by John Crowley
It was no fate she expected or desired. He had been kind to her and she missed him terribly. But she had refused his bequest, or at least hadn’t agreed to accept it; turned aside all of Allan Butterman’s inquiries about when a decision might be expected, while the summer ran out and the house grew cool. Every day that she didn’t decide seemed to her a small hard-won victory, and every morning she prepared herself to fail once again to decide. It was a knack, she thought, and one that might have come down to her in her genes, for Boney certainly had it. And maybe it would keep her alive till great old age as it had Boney. Maybe she could do here what Boney had somehow longed to do and had not done: maybe by making no decisions she could live forever.
There was Sam now: an urgent moan as though she had been roughly snatched back from wherever she spent the dark hours.
“Okay, hon, Mom’s coming,” let her know who’s with her here, sometimes Sam arrived in the waking world in a sort of bewildered amazement that Rosie used to find funny. She mounted the stairs by twos, the teapot singing urgently behind her.
Dr. Bock’s phenobarbital was a stopgap, he said; Sam needed tests to find out what was going on with her, and a program of medication tailored to her. Tailored was the word he used, a little suit just her size. She needed an EEG, the test where your brain waves are measured with electrodes, which might or might not reveal something about what in Sam’s brain could be causing her seizures.
So today Sam and Rosie were to go to Conurbana Pediatric Institute and Hospital to see a neurologist and have the tests; and then (Rosie could feel it already) they would continue in that direction from then on. No road that they could take would ever lead back to before that August night when Sam first said What’s that? toward something she alone saw in the empty air, and then grew rigid and trembled, blind deaf and absent. The road they parted from that night fell steadily behind them, the life Rosie had been living; it went on unrolling, no doubt, she would picture it sometimes vaguely but vividly, with a pang of regret and longing nearly unbearable. Her real life, growing imaginary, while her new life filled up with obdurate reality.
Bring a favorite toy or book, said the mimeoed list the hospital had sent her. Sam chose Brownie, a rag doll she’d found in a drawer here at Arcady, whose brown yarn hair and gingham dress were sordid with age and whose left eye, a black bead, had recently come loose and now hung by a thread, ghastly a little, Rosie promised to fix it and had not. If you wash your child’s head carefully the morning of the test this will not have to be done upon arrival. Answer the following questions in consultation with your child’s physician. A careful description of the nature of the attacks is necessary to make a proper diagnosis. List the medications your child is currently taking with exact dosages and times.
“No Mommy. No no no no.”
“Oh come on Sam. For just this once no fight. We need to go so we’re not late.”
Sam slipped from her and started down the hall. Rosie with her dose followed. “Samantha!”
She hadn’t been told if she was to give Sam her usual medicine. Would it interfere with the brain waves? Make them look worse, or not bad enough? She didn’t dare not give it to her. Dr. Bock said that very likely Sam’s seizures weren’t hurting her brain, but Rosie couldn’t bear to see another one, her child shaken nearly apart, how could that not damage you. And no number of them she saw thereafter, down the years from that day to this (never many in a year, but never none) would make them easier to witness. Or remember. Or envision.
“Oh Sam damn it. Come here. You little.”
“Go way you big.”
Down the front stairs naked and bright against the dark wainscot and purplish carpet, Rosie after her handicapped by the syringe she held aloft. Negotiation in the downstairs hall where Boney Rasmussen died, on his way to the toilet. Yes okay French toast if you’ll just, Sam I haven’t got time to argue: laughter rising helplessly in her throat, laughter of bewildered frustration, cosmic laughter maybe because this really was just a game, as Sam (laughing too) believed or knew; but it had to be got through anyway, had to. Sam be serious.
Done at last, tears but at least she didn’t spit it out (Rosie had tried mixing it into juice but Sam never drank the whole thing, and Rosie never knew in what part of the drink the medicine—medicine she called it, it cured nothing—was lingering). While Sam ate her French toast Rosie packed, Sam’s book about mice who go up in a balloon, a book for herself too (The Company by Fellowes Kraft, she had been becalmed in the second chapter for some weeks), Brownie and blankie, cookies and juice and the bottle of phenobarbital and the syringe and all the various papers.
They went out at last through the front hall and the big door (passing unseen and unseeing around or through Boney Rasmussen himself, who since his death on July Fourth night had been standing there before a door that would not open, unable to go forward and certainly not back) and out into the fragrant morning, a nice day, another nice day.
Though she was now at the very least the acting director of the Foundation, Rosie wouldn’t pay herself more salary; every week she wrote out for herself a check for the same amount she had been getting as the Foundation’s part-time secretary. Today though she would allow herself the use of Boney’s great black Buick that lay dormant in the garage, formerly carriage house, at the turn of the drive. On her own Bison station wagon—not even hers but Mike’s, he hadn’t bothered to demand it from her or was holding the demand in reserve to be laid on the table later—the struts were weak and brakes insecure, and the thought of driving it on the highway far from home made Rosie uneasy, though Spofford said that if it was going to go, or stop rather, it was more likely to do it careening over a dirt road in the Faraways than on the interstate. She said she saw the logic.
She had found the Buick’s key in the pocket of Boney’s winter overcoat, left there the last time he had driven, and yesterday they’d gone out to the carriage house, Sam delighted and laughing, to start it up. They’d pushed the big stable doors open, Rosie marvelling that Boney hadn’t ever bothered to put in a real garage with a roll-up door and concrete floor. Sam inspected the sleeping dragon, putting her fingers in the gulp-holes in the side (which were actually fake, Rosie found, went in an inch or so and stopped; on her father’s surely they had had some function, swallowed air or something). It came right to life, strong and willing. Sam cheered.
Like all this, it wasn’t hers, even if it was hers to use. If it belonged to anyone it belonged, as did all of Boney’s remains, to Una Knox.
I’m leaving it all to my old girlfriend Una Knox, Boney said to her a month before he died. The way he’d said it, and the fact that nothing official ever turned up with this name on it, convinced Rosie that Una Knox was a joke of some complicated kind, the kind that deeply private and solitary people enjoy playing on themselves; or on the other hand was maybe a momentary ploy, a name snatched at random to fend off Rosie and Allan who were forcing him to talk and think about his own fast-approaching nonexistence: that, in any case, there was no such person. Which didn’t keep Rosie from imagining her appearing one day, sailing darkly tall into Arcady, come to claim what was hers.
Vroom. Sam cheered again at the miracle of the car’s starting. Rosie guided the great length of it out of its lair inch by inch, certain that by day’s end it would be dinged; and to whom would she have to answer for that?
4
Human lives are ordered in cycles of seven years, counting from the child’s first appearance on earth to the day or night on which she departs. Cycles, which in sequence form a wave, a wave with its tops and bottoms, ups and downs; it can be drawn on paper, a simple sine wave, with x and y coordinates of Time and Amplitude, peaking at seven, at fourteen, at twenty-one, at twenty-eight, at thirty-five. Halfway through the climb to the top, we reach the horizontal coordinate that divides this rolling wave of the years into upper and lower halves; and the year in which we pass over this line we can call the Up Passage Year. Anyway that’s what the most recent di
scoverer or deviser of this cycle chose to call it.
Rose Ryder, awake but undressed, sat unmoving on the edge of her narrow bed in her cabin by the Shadow. At her feet, on the bedroom floor, were many long sheets of paper with waves or cycles drawn on them, crossed by a median line; she had drawn them herself, with compass and rule. They had slipped in the night from the bed where she had left them, and she looked down at them without exactly seeing them. It was to be another perfect cloudless day, tenth in a row, heating the Faraways to summer levels by noon.
Rose was, herself, at the threshold of an Up Passage Year, headed for the uplands of twenty-eight. Which in her own case and for this present cycle she did not contemplate reaching. She did not know or actively imagine what would intervene to stop the upward progress but didn’t feel, today, that she would be around to celebrate her arrival there.
Of course she knew that “up” and “down” in the system had no necessary emotional coloration, your spirits didn’t necessarily rise on the way up nor sink on the way down. Going down around the bottom of a cycle—your old certainties in pieces, whelmed with new data, estranged from former selves and not knowing what new ones await you on the way up again—can be quite exciting and interesting. Okay, she said to herself, or to Mike Mucho, author of the system he called Climacterics: okay, but here on the way up I should at least feel.
Feel what?
Not disintegrating, at least; together, and moving; I should know who I am, and that I exist. At least.
Yesterday she had known who she was, and who she was going to be. She was a graduate student, American and English literature, and she was primarily involved with language; she was a teacher, or on her way to being one. A language school in Lima was advertising for such a person in a journal Rose found the previous week at work, and Rose had been turning into that person ever since, a little bit every day. She spoke good Spanish (she spoke, or had spoken, college Spanish). She lived with a family, her own room up at the top of a tall old city house, lonely and a little afraid at first, but then discovering the city and meeting people, going to the shore and up into the mountains. In her class she taught young people who wanted to become airline stewardesses or import-export clerks, they were mild and beautifully mannered and seemed to come from another age, or another decade anyway. In the company of these people and the others she met she went on from adventure to adventure, feelable but not nameable in advance, and did not come back by the same path, if she ever came back at all.
For many days the presence within her of this person warmed her, like a child growing, or as she imagined such a child would warm a woman. And then this morning she awoke and found her gone. Dead maybe; gone certainly, a cold hollow where she had been, the awful cold hollow that she had for a time filled. Lima seemed as remote and airless as the moon. The Xeroxed page from the journal where she found the ad looked up at her from her bedside table, also having died, showing nothing, or a cruel joke.
Dead.
One more dead. There would come a day when there would be no more to die, and she would be alone.
With one bare foot she pushed the paper at her feet around so that it was upside down. The Up Passage Year now a slope to a valley, the high hill a slough. What the fuck difference did it or could it make. It had died too.
Pierce (who had—maybe not seriously, she couldn’t tell—offered to help her make Mike’s Climacterics scheme into a book, a self-help book, or a proposal for one) had asked her why a curve, how boring, how two-dimensional, why not a spiral, up which we go as though climbing a mountain; every seven years arriving at the same places or stages, only one turn higher, all different.
Why higher? She hadn’t asked it of him then, but asked it now. Why higher?
Why climbing?
The electric clock humming on the table hadn’t died, it alone remained alive, and by it Rose could see she was late, late. The thought of the drive up around the mountain to The Woods was paralyzing, in spite of all she had hoped from it, this day, this chance. She tried to make herself feel the urgency, getting later, all the while thinking it would be a good day to get lost, drive upstate, find a mall she’d never been in. Get her hair cut. Thinking of this, imagining herself doing this, felt like diving or sliding down that slide, Down Passage Year, no bottom in sight; and for some time longer she didn’t stir.
Meanwhile the mist had lifted from the Blackbury, a blanket withdrawn; and in his little yellow house by the riverbank, somewhat hidden and lairlike amid the flame-tipped sumacs, Pierce was hard at his morning’s work. Someone snooping would have heard from outside the arrhythmic tapping of the electric typewriter he had rolled out onto the porch; the squeaking of the kitchen chair he sat in too, when he paused for thought or rest.
He’d begun with an anecdote.
One morning just after Christmas in the year 1666, the well-known Dutch physician and scientist Johann Friedrich Schweitzer, known as Helvetius, had a visitor—a small beardless man in plain clothes with an accent that made Helvetius think he might be from Scotland. It was a snowy day, and the stranger came in without wiping his boots. He had read, he said, in Helvetius’s treatises that he was a skeptic concerning alchemical transmutation, and Helvetius admitted he had never seen it work. The stranger showed him a “neat ivory box, and out of it took three ponderous lumps of the Stone, each about the size of a walnut.” He could not, he said, give Helvetius any; but he allowed him to handle one piece, and Helvetius managed to scrape off a bit while the stranger talked of the powers of his stone, and how he had come by it. When the man departed, promising to come again, Helvetius collected the matter of the stone from under his nail, and later experimented with it, following hints in the stranger’s conversation. No luck. When the stranger reappeared, he gave Helvetius, after some hesitation, a piece of his stone as big as a turnip seed; when Helvetius worried it wouldn’t be enough, the stranger took it back, broke it in half, and gave him only half, “wrapped up neatly in blue paper”: that would, he said, be sufficient. And indeed, late that night Helvetius’s wife—who was a student of the Art—persuaded him to try it, and together they transmuted with it a half ounce of lead to gold, which turned out when Helvetius had it assayed to be extremely pure.
With the next carriage return, Pierce’s sheet extruded from the machine, toast from a toaster, nicely done, and he inserted another. A fast and tidy penman, Pierce had never learned to type, it was like chopping wood the way he did it, banging down each key in turn with a strong forefinger, tongue between his teeth, he would fall back exhausted by noon having covered no more than four or five sheets.
For working Pierce affected a vast old dressing gown that had belonged to his uncle Sam, Dr. Sam Oliphant, now dead. It was a rich garment, a gift from someone to the doctor, someone whose life he had saved (no surely not, Pierce forgot the actual origin) which Sam himself had never worn. It was as heavy as an episcopal cope, of thick pin-wale corduroy on the outside and purple satin inside. Pierce wore it always inside out, finding the touch of satin on his skin distastefully unctuous; it was as highly finished on the inside as the out, every seam turned, the collar rolled high, the sleeves capacious. The belt was lost, and Pierce belted it with a wide leather one. Rose had laughed to see that robe, belted with that belt; laughed at first.
“This account,” he typed, “is extraordinary for a couple of reasons. First it is highly circumstantial; it has little of the air of fable and romance these encounters with the Mysterious Master usually have. There is the fact that the alchemist left Helvetius alone with the transmutative stuff he gave him, to try it for himself: the smokesellers and frauds who abounded at the time always supervised experiments themselves, and had a lot of ways of seeming to have produced gold. Third and probably most extraordinary, the stranger never asked for money—no investment, no ounces of gold demanded with the promise that they would be returned tenfold. In fact he thereupon disappeared, never to be seen again.”
As he typed out this well-known anecdote, Pi
erce noticed for the first time, like a mystery-novel detective sorting his evidence, a fact that had been in the story all along but that he had not considered; and he thought he saw an explanation for what happened. But he continued anyway as he had meant to:
“It would seem, then, that we have two possible conclusions: either Helvetius lied about what happened, or Helvetius made gold.
“We know now that gold is an element, and so is lead; therefore, one could never be transformed into the other by heating it together with a third thing, whatever the third thing was. So we are left with Helvetius lying, spectacularly, convincingly, and for no apparent reason (he never tried again to make gold).
“There is, though, one other possibility, least likely of all, indeed patently absurd: that Helvetius really could make gold by the means he had, but we today no longer can, not by those means or any other. Not because we have forgotten how, though we have, or lost faith that we can, though we have, but because gold is not the same as it once was, earth is not the same, fire is not the same.”
He took his hands from the keys.
A snowy day in 1666. In Pierce’s imagination, each of the ten digits had a distinct color, a color it had had as far back as he could remember, unchosen by him but there in his mind nonetheless: and the six is white. The snow on the Master’s boots; the ivory box of glistening matter. Wife in white at the stair’s top: Husband what have you there.
That wife: that was what Pierce had noticed in retelling this tale. That wife skilled in the Art. What if she had been in league with the supposed Nameless Master. Able to trick her husband, somehow produce the gold, expecting a further development of some kind, she and the other guy, who knows what; a plot that never fruited. Guy skipped town. Wife kept quiet.
