Endless Things

by John Crowley

  Well, didn't bomb-man Einstein agree, as far as Kraft could tell anyway, didn't he say that the universe was unbounded but not therefore infinite, and that a man setting out in a straight line from earth would never reach its frontiers, but would eventually, though still traveling his straight line, come back to the place from which he started?

  As Fellowes Kraft had done too. Not to pretend that the findings of lofty science could be implicated in such a little human cycle. He had come back, at the end of his writing life, to where he stood at the beginning: to Rome, by Giordano Bruno's side. Having once again in his pages tried him, condemned him, put the tall dunce's hat on his head, tied him backward on the ass, the ass whipped from the prison through the streets past mocking and bloodthirsty or incurious crowds to the Campo dei Fiori where the stake has been erected. Ready but unable or unwilling to burn him again.

  He put his hands on the sheets he had covered this day, not all of them with sense. Endless things, his mother had used to say, and write in her letters too: a little ejaculation or verbal sigh, the endless things of this world that trapped and pestered her or pleaded for her attention like unfed sheep. Endless things, he too had said, said to himself in those days when he had set out for the brand-new Old World in his twenties; endless things, his own small prayer and mantra as he stood on the boat deck or in the crowded and scented foreign street. To him it meant not the endless ghastly multiplication of things, as it did to her. It meant those things that roll on forever: travel, and the intoxications of thought and gaze and words, and possibility; sex, the sea, childhood and the view from there, the way ahead.

  But of course (he thought now) it might also mean things without endings, without reprieve. Eternal return; limbo of the lost. Death. Bruno's journey to Hell, still going on, from that book to this.

  Well, maybe there was a way, this time, to free him. Get him off.

  The case clock in the far room whirred and then bonged once, as did his heart.

  Yes: a way to free him that would change nothing, that would leave it all to happen just as it had done, as it must, only altogether otherwise. Kraft lifted the papers in his hands, and looked down at the words that his thumbs indicated.

  Maybe, maybe there was.

  2

  Yes: that ass, the little ass that bore him.

  Pierce Moffett in the middle of the Magnificat clapped his hand to his brow and made a haw of understanding and self-reproach that made the brothers around him turn to see. He was stunned not so much by the sudden insight arising in his mind as by his own obtuseness: that he could have been shuffling and reshuffling and considering those pages for so long and never noticed it.

  But for Christ's sake: that little ass.

  But then he thought no, he must be wrong, he was remembering the scene not as Kraft had left it in the manuscript but as he, Pierce, might have written it, or might write it now, because it was so right: he had a nearly uncontrollable impulse to get to his feet right now, in the midst of the prayer, clamber over the legs and laps of the brothers who filled the pew, like a playgoer who's had enough, and rush to his little room to find the pages.

  Magnificat anima mea, the choristers sang, or should have sung. It was all in English now, the rare Latin plainsong falling on Pierce's soul like balm, in spite of everything; yes, all English, accompanied today by a brother on guitar. Pierce thought the older brothers must suffer from the change, but of course there was no way to ask them.

  When Lauds was done and they had recessed from the cool church together, the brothers housing their meditating heads in their white cuculli, Pierce went back along the flagged halls to his room. Spring light still fell sweetly there. The furnishings were solid and plain, like school furniture: oak desk and chair, plain prie-dieu. A narrow bed, a crucifix at its head, Virgin at its foot. When Giordano Bruno was a young brother in the Dominican house in Naples, he had shocked his superiors by pitching out all the devotional clutter his cell had come to contain, all the statues of saints, the blessed palms and rosaries, the memento mori, leaving only a bare cross. So he could fill, perhaps, those bare spaces with pictures of his own.

  On Pierce's desk was piled a photocopy of Kraft's last unfinished book, which for some years Pierce had thought himself free of. Brighter and cleaner in this form than it had been on shoddy goldenrod, but paler too, less distinct, speaking more softly. Seeing it at first was like seeing an old acquaintance after a like number of years, grown gray and strange to you but after a few moments the same. Almost the same.

  Kraft's reputation as a novelist had, during those years, undergone an unexpected transformation. His books hadn't ever been as successful as other historical romances similar to his own, those fat but somehow lightweight confections that everyone read when they appeared and no one ever opened again. But—though Kraft certainly hadn't seen any reason to hope for it—his own readership had never entirely dried up; and though his books one by one went out of print, old copies were traded eagerly, and even began to fetch good prices; it became a sign of wide cultural sympathies to at least know about Kraft, as you knew about Erich Korngold or John Cowper Powys or Philip Dick: a never-populous archipelago you could imagine visiting one day, island-hopping through a large oeuvre and having fun.

  So in time Kraft's copyright holders (the Rasmussen Foundation) opened negotiations with his old publisher, and though they didn't see prospects there, another house did, and the best known of the books began to come out in pretty “trade” paperbacks with striking covers, and newcomers found them and bought them, and so more were brought out: and then all of them, reissued in numbered volumes so that you could remember which ones you'd read and which were yet to go (they were admittedly pretty similar). It could be seen then that they told a single story, the main branch of them anyway, unfolding over time and populated by a large cast that migrated from book to book with the turning years. In chain bookstores Pierce Moffett with nameless feelings looked on the books that had measured out his childhood, A Passage at Arms, Under Saturn, Bitten Apples, The Werewolf of Prague.

  The last remaining was this one, which the Rasmussen Foundation (Rosalind Rasmussen herself, actually, the executive director) asked Pierce to take up again: to edit, fix up and trim up and cap off so that it could be brought out too, finish the story, she said.

  I don't think I can, Rosie, he'd told her (though here it was, piled beside the computer into which he was entering or keyboarding it, page after endless page); things, he said, had changed so much for him, she should get a real writer to do it, there were plenty. So Rosie said all right, she understood; and then when a couple of days and sleepless nights had passed he wrote to her to say that well after all he would. He owed it to her, he said, for all that she had given him, all that he had left unfinished and unreturned. When he undid the wrappings and opened the box that contained the thing, though, he knew his reluctance hadn't been misplaced, the whole bad time in which it had figured so largely so long ago was in it, and he found he could hardly touch it for some time even in this clean new form, not the rotting corpse itself, just the bleached bones.

  He marked now the place in it to which his transcribing (rewriting too, a bit) had reached, and dug down into the later, the latest, parts, and turned them out to read.

  At two in the morning on the 18th of February, brothers of the Headless John Society assembled at the Convent of St. Ursula in the depths of night, as was their habit, and processed to the fortress where Bruno was imprisoned, to awaken him, to “offer up the winter prayers” and give comfort and correction, maybe even snatch the man back from the abyss at the last instant. But no, he stayed up through the night with them talking and disputing, “setting his brain and mind to a thousand errors and vaingloryings” (But what were these really? What did he say at the last?) until the Servants of Justice came to take him.

  There was a little gray donkey tied up outside in the dawn light, where the crowds were being held back by the Servants.

  A little gray
donkey: yes. Whose common work this was, perhaps, a functionary himself in a way, employee of the Holy Office or of the secular arm, the Servants of Justice. How many condemned men had he borne on his back to the place of execution? Actually, though, there weren't that many, despite the Black Legend. Maybe none, then, none ever before.

  He was mounted backward on his steed to cheers of loathing, and a tall white paper hat put on his head, a fool as well as a devil.

  The crowds along the way were vast; it was a jubilee year, and all the City was being renewed, just as the Holy Catholic Church itself was. Fifty cardinals from all over Christendom were assembled here; there were processions, high masses, new churches dedicated daily. The little ceremony at the square of the flower sellers was not even the best attended.

  He was stripped naked after being tied to the stake. It's reported that a cross was held out to him at the last moment, but he turned away from it.

  Pierce turned over the page. Yes: the man was going to get away, he was.

  The little ass that had borne him stood by the scaffold; after the man had been dragged from his back the ass had been forgotten about, his rope not even tied. Jostled by those pushing forward to have a better look and those pushing back who had seen enough, the beast kicked once, and pranced away. No one stopped him, no one noticed him. He left the Campo dei Fiori (not pausing even at the unattended stalls where winter vegetables were sold, whose greens hung down temptingly) and entered the narrow streets beyond, Hat-makers’ Street, Locksmiths’ Street, Crossbow-makers’ Street, Trunk-makers’ Street, out beneath the high walls of palaces and churches, skirting the crowds that filled the Piazza Navona, finding another way, north, always north. Now and then boys or shopkeepers chased after him, housewives tried to snatch his lead, but he kicked out and brayed, and they laughed and fell behind; none could catch him. Some noticed the dark cross in the hair of his shaggy back, the cross that all asses still bear in honor of Our Lord, whom one of their kind once carried; but this cross was not the same, no not the same.

  Pierce knew what cross it was, what complex figure rather, one that contained the cross of Christ and of the elements, and more: indeed everything, everything in one thing, a Monas, or rather the sign for it, the sign for its unimaginable unfigurable plenitude. No ass but this one ever bore it, and this one hadn't till this day. Giordano Bruno, though, had followed that sign since he had run away from Rome the first time, twenty years before, and now the sign was his, he was the sign, and it was he who was borne.

  After many years had passed, the Vatican authorities would begin to claim that they hadn't burned Giordano Bruno at the stake at all, that what was burned that day on the square was a simulacrum or effigy. As all the papers relating to the trial and the execution had disappeared into deep and unbreachable archives, those who wished to believe this could. Something burned there in the Campo dei Fiori for sure, for a long time.

  But not he. He was gone out of the city before those ashes were cold, on roads like those in Italian genre paintings: rural crossroads somnolent in the sun, a tavern, a guard with a pike, a broken arch from which saplings sprout and wash is hung. The high-piled ochre houses with their red roofs; a pot of basil in a window, and a woman daydreaming in another. Say, whose beast is that?

  And from there, where? Kraft didn't say, hadn't written that, wasn't granted the time or the compos mentis.

  Pierce put down the page.

  A Y sprang from that scaffold on the Campo dei Fiori in Rome. One horn of it led to the one that led to the one that came eventually to here where Pierce sat, the world he lived in; but the narrow rightward horn went on just as far, growing ever farther from its broader mate, running into alternity forever, generating its own fartherness as it went.

  Which Pierce could see, which Kraft surely always meant to write: that must be what some of the homeless and sometimes unnumbered pages were that constituted the typescript's end.

  Which Pierce could write, almost, if he wanted or dared to, or were being asked to, as Boney Rasmussen had in fact once asked him to do in the year of his death. But no he was editor only, annotator and tidier of the other man's work.

  For a long time Pierce sat at the desk, or lay on his bed, or stood in his walled garden, while that other farther story unfolded before or within him as plainly as though he could really read it there in the writings he possessed. He sat and stood and lay and laughed until the eternal bells called the brothers, once again, to prayer.

  3

  It was exceedingly odd, thought the Ass, to be thinking the thoughts he was thinking, or indeed to be thinking any thoughts at all, seeing as he had never done so in his life before, as far as he could remember; then again he had never before tried to remember anything either.

  He, who had never considered himself to have a self, now found himself thinking that he was possessed of more than one, an old one and a new one, and that they didn't agree on how to go forward from here. They did not, or could not, agree on how to move at all. In his run for freedom he had given it no thought, but when he was far from the city crowds he stopped, weary yet exalted, to rest at last, foam on his lips and his flanks trembling; and then when he commanded himself to go on, he couldn't think exactly how it was done. Did he move the two feet on the left side of his body, then the two on the right? Or did he move the four of them each in turn, like four men shifting a heavy trunk? Or the right front leg and the back left together, then the other two?

  Immobile in the roadway as he was, unable to make a choice among these methods, he was unaware of the peasant and his son who had come up behind him, though his protruding eyeballs should have warned him of them. The man took hold of his trailing rope, and at the same moment his son slipped a halter over his puzzled head. Then immediately he knew what to do, though it was too late: he planted his four hooves in the road and balked, and when the man pushed from behind he kicked out, and he turned his big lips inside out and brayed loud enough to bring the women to their doors to watch the contest. But at length the old man fetched a bunch of carrots, and the younger a stick, and the little ass remembered he had run for miles that day and not eaten. He tried to get his teeth into those carrots—but the peasant of course pulled them away, and then held them out again further on, tempting him to try again. And so between the carrot held out ahead and the blows of the stick behind, the Ass was at length brought to the man's dilapidated little farmstead and the manger where, amid the other incurious animals, he was shut in. Confused and horribly uncomfortable inside this rough skin, smelling still in his great nostrils the stench of his own burning, he could not know if he had escaped death only to be trapped forever in an even worse fate; and he lowered his great head, and wept.

  * * * *

  There are kind masters and cruel masters but no good masters; what's good is to have no master. The Ass soon learned that there was no one in the world who was not his master, no one who did not have the right to strike him, goad him, insult him, injure him, withhold his rough feed, work him to exhaustion. His wit all went toward avoiding the worst, and it was easy to see what that was: in the clay yard a little mill stood, a mola asinaria (the Ass found he knew the Latin name), turned now by an old blind (or blinded) horse; a long bar was bound to his back and breast, and his hooves trod the circle, and the heavy stones ground together. The horse, swag bellied and otherwise thin as a bunch of sticks, seemed unlikely to continue in that labor for much longer. Each day the Ass observed him, to see if he might be faltering; each night he woke from horrid dreams to find that he himself was not, thank the gods, bound to the wheel after all—and to find, also, that he was still an ass.

  So he scampered and kicked and tossed his big head like a frisky puppy, hoping to seem unsuited to the wheel; loaded with heavy panniers or heaped with fagots that pierced his hide, he tried to be patient and mild, for no burden could be greater than that blind journey to nowhere; he thought of the name Sisyphus but couldn't for a long time remember who that was.

  H
e couldn't remember. His gigantic memory, the endless corridors and towers where who did what when to whom with what for what reason, on and on in ordered ranks, could simply not unfold into the small ass brain where it was now housed; the strong ass-heart could not fire it up or light its lengths and breadths. More than once in the first days of his escape, the Ass, unable to remember a thing or a name or a place or a picture that he had once needed only to raise a forefinger to find (he had no forefinger now), had thought of suicide: thought to fling himself down some ravine, leap into the river, eat poison—anything but fire, anything but that. There was no ravine along the way of his daily labors, though, and the river was far, and nothing he ate seemed even to disagree with him. What the Holy Office had not been able to do he would not be able to do for himself.

  Days and months went by, seasons turned, he tried to keep an inward calendar, marking full moons with an imagined white stone, but when he went to look at it again he found the stones scattered. He put aside each night a wisp from his feed, but he trampled them inadvertently or ate them absentmindedly.

  Thus a year passed, another, another. Once upon a time he had praised asinitá, the patience of asses, their willingness, their refusals and their truculence too; praised them as possessing a divine wisdom that ought to be enthroned in heaven. But that was a game, a play, a ludus or a ludibrium, written without this experience, which it seemed would last forever, until his poor soul was freed to feed at last upon the deathless grasses of Elysium. He began to pray that he might in the idiocy of daily labor forget that he was a man, or bore a man's spirit, and instead know nothing, nothing at all. Then, just as he was surrendering to despair, his fortunes altered.