by John Crowley
What if that could be, what if all along, from the beginning, it was meant to be? With a soft moan, a child’s cry of longing or amazement, he sees himself beside the old Toyota wagon, ignorant of all of this world he looks out upon. A thundery summer evening, nineteen ninety-one, he inserting his exclaiming daughters into the backseat; the New England maples, smell of rain coming, and over him the swallows that nested in his barn flashing in the electric air.
No, it is not going to be so. It is not like that.
He takes the Jaguar down the Old Topanga Canyon road to the Santa Monica beach, because he may never see it again in his lifespan: the water blue satin, lifting like a veil with graceful gestures, the sun going down in a clear winter sky. It’s longer this way, but he’ll go along broad Sunset, glimpses of old mansions behind high walls and shaggy overgrown trees; up Hollywood Boulevard into the Hills.
Perhaps he does suffer from anosognosia, as Carla Young seemed to believe. It would make everything simpler. Can you suffer from a condition of ignorance that you don’t know you have? Of course you can. If it’s true that a neurological condition prevents his understanding that he has simply invented another life, a life wherein he graduates from a Catholic high school and goes on to Indiana University and then New York and all that thereafter happened, the life that (so he believes) he was living when he was given the chance to return to an early key point in that life and deflect it consciously and deliberately to make a life he’d rather live, this life—well, if he invented all that then it doesn’t matter what choice he makes, because he will awaken tomorrow to find himself still here, in the only actual life he has ever had.
No. No. He did, he really did make that new life for himself starting at sixteen, in delight and a rage of creation, meeting and overcoming obstacles because he knew now what obstacles are and how to overcome them, which he learned only as he grew to maturity in that life, before he was given the choice to begin again. And he did win for himself what he wanted, taking every well-thought-out step in turn, from adolescence through early creative development and on.
He was offered a choice, the choice a hundred fools and heroes and maidens in tales are offered, but his choice was a choice he offered to himself. He understands at last now, though, that it wasn’t in fact a choice at all: choice, and even possibility in some weird but absolute sense, has been drained out of the arrangement he made and the world he entered, and the world also that he left. He supposed at the beginning, in a vague way, that there would be a lesson and that he would have to learn it, about choice, about life, about desire, and that learning it would make the ultimate and mandated choice-making easier, hard but also easy, or clearer at least, because he would have learned in the course of his second life to choose the right one in the end. But he has learned nothing, and there is no choice. There is not one thing and another thing, one pile of hay and another pile. It’s a single indivisible soup of possibilities and memories. If he returns to the first way, he will return imbued with three decades’ worth of memories of another world; if he remains in this path or place he will swim always in the past he exited from, a world that has ceased to exist: which is dreadful to imagine.
He belongs in no place. It’s just as though he has been exiled from the land of his birth, the land that was his, because of what he did: his hubris. He is that folklore figure who at a moment in his life laughed at Jesus on the Cross and so was cursed to wander forever, in lands and times he could never inhabit but only pass through in embarrassment, empty-handed.
The house in the Hills he comes to is one of those built up here in the late 1940s, Modernist masterpieces made of vast windows divided by slim columns, stone patios, wide stairs, jutting beams, and nothing else. As calm and open as a Greek temple empty for a thousand years. He stops the Jaguar where the parking service waits. His door is opened for him and he climbs out, takes the proffered ticket, and feels a sharp pang as he turns away, as though he is abandoning a friend, nevermore to see him. He climbs the broad shallow steps.
Maybe this was a mistake. Too many people, too many he knows well or superficially. But no, he can make no mistake now, no more than a skier on a fast downhill run: it’s all go. He feels evanescent already, but calm enough. Takes a glass of champagne—something fizzing anyway—from the tray of a passing waiter. Is hailed, returns the wave. Is carried forward. Seconds continue to come and die.
Hours later. On the deck cantilevered over the rubble of rocks that seem to be frozen in their fall down the canyon he stands alone; a screening has been scheduled, and he has slipped away. He has decided that the limit set for decision won’t be midnight, first seconds of the day. Dawn, he thinks, will be the moment. He’s always felt, and on this deepening night feels intensely, “the always coming on/The always rising of the sun.” He was born about dawn.
Below him on the lower level is the azure pool, where now naked boys and girls, bodies as hairless and gleaming as dolphins’, are climbing out and taking towels; he knows they laugh, but he can’t hear them. Something about their aliveness, and how they vanish two by two, leaving the water empty, the golden lights endlessly chasing, returns a thought to him that he once had but set aside.
He made it clear to Carla Young that in the story as he has lived it there could be no Third Thing: but of course there could be a Third Thing. Even now, at the very end, the unexpected resolution appears to him, the anagnorisis. How can it be that he has not ever considered it?
Death. Death as meta-stability, causing a permanent system crash in both worlds.
Maybe it’s why he chose to come here, why he stands looking down from this height; maybe he knows, maybe he knew, that this is why. A step up onto that corner of this low concrete wall, a brief flight outward. Put out the light, and then put out the light. For the first time in years he remembers his dyke Hamlet on stage, thrusting a pistol, bare bodkin, into her mouth, desperate to do it, unable to. Barking out all those makes-cowards-of-us-all qualifications as though (Yeah right) she knew she was lying to herself, and to us. Not conscience but consciousness, and its inconceivable extinguishing.
No. Even if he was allowed to he wouldn’t, and it’s clear to him he is not.
He glances at his watch, or rather turns his wrist to see it, but doesn’t comprehend the hour it shows. It’s hard to tell, in the dull coming-on of the city lights and the smog that thickens above and resists them, whether the sun is near rising. He feels at last no anxiety, no urgency; he will make a decision or he will not; if it doesn’t arise within him, it will be borne in upon him, and it will be made; and it will make no difference at all. Either he has invented all this, or he is himself invented: and these are not two contradictory things but one thing.
Yes: he can see it now: the sky in the east is really lightening, and clouds are taking shape, lit by the sun just under the horizon.
About the Author
John Crowley’s novels include Little, Big, the Ægypt series, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, and a new edition of The Chemical Wedding, by Christian Rosenkreutz. Recently retired after teaching creative writing at Yale for twenty-five years. He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and the Mythopoeic, Locus, and World Fantasy awards, including a Lifetime Achievement award. His website is johncrowleyauthor.com.
Publication History
“The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” (Conjunctions 39, 2002)
“In the Tom Mix Museum” (This Land Press, 2013)
“And Go Like This” (Naked City, 2011)
“Spring Break” (New Haven Noir, 2017)
“The Million Monkeys of M. Borel” (Conjunctions 67, 2016)
“This Is Our Town” (Totalitopia, 2017)
“Mount Auburn Street”
“Little Yeses, Little Nos” (Yale Review, Vol. 93, 2005)
“Glow Little Glow-Worm” (Con
junctions 59, 2012)
“Mount Auburn Street” (Yale Review, Vol. 105, 2017)
“Conversation Hearts” (Subterranean Press, 2008)
“Flint and Mirror” (The Book of Magic, 2018)
“Anosognosia” is published here for the first time.
John Crowley Titles from Small Beer Press
“Endless Things is the fourth novel—and much-anticipated conclusion—of John Crowley’s astonishing and lauded Aegypt sequence: a dense, lyrical meditation on history, alchemy, and memory. Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffett, the Aegypt sequence is as richly significant as Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Crowley, a master prose stylist, explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal in this epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other.
hardcover · $24 · 9781931520225 | ebook · 9781931520225
Also Available from Small Beer Press
A new edition printed in two colors celebrating the 400th anniversary of one of the most outlandish stories in Western literature. Illustrated throughout.
A Romance in Eight Days By Johann Valentin Andreae
In a new version by John Crowley
Illustrated by Theo Fadel.
Designed by Jacob McMurray.
trade paper · $16 · 9781618731081 | ebook · 9781931520225
lettered edition $500 | numbered edition $250
