Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  "I don't know,” he said. “I can't say."

  He did tell her that the church before which the elephant stood was called Santa Maria sopra Minerva—a church of Mary over a temple of Minerva, and before that a temple of Isis too. He said that in the Dominican priory opposite, Giordano Bruno had been tried and condemned to death when at last the Dominican inquisitors stopped trying to get him to renounce what he believed he knew. He tried to tell her something of what Bruno believed: infinities, transmigrations, relativities. He told her what Bruno had been heard to say when the judges pronounced sentence on him: I think you are more afraid to hand down this sentence than I am to receive it.

  "What did he mean?"

  "I don't know.” They walked out of the square. The Dominican priory looked like an office building, though perhaps it was church offices. Blue glow of fluorescent bulbs. A blind just then drawn. “It may be he was saying that if the church officials felt they had to kill a philosopher investigating the nature of things in order to keep their power, then it couldn't last as an institution. Someday it would lose. And someday after that it would just dry up and blow away. And he thought they knew it."

  "Did it?"

  "Yes. It did. A hundred years later it had no power to kill people anymore. And it has less now."

  "So he was right?"

  "No. If real power could be annihilated by wisdom or shame it would have been, long ago. But look at the Soviet Union today. Still there."

  They wandered on. The empires were gone, here where tourists trod.

  "Did they really kill him?” Roo asked.

  "In public. Here in Rome. At a place called the Campo dei Fiori."

  "Oh? And where's that?"

  "Well, I guess it can't be far,” he said. A strange burble of laughter arose in his breast or throat. “I guess. Right around here somewhere."

  "Have you been there?"

  "No."

  "Okay,” she said. “First off, I've got to go buy some things. I need some tampons. I don't want to go any farther without some. Dumb I didn't get them before."

  "Okay."

  "There was a whatchacallit, a farmacia, a few streets back that way.” She turned, her outstretched hand moving like a clock's, and pointed. “That way. I'll go back and get stuff, and meet you."

  "Okay."

  "So what's the place again we're going?"

  "Campo dei Fiori."

  She pulled out the map from her bag, and together they found the little square. “Yeah,” she said, “see, it's a triangle from here. So you go on and I'll go back and we'll meet there."

  "Okay."

  "Okay?"

  "Okay."

  She started to put the map back in her bag—she had glanced at it once that morning to orient herself, then refolded it and put it away, and they had just wandered together—but instead she withdrew it and gave it to Pierce. Then she was gone.

  Pierce looked around himself to see where he stood relative to the map. He found the intersection of streets where he was, and could trace with a finger the way to the Campo dei Fiori.

  Okay. He set out.

  Within minutes he was not where he had thought to be. He walked to the next corner, and it was not the street he expected (or now, rather, hoped and prayed) it would be. He looked from the map to the world, the world to the map, making no connections. He turned the map this way and that, trying to match it to his own stance and the way he faced, but could not. He walked another block. The sun stood at midheaven, no help there. He had no way to choose a way.

  He was lost.

  He could perceive no reason at all to go one way rather than another. It might be that if he chose a way it would immediately lead him to a place he recognized, where he could make a clear choice: but within himself there was no reason. It was Roo who had made the city intelligible, because it was clear to her; he had only shared in the order she perceived; without her it disintegrated in a moment, he couldn't hold it together.

  The thought that he might not find her again at all, or for hours, and have to endure her scorn and her bafflement, was terrible. But what was more remarkable (he still hadn't moved, the chattering young people and burdened tourists passing around him like a tumbling brook around a stone, a pasticceria on one side of him and a store selling religious goods on the other) was the thought, also just unfolding within him, that perhaps after all he was a profoundly limited person. Not just inattentive, or feckless, or forgetful, but actually incomplete. Someone who did not know, and could not by effort truly discern, where he stood in space, or where the things and places around him were in relation to one another. He could learn from experience and habit how to perambulate the places he lived in, and this could sometimes give the appearance that he, like others, had a map of the surrounding space in his brain. But he didn't. He clearly didn't. He was missing it, a part or organ others had, as someone might be missing an eye and be unable to perceive distance.

  He turned one way, then the other, and started walking. He walked slowly but not attentively, for he had given up trying to know what to do or where next to go. After a time he stopped again, with a choice of ways to make. The street was named Vietato l'affisione (it said so on the corner building's side, where as he well knew Roman street names are posted, but the crossing street seemed to be named the same, Vietato l'affisione, Old Affliction Street?). He thought of all the times he had stood just as he stood now, ashamed of his bafflement among his fellows, or so ensorcelled he couldn't even notice his fellows. There was a place in the city of Conurbana where two streets crossed, on one corner a photographer's shop, on the corresponding far corner a store selling children's clothing. There he had stood trying to find a way back to Rose Ryder's apartment. There he still stood.

  "Hey.” A hand was put upon him. “Wake up."

  "Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh hi. Hi."

  "Doing good,” Roo said.

  He looked from Roo, slipping her arm in his, to where she pointed, a fingerboard he hadn't seen labeled Campo dei Fiori. They went that way. They passed again the pasticceria, the store selling crosses and incense. He tried to tell her what he had learned, alone on the streets, without her; what he knew now.

  "I know,” she said. “I know what you mean. It happens to me in dreams. Go someplace, you can never get back again to where you were. You can't remember where things are. Or they're not there anymore."

  "Yes. But not in dreams."

  "Just concentrate,” she said. She stopped him, and took his shoulders, looking in his eyes. “From here, which way's the hotel? I mean which compass point? You know."

  He looked at her and could see reflected in her face his own blank one.

  "So never mind,” she said, releasing him. “Ask when you don't know. Ask for help. If you need help, you ask. That's all."

  "Well."

  "Men are so bad at that. Everybody says."

  "You never ask. I've never seen you ask."

  "I always know."

  "Oh. Okay.” He wouldn't tell her how often—suddenly a long parade of incidents, all similar, tumbled backward from this moment to some far-off original—how often he had asked the way, of strangers and loungers and busy shopmen and a hundred others, and listened to them and watched them point, and stood beside them trying to sight along their fingers to see if he could see what they saw, and learned not much, and went a block or a mile or a turning and asked again. He had told no one, not even himself, how bad it was.

  It was very bad. He walked holding Roo's hot hand and it was as though with each step he was changing from vegetable to animal, or opaque to transparent, growing more clear about how bad it was. It wasn't some trivial flaw or amusing tic, a stutter or a missing digit; no, it went all the way down into what he was and what had become of him, all that he had and all that he lacked, all that he knew and didn't know, all that he had imagined to be possible and all that he had failed to see was not. It was the reason he was here, and also the reason why he was not elsewhere. He couldn't tell
if he felt cursed or liberated by knowing, only that he knew, and knew for sure. He thought that if Roo or someone like her were to be able to inhabit his sensorium they would see the problem too—well of course, given this, no wonder.

  No wonder he had never known what was to become of him, or been able to choose one way ahead over another, or imagine the future to be inhabitable. Because space is time. The flaw in his knowledge of space was not different from his bafflement in time. How have I come to be here? he would ask, of a place, a street, a dilemma, a context. Where was I that I could have reached here from there? Which way should I now choose? Or he could not think even to ask. What do you want from the world, and how do you plan to work your way toward it? His uncle Sam had asked him that, and other people, kind or impatient, had as well. Where do you want to be in ten years, Frank Walker Barr had wanted to know when Pierce was in school. Not a question he could address, either then or later, much as he would have liked to, shamed as he was that he could not, and with no good reason to be so unable. But there was a reason. There was. Not yet an explanation. Not yet, if ever, a cure, or a fix. What makes you such a dope? If he knew, could he cease to be one?

  "Look. Here. See?"

  The Campo dei Fiori was a small narrow square, seemingly unchanged since the Renaissance—no baroque facades or churches, just tall houses in shades of ochre and orange, and the flower sellers’ tables, as they must have been then.

  "It means field of flowers,” Pierce said. “Or place of flowers, I guess maybe."

  "Bloomfield,” Roo said. Her hands were in her jeans pockets.

  "When I read about it first,” Pierce said, almost unwilling to take steps there, “I thought it meant a flowery field, like a meadow. I could see it. Tall grasses and flowers, and a platform and a stake."

  "He was burned at the stake? I always thought that was a kind of joke."

  "No joke."

  The long square was filled with loiterers, the lights coming on in cafés, music from radios and guitars colliding. There was a fountain, not running now, a long narrow trough, and at its end a statue: a man in a flowing robe and hood. It was strangely hard to grasp that of course it could be no one but he, his jaw set in defiance, his hawk's eye on the future, in the Dominican habit he never wore again after he left Italy for the great world.

  "That's what he looked like?” Roo looked upward into the hooded face.

  "Nobody knows what he looked like. There's only one picture, maybe not even contemporary.” Yet somehow this false craggy hero with only a virtual interior made it certain to Pierce for the first time that the man had, in fact, lived and died.

  The monument was dated 1869. There was an inscription in Italian, and around the statue's base were scenes in bas-relief of Bruno's life (teaching his heresies, defying the Inquisition, being burned), and also a set of medallion heads whose significance Pierce couldn't at first work out. He expected Galileo, but couldn't find him. After some study he discerned that one of them was Peter Ramus. Ramus! Bruno's nemesis, the iconoclast, neo-Aristotelian, inventor of the outline. So these faces weren't Copernicans but victims of religious bigotry: yes, here was Servetus, killed by Calvin; and Hus, the Bohemian ur-Protestant. Tommaso Campanella, another Dominican, magician, utopian, who got out of the Inquisition's prisons just in time to die. Ramus, Pierce recalled, was murdered on St. Bartholomew's Night for being a Huguenot. How annoyed Bruno must be, to share a plinth with him.

  Two young people at Bruno's feet, spooning (living young people, not bronze), looked up at Pierce when he laughed, or wept. Che?

  "Bruno,” Pierce said, pointing up. “Giordano Bruno."

  Ah yes. They nodded, looking to each other for more, getting nothing. They looked up at Bruno above them as Pierce might at a statue of Millard Fillmore in a public park. Just then Roo came up beside him, and she bore a trio of red roses, just bought at one of the flower-sellers’ stalls around them burdened with poppies and roses, oxeye daises, lilies and blue lupines. She put them in Pierce's hands. Swallowing in embarrassment and grief, with the incurious eyes of the hylic youth in their beauty upon him, he laid them at the statue's base, and stepped away. He took Roo's hand, amazed to see her eyes had filled.

  "There,” she said.

  * * * *

  The next afternoon they went up through the Castel St. Angelo, as Pierce had done alone: Hadrian's empty tomb, the catacombs and tunnels now as harmless as a funhouse, laughing children in plastic sandals racing up the newly cleaned and plastered spaces lit with bright strip lighting, laughing at the underground dungeons and at the tub made for the fat pope, who was hoisted with that block and tackle to take his bath, no really; and up and out into the sunlight, all Rome around. There was an alfresco bar there, at the very top, fully furnished with bored waiters, Campari ashtrays, wooden tables under grapevines, and all other things. The prigione storiche, though, were gone: Pierce circled the tower twice to find the entrance he remembered, but time had closed it and hidden the door. There wasn't even a sign.

  "Maybe it was someplace else,” Roo said.

  "No. It was here. I can't understand.” He had told her how he had visited that cell, the cell that might or might not have been Bruno's, the stone bed, the high narrow window, the strip of sky. “It couldn't be anywhere else."

  They had come around again to the same place, the arched way back downward, the tables of wine and coffee drinkers who pointed out at far places in the city beyond.

  "I'm sorry,” Roo said, and took his arm, sad for him: but his own heart actually lightened, as though a window had opened within him, light airs allowed in, and old things out. Oh well, he thought: oh well.

  "We'll ask,” Roo said. “We'll go back and start over."

  "No. They've probably been renovated out of existence. Probably somebody found out they were really just storerooms after all. Revision."

  They sat instead, and ordered wine. The sky was clear green and gold, stained with dark contrails. Of course he knew that they were there somewhere, the row of dark doors, one of them his, and he felt sure he knew now why he wouldn't and couldn't find them, why no more than in dreams could he go back to a place he had once been, start over, and find the right way ahead. But it was all right. The world is only a cruel maze if you think you ought to be able to find a way from where you have been to where you want to be. He knew nothing of the sort; where he had been was the unvisitable Then, and this was the never-before-imagined Now. So maybe he was, and had always been, if he had only known it, a lucky man.

  8

  In an April of the following decade, Rosie Rasmussen drove over to Cliff's, going the back way over a hump of the Faraway Hills from her office in the Rasmussen Conference Center. Unafraid of spring mud in her new car or truck (it was a little of both, and called a Sport-Utility Vehicle) she went down an old road officially closed, bouncing and splashing hilariously through a slough at the bottom, and stopping to hear what she hadn't yet heard this year: peepers in their hundreds.

  Upward again, and the roads improving as she rose, till the still-bare woods gave way a little and there were houses, many new ones, some huge ones, on new-made lots. A dozen years before no one lived out here but Cliff; pretty soon now it would be a neighborhood, the school bus would have to come. In some of the new driveways there was a Sport-Utility Vehicle like hers.

  Cliff's place was still part of the woods more than it was part of the world. The entrance, marked only by a yellow mailbox on the other side of the road, was as easy to miss as a woodchuck's burrow; you turned in and went down a rutted way through a tunnel of trees more than a dozen years taller than they had been that first time she came, to a fairy-tale glade, where Cliff's house was. Cliff had made the house, with Spofford and others too to help sometimes, and it had seemed raw and just hewn when she had first seen it (Spofford was bringing her then, to have her heart healed or looked into): made of bare beams and boards, a row of old storm windows not all alike making up a front wall, the scragged necks of trees that h
ad been roughly executed in the yard. Now it was different: the never-painted wooden heap looked ancient and gray, archaeological even, a lost galleon at the bottom of the sea. Not forbidding anymore. Maybe because she'd come so often since then; maybe because her heart had healed.

  Cliff was working on the engine of his truck, an oily rag on the fender where tools rested. He looked up to see Rosie drive in and roll to a stop. He too, she thought: fifteen years ago his hair was as white as it was today, and almost as long, but back then it was shocking, wrong, like his pink pale skin and colorless eyes. Now he was only, or might seem only, an old man gone white with years.

  "Hi, Rosie."

  "Hi, Cliff."

  "Just let me clean up."