Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  Before he set out next day—unwashed and sleepless but feeling as though he had fed for hours on rich and satisfying food (he knew this sensation too, it would not last, there were dreadful fasts awaiting him)—he sent a telegram to Boney Rasmussen in the Faraway Hills:

  mon empereur have what i promised you packed

  w/troubles in old kit bag smile smile smile sandy

  His guide awaited him in the lobby, sunk in one of the swollen armchairs that were the height of Soviet-style luxe, digging his toe into the unspeakable carpet. He wore the same shiny shoes and leather coat. It was the first of March, bright calm cold expectant morning; the mountains rose not so high as they had once seemed. And the deep and famous caverns at the end of the journey, where he would find at last nothing but what he himself would put there.

  * * * *

  Kraft at his desk in the Faraway Hills put the typescript back into the box from which the blank paper it was typed on had at first come, a box of goldenrod draft paper, Sphinx brand. A book that even if he finished it would be too long for anyone to read, and would still have to be read twice to be understood. There it would lie, hidden like the purloined letter in plain sight, and Boney would come and search the little house and eventually find it, for Boney was going to live forever just because of his natural unkillable constitution, that was the funny part; he would find it, the thing that Kraft had found, the Stone at the end of the journey. Unfinished, unmade, as all of them are and must be.

  For a moment he wept.

  All his life he had searched for the words of power that would go beyond mere description, explanation, catalog, to effect transformation. He was modest; he had aspired to that language, that gematria, but had never really believed it might be his. Well, it was the other way around. He had aspired to what he already possessed; but he could never have what he despised as common.

  Thought can't really encompass the world at all, pace Bruno's unresting daemon. It can't limn the world exactly or represent it adequately. Language, thought, conception, can't even cross the gap between the soul and the world; it may even constitute that unbridgeable gap. All that language can do is to transform.

  Give me the base stuff of the world, sadness and nightmare and things tortured in the black smithy of history, and I will turn it all to gold, sophic, wonderful, gold that can't be spent. It was easy: all the old alchemists said it was. It was simply not as great an art as those unachievable others: as encompassment, as true representation. Transformation was what language could do. It was what language could do best. It was all that it could do.

  He bent and rested his cheek against the cool bare brow of his Remington.

  The power of transformation, which he and everyone had sought as the goal. It had of course been all along right in his own backyard, a magic small and white, but as necessary to the heart (to his heart, but not only to his) as its own beating.

  O get up, he urged himself, walk to town. Keep moving, he ordered himself, an Arctic traveler facing a long dark night. Which he did face, una eterna nox dormienda, as Catullus had it, one everlasting night's sleep. Boney had been quite taken with that chilling little phrase.

  He rose and breathed, looked at the clock. There was a high-school boy he paid to truck him around, take him shopping, rake his lawn or mow it in season. Hauls my ashes too, he joked or choked to no listener, old flaccid satyr. Anyway the boy had apparently forgotten today, youth forgets, no matter.

  He put on a straw hat and took a stick from an urn of them by the door; the choice would once have occupied a minute or two of pleasurable fussing, no more now the games that you liked to play.

  He got no farther than the garden. Stood in its midst astonished at how late the year had grown, had autumn come early? No, it was September; there was nothing unlikely in the leaves fallen amid the wild asters and the larkspur, the last daisies drooping, their leaves aged and eaten. Pitiful how it had gone unattended. Some sort of vine with star-shaped leaves was clambering over the rhododendrons, he hadn't even noticed it, but now it had blushed deep red and he saw it.

  It was in this season that his mother had died, not so many years back that he could not still be filled with pointless grief on hot colored brambly days like this. She hadn't told him how ill she was, of course, she who hardly distinguished between illness and being alive. But then she decided to check herself into a hospital, and after a quick consultation with a doctor had elected to have a prolonged and risky surgery, get at this once and for all or die under the knife—he was sure that was how she had conceived of it, not even having a firm opinion as to which she would prefer. The operation had gone badly, complications, she had neither been killed nor cured, only lingered in awful discomfort and longing while more dreadful things were done to her.

  He had gone back and forth to the city over hills and valleys caught in the glamor of golden stasis, September, this time of hastening transformation that always seems so perfect and changeless. Sat by her long hours as she lay suffering, and learned at last how you could believe, how you could be grateful for being able to believe, that really truly there was someone inside the integuments of suffering flesh, someone who could never be touched, never hurt, who only waited patiently in bondage to be freed.

  And now that time was come again, once again. Unfolding tirelessly and willingly as it always had, always would. The older he grew and the faster the seasons came around the more permanent and inescapable they seemed, even though in fact he hurtled through them toward escape, his own escape.

  He wasn't afraid of dying, never had been. He was uncomfortably, childishly afraid of being dead, in his grave, gone down into the underworld. Maybe because of living so long in that basement apartment. No afterlife had ever been convincing to him except that commonwealth beneath the earth, Pluto's realm, and none had ever seemed quite so dreadful either. It was going to be like that, it was; at any rate he feared it was going to be like that, which came to the same thing; after he was truly dead he did not expect to fear that or anything.

  What he thought was that when Hermes came for him, to guide him down into the dark land (oh he could see his kind uncaring face), he would try to beguile him. That god had a special fondness for writers, wordsmiths as the papers called them; so Kraft thought he would ask him to listen, before they departed for that gate, to a story he had written in his honor. And if the god did not remember his own history, which probably a god never forgot, he might work on Hermes the trick Hermes had once worked on hundred-eyed Argus, to escape his vigilance: tell him a tale so involving, so long, so tedious finally, that his eyes would close, and he would sleep, well before the end was reached.

  Which Kraft was not going to get to anyway.

  He didn't grieve for himself, as good as a ghost already; he grieved for those others, men and women of flesh and blood, real people still caught in the machineries of history, whom he had toiled to release, and now must abandon.

  Rabbi David ben-Loew, the Great Rabbi of Prague, who made or didn't make the golem, often repeated the saying of Rabbi Tarphon, that we are not required to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. He meant the work of saving the fragments of divinity, sparks of life lost in the dark world of suffering matter, so that God could be healed. We redeem them by our prayers and our religious duties, the rabbis said. Dr. Pons had said that it was by Knowing. Dr. Pons said Knowing was salvation. But though knowing might be salvation, it was not release, it was harder than not knowing, it was only a more intense, a clearer suffering.

  He wiped the tears from his face, with his own kerchief, his own. Better to labor than to sleep. We who have spent ourselves in the labor of making the Stone, or saving it from the dark matrix wherein it has been caught: we call the work a game, a walk in the woods, a play, a ludus, a ludibrium, a joke: and that is because the only way to make the Stone is by the action of the Stone. In other words by means of that lesser art, transformation: his own art, wherein he had spent himself. So at the end of li
fe we turn homeward, weary, and with the work far from finished, but our own task anyway is done. And surely, surely turning homeward will not be climbing down into, but up out of: up out of a dark mine into the ordinary air, the surface of the earth, where we can wash and rest. He would believe it to be so, if he could.

  A cloud, harmless, covered the sun, and Fellowes Kraft saw that far down at the end of his drive an unfamiliar big car was turning in. Not the high school boy's old Rambler, nor Boney's Buick. An Oldsmobile, an 88.

  Am I not done now? he asked, of someone, of all. I can't finish. Is there really more yet to tell?

  8

  "It was in that autumn that he died then?” Pierce asked.

  "No,” said Rosie Rasmussen. “He got pretty sick, I guess. He spent some time in and out of the hospital. But he didn't die."

  "He didn't."

  "No. In fact I think I remember that he actually got quite a bit more work done that winter."

  "You think so?"

  "I mean I think Boney said so, but I don't remember all that well; it didn't seem so important to keep track of it. Why are you talking so softly?"

  Pierce shifted the phone to the left side and bent into the corner of the little booth. “The phone here isn't actually supposed to be used except for emergencies,” he said. “Not for like long conversations."

  "Oh.” There was a pause, suggestive of puzzlement, perhaps preparatory to asking where “here” was, but then she only said, “So why did you want to know?"

  He couldn't yet say why, or what he was looking for in Kraft's last days. He had come within sight of the end of Kraft's typescript and felt as though he had caught up with him, had reached the point Kraft himself had reached when he ran out of certainties, and now the two of them stood together on the brink of branching possibilities, facing decisions: which now Pierce alone could make.

  "You know Beau knew him in that year,” Rosie said.

  "Beau Brachman?"

  "Yes. Beau came to the county just about then. He used to go visit at Kraft's a lot."

  "Why? I mean what would he want there?"

  "I don't know. This is before I came back. I was living in Bloomington then."

  Beau Brachman thought the world is made from stories. He had told Pierce that, and surely not Pierce alone. All stories, he said, are one story. Or maybe he had said: one story is all stories.

  In Pierce's cottage in the Faraway Hills, on a winter morning, the last day Beau had been seen in the Faraways. One story. You're not required to finish it, Beau said. But you're not supposed to give up on it, either. And so Pierce had set out.

  "You still there?” Rosie asked.

  "It's just not like his others,” Pierce said. “It's different."

  "Just because of the time when he wrote it, maybe,” she said. “You know. In those years. Everything was becoming different. After being the same for so long."

  "Yes,” Pierce said. “For a while it seemed like that."

  "Every day you woke up and something was different from the way it had been when you went to sleep. I remember."

  "Yes."

  "Hair. Go to bed and wake up and every man you meet has sideburns down his cheeks."

  "I remember."

  "Go to bed married,” she said. “Wake up free."

  "So you don't know,” Pierce said, “how close he came to finishing."

  "Nope."

  "Nope?"

  "Well, I guess it depends,” she said, “on how long it was supposed to be."

  "For a longer book, of course, he would have had to start sooner.” Silence. “I'll just keep going,” Pierce said. “I'm not far now."

  "Call me when you get there. Wherever you are."

  He hung up the instrument but for a time didn't leave the little cranny, small as a confessional, where it had been installed. There was a pencil stub, hideously chewed, there on the ledge, and a white wall never soiled with graffiti or the numbers of lovers. He thought what might be appropriate to scrawl. Credo quia absurdum. Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. Call VAt 69—the Pope's phone number.

  In his cell again he sat at the plain desk, where the photocopy of Kraft's book lay, beside the gray slab of his computer. The computer was a Zenith; the “Z” in the name on the lid was the same lightning-bolt zag as on the great radio and record player they had listened to in Kentucky, whereon Sam had played his Caruso records, his Gershwin rhapsody. Two slider tabs on either side unlocked it, and it opened then like a box, the lower half being the keyboard and the works, the other half the glass tablet or screen whereon the work was shown. It was called a laptop, though wearisome to hold in a lap, even one as broad as his. Before him, on the keyboard half, were two small trapdoors, each made to hold a square flat “disk” of magically encoded information: on the left side, the instruction set by which the machine would learn and act; on the right side, the disks containing Kraft's book, which Pierce was retyping from Rosie's photocopy and rewriting as he went.

  He turned it on. No daemon of Bruno's or Dee's as potent as this; when this one was born, this one and its million fellows, then the world began anew. So those who loved them and served them—and were served by them—were just then claiming. As it awoke it spelled out on the screen a question for him, a question he had set it to ask: how can I help you?

  He directed it, with a few cryptic keystrokes, to call from its right-hand pocket the last of the twenty-five files he had made of Kraft's book, named in order by the letters of the alphabet. Thank the great stillness here: he was nearly done copying it all. The one that collected itself now upon the screen before him was called y.doc. In bright daylight the screen was dim and the letters and words hard to perceive, but now at evening it was a clear pool, book, lamp, and thought in one.

  The book itself, Kraft's original, had turned out to be less complete even than Pierce remembered it being. As the pages had silted up Kraft had seemingly begun making the worst of fictional errors, or ceased correcting them: all those things that alienate readers and annoy critics, like the introduction of new major characters at late stages of the story, unpacked and sent out on new adventures while the old main characters sit lifeless somewhere offstage, or stumble to keep up. New plot movements, departing from the main branch of the story for so long that they become the main branch without our, the readers', agreement or assent. All of it inducing that sense of reckless haste or—worse—droning inconsequence that sooner or later causes us—us, the only reason for any of it, the sole feelers of its feelings, sole knowers of its secrets—to sigh, or groan in impatience, or maybe even end (with a clap) the story the writer seems only to want to keep on beginning.

  At the bottom of the pile it began to turn into alternative versions, partial chapters, stuff that seemed to be maybe even from some other book entirely as the plot ran down or ran away. Pages started off hopefully with a standard coupling (Meanwhile in another city) only to be abandoned after a few sentences, or contained only a single paragraph of thought or explanation left floating alone on a blank sea. Then finally it just stopped. It actually stopped in midsentence—as Philip Sidney's Arcadia did, and Thucydides, and the Chemical Wedding, and Dante's De eloquentia vulgaris, for that matter, good company for an abandoned book, if it was abandoned. It actually seemed to Pierce, as he worked over it, not that the book was failing, running out of gas, but that a progressive disease was eating it up, and might go on doing so despite Pierce's efforts, corrupting it pastwards from the conclusion, which was already gone.

  gone, gone to hide her head where no one knows, until someday somewhere

  That was all the last page said. Which was maybe a sort of foreshadowing or unkept promise, and stories can end with those, but this one wasn't even the end of the matter of the story, for some of the events actually occurred later in time than this moment, though told of earlier, and if it were true, it would make those earlier parts untrue, roads not taken and impossible now to take.

  Well. Beginnings are easy. Everybody knows. So
are continuings. It's endings that are hard. Not only hard to think up, but maybe hard to assent to: the closer you get to the tugging of the final knots, the more reluctance you might feel, Kraft might have felt, after all his labor, decades long in a sense, since this was the culmination and closing of a series as well as of a volume. And the end of his own span approaching.

  So maybe he just couldn't bring himself to end it, even if he knew how, and knew he must. All right then: the computer's winking cursor stood on the last line, at the last character, and Pierce's finger hovered over the point key, yet unwilling to press it, not even the conditional three times, certainly not the final single full stop. Of course if he did, if he “entered” it, he needed only to press another key and make it disappear; for it was not yet, that was the strange and unsettling thing about it here on this machine, none of it was yet in a way, all of it was still malleable, he could send a tide of change backward through it all with another key press or two. If he chose he could, with a few key taps, reduce it all to a simple list of words in alphabetical order.

  But all novels are like that. This one only revealed to be so because of this new immaterial or unstable mode it was cast in. For readers, time in a novel goes only one way: the past told of in the turned pages is fixed, and the future inexistent till read. But actually the writer, like God, stands outside of time, and can begin his creation at any moment in it. All the past and all the future are present in his conception at once, nothing fixed until all of it's fixed. Then he keeps this secret from the reader, as God might keep his secret from us: that the world is as though written, and erasable, and rewritable. Not once but more than once: time and again.

  Which isn't so, of course: which isn't so. Only in here.

  He said or thought Oh. He felt a flight of little laughing putti tumble through the air of his cell and vanish. Oh I see.

  For a long time he only sat, and no one observing him—no observer looking into that cell from outside, if such an observer there were or could be—would have supposed that Pierce saw anything more than the same words he had been looking at before. Then slowly he put out his hand, turned it, and looked at his watch, and then at the glow of the garden outside. The bells rang for Vespers, the close of day. He stood; then after a time he sat again. He took and turned over, faceup, the facedown pages of Kraft's book. And began again to read.