Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  The little City of Eternal Spring (high enough in the mountains, near enough to the equator, that its useless thermometers stood every day at room temperature) was plain, nearly paradigmatic: a grid of streets, some named for heroes and the dates of victories and the rest numbered; a brown and white population neither rich nor poor, churches neither grand nor squalid, the one cathedral humbly made of wood. Pierce and Roo took buses here and there, sitting amid placid people and their babies. How still they sat. A peace began to descend on Pierce, and Roo took his hand. Later he would doubt that he had, in the weeks they spent in that nation then and afterward, ever seen a child crying.

  Some thirty years before, a brief and nearly bloodless revolution had toppled a corrupt oligarchy. A Cincinnatus from the countryside had come to power; he disbanded the army, reformed the electoral system, set up national welfare and health care. They wanted him to be president for life but he told them No no you must have political parties, and candidates, and you must vote; and then at the end of his term he went back to his ranch, and they did what he had told them to do, and now election days are joyous celebrations, and everyone votes.

  "It's true,” Pierce said. “All true."

  "I know,” Roo said. “All true. Not even the police have guns. I told you."

  They went on a bus out of the City of Eternal Spring into the country. The people of the country were woodworkers, famous for what they made of the hundred different woods of the forest. Their houses, even humble ones where chickens scratched the dirt, had great paneled carved doors that would last a century. After going a long way downward they changed in a sultry plaza for a smaller hand-painted bus and went upward again, rising toward another mountain (there were three mountains pictured on the great seal of the nation, two tall peaks like a wide green M with the third between them, like Randa, Merrow, and Whirligig in the land from which they had come). The bus lurched, straining like a fat man to climb steep dirt roads increasingly narrow, its holy pictures and beaded valances and rosaries swaying side to side. People got on and others got off. “It's on ahead,” said Roo.

  Up on the mountain that they climbed, at the end of the tortuous track, was where she had been invited to come. There, a body of American pacifists, Christian farmers, had come long ago fleeing the draft that wanted to take their sons, and there they had established, on the eternal cool green meadows of the mountain's heights, the new nation's first and now its largest commercial dairy. Pierce thought of them arriving here, self-exiled, in a small nation just disarmed, to make milk.

  "We walk from here,” said Roo, studying a travel-stained typed paper she had carried from the States, her directions; they'd come to her from an entomologist, an old friend or boyfriend, Pierce gathered, who with a dozen other researchers from around the world lived and worked here too, as though in Eden, naming the animals: bugs in particular, of which there were countless kinds. He'd invited Roo; Pierce didn't know if he had also been expected. There were scorpions around too, Roo said; scorpions galore.

  "This way saves a lot of time,” she said. “The bus goes all the way around the mountain. We can go straight up. There's a path—see?"

  They weren't the only ones setting out on it, there were mothers with bundles and children and a man with a machete slung at his waist in a worked leather scabbard, like a knight's sword. Pierce lifted the backpack, slung it over his shoulders as she'd shown him, and pulled the waistband tight. That was the secret, she'd said. You can carry a lot of weight, if you balance it right.

  A lot of weight. Almost immediately sweat tickled on his brow. The path wound upward, and one by one those who walked with them came to their houses, small farms and cabins, and waved farewell. Roo asked the way, said the name of the dairy and the research station, and they nodded and pointed ahead. The path entered the forest and narrowed, as though making up its mind what it must do, and then decided to ascend straight upward, seeming to disappear. Take small steps, she called back to Pierce. You don't have to lope, she said. You don't have to stride. Just make a little progress, a little steady progress.

  And they came at length over a crest, and into green meadows, right amid the clouds: clouds actually stood on the next higher crest, and the next crest beyond that couldn't be seen at all under its broad hat of white. Black and white cows lifted their heads to see them, and one by one returned to cropping the emerald grasses. A flight of parakeets occurred, red and yellow. A tall, vanishingly thin man was walking toward them, white shirt ballooning, gibbon's arm raised in welcome, what a coincidence.

  They three walked together, Roo and her friend in reminiscence. To Pierce it seemed not like visiting the tropics but like returning to the land his fairy ancestors had come from. The lowing cows, belled and horned, were called home at evening, winding slowly o'er the lea. Little lanes led through the dewy grass and along the tangled hedges from house to house, and from their open Dutch doors he and Roo would be hailed in cheerful English, but rainbows, single, double, triple, came and went continually over the breasted fields as the big clouds and their small children passed over just above their heads, and warm showers wet their faces for a moment. Underfoot grew a million small flowers in candy colors, just like the flowers that color the edges of the forest floor in woodland cartoons—they were called, Roo said, impatience.

  Why impatience? She didn't know. They seemed patient enough to him; the whole place seemed imbued with a holy patience, the brindled cows at evening, the changeless weather—there weren't even silos, because the green sprang yearlong. But at night Roo's weedy entomologist friend—Pierce's too already, unjealous as a saint or a house pet—hung a white sheet on his cabin wall, and shone a black light on it, and from the surrounding night there came will-lessly in the things he studied, in all their multitudes: bugs just like twigs a half a foot long, great beetles like warhorses caparisoned in heraldry, tiny sparks and atomies, moths with trailing raiment green and gold. He told them about the army ants that, on a biological cycle not yet understood, would appear suddenly in billions on the horizon and march like an army of Wallenstein's through fields, through houses even, eating everything in their unswerving path—meats, clothes, green lizards, unfortunate infants; then gone till next time. And he told them to shake out their shoes in the morning.

  "Because of the scorpions,” said Roo.

  They walked up higher, toward the cloudy-headed heights; they sat in a glade—he hadn't before ever found himself in a glade, he didn't think, but here was one for sure—on a fallen log and listened to the insects seethe. Royal blue butterflies of impossible luster visited Oz like blooms, stamen and pistil, comically obscene.

  "It's real,” Roo said. “It's all real."

  "It is."

  As they held hands and looked around themselves like the First Boy and Girl, a pair of slow mammals appeared from out of the forest, cat sized, great eyed, with tall tails erect, a boy and a girl, maybe; what were they called? Coatimundi, Pierce remembered or imagined.

  "So do you ever,” Roo in time said, “really think about kids?"

  "In what respect?"

  "Well, for instance. Having kids. Being a parent."

  "You think about that?"

  "Yes."

  "It's something you want."

  She didn't answer; it wasn't a question; hers to him remained in the air unanswered.

  "Well,” he said. “I have a son."

  She didn't say anything for a time, neither did she move, though she removed her hand from his. “You have a son?"

  "I had one. Not a real one. An imaginary son."

  Nothing.

  "His name,” Pierce said, looking down or out but not at her, “was Robbie."

  "Robbie."

  "Yes."

  He knew that he was about to tell her that Robbie, who had not long ago been more real to him than almost every corporeal person he knew, was only twelve, or maybe thirteen, though big for his age in some respects, and of all that happened between them and after. It was as though
he could see himself from afar sitting there beside Roo on the fallen log, as though he were at once the poor stupid mortal he in fact was and at the same time a laughing god watching him, watching him dig himself deeper. He told her. It took a while.

  "Oh my God that is so strange,” she said softly. She had raised her hand to her mouth, as though she saw a wound she hadn't known he bore. “That is so creepy."

  He took his own hand, looked at his feet.

  "And you just made him up? Just like that?"

  He couldn't say that he had made him up, because it was so clear to him that Robbie had arrived, unsummoned; wished for, yes, though not in such a form, not foreseen or imaginable even. Would he have to say Yes I made him up in order for him to be able to pass away and not have been? He tried to think of a way to say that it hadn't really been his idea, somehow; that yes he had welcomed Robbie and elaborated his presence—added facts and flesh and a gaze to him, whatever he was—had been glad, so glad he'd come; but that still he hadn't thought him up, had only and suddenly found him to be there, complete, as though on his doorstep. Which he knew mitigated nothing.

  "It seemed,” he said, “to solve a problem. That's what it felt like. It solved a problem, at last. I was glad."

  "But the stuff you did.” She swallowed. “I mean are you, is that something you."

  "No,” he said. “I never did. Never before. Not even when I was a kid. Never. I never even thought of it.” He said nothing more for a long time, and she said nothing, only looked at the forest floor, the beasts and bugs.

  "I don't know,” he said at last, “where he came from. I really don't. I don't know why."

  "Was it,” Roo said carefully, as though afraid to guess wrong, “like a dream? Like dreaming? Or like pretending?"

  "I,” said Pierce. It was like dreaming in being given, and unchosen; not like a dream in its willfulness. “Like sort of a dream."

  "Well.” She touched his arm, and then in a moment withdrew her hand again, as though she found him too hot. “You know how they say everyone in a dream, all the people, are you. You yourself turned around, or put outside of you for you to see."

  "Yes."

  "And,” she said, thinking. “And here's a son and a father. And didn't you want your father's love? I mean wasn't it taken away from you? Like you told me."

  "I,” Pierce said. “I.” Something huge was gathering in the forest around him, and now built toward him, or it arose greatly and swiftly within him, in the forest within.

  "So this Robbie,” Roo said, “came to get love from his father. Right? You said. And you could give him that. And what you gave, you could get. Sort of in a way. If you're both."

  "Both."

  "Well, yes, sure. You were him as much as you were you."

  "Ah. Ah, ah. Ah."

  "Pierce? You okay?"

  The sounds Pierce had begun all suddenly to make were startling, outlandish. Ah, ah ah. Ah ah. He threw his face into his hands as though to contain them; they seemed summoned from somewhere she hadn't known sound could issue from in a person, and she touched him again.

  Tears shed in Eden. It went on a long time, he trying to cease, mop up, then bursting again as though whelmed in grief. It was grief, astonishing and right, grief ungrieved till now, witheld for no good reason but ignorance. You were him as much as you. What amazed him most just then, as he wept, was that he could not ever, never ever, have thought of it himself, when it was so obvious to her: she took that old crabbed page from him, turned it over and right side up, and he could read it immediately. Later on what amazed him most was that he had to climb such a mountain to hear it said.

  "But,” he said. “But then why that, why that."

  "Yeah, well, that's what's sad,” she said. “That you could only think of that. Of that one way."

  He tugged his shirttail from his pants to daub his eyes. “He wasn't real,” Pierce said. “He really wasn't. And now he's gone."

  "He's gone?"

  "Gone.” Still he didn't dare look at her, still he clung to his own hand and then his knees. “So anyway now you know,” he said. “About me."

  "Yes,” she said. “I guess now I know."

  "I had to say."

  "Yes."

  "Yes."

  Unsilence of the glade.

  "There's more,” he said.

  * * * *

  To travel down from that green mountaintop was to pass through one climatic zone and then another, the air growing hotter, the vegetation changing, until they reached the sea, the unstilled Pacific. He swam with her and he lay beside her under the netting of their bed, for some nights in a stillness and isolation that finally neither could stand, then making cautious plain love while the bugs gathered on the net and watched. He walked, as she taught him to do, walked for miles behind her and beside her along the tiger-striped coconut walks, or over the beast-shaped rock heaps that lay in the surf just off the endless empty swathe of sand; he studied her and thought about her, he found himself waiting for something she would do or say, without knowing what it was, thinking maybe it had already been said and he had missed it; he recounted his own story to himself, seeking for the premonition or foreshadowing that would point him toward what he must say or do. Why was this so hard? Coleridge had written (yes he'd brought a big thick Biographia literaria, small print, hard thoughts) that “the common end of all narrative, nay of all poems, is to convert a series into a whole: to make those events, which in a real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a Circular motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth.” And a poet is a maker, and a poeia is a made world, and in his own world or history, real or imagined, he perceived no such figure, long and hard as he had tried, much as he desired to.

  And if not that story, what? If he had reached deep enough into the sun-erased pages of the Biographia he held, he would maybe have noticed where Coleridge mentions the distinction made in alchemy between the automatica (things that are changed by a power in themselves) and the allomatica (things that are only changed by the action of something—which in alchemy is almost always someone—else). Automatica can change, and change back, but only the allomatica change by changing what in turn changes them: a spiral rather than a circle, going on and not returning. But he didn't get that far.

  "So tell me,” he said. “If somebody sometime wanted to ask you to marry them, do you think that having had such a bad time before would..."

  "No."

  "No?"

  "No. Like they say: that was then, this is now."

  She had in her hand a bottle of soda, and on it was a picture of Betty Boop, looking like an old flame of his, or every old flame of his, as she always would, and her name in this country was Lulú.

  "So if,” he said.

  "Watch it,” she said. “It says in all the books that you're not supposed to propose when you're on vacation."

  "All the books?"

  "You're having fun, you're free of everything, feeling romantic. You can fool yourself. You could make a big mistake."

  "Thanks for the warning. I'll take no steps without consulting you. But I wasn't proposing."

  "What were you doing?"

  "Wondering."

  "As usual."

  "As usual."

  Anyway it was there, of course, it had been there “all along,” that prolepsis, foreshadowing, figure, destiny he felt he needed: the three of them (of course it was three) at the Full Moon party, rising naked together before him from the waters of the Blackberry, the endless river: a dark, a light, a rosé. And one of them her. There they are still, unchanged except in meaning, or rather with their meaning not yet unfolded, a complicans of which his life thereafter was to be the explicans. Pierce no longer remembered seeing them, right there at the beginning, nor did he understand what it had meant, if it really had a meaning beyond or within the fact of its having been. So his very last solemn wish went forever ungranted, unspoken in fact, though not the less urgent for that: his wish tha
t he might, please, be allowed to do what he must, and to know it too. But no, he had to choose it for himself, by himself, in ignorance and incertitude, and then do it. And eventually, but just in time, he did.

  6

  Three years later, Pierce sat down in the office of the dean of studies at a community college in a northeastern city, to be interviewed for a teaching job.

  The dean was struck by the shape of his résumé, as anyone considering hiring him would have to be: how he had quit or been let go from Barnabas College, where he'd been tenure track, then vanished (the résumé described work on a book, but there was no book) and some time later surfaced as a second-tier private-school dogsbody, teaching history and English and running the chess club and the debate team. Pierce, hands clasped in his lap, knew what this looked like, and knew better than to account for it. Never complain, never explain.

  "Downside Academy,” said the Dean. He was a boulder-shaped black man in a tight three-piece suit and stiff collar, tight too, gray bristles on his big cheeks. “I'm not real familiar with this institution. Is it large?"

  "Small,” said Pierce.

  "Downside?"

  "Downside.” It had been a fine, even an evocative name for years, but now the trustees were rethinking. “It's about fifty years old."

  The unsmiling dean continued to regard the name, as though it would grow transparent, and allow him to see the place itself behind it. “You had a house there."

  "I was a housemaster, yes,” Pierce said, and felt a wave of pointless embarrassment.

  "You're married?"

  "Yes. Three years."