“It’s a corrupted text,” Pierce said. “I believe.” There was, he now saw, another bentwood chair beside the man, exactly like the one he sat in.
“I so much wanted it to knit,” the other said. He interlaced his own fingers. “Past and present, then and now. The story of the thing lost, and how it was found. More than anything I wanted it to resolve. And all it does is ramify.
“You take this party, or ball,” he said, lifting his glass as though to toast it. “I mean it’s hardly the Walpurgisnacht that was promised for so long.”
“Well,” Pierce said. “I mean.”
“The all-purged-night; the all-perjurers’-night. The transmuting revels, the night machinery out of which we all come different. Wasn’t that the idea? ‘Where nothing is but what is not.’ What is not yet, or is not any longer.”
“Ah,” said Pierce. “Ah yes.”
The masked man pointed at Pierce with a yellow-nailed smoker’s forefinger. “And take yourself, for another instance,” he said. “How are you to be understood now? The Golden Ass? Dionysus? There’s Bottom, of course. Whose dream hath no bottom.”
“Well it wasn’t what I planned,” Pierce said. And suddenly weary he sat down where he was so obviously meant to sit. “Not at all what I intended.”
“No. No. Not at all. I’m so sorry. Well at a certain point invention flags, you see; you begin to repeat, helplessly. You keep coming upon the same few conceptions over and over, greeting each one with glad cries, yes! Yes! The way on! Until you realize what it is, oh here I go again, the same story again, as ever. And you feel so damned.”
So damned what? Pierce wished he had a nice drink like this guy’s, who didn’t seem to be drinking his.
“I just hope,” he said, “we won’t all be in here forever, and none of us able to move up, or down.”
Pierce’s heart shrank. “Oh don’t worry,” he said. “No party lasts that long.”
“You,” the fellow said. Somehow his voice had lost the delicate affected whine it had begun with, as though that had been part of the mask, and this was his own, a flatter voice, with an angry irony in it. “It’ll have to be you that does it. Somehow, I don’t know how. If you don’t make a contribution, haven’t I labored in vain? Not to speak of your own sufferings.”
“I,” Pierce said. “I was supposed to be getting coffee.” And he rose, feeling the sudden dream horror of having forgotten for a fatal length of time the mission you’ve set out on, too late, too long. “Gotta run.”
“You’ll have to do it,” the man called after him. “I’m so sorry.” By the sound of his voice Pierce could tell he had removed his mask, but nothing would have induced him to look back to see who was beneath it.
Meanwhile, the Orphics have set up a theremin, a black box surmounted by a slim antenna, another looping from its side; a woman plays the tall antenna with her hand, running it delicately up and down inches from the rod, as though it were the central nerve of an invisible phallus she strokes, from whose possessor she draws eerie wails of bliss or agony. Night, turning and turning to the music, is being touched by strangers from whose hands she slips away, till the red DEVIL whispers in her ear and makes her laugh.
“Gotcha,” he says, and “Hello, Mal,” she says back to him. “Knew it was you.”
“Let’s go up on the battlements,” he says to her, “and look see how far down it is.”
“Oh no,” she says. “I know that one, Mal.”
“I’ll buy you a drink,” he says. “Whatcha drinking?”
“Not what you can get,” she says, and her tireless feet have left the paving stones.
“Come on,” he says, “for old times’ sake.”
“You can’t catch me,” she says.
“Later,” he calls, “later,” as she spins away from his touch and from them all to turn and turn in a circle of her own, black skirt twirling. The lead singer, pale hair streaming, sings:
We gotta live, Lesbia
We gotta love
So let the cold old men rave on, it’s all right
Kiss me one time, Lesbia
Kiss me ten times
Now square that number, girl, then multiply’t
Just keep on kissing, Lesbia
Don’t stop your counting
Till way past a thousand the number’s out of sight
Keep the sun from setting, Lesbia
Make it rise back up
’Cause when our sun’s gone down it’s one long mother of a night.
“Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,” Pierce muttered inside his ass’s head. “Let’s live and love. We can, we could.”
“What language are you speaking?” Val asked him, with whom Pierce found himself gravely waltzing to the tune. Where was Rose again?
“Latin,” he said. “Catullus. It’s the song they’re singing, don’t ask me why.”
“They’re singing in English.”
“Nox est perpetua una dormienda,” Pierce said. “One endless night’s sleep. Una nox perpetua.”
Val suddenly stopped still. Pierce saw that he had spoken a name; and that it was the name of someone she knew, the name of someone he knew even though he couldn’t think who it was or how he knew her.
“Una Knox,” Val said. “Oh my God.” She turned away from the throng in consternation, and gripped her brow: A last firework was lofted into the air with a long suspenseful whisper, and then popped lazily. “Then. Oh my God it was just some kind of joke. She’s not real.”
“She isn’t? Who isn’t?” Pierce called after her.
“Rosie! Rosie!” Val cried, catching sight of Rosie’s back, or front. But when the person turned to Val, Pierce saw it was a different old gent, a real one, who had just come as he was. Val went off looking side to side. And Pierce remembered who Una Knox was: the woman Boney Rasmussen said he was leaving all that he had to.
Well she was real; real enough. Una P. Knox, great Uthra of the end, third of the three great ones, everyone’s mother and heir. Rosie Rasmussen had often told him that Boney had refused to admit that he, just like everybody, was bound for that endless night. But Boney had known all right, he had only resisted; his resistance had of course been futile but he’d known that too. So one last small joke in the face of it or her: he had left her everything.
He looked up. On the ramparts above appeared Night herself in sable furs.
Rose Ryder came down toward him weaving gracefully, a top slowing down.
“See,” she said, “you let me stay too late. I knew you would.” “No,” Pierce said. “No we’ll go. It’s over anyway.”
No it was not Boney Rasmussen who would not honor Death; it was Ray Honeybeare and Mike Mucho and the rest of them, Dr. Retlaw O. Walter; it was they who denied her. O Death where is thy sting. Rose Ryder could come here dressed as her, as Night, just because it was not who she was. It was who she was fleeing from, Beau said: but she had fled in the wrong direction, right into the arms of other powers, and all those powers were the same, all the way down or out; and now Pierce thought she was deeper in than before, and he didn’t know how to reach her, and would not dare go there if he did.
“So tell me,” he asked her as he helped her toward the boat. “How long were you living in the City?”
“Oh not long. A few months.”
“And when you were there,” Pierce said. “What did you do? Who did you, what.”
“I don’t remember.”
“And when was this? I was there then. Was this after you ran away from Wesley?”
“Who?”
“Wesley. Wes. Your first husband. The one who.”
“Him?” She opened her eyes in surprise and amusement, holding his arm. “Well you tell me,” she said, and laughed. “It was you who made him up.”
But did she come at last to the party, Una Knox, she herself and not another dressed as her? For wasn’t she invited, or at least expected? Well that could be her disembarking from the paddleboat now, hugely tall in a drape of sig
ht-drowning black, a head of stark white bone, not a skull exactly or not a human skull but certainly something from which the flesh has fallen and which the sun has bleached, anyone who’s lived on earth would recognize it; and bony sockets within which no eye can be seen or imagined.
It’s very late now and the revellers are actually shedding bits of their getups as inconvenient or already falling apart, not who they ever were; more people are now going out than in. The band’s about to quit, and does quit just as this personage comes to stand in the doorway. Everyone, not everyone at once but each group as it is passed, turns to look and wonder, and stops talking for a moment, the braver ones calling out greetings or acknowledgment, not returned except by a look. Up at the back on the dais, Rosie stands to see this dark eminence, the last dignitary to be greeted, the one she’s waited for.
Coming in behind, exciting almost as much awe or interest, a spindly wraith in sheepskins, long white hair floating on the heaters’ airs, eyes so pale they must be sightless yet they look left and right and seem to smile. The bony dark one stops before Rosie and puts out a big plain human hand. Tattooed on the back—tattooed so long ago it’s grown obscure, though Rosie knows it instantly—is a blue fish. The hand opens and shows or proffers a large ugly tooth, a canine tooth, a wolf’s tooth.
“For you. All I brought.”
“Oh you,” Rosie says.
Spofford lifts for a moment the mask from his head (not a skull but a lamb’s pelvic bone, sun-whitened and still smelling inside of the high plains where he found it) and is seen to be grinning broadly, pleased with himself. The dead tooth in the middle of his own mouth has come out on this trip somehow at last, leaving a comic hole.
“Oh you bastard,” Rosie says, weeping and laughing at once into his black cloak, holding him tight. “Oh you.”
From down below, where not only spectral Cliff but everyone else has been watching, it looks as though great Death has taken another elderly victim from behind, wrenching the man’s poor limbs all out of bent: and they all laugh, for of course it’s not Death at all, not at all.
“But what happened?” she says. The big tooth is hard in her hand. “What the hell happened?”
“I’ll never tell,” Spofford says. A glance Cliff’s way. “It can’t be told.” But he’s still grinning, and it seems that one day—maybe long after it’s not true anymore—he might.
“See, Moffett,” Rose Ryder said to Pierce. “The difference was. In our relationship. You were mostly interested in the sex.”
Pierce registered the past tense. “Yes?”
“To me there were other things. Things that meant more.”
“There were?”
“Sure.”
What other things had there been, he wondered, had things happened between them that he had had no knowledge of or was she forgetting how every night, every single night. What would she rather have been doing?
Her black mask was on a chair beside his broad bed, where she lay, pretty drunk and grinning blissfully, moving slowly as though sunk in clear syrup. The ass’s head was on the floor and yet still affixed to Pierce’s shoulders, where it was to remain for a long time.
“To me,” she said, and raked her long hair with both her hands. “To me there were other things.”
Well he had been wrong so far about everything else, so maybe what she said was so. It seemed likely, suddenly, certain even, self-evident. It hadn’t been he serving her, laboring to bring her to awareness of her own nature and forcing her assent to it: no. Out of her own generosity or curiosity or awesome acquiescence, whatever it had been (love, no don’t call it love) she had bent herself to fill needs that she had uncovered or divined in him, latent till then.
Sure. All along. Maybe she was glad for him, glad to do it, it being so obvious what he wanted, what he so badly needed. Like a strong nurse who’s able to put up with excretions and cryings-out, body needs of any kind, her job or role, until it grew at last too onerous.
But did you like it? she had asked him, shivering and weeping in his arms after his first exactions. Did you, did you really like it, did you?
“Well I have to tell you,” he said, and the lump in his throat hurt as though the words themselves scored it in their passage. “I. I never, you know. I never did those things with anyone else. Never with anyone before.”
“Oh?” she said, smiling. “Hard to believe.”
“I’m not really,” he said, “I mean I don’t really,” and then nothing more, for he could see even despite her unfocussed forgetful eyes that she did not believe him at all, and never would or could; not that or anything else he said on that score. And he had taught her that.
“Say listen,” she said, and rose a little on her elbow. “Hic. When you called me before. You said you had something really important to say. Hic. Then you never said it.”
“Oh ah,” said Pierce, and sat on the end of the bed. Why was it that every day, every hour that passed seemed to fly into remote antiquity almost instantly, to become so hard to remember, positively conjectural, before it could be acted on or its consequences grasped? “Well it was crazy, in a way. A crazy idea.” She only waited, still smiling. “Well. I thought. I thought that there was a way out, or maybe through, our difficulties.”
“What difficulties?”
“I was going to ask you,” and he dove, “to marry me.”
But she had drifted off, to sleep or elsewhere, and returned too late to hear.
“What did you say?”
“I was going to ask you,” he said, and a burble of weird laughter arose in him to reiterate it, it was just so god damn stupidly sad, “to marry me.”
“Oh.”
“Kids,” Pierce said. “Maybe.”
“Oh. Jeez. God that is just so hic sweet.” Even through the blur of alcohol clouding her face he could see her eyes aglow. “Pierce.”
“I thought: if you did, if you would, then I.”
“Aw,” she said. “You know though really. I couldn’t marry anyone who didn’t share my faith.”
Now he did laugh, gently, at himself as much as at her, but certainly at her: her abstracted drunken serious certainty, immemorial seemingly but only adopted a month or so ago, he wondered what it would be like to be able to speak a new language with such conviction. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, I see.”
“Hic,” she said.
“I just thought it up. Wild hair up my ass. You know.”
“Hic,” she said again, and looking appalled she tried to rise. “Oh hic no. I’ve got the hic hiccups. I hate that. I’ll have them now for hours. Hic. I always do.”
“Drink water backwards. Breathe into a bag.”
“I tried that once and hic passed out.”
“What I thought was,” Pierce said, “that if you could say Yes to that question, then I could put up with. With anything.” He folded his hands, and hung them between his knees. “Anything. I don’t know why I thought it. Why don’t you pray?”
She looked on him, and then turned to lay her head in his lap. He felt the small spasm of her next hiccup.
“What,” Pierce said. “It wouldn’t work on hiccups?”
“Of course it would ‘work,’” she said, laughing. “Of course.”
“If thou be willing, remove this hiccup from me,” Pierce said. “But not my will but thine be done.”
“Pierce.”
“Well.”
She closed her eyes. “Holy Spirit be with me and in me,” she said. “Please let these hiccups stop. I ask this in Jesus’s name. Amen.”
Her head in his lap was heavy. So small in compass, so huge inside, infinite actually. She breathed in and out. There were no more hiccups; the hiccups were gone. In a few moments she was asleep.
“I remembered I’d been there before,” Rosie Rasmussen was just then saying to Spofford. By her bed, her own old one still and not Boney’s former one, lay all of Boney’s clothes in a heap, as though Boney had dropped them there. “When I was thirteen or so
. I was sent there for a cough that wouldn’t stop. The girl in the bed next to mine died. I was there when she died in the night.”
Spofford’s long bare body like a dark god’s was arrayed on the bed, his head supported by his arm and fist, one knee raised and his other hand resting languidly on it: a river god, Bernini’s or Tiepolo’s, Rosie was thinking these things with a part of her mind unenlisted for the telling of what she told or the feeling of what she felt. She wiped her tears with a corner of the sheet. She had thought she could tell about what she had learned in the hospital, not back then but now, about illness and being alive and patience and chance, about the odds and how they are different from fate: the odds aren’t fate at all even though you can be fooled into thinking they are, that the terrible thing or the illness or the wonderful recovery is not just the odds but something that had been waiting there all along to happen; it’s not. She believed this still but she was too afraid and drunk and depleted to make it sound true, and she let it pass through her and be lost; but it wasn’t lost, it would return, it was part of her now.
“I found out then in the hospital, that first time,” she said, “that I didn’t want to die; that I wanted to be in the world. I hadn’t been before but I wanted to be. Maybe that’s how I got better. I got better when that girl died. Isn’t that strange to think. Like a trade. But it wasn’t.”
“No,” Spofford said. “It wasn’t.”
“Well it’s not easy for me. Being in the world. It still isn’t.”
“No,” said Spofford, who knew. “It isn’t.”
“You have to learn it over and over. Like finding something you lost again and again.”
“How can I help?” Spofford said.
Rosie thought of the knights Pierce and she talked about, who went out and did things women told them to do, if they could. She thought it wouldn’t matter if they did it because they had to, or for reasons of their own; it happened at least. When there was no other way it could.
DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle Page 55
