by John Crowley
“Um—well no. What we’re learning is that in children whose seizures have a distinct focus or foci, there are brain events that aren’t quite seizures, or that don’t quite precipitate seizures, and that happen rather frequently; that’s what we’d be looking for.”
Rosie thought, or tried to. “And so then?”
“Depends. It might help you figure out how best to control the seizures. Maybe down the road, if they persist or get worse, we can say well we know where they’re coming from and we can neutralize that area.”
“Neutralize?”
“Surgically.” He added quickly: “I really don’t think that’s Sam’s case. I really don’t.”
“Well if it cured her.”
“You don’t want to have to do surgery. Living with idiopathic seizures is preferable.”
She put her head in her hands, overwhelmed. “But how do I,” she said. “How. If one’s always going to happen, how.”
Dr. Marlborough closed his plump hands together and rested his chin on them. Rosie thought she saw him glance covertly at his watch. How weird it is, she thought, this man I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, that I have to trust so much, more than any lawyer, more than any best friend, but who isn’t my friend; who I have to trust to be not only smart but wise. And no way of knowing if he’s either, no way but the usual ways you decide about people, which don’t apply.
“This is what I think,” Dr. Marlborough said. “You’ll never know when one’s going to happen, and there’s not much that you can do beyond making sure she takes her medication to prevent one, and not much you can do to cause one either. So the best thing to do is just act every day as though one will never happen again.”
To get out they had to return the way they had come, which Sam seemed to remember, tugging at her mother’s hand, plenty ready to go; Rosie looked around for guidance, saw Bobby the aide, who nodded and pointed the way Sam was going; this led them past the nurses’ station, past the child in the rocker. Rosie didn’t want to go that way, resisted Sam’s tug. It was still there, still unmoving except for its ticktock motion back and forth.
“Yets go, Mommy. This way.”
Rosie couldn’t shut her eyes and be led, but that’s what she wanted; couldn’t turn back because back was only farther in. But she was for a moment unable to move, because a dreadful certainty had taken over her and held her and stopped her breath. Two certainties: that no time had passed since she had been a patient here on a ward—that this was then, and not done yet; and that the baby in the rocker chair, with its split-level head and black-currant eyes open a crack, was not a real baby at all, but something else entirely.
7
At evening when the sun was low, Pierce came out of his house washed and freshly dressed, and breathed the lateness of the day and the end of summer. Far away up the hill stood the big house, the Winterhalters’, and there was Mr. Winterhalter too amid the geraniums; utterly still he stood, weary maybe or in the grip of Parkinson’s.
The house that Pierce lived in had once housed the servants of the owners of the big house; like the big house, the little one was a lemony stucco with blurry neoclassical details. The big house, though, had the terraced gardens, the sculpted chimney pots, the flagged verandas and French windows the little could not have. When Pierce had taken the house it was with the understanding that, when frost came and the Winterhalters migrated south, Pierce would stay to mind their house and see no harm came to it through the long winter. He had agreed without really pondering the condition, feeling unable to bandy terms with Destiny (by this name he meant only mighty Chance, which we call Destiny when it deals us, after a million so-so hands, one undeniable straight flush).
The well too. He had not yet given much thought to the well.
Up on the hill, beyond the big house, in the little woods, was a pretty little wellhouse that supplied the water to Pierce’s dwelling; it came in through a python-thick black plastic pipe (formerly of lead, Mr. Winterhalter said) that ran over the ground and then down into Pierce’s basement, to a pump that drew it up to bath and kitchen. In the winter, when Pierce lived here alone, he would keep the water flowing just a little continuously through this pipe, and out an overflow pipe, so that it wouldn’t freeze. That was the charge laid on him.
He waved to the statue on the hill, which made no response, and got into his car. The plastic covers of the seats, woven in a dim tartan pattern, were still warm from the day’s sun, sun that brought out the pleasant old-car bouquet too, grease and metal and what else. He drove with stately care out the long grassy path that in winter would be snow, another thing that Pierce, like the Grasshopper, chose not to ponder now in the golden time. He went through the Winterhalters’ stone gateposts, and up toward Blackbury Jambs, where his river joined hers. He thought there must be shorter ways, right over the lap of the mountain (Mount Randa); one of these roads he was now passing, Bug Hill Road, Jasper Road, Rattlesnake Road, Hopeful Hill, would surely lead him up and then down into the Shadow’s valley. His friend Spofford, who had lived here all his life, would know, but Pierce didn’t, and any road he took, he thought, would doubtless end in swamp or peter out to nothing.
Besides, he had a couple of stops to make, at the library, at the hardware store, before his date. Not before had any courtship of his required a stop at a hardware store, but this one did. Pierce rolled south, more than early enough and without after all another thing in the world to do.
Town was changing. Pierce had been a resident of the county long enough to notice and even to deplore how fast it went, how the old houses would turn, as soon as their owners died or were moved out, into salons de thé or antique clothing stores or hair-cutting parlors with awful punning names, if this went on there would not be a human family living on Pleasant or High Street at all. It was hard to find a parking place before the library, and a car with out-of-state plates was eager to get his when he pulled out. He drove around past the building on Maple Street that he had just moved out of; it had already become an antique store, or at least a store that traded in old things, his former apartment the new owners’, two guys who had already muffled with curtains the windows of the sunporch.
Where he had once. The sunporch where.
No he is not allowed any longer to see down that way.
He stopped his car, got out. The name was to be Persistence of Memory, the name sketched but not yet painted on the door and window. He went down the path and in.
There was a species of dream Pierce knew well, which took place in environs like this, piled up like this with articles nameable and not, hardly room to move among them, the walls hung too with obscure pictures, the tables and shelves loaded with small and fragile things that would shrink from his searching fingers (is this the one I want, the one I was sent to find? What was it I wanted or needed?) and shape-shift as he reached for them.
Jeez look at this. A picture, much more frame actually than picture, the frame being what he had noticed. It was carved or cast, he couldn’t tell which, in that chocolatey-black stuff that might be wood or some kind of resin, late Victorian, the kind that frames a lock of Mother’s hair. Deep moldings surrounded the little arched space wherein the picture was contained, which appeared (Pierce came closer) to be a small photograph, though one so tinted and worked-over as hardly to retain any of the light of other days. A bulldog; a jowly head, piggy eyes, ears upright. A dead dog (dead now), a beloved dog whose memorial this doubtless was.
There were figures carved in relief in the frame, and Pierce brought his face even closer to see that yes, they were what they appeared at first glance to be. Little crossed whips at the top, the checking of their leather handles and their thin switched tips clearly cut. At the bottom a studded collar, and a leash linked to it that curled away and around the image protectively. A studded collar: its buckle and even the buckle’s tooth able to be seen, to be fingered, as the eye can finger relief.
“That’ll clean up nicely,” said the shop’s owner
from behind his counter of costume jewelry, old lighters, pens and medals.
Pierce wasn’t so sure. The ancient dust trapped in its folds and carvings was somehow loathsome, and he could think of no tool that could reach it: as though the thing had been made to gather it, like a bronze statue’s patina. There was a tiny bright white sticker attached to it, with a teeny tiny but quite high price written on it in a careful hand. Who would want such a thing at such a price?
“Do you,” he asked the keeper, “take credit cards?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Oh we sure do.”
When he had finished the rest of his errands, and read the time by the Town Hall tower, he went out of town by the iron bridge over the Shadow. His new oddment was in his trunk, wrapped loosely in tissue. His other purchases were in a brown bag on the seat beside him. He turned north and west up the river road, which soon passed the last of the town’s commercial buildings (a welder, a coal-and-oil dealer) and the last residences, and climbed into the woods.
Why does the sky’s blue darken as autumn comes? Is it just the gradual subtraction of cousinly green from the foreground palette, the addition of oranges and browns? That little maple, hastening to turn before her sisters did for some reason, lifting and shaking her burning hands. The hurt and the old turned soonest: the high outermost limb of that dying ancient; that riven but still living one.
Among the lesser charismata he had noticed lately, Pierce had come to be aware of an ability to reverse the relativity of motion, experientially at least: when driving in his Steed sedan through the Faraways he was able, as though by flipping an inward switch, to cease rushing past the scenery and instead, himself still, to watch it rush past him; to feel the roadside trees giddily fly by, lifting their limbs and showing their leaves’ undersides as they passed over him, the clouds roll up toward him, the mountains too, shape-shifting like clouds as they came. Fence posts rattling single file along the road in their regiments, barns and houses demonstrating their geometries to him as he sat still, hands on the wheel and foot on the gas, marvelling. Sometimes he had a hard time making it stop.
Despite all his malingering he arrived at her little place to find the driveway still empty. The house too, obviously, though he was careful to call out before he pulled open the screen door from the deck. He was alone there, and could go where he liked amid her belongings and her books. That room there would, surely, be her bedroom.
Some time later, Rose Ryder also turned off the Shadow River road onto the dirt road that led to her cabin, took its three brief turns to her driveway, pulled in and braked. She was running late, still in pursuit of that lost hour or so she could not overtake. She pulled from the car her bag of purchases, all that the Here You Are Grocery in Shadowland provided. It didn’t matter, it would do, it was fine. The sheets needed changing, the dishes washing.
Meanwhile Pierce had left the house, and driven back to the same little store where Rose had just been, and at that moment was buying beer as she had asked him to do. If she had been paying attention, Rose would have seen him go past her on the road: he saw her.
When she had done what she could with the dinner and the house she walked the deck, not knowing how to spend the last minutes till his arrival, feeling she might disintegrate, part company with herself, if she could not think of something. She had to stop running, toward or away, whichever it was. It was both. She prayed: Holy Spirit be with me and in me.
Immediately (astonished, she watched it happen) the wind she had been standing in fell. The day was (had all along been) still, perfectly still; the clouds stationary; the river merry, yet still too. Her lost hour was returned to her. She lifted her hands and placed her fingertips in wonder on her lips.
Once, a universal animating spirit pervaded the whole universe, the reason why everything was as it was and not a different thing. Because of the continuity of the spirit within us and this universal spirit, thoughts could be transmitted from the operator’s spirit, via the star-powers, to the spirit of another, like a phone call bouncing off a satellite.
Today too there are links and chains of causality, occult connections which can be manipulated in order to make changes and produce effects; that’s what science and technology do. One difference then was that anybody could play. If you could see, if you could feel, a connection, you had made one; the forging of connections was like the making of metaphors. No it was the making of metaphors, fusing tenor and vehicle into an ampersand of incandescent connection.
The dandelion is the sun’s child. Pierce pointed out one that had come out by mistake in her brief shabby lawn, dazed by the weirdly warm October. Look at its golden head, a sunburst—which is a lion’s mane too, and the lion, golden and noble, is the sun-beast above all. And the green leaves, dentate, fierce, dent-de-lion. Now cut its stem and see the sun’s sign, , which places it for sure among the sun’s things, with the lion, and gold, and the goat and the honeycomb and the heliotrope and a thousand other things great and small. Read a book of such signatures and commit them to memory and you can use them for making medicines, say, or telling small futures; imagine the signatures in your heart, discover new ones, and open a way upward for yourself toward the heavens and the gods.
“But it works on other people too,” Rose said. “You said.”
“Right. On people too.”
This October evening Pierce Moffett, junior magician, was going to attempt to receive, by techniques freely adapted from the masters, a communication between his spirit and that of Rose Ryder. Who was his apprentice as well as his subject, and already showing more natural aptitude than her teacher: it’s often so.
“So I’m thinking and feeling,” he said. “And hm. You’re a Leo, right? Also a child of the sun. And so I think well in these days of the old age of the sun you might be experiencing some anxiety. You might be thinking about the sun, getting closer to the sun.”
“How, closer.”
“Oh travel. Maybe major travel. In the South, the southern hemisphere I mean, it’s spring now, turning summer.”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
“So oh I don’t know really, this is guessing—you might be drawn to that.”
“Yes maybe.”
“What I’m getting, what I feel coming, is an emblem of the sun, of its what. Its vicissitudes. Sudden changes willed in the sun’s life.” He studied her, stroking with his hands the chilly tops of his thighs. “Say Phæton.”
She looked at him oddly. “Phæton,” she said.
“Yes, you remember, the sun’s child. The boy who.”
“Sure.”
“Father Sun and his boy, who drove the chariot so close to earth that he started fires everywhere, parched the ground, boiled the rivers.”
She nodded at him, and flicked the end of her cigarette with her thumb, and looked at its burning tip. “Phæton,” she said. “Actually I have been. Thinking of him, of that story. A lot. Just this week, last night.” She shook her head and laughed. Pierce laughed too, a small laugh of gratified amazement, hey I’m good.
“Well these stories, see,” he said. “There’s a reason these stories go on being told. In many forms.” He looked west, where the sun was hurrying down, pulling day after him. “And your father,” he said.
She put down the can of beer she had lifted to her lips. “Why did you say that?”
He pondered, staring at her, as though the reason had to come from her.
“Well,” he said at length. “Phæton. It’s a story about fathers too. As well as about.” He smiled. “About reckless driving.”
She began to laugh, the sudden laugh from the throat and the gut that rushes forth when tension breaks. He laughed too, the two of them staring at each other and laughing aloud like devils delighting.
Too cold when the sun went down to eat on the little gray deck. She made a fire in the big stone fireplace that it seemed the house had been built around, and which would surely remain long after it was gone, like a house of eld; and when the pine and bi
rch had roared for a long time (she kept rolling the logs into the fire-mass, never enough) he took the black fire shovel that leaned against the stones and shovelled out enough live coals to fill her little hibachi. On it they grilled her wieners and burgers, and sitting on the floor before the hearth ate them with slaw and beans: comfort food for her, he had decided, and wondered if she had marshmallows to toast. It was this meal, this sort, that they had met over, at that party by the Blackbury.
They drank more of the beer he had brought, she trying to incite or invite a certain recklessness and at the same time hold it in check, like a woman with a half-tamed cheetah on a leash; she knew what it was for but not always how to use it. He helping her with a word or a look, moving a third fresh bottle out of her reach at last.
For now it was she who was to be examined, whose powers of mentation and whose colored memories were to be unrolled, for a particular purpose they had agreed on without discussion. Hot enough now from the fire that she could be undressed for this examination: she did this herself at his request or command, he watching, remaining dressed himself.
She approached him where he sat on the battered couch. “No hon you take the little stool there.”
It was a three-cornered stool of leather and wood, maybe North African, strung with rawhide, the seat somewhat saddlelike. She looked at him a moment, and at it, then lowered herself onto it.
“Now I want to ask you first,” he said. He tipped the shade of the standing lamp away from himself and toward her; the lamplight fell on her, spotlight, third degree. He himself was in shadow. “I want to ask first about this guy. Your husband. The one who first.”
“Oh God.” She put her arms defensively before her for a moment, but then lowered them when Pierce, very slightly, shook his head. “Him, well. Yes we sort of eloped. He was, I think, in fact crazy. I’m still afraid of him.”
He had her tell just how afraid he had made her: a dark muscled mechanic just past teenhood, her high-school crush, though not till they were out of school and he had gone through one wife—a girl who had graduated visibly pregnant two years ahead of Rose—had they got together. And where now were this other wife and child? Who knew?
