by John Crowley
“The trouble is,” he wrote to his new patron, Boniface Rasmussen, called Boney for more than one reason, “that all I seem capable of these days is description, I mean the stuff that used to be deplored in book reports when I was in high school—‘I liked the story, but there was too much description.’ And a novel, Boney, is like a family photo album, in this respect: that no one is going to care about your nature shots, your sunsets and distant mountains (never really satisfactory anyway, and done not so much better than many another snapshooter could do them); nor about your pictures of famous monuments or buildings. All they will care much to look at will be people, the faces of people they can recognize.”
Except for a little memoir, then, privately printed (Sit Down, Sorrow, 1960), he produced nothing in the last years of his life; or so Pierce Moffett was given to understand when he was taken to Fellowes Kraft’s house to examine his literary remains on behalf of the Rasmussen Foundation. There in Kraft’s study or office he opened a gray cardboard box on the novelist’s desk, and lifted out a pile of yellow typing paper, strangely light, a large manuscript, an unfinished novel whose existence had not before been suspected; and sat down in the stillness of the dead man’s house to look at it.
Pierce Moffett was then midway through the course of his thirty-fifth year. The room was what the builders and sellers of the house would have called a den, not really intending the old metaphor in the word, the place to which a predator retreats to hide and devour what it has caught. The chain of circumstances that had brought him there, to sit in Fellowes Kraft’s oaken swivel chair, was so long and strange it could not but hint at the workings of Fate, even to Pierce, who didn’t believe in Fate; his coming to be there, right there in that deep den, was as just as it was unlikely, as though his arrival were the end of a quest, an end that could have been achieved only by singleness of purpose and unerring Coincidence.
Pierce first suggested to Boney Rasmussen that the great typescript be taken out and photocopied, so that he could read it himself if he felt incapable of coming here to sit before it (he was old and not strong); but Boney had not wanted it to leave Kraft’s house, as though were it to be taken out into the sunlight it might turn to dead leaves or crumble into gravedust. So every day Rosie Rasmussen drove Pierce from his apartment in Blackbury Jambs to Kraft’s house in Stonykill to read by the light of Kraft’s study window (the electricity was off in the house). And since Boney Rasmussen would not come to read them he, Pierce, was going to have to tell him the story, like an ancient bard, once upon a time.
He raised his eyes to the window, where now Rosie and Sam could be seen, gathering rosebuds.
Once upon a time—say right about the time of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, or at the beginning of the Piscean age—it seems that wise men in the city of Alexandria, or maybe somewhere older and deeper in the Old World than that, made by pure thought an astonishing discovery. They discerned that time and the world do not flow evenly forward together, but are subject to quite sudden, total, and irreversible alterations. Every now and then the observable universe passes through a sort of turnstile or baffle and comes out different on the other side—different not only in its physical extensions and the laws that govern them, but different in its past and future too: once the world was all like this; then it changed; now it’s like this, and always has been.
Perceiving then that their own universe was itself in the process of taking a sharp turn or transformation (perceiving, indeed, that their discovery of periodic world-overturning transformations was only possible because one was under way), the wise brotherhood set about trying to preserve something of what they had found or created: something which would bear with it, like an ark, not only the powers and arts about to be lost once again, but also the memory of falls such as they were experiencing. They guessed that the chances were slim of any one part of their world surviving unchanged into the next, and so they created several such carriers—a jewel, an elixir, a cask, a personage wrapped in changeless sleep—and, as the frame of the universe they knew shook and tottered, they went in bands out to the four corners of the earth (which did have four corners then) to preserve and conceal these treasures, and to pass on to their descendants the knowledge and the duty to keep and guard them.
Inevitably, though, one by one, corroded or fouled by the alteration of space and time, the treasures decline into useless rubbish; the guardians forget what they are guarding, and why; the new age grows old, and if the stories are remembered they are remembered as that alone, as stories.
And as that age, too, draws to its end (now we are somewhere at the end of the Renaissance) amid awful rumor and wild speculation, a new body of wise men discerns that the upheaval of their time is but the latest in a series, told of in stories and encoded in the obscurities of ancient sciences and the recipes of magic-books. The wreckage of time, they conclude, is about to bring forth the treasures that the past laid up, as an earthquake breaks open tombs; and they will be the inheritors of the jewel, the crater, the person wrapped in deathlike sleep with emerald tablet gripped in his white fingers; the inheritors too of the duty to preserve and transmit at least one of these alive into the unknown new age now dawning, etc., and with it the knowledge, etc., etc., as before.
All this told in approximately reverse order, not without skill, but with the unreal lightness of a film run backward, the same eerie swapping of cause and effect. Unfinished, moreover; a Möbius strip obviously still needing to be pasted end to end in order to become endless.
And it was all true: Pierce knew the history Kraft had built on well enough to see that. Strange but true. It was only inverted, as Pierce had once himself imagined History could be inverted, the real good guys being not the textbook victors but the others, the forgotten ones, who preserved among them a secret history opposite to the history everyone else is given to learn; exiles, made to suffer unfairly through the ages by harsh authorities, though their wisdom will triumph at last and in the end. The great coincidence, sum of all the small and apparently unimportant ones that had guided and tugged and chivvied him gently to this room in this year, was that he already knew this story of Kraft’s before he sat to read it.
Ægypt.
He had told his cousins when they asked him Will we be in this story when we’re grownups? that they would, that it was a story about grownups; it wasn’t make-believe, he had said, they hadn’t made it up, they had discovered themselves in it. He had told them it would still be going on when they were grownups and they would be in it still. And so it had. And here again he was himself.
Pierce lifted his eyes from the eroded bluff the pile of pages made, face down on the left-hand side, face up on the right.
He had that day received his first check from the Rasmussen Foundation, made out in Rosalind Rasmussen’s back-slanted lefthanded script with schoolgirl circles dotting the i’s, and signed in Boney Rasmussen’s Palmer Method tracery. It was in his pocket.
What really was he being paid to do?
There was this huge typescript, which had been hiding so long in plain sight on Kraft’s desk, which Pierce was now charged with deciding about.
There were Kraft’s other papers, a dusty attic pile of liquor cartons which Pierce, heart sinking, had looked into as into another man’s unwashed laundry. All through the house, floor to ceiling and in casual piles and in turnabout bookcases, were books, and he was to rummage in those, to see what of extraordinary value might turn up (his suggestion that a professional dealer be brought in to make an assessment had been dismissed gracefully, which puzzled him but pleased him too).
Above—or beneath—all these charges was another task, one that Boney Rasmussen had seemed to lay upon him without ever quite stating it: to look for something somewhere here—in the books, the book, the boxes—something that Kraft had lost or found, something which the old man (gaga maybe, probably) much desired and yet referred to in terms so delicate and tentative and shamefaced that Pierce had decided not to un
derstand him.
And there was his own book, too, not to forget. For which another and larger check had also just arrived, signed by his agent Julie Rosengarten, the first half of an advance against the royalties of a book that was not yet half done, was not even half begun: a book that he could almost believe he need not ever actually write (he laughed a mad laugh in the hollow house) because he had found it here all done, like the shoemaker in the story; all but done, easily done, if he could only think of the right question to put to the place, and to Kraft’s unlaid spirit that inhabited it.
When Pierce had first left New York City and moved out to the Faraway Hills not so far away but a different world for sure, he had supposed that he would be going back to the city regularly, unable to imagine that the little town he had come to live in and the nice little apartment Brent Spofford had found for him could supply him with the excitements and possibilities he had learned to subsist on. Actually he had hardly gone back at all. But on the day after he finished reading the manuscript of Kraft’s last novel, he found that he had packed an overnight bag, called his agent in the city, acquainted himself with the bus schedule, and prepared his mind to go to town; and he stood now in the middle of his little sitting room (less ready to go than he imagined himself to be, he had not got himself enough cash, he had not packed his toothbrush among other necessities, his heart was full) looking out and down into the scruffy back yard of the building whose second floor his apartment occupied, becoming aware that an old, old rose bush burdening the slat and wire fence between his and the next house’s yard was in bloom.
It had been a briar patch when he arrived here in March. And now look. All by itself, untouched, unloved. He remembered the big bushes that went down the sloping lawn in Kentucky.
Something entirely different is coming.
This thought—it was not a thought but an understanding, a sudden conviction such as he had never had before, a clairvoyance distilled out of the June day and the roses and the tick of time’s passing—neither surprised nor exalted him, nor made him afraid. It was a conclusion he came to, as simple and certain as a sum; only he had no idea what evidence, what multiplier or multiplicand, had been accumulating in him to be totted up just then. No idea.
Something entirely different is coming to you, that you can’t imagine; and a different spirit to inhabit you, to meet it with.
He waited for more, stock still and not breathing, as though he had looked up to find a shy rare beast in his path that would flee him if he moved; but the message was done.
After a time he turned from the window, and shouldered his bag to go.
The bus (Pierce took the bus because he had no car, had never learned to drive or acquired a license) left from the little variety store on River Street, which was the main street of Blackbury Jambs, the street where the library and the three-story Ball Building and a bar and a coffee shop (the Donut Hole) looked out across the Blackbury River.
“Just rolling in,” said the lady who sold him his ticket, and indeed just then the windows of the store were darkened by the bulk of the bus drawing up before it. Pierce bought a local paper (the Faraway Crier) and one of the city papers; the bus snorted and exhaled the air of its brakes; the door swung open, the cheerful driver leapt smartly out, and Pierce, though gripped momentarily by a strange reluctance, boarded.
His book, as he had at first conceived it, was a book about stories: a book about how a past world, once whole, had broken apart, and forgot itself, and yet persisted in fables, in maxims, in turns of phrase and habits of mind and childhood rhymes whose import is lost. There is more than one history of the world: one of them patent and sensible, the other one blind, unrecognized, and yet issuing from our mouths and our actions daily, unexpungable. In one the world is round: in another the world has four corners, and we still say that it does. And where are the four corners of the world? Why are there seven days in the week and not nine or five? Where do the names of the astrological signs come from, and why those names and not others? Who are the lily-white boys, clothéd all in green-o? How does music have charms to soothe the savage breast? Pierce knew all these things, and more. He knew why cosmic and cosmetic have the same root; he knew why you stuff a cold and starve a fever. He knew why we have always supposed that Gypsies could tell fortunes: it’s because they come from Egypt, though they don’t, and we know Egypt is preeminently the land of magic and of secret wisdom, though it isn’t. And Pierce knew why that was too, that was a story he wanted to tell: how when he was a kid he had excavated an imaginary country that turned out not to have been imaginary at all, or not, at any rate, to have been imagined by him alone.
He had offered this book—a book about the past—to Julie Rosengarten, once his lover and roommate, now a literary agent, and Julie had transformed it (page by page, lunch by lunch) into a book about the future. She wanted Pierce not only to recapture the leavings of old sciences, but to intimate new ones; she wanted him to send out a call from his own potent subjectivity, newly awakened by his occult studies, to the latent powers in the souls of his readers. She wanted—it took him a while to understand this—a book of magic, a new black book, clavis Salomonis, ars magna. That, she said, she could sell. “It’s a new age, Pierce,” she’d said to him. “All that stuff is coming back.”
Pierce had promised to try. He had many qualifications for writing such a book, and he had one serious disqualification, or drawback, or what might be construed as a drawback or maybe a sort of sidewise advantage: he did not, himself, believe in magic. Even if he could derive from his history books and his source books any exact description of what might be done, any new-old practice, he just could not bring himself to instruct anyone in it; even to make a little convincing the recipes and procedures that had been the actual end-product of all that vast past intellection, it would be necessary to cast over them a lot of rhetorical glamour, sidestepping or mistranslating the incomprehensible physiology and the unworkable physics, in order to keep out of sight the great cæsura (Pierce at least sure felt it) between what we do, today, which at least works, and what they did, which didn’t. He actually pulled off this trick in miniature, in the scant pages of his proposal, and it had sold the book to a giant publisher of paperbacks, as Julie said it would; and then he had come to a halt, unable to think how to do it in large, in a real book. He had got no further with it when he moved to Blackbury Jambs and came upon the box of paper on Kraft’s desk.
The bus traversed back and forth down the green foothills, crossed and recrossed the river, and then entered onto the broad artery leading to the city. Across the degraded flatlands the lanes grew ever more clogged with traffic pressing toward the distant brownish towers of Dis, which for a long time seemed to grow no closer, until all the traffic rushed together into the aortic tunnel, abandon all hope, and out into the scarred old heart of it, always a surprise somehow to find it surrounding you, Heraclitean, the same but never the same. Marveling at the filth and the crowds of wildly various humans, both more extreme than he seemed to remember (had he lost a carapace, an ability not to notice things?), Pierce went down stairs and escalators into deeper bolges with the damned throng, looking in his pockets for the address Julie Rosengarten had given him, the restaurant where she would meet him and (he hoped) buy his lunch: uptown, a couple of stops.
“I’ve never heard of this writer,” Julie said. She faced him across the table of a calm and superior restaurant, a nicer place than she had taken him to on other occasions, maybe she was doing well. “Who is he?”
“A novelist. He was sort of popular once. He became sort of a hermit; lived alone, working on this huge …”
“Is it going to be published?”
“Not possible,” Pierce said. “It’s just an idea. One long idea. This idea.”
Julie rested her chin in the cup of her hand, and the many bracelets she wore slid down along her arm with a whisper of wood and metal. “So,” she said.
“So suppose it was so,” Pierce said. “Th
ink what the consequences of that would be.”
“Well I guess I can’t really imagine. I’m not even sure I can imagine what you’re saying.”
“It might mean,” he said, “that once the physical laws that govern the universe were such that certain practices we read about really worked the way they were said to work, even though now they no longer do. Alchemy, for instance. Judicial astrology, or astrological medicine. Automata. Prophecy.”
“Well did they? I mean I think they did, really. Probably. Some of them.” Julie, he suspected, might now and then try a little innocent witchery, crystals, cards, magia naturalis.
“They didn’t,” Pierce said. “Or rather put it this way: either those techniques and sciences of the past did work, and ours don’t; or ours do, and not theirs. If they could turn base matter into gold, then ‘gold’ and ‘matter’ weren’t then what we know they are now.” He drank from the glass of amber whiskey that had been put before him. “Well maybe they actually weren’t always what they are now. Maybe they became the way they are now.”
“Well gee. It seems like we’d know. If this was really part of our history. Changes like that.”
