by John Crowley
They sat on one of Drinkwater’s seats of bent and knobby wood. Through the screen of naked trees they could see across the land a great gray distance. They could just make out the gray back of the Interstate lying coiled and smooth in the next county; they could even hear, at moments, carried on the thick air, the far hum of trucks: the monster breathed. Smoky pointed out a finger or Hydra’s head of it which reached out tentatively through the hills this way, then stopped abruptly. Those bits of yellow, sole brightness on the scene, were sleeping caterpillars—the man-made kind, earth-movers and -shakers. They wouldn’t come any closer; the surveyors and purveyors, contractors and engineers were stalled there, mired, bogged in indecision, and that vestigial limb would never grow bone and muscle to punch through the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood. Smoky knew it. “Don’t ask me how,” he said.
But George Mouse had been thinking of a scheme whereby all the buildings, mostly empty, on the block his family owned in the City might be combined and sealed up to make an enormous, impenetrable curtain-wall—like the hollow wall of a castle—around the center of the block, where the gardens were. The outbuildings and stuff inside the block could be torn down then and all the garden-space transformed into a single pasture or farm. They could grow things there, and keep cows. No, goats. Goats were smaller and less fussy about their food. They gave milk and there would be the odd kid to eat. George had never killed anything larger than a cockroach, but he had eaten kid in a ‘Rican diner and his mouth watered. He hadn’t heard what Smoky said, though he had heard Smoky talking. He said, “But what’s the story? What’s the real story?”
“Well, we’re Protected, you know,” Smoky said vaguely, digging the black ground with his stick. “But there’s always something that’s got to be given in return for protection, isn’t there?” He hadn’t understood any of that in the beginning; he didn’t suppose he understood it any better now. Though he knew some payment had to be made, he wasn’t sure whether it had been made, or was to be made, or had been deferred; whether the vague sense he had in winter of something being wrung from him, of being dunned and desiccated and having sacrificed much (he couldn’t say what exactly) meant that the Creditors had been satisfied, or that the goblins he sensed peeking in the windows and calling down the chimneys, clustering under the eaves and scrabbling through the disused upper rooms were reminding him and all of them of a debt unpaid, tribute unexacted, goblin principal earning some horrid interest he couldn’t calculate.
But George had been thinking of a plan to represent the basic notions of Act Theory (that he had read of in a popular magazine and which seemed to him just then to make sense, a lot of sense) by means of a display of fireworks: how the various parts of an Act as the theory explained them could be expressed in the initiation, rising whistle, culminating starburst and crackling expiration of a colored bomb; and how in combination fireworks could represent “entrained” Acts, multiple Acts of all kinds, the grand Act that is Life’s rhythm and Time’s. The notion faded in sparks. He shook Smoky’s shoulder and said, “But how goes it? How are you getting on?”
“Jesus, George,” Smoky said standing. “I’ve told you all I can. I’m freezing. I bet it freezes over tonight. There might be snow for Christmas.” He knew in fact there would be; it had been promised. “Let’s go get some cocoa.”
Cocoa and a Bun
It was brown and hot, with chocolate bubbles winking at the brim. A marshmallow Cloud had plopped in it turned and bubbled as though dissolving in joy. Daily Alice instructed Tacey and Lily in the arts of blowing gently on it, picking it up by the handle, and laughing at the brown moustaches it made. The way Cloud watched over it it grew no skin, though George didn’t mind a skin; his mother’s had always had a skin, and so had that they served from urns in the basement of the Church of All Streets, a nondenominational church she had used to take him and Franz to, always, it seemed, on days like this.
“Have another bun,” Cloud said to Alice. “Eating for two,” she said to George.
“You don’t mean it,” George said.
“I think so,” Alice said. She bit the bun. “I’m a good bearer.”
“Wow. A boy this time.”
“No,” she said confidently. “Another girl. So Cloud says.”
“Not I,” Cloud said. “The cards.”
“We’ll name her Lucy,” Tacey said. “Lucy Ann and Anndy Ann de Bam Bam Barnable. George has two moustaches.”
“Who’ll take this up to Sophie?” Cloud said, setting a cup and a bun on a black japanned tray of great age that showed a silver-haired, star-spangled sprite drinking Coke.
“Let me,” George said. “Hey, Aunt Cloud. Can you do the cards for me?”
“Sure, George. I think you’re included.”
“Now if I can find her room,” he said giggling. He took up the tray carefully, noting that his hands had begun to shake.
Sophie was asleep when he came into her room by pushing the door open with his knee. He stood unmoving in the room, feeling the steam rise from the cocoa and hoping she would never wake. So strange to feel again those adolescent peeping-tom emotions—mostly a trembling weakness at the knees and a dry thickness in the throat—caused now by conjunction of the mad capsule and Sophie deshabille on the messy bed. One long leg was uncovered and the toes pointed toward the floor, as though indicating the appropriate one of two Chinese slippers that peeped from beneath a discarded kimono; her breasts soft with sleeping had come out of her ruffled ‘jammies and rose and fell slightly with her breathing, flushed (he thought tenderly) with fever. Even as he devoured her though she seemed to feel his gaze, and without waking she pulled her clothes together and rolled over so her cheek lay on her closed fist. It made him want to laugh, or cry, so prettily she did it, but he restrained himself and did neither, only set down the tray on her table cluttered with pill bottles and crushed tissues. He moved onto the bed a big album or scrapbook to do it, and at that she woke.
“George,” she said calmly, stretching, not surprised, thinking perhaps she was still asleep. He laid his swarthy hand to her brow gently. “Hi, cutie,” he said. She lay back amid the pillows; her eyes closed, and for a moment she wandered back to dreamland. Then she said Oh and struggled up to kneel on the bed and come full awake. “George!”
“Feeling better?”
“I don’t know. I was dreaming. Cocoa for me?”
“For you. What were you dreaming?’
“Mm. Good. Sleeping makes me hungry. Does it you?” She wiped away her moustache with a pink tissue she plucked from a box of them; another took its place pertly. “Oh, dreams about years ago. I guess because of that album. No you can’t.” She took his hand from it. “Dirty pictures.”
“Dirty.”
“Pictures of me, years ago.” She smiled, ducking her head Drinkwater-style, and peeked at him over her cocoa cup with eyes still crinkled with sleep. “What are you doing here?”
“Came to see you,” George said; once he had seen her, he knew it to be true. She didn’t respond to his gallantry; she seemed to have forgotten him, or remembered suddenly something else entirely; the cocoa cup stopped halfway to her lips. She put it down slowly, her eyes looking at something he couldn’t see, something within. Then she seemed to wrest herself from it, laughed a quick, frightened laugh and took George’s wrist in a sudden grip as though to stay herself. “Some dreams,” she said, searching his face. “It’s the fever.”
The Orphan Nymphs
She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl’s wings and talons and became other than conscious.
Starting from the simple pleasure of it, she had become practiced in all its nameless arts. The first thing was to learn to hear the small voice: that fragment of conscious self which like a guardian angel walks with the eidolons of s
elf with which we replace ourselves in Dreamland, the voice that whispers you are dreaming. The trick was to hear it, but not attend to it, or else you wake. She learned to hear it; and it told her that she could not be hurt by dream wounds, no matter how terrible; she woke from them always whole and safe—most safe because warm in bed. Since then she had feared no bad dreams; the dream Dante of her leaned on the dreaming Virgil and passed through horrors delightful and instructive.
Next she found she was one of those who can awake, leap the gap of consciousness, and arrive back in the same dream she had awakened from. She could build also many-storied houses of dream; she could dream that she woke, and then dream that she woke from that dream, each time dreaming that she said Oh! It was all a dream! until at last and most wonderful she woke to wakefulness, home from her journey, and breakfast cooking downstairs.
But soon she began to linger on her journeys, go farther, return later and more reluctantly. She worried, at first, that if she spent half the day as well as all the night in Dreamland, she would eventually run out of matter to transmute into dreams, that her dreams would grow thin, unconvincing, repetitious. The opposite happened. The deeper she journeyed—the farther the waking world fell behind—the grander and more inventive became the fictive landscapes, the more complete and epical the adventures. How could that be? Where if not from waking life, books and pictures, loves and longings, real roads and rocks and real toes stubbed on them, could she manufacture dreams? And where then did these fabulous isles, gloomy vast sheds, intricate cities, cruel governments, insoluble problems, comical supporting players with convincing manners, come from? She didn’t know; gradually she came not to care.
She knew that the real ones, loved ones, in her life worried about her. Their concern followed her into dreams, but became transformed into exquisite persecutions and triumphal reunions, so that was how she chose to deal with them and their concern.
And now she had learned the last art, which squared the power of her secret life and at the same time hushed the real ones’ questions. She had Somehow learned to raise at will a fever, and with it the lurid, compelling, white-hot dreams a fever brings. Flushed with the victory of it, she hadn’t at first seen the danger of this double dose, as it were; too hastily she tossed away most of her waking life—it had lately grown complex and promiseless anyhow—and retired to her sickbed secretly, guiltily exulting.
Only on waking was she sometimes—as now when George Mouse saw her look within—seized by the terrible understanding of the addict: the understanding that she was doomed, had lost her way in this realm, had, not meaning to, gone too far in to find a way out—that the only way out was to go in, give in, fly further in—that the only way to ameliorate the horror of her addiction was to indulge it.
She grasped George’s wrist as though his real flesh could wake her truly. “Some dreams,” she said. “It’s the fever.”
“Sure,” George said. “Fever dreams.”
“I ache,” she said, hugging herself. “Too much sleep. Too long in one position. Something.”
“You need a massage.” Did his voice betray him?
She bent her long torso side to side. “Would you?”
“You bet.”
She turned her back to him, pointing out on the figured bed-jacket where it hurt. “No no no honey,” he said as though to a child. “Look. Lie down here. Put the pillow under your chin—right. Now I sit here—just move a little—let me take my shoes off. Comfy?” He began, feeling her fever-heat through the thin jacket. “That album,” he said, not having for a moment forgotten it.
“Oh,” she said, her voice low and gruff as he pressed the bellows of her lungs. “Auberon’s pictures.” Her hand reached out and rested on the cover. “When we were kids. Art pictures.”
“Art pictures like what?” George said, working the bones where her wings would be if she had wings.
As though she couldn’t help it she raised the cover, put it down again. “He didn’t know,” she said. “He didn’t think they were dirty. Oh, they’re not.” She opened the book. “Lower. There. Lower more.”
“Oho,” George said. George had once known these naked, pearl-gray children, abstracted here and more carnal for not being flesh at all. “Let’s take this shirtie off,” he said. “That’s better….”
She turned the album’s pages with abstracted slowness, touching certain of the pictures as though she wished to feel the texture of the day, the past, the flesh.
Here were Alice and she on the stippled stones by a waterfall which plunged madly out-of-focus behind them. In the hazy foreground leaves, some law of optics inflated droplets of sunlight into dozens of white disembodied eyes round with wonder. The naked children (Sophie’s dark aureoles were puckered like unblown flowers, like tiny closed lips) looked down into a black, silken pool. What did they see there that kept their lashy eyes lowered, that made them smile? Below the image, in a neat hand, was the picture’s title: August. Sophie’s fingers traced the ray of lines where Alice’s thigh creased at the pelvis, lines tender and finely-drawn as though her skin were thinner then than it would become. Her silver calves lay together, and her long-toed feet, as though they were beginning to be changed into a mermaid’s tail.
Small pictures clipped to the pages with black corners. Sophie wide-eyed, open-mouthed, feet wide apart and arms high, all open, a Gnostic’s X of microcosmic child-woman-kind, her yet-uncut hair wide too and white—thus golden in fact—against an obscure cave of summer-dark trees. Alice undressing, stepping one-footed from her white cotton panties, her plump purse already beginning to be clothed with crisp fair hair. The two girls opening through time like the magic flowers of nature films as George hungrily looked through Auberon’s eyes, double-peeping at the past. Stop here a minute….
She held the page open there, while he went on, shifting his position and his hands; her legs opening across the sheets made a certain sound. She showed him the Orphan Nymphs. Flowers twined in their hair, they lay full length entwined on the grassy sward. They had their hands to each other’s cheeks, and their eyes were heavy and they were on the point of kissing open-mouthed: acting out lonely consolation, it might be, for an art-picture of innocence at once orphaned and faery, but not acting; Sophie remembered. Her nerveless hand slipped from the page and her eyes too lost their grasp of it; it didn’t matter.
“Do you know what I’m going to do,” George asked, unable not to.
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” An exhalation only. “Yes.”
But she didn’t, not really; she had leapt across that gap Consciousness again, had saved herself from falling there, had landed safely (able to fly) on the far side, within that pearl-toned afternoon that had no night.
The Least Trumps
“As in any deck,” Cloud said, taking their velvet bag from the tooled case and then the cards themselves from the bag, “there are fifty-two cards for the fifty-two weeks of the year, four suits for the four seasons, twelve court cards for the twelve months and, if you count them right, three hundred and sixty-four pips for the days of the year.”
“A year’s got three-sixty-five,” George said.
“This is the old year, before they knew better. Throw another log on the fire, will you, George?”
She began to lay out his future as he fooled with the fire. The secret he had within him—or above him asleep actually—warmed his center and made him grin, but left his extremities deathly cold. He unrolled the cuffs of his sweater and drew his hands within. They felt like a skeleton’s.
“Also,” said Cloud, “there are twenty-one trumps, numbered from zero to twenty. There are Persons, and Places, and Things, and Notions.” The big cards fell, with their pretty emblems of sticks and cups and swords. “There’s another set of trumps,” Cloud said. “The ones I have here are not as great as those; those have oh the sun and the moon and large notions. Mine are called—my mother called them—the Least Trumps.” She smiled at Geor
ge. “Here is a Person. The Cousin.” She placed that in the circle and thought a moment.
“Tell me the worst,” George said. “I can take it.”
“The worst,” said Daily Alice from the deep armchair where she sat reading, “is just what she can’t tell you.”
“Or the best either,” said Cloud. “Just a bit of what might be. But in the next day, or the next year, or the next hour, that I can’t tell either. Now hush while I think.” The cards had grown into interlocking circles like trains of thought, and Cloud spoke to George of events that would befall him; a small legacy, she said, from someone he never knew, but not money, and left him by accident. “You see, here’s the Gift; here the Stranger in this place.”
Watching her, chuckling at the process and also helplessly at what had occurred to him that afternoon (and which he intended to repeat, creeping quiet as a mouse when all were asleep), George didn’t notice Cloud fall silent before the completing pattern; didn’t see her lips purse or her hand hesitate as she placed the last card in the center. It was a Place: the Vista.
“Well?” George said.
“George,” she said, “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“Exactly.” She reached for her box of cigarettes, shook it and found it empty. She had seen so many displays, so many possible falls had grown into her consciousness that sometimes they overlapped; with a sense like déjà vu, she felt she was looking not at a single arrangement but at one of a series, as though some old display she had made were to be labeled “Continued,” and here, without warning, was the continuation. Yet it was all George’s fall too.
