by John Crowley
“They aren’t?”
“Not in this state. Maybe somewhere. Indiana or Iowa or wherever. Not here. They can’t buy it under the conditions they propose until they are. And that’s not all.” He switched his phone to the left ear, and lifted his feet to his desk. “There’s a story. A young woman named Flora Fasti, I think it was Flora, who became a convert to this organization. She was an heiress, I didn’t learn where the money came from but there was a lot of it, and she was also very ill. She was starving to death. Have you ever heard of this? She wouldn’t eat, not that there was anything wrong with her physically. She just wouldn’t. Or not enough anyway.”
“I’ve heard of it. It has a name, I forget what, Mike told me. I’ve known people, girls.”
“All girls, yes,” said Allan. “So she became a convert, and they claimed they could cure her, get her out from under this. And she made over to them her entire fortune. It came to well over a million. Gave them control over it. A gift. Just like that.”
“So that’s where the money is.”
“It goes on,” Allan said. “Apparently they don’t have the pull with God that they claim to have, because she died. Flora died. In their center or headquarters. It was hushed up for a time but has now come out. And the state is very interested in this, and so are her collateral relatives. Who tend to think that maybe Flora was deceived and robbed.”
“Oh my God.”
“Anyway, the money now is in dispute to say the least. No one knows how this will turn out. Maybe they’ll win. They certainly have been on a streak. But you never know.”
For a long time Rosie said nothing more. Dawn gathered in Allan Butterman’s window.
“Allan, I have to see you this morning,” she said. “I have to.”
“I’m going to be in court.”
“I mean right now. In a little while. I’m, well I have to do something today that I want your advice on. I wasn’t sure I had to do it but now I am. It won’t take long. Please.”
“You can’t ask?”
“I have to see you. When I tell you you’ll know why. Allan, it might be the last thing you’ll ever want to hear from me, and if it is I’ll understand.”
There are multitudes of spirits, Giordano Bruno taught, rank on rank, more kinds of spirits than there are kinds of material things like dogs, stars, stones and roses. They are mortal, though many live fabulously long lives; some are good, some bad, some neither good nor bad; they can be shy, weak and flighty, fierce and terrible, placid and inert, stupid or wise. Of those who clustered around Pierce as he went up Mount Randa he might have distinguished several of these kinds. There are demons who can hear and understand our voices and demons that cannot; there are fiery great gods who need nothing from us and demons who live with us companionably; there are some who love us, some who shun us, like the “light-fleers, throwers of stones whose impact is however harmless,” who had often thrown stones at young Bruno and his friends back in Nola, up near the ruined temple of Portus on Mount Cicala, a mountain like this one.
You never know in what form you might encounter one. Travelling spirits can house themselves in plants, in gemstones, in animals. And in fact Pierce, just then sensing something behind him to be afraid of, half turned to see a large black dog, just steps away, following him silently, dogging him: red tongue awag, and eyes like coals.
MEPHISTO, Schwarzer Pudel, uncommonest of his shapes. You can only know this fact, in these latter days, if you’ve read it somewhere, and Pierce had, and how does it happen that such a notion can so startle the heart—intellectual Meaning translated into physiological Dread in a single beat? For upon seeing the hound so near, Pierce drew the big breath of a startled mammal who might need the air in the coming fight, his elbows jutted, claws at the ready, and he bared his own canines. He did this all in an instant, without a choice, poor beast. The dog (just a dog, it was obvious in a moment) only tilted his head quizzically at him, and wagged his tail. Everyman I will go with thee.
They walked on together. Pierce thought of the little she-wolf that once, long ago, Sam and Winnie being absent, he and his cousins had taken in, to tame or try to tame. He began to tell this story to his interlocutors, only to realize it had not happened. No of course not. Soon thereafter he found himself speaking to a new person, one he hadn’t known to be present to him before: not Pitt Thurston or spectral Rose, or Mike Mucho; not Robbie or any other phantasmic offspring, not the Kentucky girl either, the she-wolf cub whom he still couldn’t name. A real girl. A nine-year-old girl, about; a girl in knee socks and a plaid kilt fastened with a silver safety pin, large wise glasses maybe, a tender broad brow. He had been talking to her, and listening to her answers, for some while before she came clear to him.
If it really all was up to me, he said to her, I would hope it would be different.
Different how, she asked.
Not so dark, Pierce said. Not all the time.
And? she asked.
I would like, Pierce said, and the hard lump in his throat hurt just as though he spoke aloud; I would like the earth back. I would like it to be first, not last. I would like it to be final. Just earth.
How so? she asked, so grown-up, but perhaps understanding less than she seemed. He wanted to say to her that if it was up to him, then what he would decree was that it not be up to him. He wanted to come last, he and all his kind, latest children of a billion ancestors; he wanted not to have come from elsewhere but to know he arose here, where he would lie down at last. That’s all. He wanted to resign his commission, or decline his duty. This sick plague of Meaning he was caught in, or of no meaning, which seemed to be the same thing, a world of no meaning but many acts, where intentions had random effects unrelated to desire or need and yet produced by them, like the dishes a madman breaks trying to fight off his pursuers: he wanted it to stop. That’s all.
If that’s what you want, she said, that’s what you’ll have to make.
I did what I thought I was supposed to do, he said, and I failed. I would like to be freed.
Up to you, she said. Nunc dimittis. Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
But what about Sam? he cried to her, or the brightening air. What about Rose? Will they all be all right? Will she be all right?
It is not of thy charge, she said.
Sometimes the gods are as amused by releasing the caught soul like an undersized trout as by reeling it in once more. Or maybe it was only that the sun arose fully just then, warming Earth and Pierce’s cheek, making the world real, and real to him; or maybe it was that the accumulation of sleepless nights, the stresses of hopeless effort, and the long breakfastless climb upward now caused, or “triggered,” a release of endorphins in Pierce’s brain like those which give the flagging athlete a sudden superb calm strength, the world bright and the goal near and easy: a neurochemical process coming to be understood just then in faroff labs, just at the turning of the age. Whatever it was, in that moment they all fled away.
All of them, the staring demons, the name-callers and rock-throwers, Pitt and Ray and the dynamen and dynamettes, he actually saw them turning tail, growing small and scattering. All the powers, not only those who had afflicted him but those who had aided him as well; even she herself who had just now answered him. They fold into 10ths like the Arabs and quietly steelaway said Enosh, who was one himself.
Pierce took another step or two, and then stopped, and lifted his eyes to the heights, blinking. He turned and looked back down the way he had come. He didn’t know how he had got up here so high; he remembered setting out from his house and turning upward, but not the rest. He tried to remember what he had been told, what he’d seen, what the discourse with all of those he’d seen had been, and couldn’t. Then he couldn’t remember that there was something to remember. He looked down to see that he was wearing two different shoes, a black one and a brown one, pulled on in his ignorance in the darkness of his bedroom. He had walked miles without noticing.
Oh you dope, he tho
ught. What are you, nuts?
Wake up, he said, as though to another, and then again: Wake up. And, blinking with mouth ajar as though in fact awaking, he looked upon a roadside tangle of bittersweet, the black branches frosted and the berries orange and red; for a long time he looked at it. He felt his cloudy breath issuing; and he heard a clamor of crows assuring one another that they were there, and the day had begun. That’s all.
He turned to walk back down the mountain. The black dog (who himself lived up that way) watched him go. With his two different shoes, like one of those heroes who goes to the Happy Isles or the land of the dead to find the flower or the fleece, and comes back up onto the surface of the earth with one foot shod and the other bare, one hoofed or cloven and the other human. His own hands though, he thought, were empty. So was the sky.
When he got back to his house, he thought, he would call his mom in Florida. He would go see her; go and get some answers from her, make her tell him; ask her, get her to tell him, to tell him
Bobby.
That was the name. Bobby what, Bobby. As though a stubborn stone now gave way at last under a lifting bar and rolled aside, Pierce without surprise found her name: Bobby Shaftoe.
Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea Silver buckles at her knee She’ll come back and marry me Pretty Bobby Shaftoe. That was her name. And inside her name, he saw, was the name of his imaginary son.
He felt lighter than he had in days and weeks. His step down the mountain was lighter, almost like that skimming over the earth, an inch aloft like Little Enosh, that we do in dreams. It wouldn’t last, of course, for his tasks were not yet done or even recognized for what they were; he guessed it wouldn’t last, and tried to memorize the things he saw as he came down again to the river road and its habitations—the sun in the brown bracken, melting the frost and making it glisten; the long body of mist prone over the supine river, pierced with the same light; old green truck in that driveway, tailpipe breathing whitely, waiting for its master—so that he could, when it was lost, recall that at least for a moment he had known better. He thought he could, he prayed he might. And yet even before night came again, he would be helplessly picking up his burdens, asinus portans mysterium, and he would go on carrying them far longer than everyone else thought he should, or could.
At The Woods Center for Psychotherapy Sam Mucho was now awake. It was six in the morning, which happened to be the hour at which the big clock in the main lounge had stopped after it had ceased to be wound. She didn’t wonder why she was wide awake so far before everyone else. It had now been sixteen hours since her last dose of medicine.
The light had been left on in the bathroom, a little one, and the door was almost shut, just a thin L of light around its edge. It was far away out the entrance of the lounge and a little down the hall but she could see it.
Tinkle was what Mrs. Pisky always said. Sam got out of the sleeping bag and on her hands and knees looked around at those asleep, unable to tell which of the rolls of darkness was her father. She went on all fours through and around them, and one stirred and then was still; and when she was past them all she stood, and went out into the hall and down to the bathroom. She could begin to taste the taste of immensity but didn’t recognize it, confusing it with the strangeness of the big building and the dark. Then she did recognize it.
It was one of the young people from Conurbana who witnessed Sam’s seizure. She heard Sam call Daddy softly from the bathroom in the hall, in a voice that awakened this woman but not Mike; she couldn’t at first figure out just where the call had come from, and when she reached the bathroom Sam was falling.
The woman cried out Oh my God. Then Mike’s name.
He stumbled up, feet caught in the entangling sleeping bag, and several others got up too, who beat him to the bathroom to look in but let him pass when he got there. Sam was in the young woman’s arms rigid and grimacing, the young woman rigid too, mouth corners drawn down in fear and horror.
“Okay,” Mike said. “Okay. It’s okay.”
He gathered Sam up. She had lost bladder control and her nightgown was wet; she was on fire; spasms shook her as though the rigid structure she had become were being torn apart.
“She’ll swallow her tongue,” somebody said. “You got to get her mouth open.”
“No,” Mike said. “No she’s okay.”
Someone began to pray, and then the others too, as though remembering to do so, and just as they did that Sam in Mike’s arms suddenly softened and turned again into a human child. She opened her eyes.
“Okay hon,” Mike said. “It’s okay.”
She didn’t answer; she pulled a wisp of hair from her mouth with a pinky, her eyelids fluttered, she regarded Mike as though she had never seen him before; then she curled against him and in a moment was deep asleep.
Mike looked up at the faces of those gathered at the bathroom door, looking down at him and his daughter concerned or shocked or curious, like the faces of people at an accident. He thought of Sam looked at in this way all her life; he knew that he would not be able to protect her because he could never tell when she would need him, he would always be looking the other way or doing something else. He bent to kiss her brow, and his lips touched the cool sweat. Ray Honeybeare was now among those looking down at him and his daughter, and the others looked to Ray.
14
On the carriage drive at Arcady were parked Val’s Beetle and Spofford’s Dodge Ram, beside them the old Bison station wagon and the Python sedan that Beau Brachman drove. A motorcycle too, resting canted on its kickstand as though taking a sharp turn at speed.
“Mike will be very afraid,” Beau was saying. They all sat on the floor of the great living room as though around a campfire; only Val chose to remain in the depths of the leather couch. “He won’t have understood how much he’s been asked to give up, and now that he does understand he’s going to be confused and empty and afraid. He wants to get to the other side of this quickly, where it will be all better. Anything could be asked of him now and he won’t know how to refuse. That’s what I think.”
He looked around the circle, and at last to Cliff, who considered Beau’s face or his words for a moment, and then assented, with a little nod. Spofford, who had been watching Cliff with care, now turned his gaze again on Beau. Rosie took his hand.
“I think it has to be done,” Beau said. “I think it’s important, and I don’t think we can wait at all.” It was the most important thing that could be done, and everything depended on it from here forward; at the same time it was just one act on one winter day and only one child at risk. Beau knew that. “I should have known earlier,” he said, “and I didn’t.”
“How many people are up there?” Cliff asked. “Are any of them people we know, besides what’s this guy, Mike? Anybody we can go calling on?”
“They’ll let us in,” Beau said. “The getting in won’t be hard. Where Sam is, maybe yes.”
Cliff seemed uncomfortable. “I want there to be somebody I know. Somebody I can ask for.”
“Ask,” Beau said, “for Bobby.”
No one spoke, or asked Beau how he knew this name, or why he suggested it. Cliff could be admitted there or almost anywhere if he had someone he could ask after, someone whose name he knew, toward whom he could open himself in honest inquiry. It was a thing he could do. Spofford knew it. Beau knew it.
“But the main one?” Rosie asked. She had seen him, the one she wouldn’t now name, at Boney’s funeral, where he had only appeared seemingly to make himself known to her, and to the Foundation; she had since looked up the grant proposals submitted by The Woods for the program in healing, and seen his weird name on them. She had dreamed of him too: she just then realized that.
“I know Ray Honeybeare,” Beau said. “I know him.” His face was as clear as it always was; it was the others who felt a dark chill, or a tense resolve.
“One thing I want to know,” Val asked. “Is anybody going to jail for this? I mean that’s not going to do th
e kid any good.”
Rosie fetched a huge sigh, and hugged herself. Allan hadn’t answered when she asked him what would happen, waving his hand by his ear as though to brush away the incoming words. If she genuinely believed Sam was at risk? If she was open with Mike for as long as she could be before she acted, if there was no coercion at all, none? But Allan had stopped listening, was already denying that he was hearing what she said. So she couldn’t answer Val.
“Mike would have to press charges somehow,” Spofford said, and lifted his brows and looked around the circle, am I right?
“He won’t,” Beau said.
Spofford did not nod satisfied. He took Rosie’s hand again.
“We’ll wait till it’s dark,” Beau said. “There’s a funny reason for that I won’t tell you.” His smile was unchanged, Beau’s smile that they all knew, abashing and cheering and mystifying all at once. “Anyway that’s not long from now. Rosie. Do you have a room I could sit in for a while? Just sit.”
She got up, looking around the circle to see if others understood this any better than she did, and saw that they did not, but felt no need to ask; she took Beau first to Boney’s office, but once he was in it he laughed, looking around, and shook his head No. No not here. He liked the kitchen better, sat down at the old wooden table in a hard chair and was still even before Rosie backed away out the swinging door.
Night falls so fast in December at the latitude of the Faraway Hills; it had hardly been day at all, and the lights had long been lit at The Woods. Through the building and the garages and the sheds and over the grounds the young men and women of the Powerhouse had gone in twos and threes, finding excuses not to be alone but not knowing why they should be afraid to be, and then excuses to end their accounting and list-making and return into the big main building and the lounge. Yes that was where Ray and the others were, and there was the reason: Mike sat with his daughter on an ottoman in the center of the room, and Ray with his Testament on a hard chair. By twos and threes they entered quietly and took seats.
