Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  The delicacy of her hand, the tension of its hundred muscles, for a moment he watched her test, too, what she could do and not. Without a word he put his hand between her legs, not roughly but not kindly, a physician’s or breeder’s assessment. My God how fast it started in her.

  “Pierce I can’t. I’m afraid. Pierce not tonight.”

  No more seeing: he bound her eyes in imitation silk, knotting it firmly against her silken slew of hair, not easy. He wanted to ask if or what she saw but knew he couldn’t. Then: “All right, Rose,” he said, and withdrew.

  He had among his possessions a Polaroid camera that long ago his mother had bought his uncle Sam for Christmas. Now, like Sam’s dressing gown, it was his. The little black-and-white pictures it made were a lot like the pictures that his cousin Bird used to get from her Hawkeye box camera: dim, sometimes barely scrutable, hiding and revealing at once.

  Rose didn’t know he had taken it out. She could tell nothing. Pierce? she asked again, and he made no answer. He opened the camera’s body, and its folded neck extruded, bearing its one hawk eye. The noise of its clicking into place startled her, she tensed against her bonds with a sudden shudder, it was something to be used against her, but what. Pierce saw in the foggy viewfinder a tiny scene, broadened at the edges, all lines leading outward to nowhere, inward to the human figure at the center.

  The eye is the mouth of the heart. What it eats is not light, though light is its mode or means: what it eats is Recognition, which the heart can chew on, which the soul can know. There always had to be time in their meetings for this cold collation, this scavenging and scarfing by his eyes, filling him with a repletion not different from hunger as he looked.

  Tic.

  The camera was obsolete even then, his roll of film was the last the pharmacy in the Jambs had for sale and out of date. But there the image was, light curdling on the retinal oblong of white paper that you peeled from behind the camera’s eye. There is the shine of her thigh, there is the parting of her lips; there even is the parting of her buttocks, and the shadow revealed or hidden there. Right away you had to coat the image with a sort of slime, sliding a little spongy bar provided by the manufacturer over the surface, if you didn’t it would fade faster than memory. Pierce did that.

  “Pierce?”

  No more talking. He bound her mouth. She could still raise three fingers if she needed to. He showed her she could. “With sweet May dews my wings were wet,” he said. “And Phoebus fired my vocal rage.” He leaned close to her and spoke into her ear: “He caught me in his silken net. And shut me in his golden cage.”

  At last he put his ear against her, between her breasts, to hear her heart tapping fast and fearfully, ready to receive he thought or guessed. Years later when about to pass into sleep she will be revisited by that—his warm strange ear upon her—and awake with a start, her heart filling painfully. Or she will forget it with the rest.

  He unbound himself.

  He loves to sit and hear me sing

  Then laughing sports and plays with me;

  He stretches out my golden wing

  And mocks my loss of liberty.

  * * *

  They had come so far from where they had started. We’ve all come so far. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that why we can’t stop hunting, restless, dissatisfied, champing at a bit that never becomes familiar? Or is that so only for those born under that leaden star (as deeply embedded in her chart as his, she knew it but had been misled about its meaning) that governs the liver, in whose glossy sheen (Aristotle says) the most desirable things are reflected for the hungry soul to see?

  They were exiles here. He had once known it, and forgotten, and then forgotten that he had forgotten. She knew it though: had just learned or relearned it, after a long forgetting had seen it, shocking and familiar at once. Not in her borrowed Terrier sedan, not on that night of wind coming down the Shadow River road, no before that—but it was indeed what she had been fleeing from that night. She was fleeing in the wrong direction, though—Beau Brachman would say we tend to: not out but further in, as into a maze.

  She had said almost nothing to Pierce about her first weekend in Conurbana, embarrassed maybe or wary, and he had not pressed her. Then she began going there every few days, a drive of an hour or two in her restless scarlet roadster; she returned to the Faraways the same day, or she stayed the night. She said little to him also about what went on there, sometimes volunteering vague cheerful remarks, sometimes leaving it up to him to ask, or not: as though it were a series of probing and maybe slightly shameful medical procedures she was undergoing, too intimate to discuss at length, from which she returned refreshed, alert, gay.

  “Oh we study,” she said once. “We’ll take a word, a word out of the Greek, and see how it appears in different places in English in the Bible, translated differently. To see how the meaning changes.”

  “Like.”

  “Like parhesia. “

  “Parhesia,” Pierce said. He searched his inward schoolroom. Greek came just before lunch, the smells of macaroni and cheese drifting up from the refectory; by the big knocking radiator, beneath the crucifix, was the wooden stand where the big Liddell and Scott was chained; he felt it urgent he find the word before she told him. “Openness, frankness.”

  She pointed a gunlike finger at him, you got it. “But it’s translated in lots of different ways in English. So we look it up and see. It takes a while.”

  “Hm.”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Mm.”

  More than the theodicy it was the company he pondered. Her cheerful evasiveness was that of a woman with a new lover, or an old one, which is what Pierce assumed. Mike Mucho, her quondam, and her boss at The Woods too in some sense; inventor or developer of the new science of Climacterics which had absorbed or occupied Rose when she and Pierce first met, forgotten now apparently. He fished delicately for certitude on this matter, but parhesia was no part of his relation with her, or hers with him, and it was too late to start now.

  “Are there other people from The Woods at these things?”

  “Oh yes sure. Some of them have moved there or I guess live there.”

  “In Conurbana.”

  “It’s nice. There’s always somebody to stay with.”

  Whatever it was that she had learned, or now confessed or professed, whatever she dabbled in during her time away, did not or had not yet altered her nighttime tastes. She said she was happy, and she was, but it seemed to him that she had actually grown hungrier too, and in more than one way. She ate and drank with luminous avidity. She talked about her life and the future as though impatient for their unfolding. And she listened as eagerly, if anything more eagerly, to the stories he spoke into her ear, in which she featured, she or her eidolon—the small she within her, the she whom together they had discovered or made.

  She wore a fur-collared coat when next she came to his house, and the smell of the cold night air caught in it reminded Pierce of his mother, the city, time. He brought her into the bedroom before she took it off.

  “We can’t be too long,” she said. They were going tonight to a poetry reading, some old friends or acquaintances of hers, mostly male. She herself kept a sheaf of much-handled poems she would show to no one. “They said really eight.”

  “Just come in,” he said. He brought her, still talking, to the bed, to face the wall by the bed. For a long moment she would not see what he faced her toward.

  “’Cause if you drive it takes forever and we.”

  “Hush. Look.” He placed his big hand on her neck and held her head like a doll’s pointing toward what he had brought her to see.

  She saw. She started to say Oh no, laugh and turn away.

  “Hush,” he said, and tightened his hold on her. “Look.”

  She did so. She ceased to laugh and looked. He watched her look, watched her eyes consume, or drink.

  “See?”

  The little Polaroid had turned out to be smaller than
the picture of the dead pug had been. So he had made a mat for it of dark rose taffeta, shocking within the dark surround of the frame. He now bent the flowered shade of the old brass standard lamp to shine athwart it, which brought out the details of the carving or molding of the frame, the collar, belt and switches; still tenebrous, though no longer funereal. He brought her closer, to see, to touch if she wanted to.

  “Who is it,” she said. “Is it.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you, how,” she said.

  “Hush,” he said. “Look.”

  They looked. If you did not know what you looked at could you actually discern. A shadowed headland, she; pale seafoam of her discarded slip around her oddly contorted body. Pearl-drops of light where the camera’s flash (Wink-Light, its proprietary name) had struck her bonds.

  What he had made, he saw now as she looked on it, was a seal: an impresa, not a changeable one in the soul or the heart but actual and hanging on the wall. One such as the Renaissance made so many of, thinking they were imitating the hieroglyphs of Egypt, or Ægypt; hoping to make an allegory in paint or stone so potent and utter that it passed directly through the eye to the heart, where the soul could read it and be moved to virtue or to action. Giordano Bruno had conceived dozens of them, some he himself cut to be printed, some he only described at length in words. For in fact they couldn’t be understood without words, not even back then in the picture-book world, at the very least each needed its motto: the picture was the body, the seal-makers said, the motto was the soul.

  What motto for this one, then.

  Andromeda, perhaps. The Marriage of Agent and Patient.

  “All right,” he said at length, when he thought that it and its lesson had entered her. He put his arm around her shoulders, to lead her away, as though she were bereaved, had just viewed the open casket. They said no more about it, only tore through the night in his car; at the reading he watched her listen to the poet, a rapture or spell upon her face that he didn’t think was all due to the mild verse, plangently read, about rain and the moon.

  Then late, late, she watched with a new intensity of attention as he took out and put on her neck where the blood beat a studded collar of her own, and buckled with some difficulty the creaking new leather (is this the largest you’ve got? he’d asked the pet-store clerk, divining suddenly that the man knew exactly what he was up to). There were bright chains, new too, for the ring that hung from it, heavy enough for any mastiff bitch, he said to her; and he placed her where she could see the thing on the wall that he had made for her. She looked. She soon ceased to speak except to say, when required, the assents he wanted from her; otherwise, only the sounds of the universal language. But when he entered her, when he pushed with gritted teeth into the strangeness of the wrong or back way into her (inexpressible what constituted it exactly, that harrowing strangeness, he the first who had gone that way with her) she said softly but distinctly I love you.

  Who? he wondered. To whom had she spoken? Never had she said those words to him in the light of day or facing him anywhere. He didn’t think it was to him she said them now, he thought she was sleeptalking, speaking maybe to a figure in a room into which he had only driven her: a dream she unfolded even as she lay beneath him here gripping the bars of the iron bedstead, a dream where someone was doing things to her like the things he did, but someone different, someone to whom she could say or must say what she had said. He didn’t reply. He didn’t ask.

  Then the leaves were all down. Now Pierce could see from his window the river he lived beside, the broad brown Blackbury River, and, on the far side of it, the decaying signals and maintenance sheds of a railroad spur line he had not known was there; in the deep green time it had been invisible, the mountain seeming to rise straight up from the far bank.

  Fallen leaves burdened Pierce’s brief yard and made it as one with the leaf-littered slope that went up to the big house, and with the field that went out to the road; Pierce thought of raking up all of his and burning them, but then (he saw) in the next wind a million more dead souls would be blown downward from the Winterhalter lawns and over his, unless he raked up all of those too, and so there being nowhere to stop he could not bring himself to start, only stood in the stillness and listened to the mass of them crepitating. His landlord’s car appeared on the heights above as he stood there, a long golden-bronze one as large as any, and came down from the house; did not turn outward through the gates, though, but the other way, toward Pierce’s place.

  When Pierce had first met Mr. Winterhalter, emerging now with painful slowness from his car (the more they shrink and shrivel, Pierce had noticed, the larger their cars become), he was a hale egg-shaped ham-handed man, curious and busy. Now, only a couple of months later, he was immensely old, ill, and evidently dying. Pierce greeted him.

  “We’re leaving,” Mr. Winterhalter said.

  “Yes.”

  With some effort Mr. Winterhalter put his shaking hand in his pants pocket and drew out a bunch of keys on a piece of ancient brown twine. “You’ll remember everything,” he said.

  “Yes.” Pierce had been given a tour by Mr. Winterhalter, in his former sprightlier form, shown the lights to be left burning, the fusebox, the oil cutoff switch, the emergency numbers; the house large and expensively furnished in an anonymous style, faintly shabby and smelling of human occupation.

  “That’s all right then.” He pondered. “Have you seen the well?”

  Yes, Mr. Winterhalter had shown him the well. Perhaps he’d forgotten he had. A stone wellhouse in the cove of the hill behind the great house, they both turned to look that way; the black plastic pipe along the ground.

  “You’ll keep it flowing.”

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t turn off the overflow.”

  “No, certainly not.”

  “It defeats the purpose.”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Winterhalter looked around himself at the leaves and the leafless trees. “Good,” he said. “We’ll be gone all winter. In the spring you’ll see us again.” He looked at his great gold wristwatch, then lifted his eyes, as though to check the constellations turning unseen behind the white sky, time to go, hurry hurry. Pierce thought it unlikely that the man would ever return here, and wanted to ask him what then, but he did have a list of emergency phone numbers in case the Winterhalters did not reemerge with the chucks. A lawyer’s was among them.

  “In the spring,” Mr. Winterhalter said again, and made to enter his car. At that moment another car appeared at the far gate and turned in.

  “Who’s this?”

  “A friend,” Pierce said. “Actually, we’re headed out just now.”

  Mr. Winterhalter stared at the car and at Rose. She was again driving the Terrier loaner sedan, its top somewhat crushed and rumpled but otherwise not much worse for its adventure on the night the wind blew so hard.

  “You’ve met her,” Pierce said. Rose waved.

  “No,” said Mr. Winterhalter definitely. “Never.”

  Where was her own car? In the shop again, she told him. The mechanic at Bluto’s Automotive could not acquire a certain part that the foreign-made and long-discontinued little Asp needed to run, did not think he would be able to acquire it except maybe from some collector or buff somewhere, unless he could machine it himself, which he was more eager to try than she was to permit. So it sat there.

  “The distributor drive,” she said as she drove them away from where Mr. Winterhalter stood beside his car. “Stripped out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some little gear. Is he all right?” She was studying Mr. Winter-halter in the rearview mirror. “He’s not moving.”

  “He can stand there,” Pierce said. “It’s his house. He’s just thinking.”

  They turned out onto the main road. They were going today to her cabin by the river, which must now be closed up for the winter. She had asked for his help some time ago and he had agreed, though he had feared this moment,
the place where her path once again ran out, feared it enough that he had given it no thought: where she would go now, what would become of her, the trembling that he had never been able to still. But she seemed untroubled now, driving too fast through the motionless day, happy, hectic even; for she knew, she said, what she was going to do. She was leaving the Faraways.

  “I’m going,” is what she said, and he at first didn’t know from where. They were parked now in the driveway of her little cottage, but had not yet got out. Well she had got a chance to go to school in Conurbana, she said, and she was going to take it. A sort of scholarship. She was going to enroll at Peter Ramus College, the School of Social Work, get a master’s in psychiatric social work. A real degree. Credentials. She couldn’t really pass on this.

  “Scholarship?”

  “Help,” she said. “They want to help me, and I can work with them there too.”

  “Them.”

  “The healing group. I explained it all.”

  She wiped her cheeks with a rapid movement, perhaps there were tears there; she smiled. She had not explained it all or even any part of it completely.

  “But won’t you be coming back to work at The Woods? I mean if you get this degree …”

  “Maybe.” She looked at him for an instant sidelong, then away. “What I guess is, I’m not really going to be the one to decide. But I don’t know if you could really understand that. Even if I could explain it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Pierce said. “God walks into your life and you just walk right out of mine.”

  “We can’t have a static relationship, Pierce,” she said. “You don’t want that.”

  Why? he thought. Why can’t we? Static, endless, it’s what he did want: an active relationship certainly, urgent even maybe, but yes static, a furious stasis of immediacy encompassed by a bed, four walls.

  “And why,” he said, “do they have an interest in paying for your education?”

  “Why do you need to make it sound sinister?” She pushed open the Terrier’s door. “They’re committed to healing. If you want to hear about what they’ve done in institutions, helping people who nobody else can help. I mean maybe this is something you never understood about me,” she said.