Rosie said.

  The umbrella popped open. “Automatic,” Pierce said.

  She watched him step long-legged over the gate and walk the drive, avoiding puddles. His city mac was rumpled and gray.

  She could have had him, yesterday, on Fellowes Kraft’s satin sheets; only he seemed for some reason too stunned to participate. And Rosie had not pushed it.

  She looked behind her, as best she could, and before her, and made a wide and clumsy U-turn. Bye, Pierce.

  What had happened was that as she stood with him in the dim bedroom, she had felt herself, all in a moment, forgetting why you did this, seduced people, got into their pants. She just forgot; it vanished from her. And so she gave it up.

  She might get him yet, of course. Not a warmth but a weird coldness went through her to think of it, the wrong tap turned on.

  The house she had lived in with Mike lay on the other side of the wide township of Stonykill, the newest side: a flight of broad terraces, unwooded and windswept, upon which two-and-a-half-story houses were being built, all alike except that some were mirror images of the others, reversed left to right, and some turned front to back, for variety. It made them look oddly random to Rosie, scattered on the hillside, with their hopeful young birches tethered to the lawns. As though none was aware that others were being built around it. The streets that wind through them are called Spruce and Redbud and Holly, but the whole place has always been called—perhaps after some now-lost village—Labrador.

  She approached the house slowly, ready to turn back if there was a car or cars in the driveway. There was none. Rosie had got into a habit, which she reproached herself for, of getting into the house when Mike wasn’t there, to find things that she or Sam needed, things she had never recovered, things she didn’t want to negotiate with Mike about delivering or replacing. She had at first believed that none of it was important, but now and again over the months had recalled this, or found herself in need of that, and a picture would present itself to her of the thing lying just where it lay in the Stonykill house; and she would come break in to get it.

  Only it wasn’t really breaking in. She just went up the stairs from the garage; that door was never locked.

  She wondered if Mike noticed the pilfering. He never said.

>   Parked in Redbud Street she pulled her little list from her pocket. There was a hard stone in her breast, the leaden coldness that had been there all day; all spring for that matter.

  R. view mirror

  Mice/balloons

  Pelican

  BCPs

  She had done without a rear-view mirror for nine months, but it was time to get the wagon inspected, and she wasn’t sure it would pass without one. Her Pelikan drawing pen lay (she could see it) on the windowsill of the sun porch, behind the TV; she had been writing letters with it on a summer night last year.

  She thrust the list back into her pocket. The book about the family of mice who go traveling in a balloon: it had taken her a while to figure out what Sam meant by the bloon mice, until she remembered the long-overdue, the already-paid-for lost library book. Amazing Sam could remember it, so long ago. It was because of the spring balloon festival up at Skytop tomorrow: and Mike’s ridiculous promise to Sam, he’d promise her anything lately. Bloon ride. Anyway she had to have the book. Had to.

  The birth control pills, a three-month supply she had got the day before she left this house and Mike, were in the little cabinet beside the toilet, where there was also the extra baby powder, the twelve boxes of tissues Mike had abstracted from The Woods, the potpourri from the bath shop in the Jambs.

  They would still be there, she was sure. Mike lived in the house like a squirrel or a caveman, some creature unable to think how he might alter his circumstances to suit himself. Nothing had changed since last summer; last time she had broken in her old nightie still hung on the back of the closet door. The pills would still be there. Rosie had gone off the pill the month after she’d moved out; now she thought she ought to go back on again, and the little pink dots were damn expensive, and she’d need a new prescription if she didn’t come get these she’d already paid for: and standing in the damp and concrete-smelling garage she couldn’t remember why she wanted them after all.