by John Crowley
“I’m sorry,” Pierce said. “I’m really sorry, I know how late it is; but could I speak to—” The pastor? The minister? “Could I speak to Rhea? Rhea Rasmussen?”
“Well she’s asleep,” said the voice. “Is this an emergency?”
He hesitated only a moment; once asked, he knew it was. “Yes. Yes it is.”
He could hear obscure fumblings, and something fall, the receiver maybe.
“Hello?”
“Yes. Hello. My name is Pierce Moffett. It’s likely you don’t remember me, but …”
“Um,” she said. “Yes. I think. Rosie Mucho. You helped at her greatuncle’s funeral. Yes. We’ve spoken. Yes.”
“Yes. I am truly, truly sorry to have bothered you so late. But I need to talk to somebody, I need to talk to. To you, in your, well your professional capacity.”
“My professional capacity.”
“I am in really bad trouble,” Pierce said. “Something terrible has happened to me that I don’t understand.”
There was a silence at her end that Pierce thought might be shocked, or puzzled; or thoughtful. Then she said: “Is this about your friend and the Powerhouse?”
“Um yes,” Pierce said.
“Is she in trouble, do you think? Is she suffering?”
“I,” Pierce said. “I don’t. I don’t think so. She seems okay. It’s me.” “You?”
“I wonder,” Pierce said, and closed his eyes in shame, “if I could come see you.”
There was a small pause before she answered. “Now?” she asked.
“I hoped,” he said.
“Well no,” she said, “that would be a disruption, really. But if you need to talk right now … Where are you?”
He told her.
“Oh the Winterhalters’. Yes. I know the place. I’m actually close by. I can be over there in a few minutes. If it’s not something you feel you can say on the phone.”
Awed by her willingness, she knowing nothing of him except what he had said, he almost told her no, forget it. But a hope had opened in his heart. “I’m not sure it’s something I can say at all,” Pierce said.
“A few minutes,” she said. “Leave a light on.”
“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”
And what would he tell her, he thought, after the line went silent and the air of his house again surrounded him. How he had messed with magic for his own delight, to get for himself what he wanted but should not have had, and in consequence had harmed irretrievably the world, “the world,” like a kid with a chemistry set who by chance learns to crystallize or liquefy the bonds of space and time, a process beginning at his own Bunsen burner in his own basement and proceeding outward exponentially. Stop oh stop. Horror and wonder.
He hadn’t moved when her headlights swept the room.
“That’s a remarkable garment,” she said when she had taken an assessing look at his house and at him.
It was Sam Oliphant’s dressing gown, purple satin side out, belted in leather. He tried to explain it, and himself a little, his work, his ways: he seemed to have forgotten a lot of this, or to have trouble retrieving it. He offered coffee, she refused.
“Well would you,” he said, showing her the daybed where she might sit if she liked, noticing that his lair was not fit for any habitation but his own.
She sat, a little gingerly, and by her look invited him to sit there with her.
She tried to get his story from him: carefully probing to make sure, he thought, that he wasn’t mad, or suicidal; ready to try and help, though, it seemed, if he turned out to be. And why, despite his robe, he trembled. And trying to gauge Rose’s predicament too. Did he think she would be harmed by them?
“No no,” said Pierce. “No, I know its not that. I mean I think maybe most of them are sincere. I want to respect, well her—you know, her spiritual strivings. And this is such a small dumb harmless little group really. Bible people, how many thousands are there. But I have had, well a sort of allergic reaction somehow to it, don’t ask me why.”
He had not ceased trembling, though now he made a conscious effort to do so, let his tensed shoulders fall and his hands cease to wring one another. Watching, she put her hand over his. “It’s so hard,” she said. “We think we come to know people because of the intensity of our feelings about them. The more intensely we feel, the closer we think we’re getting. It’s not always so.”
“No,” he agreed, or protested. The plain frank touch of her hand was nearly unbearable. “No.”
“The opposite sometimes. But you know that. Everybody knows that.”
He wondered if that were the real horror of madness, to understand that you don’t know what everybody knows, and that this is what separates you from them, the more-or-less well. You are gone to a land where what everybody knows is not known.
She talked more. She told him that when you feel you’ve invested a lot in a relationship, it can be very painful to think you might have to lose that investment, of time and caring. She said that we cherish others in part because of their freedom, but what happens when that freedom threatens commitment? It can be devastating, she said, to think that there’s no good way to save the relationship, that the only right thing is to give it up.
“Well,” Pierce said, trying to find comfort in these phrases, boxes in which wisdom was surely kept but that he couldn’t open. It might not give him up, was what he feared.
She stood, and clasped her hands behind her, casting her eyes over his shelves of books. He saw the familiar titles as though through her eyes: the Malleus maleficarum with lurid cover, the twelve volumes of Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science, the Rosicrucian anthologies of A. E. Waite. After a silent minute or two she turned to him, and he could tell she thought she had learned something new.
“It couldn’t be, could it,” she said, “that you’ve been raising some demons yourself.”
“I’m a historian,” said Pierce, “I don’t, I mean those are research. I’m not a believer, or a practitioner.”
“Ah.” She continued to study him. “It always seems to me that when scholars take up one subject rather than another it’s not for no reason. The opposite, actually.”
Too much reading. It was the medieval answer. Too much knowledge, not enough wisdom.
“I’ll burn my books,” he said.
“Aw, now.”
She came and sat again beside him on the daybed, close enough that he smelled the wool shirt she wore, and a light perfume or shampoo. “So tell me,” she said. “What’s the most painful thing in this to you? What is it that threatens you so much?”
“That it’s not true,” Pierce said.
She inclined her head to him, surprised maybe and interested. “Oh?”
“I can’t bear it,” he said. “That she could will herself to believe the stuff they tell her. That she could do that.” He saw that she was smiling a little, and wondered if he might have offended. “I mean I can believe that these things can be true for people inside,” he said, and touched his heart. “I see that it makes sense of the world for people. But not outside. I can’t believe it. I actually never did. I mean not even when I thought I did.” He understood this for the first time.
“And you think that separates you. That she believes what you don’t.”
“That she believes what is not true. What is demonstrably not the case. That they all can do that.”
She lowered her eyes. “Well. Is it true. You know oddly enough that’s not most people’s first concern.”
He knew. He clutched his brow.
“I think most people think first about help for pain, and certitude, and happiness. About having some power on their side. You know when these stories were first circulating, that’s what people saw in them. Not some verifiable news story. You’re a historian. You know this.”
“Yes.”
“The first question wasn’t Is this true, what I’m hearing? The first question was What does it mean? To me, to the w
orld? What does it ask of me, what does it bring me?”
“I guess,” he said. He had bent nearly double on the daybed, clutching himself around the middle as though to contain himself. “Yes, I suppose.”
“Like prayer,” she said. “About one-half of me—maybe two-thirds—doesn’t really believe in the power of prayer to alter the world.”
“They do,” Pierce said bitterly. “They think they can get anything just by asking. Health. Wealth. New cars.”
“Yes well,” she said, and smiled. “Yes. We often pray for things that I just don’t think God supplies. Even people I love and admire do that: maybe they know that they’re really asking these things of themselves. But, you know, another part of me knows very well that prayer is powerful. You know it too.”
“Okay, yes,” he said. “Certainly, maybe. Inside.”
“Inside is outside,” she said.
“Well will you pray for me then?” Pierce cried in grief and surrender. “Will you pray for me? ’Cause I.”
“I will,” she said, levelly, simply. “I will. And for her too.” She embraced him, somehow able to contain his big self in her slight arms, and for a long time said nothing more while he wept.
Whether because of Rhea Rasmussen’s prayers, or just the touch of her person, or maybe because of the drink he swallowed (still weeping a little) when she was gone, Pierce slept for a few hours; and now he had awakened calm in the darkness before dawn. He had been granted, had been vouchsafed, the right thing to do, held it now in his heart and hand.
What he had to do was to ask her, humbly and with all his heart, to come back to the Faraways and live with him instead of going to school in Conurbana, they would work it out somehow; to live with him from then on, for good. Impossibly, but yes definitely, he had to ask her—he laughed aloud in the darkness of his bedroom with hopeless understanding—to be his wife.
A simple question. And it didn’t matter if the answer was yes or no. Somehow even if he never asked it, just knowing it was the right one was enough; he felt a profound relief, like a nearly drowned man’s to breathe air and expel it. But what if he really could ask it? Why on earth did the mere thought of asking it restore him in this way?
He would ask her, he would. The strong wine of resolution flooded him. He thought of arising now, right now going to the phone while the world slept, and calling her. But no it was absurd, not yet six in the morning, she would be still wrapped in sleep, the sweet sleep they promised her. Anyway, he obviously couldn’t just baldly put his question to her, and especially not over the phone. There was going to have to be some preparation, considering his bizarre, not to say cruel, behavior over the last weeks. He remembered in shame that he had not kissed her, not once during the whole of that time with her in Conurbana. As though she had been in fact the eidolon or demon manufacture that he, standing on her corner in the dawn, had imagined her to be. Instead of merely confused and needy. It was so simple.
He tossed off his blankets and arose in the cold. There had been a little frost, and the windows were silvered. Pierce drew a bath, standing grinning while the funny old tub filled, clutching himself to calm the shudders that tightened his stomach.
He would not ask that she choose between them, no, she would not have to choose, she could have both; the Lord her God was a jealous God, he knew, but he, Pierce, was not jealous: so long as she chose him as well, freely and with all her heart, as he freely offered his to her, that would—it must—place him on an equal footing with the Old One, a footing he would win by this vast gesture. It seemed to him vast.
There was really only one strength you could bring to bear against your enemies, only one strength anyway that someone shaped as he was shaped could bring. And it was the same as the only aid he could bring, to her or to anyone. Love suffereth long, and is kind; love seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, heck they said it themselves, didn’t they, even if they didn’t mean it, or maybe they did, maybe it was all all right, perfectly nice people actually probably most of them, who knew but that they had the compassion, the charity his own cold soul lacked. What they weren’t were wizards or the slaves of wizards with magic on their side. They shrank even as he grew by the power of the question he would put, becoming the ordinary size of human acquaintances or strangers; in an imaginary house, his own house in the future, his and hers, which he could just then see with indistinct vividness, he welcomed them, her crowd. A little mystery cult such as the poor humans of this planet have been joining for ages; they just wanted what they wanted, as he did himself, as she did for sure. Happiness. Help for pain. Certitude.
He sank down moaning into his bath. He thought of Rose asleep, ignorant of this new understanding of his, of their new equality; asleep still in the time before he asked her what he would ask her, still in that former condition, or in none at all really, innocent, oblivious. He thought of how she had wept in his bed the night before she had moved to Conurbana, how he had not said then what he should have said, had been unable to do what he ought to have done, not then and never after. The right way, which appeared before him now. Untaken then and maybe too far behind him now. And maybe not.
Rose Ryder was actually awake, in her little apartment in Conurbana; she had no reason to be and it was crazy early but she felt she had slept a week; she got up amid the still-unfamiliar odors of her place, and prayed aloud: Holy Spirit be with me and in me.
She turned and looked around herself.
Awake.
They called it walking in the Spirit, this clarity she saw with sometimes, so clear it was hard to put names to what she saw, the veins and blood of leaves, the swim of liquid in her cat’s slit eyes, the fluid persistence of the air and the world; the power of her gaze to know and possess it all; this ærial hum or sung note of exaltation, made in her ears or coming from the whole great world at once. She had tried to explain it, or describe it, to Pierce for instance, and never could; to those who knew it no explanation was necessary
She picked up her kettle and brushed the cat from the stove where it liked to sit on the warmth of the pilot light; she lit the stove with care, holding the blackened and ragged sleeve of her robe out of the way. She would study this morning, she was all caught up but there was no reason not to get ahead. She could nowadays pick up any book she needed to read and read and understand it, instead of drifting away constantly into wishing and fearing as she always once had; the facts of her basically bullshit psychology textbooks walked right off the page in a funny little jostling parade into her head and lodged there, to answer whenever she summoned them. If that’s what she needed and wanted it’s what she got. Just ask.
And what would he think—Pierce, who had entered her consciousness, had been beside her somehow as she awoke, a black bear just out of eyeshot—if she told him that all the gifts she had been given (of the Spirit but not only those of the Spirit, other things too, amazing luck, finding yourself in the right time and the right place to get what you wanted or needed, a test grade, cash, a parking place even, a wake-up call, there wasn’t anything too small that it couldn’t be made to go right), that all of it was for the making of that new clarity and certainty and power and for nothing else? What would he think if she told him (she didn’t think she ever would) about the day she had come home, a raw and hopeless evening not long ago, and found sitting on the little enamelled kitchen table a small brown box that (she was certain) hadn’t been there at morning; how her heart had warmed immediately with a funny warmth and a profound interest to see it there, as though she had discovered a clue, one more left for her to find? She could tell when she picked it up that it was old, something about the printing on the sides or the weakness of the cardboard flaps she pulled open, it wasn’t modern in some way; she’d parted the greasy thick paper inside and taken out a small oiled gear or complex toothed wheel, and had known even before she read the box’s side what it was: a distributor gear for an Asp of the year and model hers was, the part she needed but could no
t find.
It was just sitting there, she told her group when they were all witnessing that evening, around a different kitchen table in a different part of town; each of them having a story to tell, many of them no more than a moment of hope or certainty, but some weirdly circumstantial like her own. And they had all smiled when she was done, some shaking their heads in calm awe or softly clucking their tongues, amazing; she studied their faces to see if one of them was going to admit to having found the car part somewhere and brought it to her house when she wasn’t there (no one had then or since) but the most amazing thing was that it didn’t matter whether God Himself had put an antique car part on her kitchen table (in its original box, with the manufacturer’s name and part number on it, just like the stuff Santa supposedly made in his shop at the North Pole that always came complete with cellophane-windowed box and famous brand name) or if finally somebody (Mike?) confessed he’d brought it to her—she could see or imagine the warmth of his smile, the laugh they would have over it—because the joy, the kindness, in it would be the same, and that was the whole point and the whole gift: and now her car ran too, and what could she say except that faith in God and his power and willingness to do anything, anything at all for her, had brought that about? And how could she tell Pierce that?
She made tea and sat at her table, the cat materializing silently there on the Formica to be given a pellet of bread she rolled in her fingers. Winter light in a place that was hers, a life at last her own or becoming her own. Because she had given it away, this time though for real.
Who loses his life shall have it.
For so long, since some time in college maybe, she had come to lose great stretches of time, nights and days but mostly nights, unable to describe them to herself or replay them except as you might memories of what you had heard someone else had done once. Waking up beside people she did not remember meeting, listening to them talk and not understanding them, searching in memory through night streets for the moment or the place she had met or chosen them. She told herself, she told them, that it was the beer, but it wasn’t really the beer, she thought, it was the night.
