by John Crowley
On a day early in May that had begun rainy (Fred Savage beside her wore a vast fedora swaddled in plastic) she sat restless on the edge of her chair, crossing her legs right over left and then left over right, watching “A World Elsewhere” and waiting for her name to be called.
“That guy,” she explained to Fred, “was the one who pretended to be the father of the kid whose real father was the other guy, who divorced the wife who fell for the girl who crashed the car that crippled the kid that lived in the house that this guy built.”
“Mm,” Fred said. Sylvie’s eyes hadn’t left the screen nor her ear the story, but Fred looked only at Sylvie.
“That’s him,” she said as the scene changed to a smooth-haired man sipping coffee and studying, silently, for a very long time, a letter addressed to someone else, trying apparently to decide whether he dared open it. He had been, Sylvie told Fred, wrestling with this temptation since April ended.
“If I was writing it,” she said, “more would happen.”
“I just bet it would,” Fred said, and the dispatcher said
“Sylvie!”
She leapt up, though her eyes didn’t leave the screen; she took the dispatcher’s slip and started out.
“See ya,” she said to Fred and to an unresponsive overcoat and hat at the end of the row of chairs.
“More would happen, mm-mm,” said Fred, who still looked only at Sylvie. “I bet now it would at that.”
Something Going
The pickup was from a suite in a tall hotel of glass and steel, chill, sinister even, despite the factitious gaiety of its tropical lounges and English chophouse and hustle and bustle. She rode upward alone in a silent, thickly carpeted elevator in which nameless music played. At the thirteenth floor, the doors slid open, and Sylvie said “A! A!”, startled, because facing her was a vast blowup in color of Russell Eigenblick’s face, bushy eyebrows over limpid eyes, red red beard sprouting from his cheeks almost up to his eyes, mouth knowing, stern and kindly. The nameless elevator music became a radio, loud: a merengue.
She looked down the long plush corridor of the suite. Instead of a secretary of any sort, four or five young guys, black and P.R., made dance steps and drank Cokes around a vast rosewood desk. Those not in a sort of military undress wore bright loose shirts or jackets of many colors, Eigenblick’s troops’ insignia. “Hi,” she said, at ease now. “Wingéd Messenger Service.”
“Hey. Check the messenger.”
“Saayy …”
One of the dancers strutted toward her as the others laughed, and Sylvie did a step or two with him; another, with an expert air, manipulated the intercom. “A messenger’s here. We got something going?”
“So listen,” Sylvie said. “What about this guy—” thumb toward the vast portrait. “What’s with him?”
Some laughed; one looked solemn; the dancer fell back in astonishment at Sylvie’s ignorance. “Oh wow man,” he said, “oh man …”
He had just begun to put right forefinger into left palm to begin an explanation (cute, Sylvie thought him, well-muscled, real neighborhood) when double doors behind them were flung open. Sylvie caught a glimpse of huge rooms glossily furnished. A tall white guy with blond hair cut severely came out. With a quick gesture he ordered the radio silent. The young men drew together protectively, taking stances tough but wary. The blond man raised his chin and eyebrows at Sylvie inquiringly, too busy to say actual words.
“Wingéd Messenger.”
He considered her for a long moment, almost insolently. He had a good five inches on everybody else present, more than that on Sylvie. She crossed her arms, placed her booted feet in a “So?” attitude, and returned his look. He turned back into the rooms he had come from.
“What’s his problem?” she asked the others, but they seemed subdued. He was back anyway in a moment, with a parcel, oddly shaped, tied with an old-fashioned red-and-white twine Sylvie hadn’t seen in years, and addressed in a hand so fine and antique as to be almost illegible. Altogether it was one of the odder things she had been asked to carry.
“Don’t delay,” the man said, with what Sylvie thought might be the trace of an accent.
“I’m not gonna delay.” Turkey. “Sign here please.” The blond man drew back from her book as though it were repellent; he gestured to one of the boys, and backed through the doors, closing them after him.
“Wow,” she said as the good-looking one signed her book with a flourish and a final dot. “You work for him?”
Big gestures all around indicating resentment, defiance, resignation. The black one essayed a quick imitation, and the others fell out in exaggerated but silent laughter. “Okay,” Sylvie said, seeing that the address was far uptown, a good long time away from the office, “see ya.”
The dancer accompanied her to the elevator, bringing out a quick line, listen I could use a message if you got one, no message for me, hey, listen, I wanna ask you sumpm, no this is serious; and after further chaff (she would have liked to stay, but the package under her arm seemed Somehow needful and exigent) he struck a comic pose as the elevator doors extinguished him to her. She did a few steps alone in the elevator, hearing other music than was playing there. Long time since she’d been dancing.
Uncle Daddy
Riding uptown, hands thrust in her sweatshirt’s front pockets and the weird package beside her.
She should have asked those guys if they knew Bruno. She had heard nothing of her brother in some time; he wasn’t living with his wife and her mother, she knew that. Hustling somebody somewhere … But those guys weren’t together. Just something to do. Instead of hanging around the block. She thought of little Bruno: pobricito. She had vowed that, once a week at least, she would make the long journey out to Jamaica and visit him, take him away from them for a day. She hadn’t, not as often as she’d intended to: not at all in the last busy month. She renewed her vow, sensing at her back, pressing on her, a history of such neglects and their cumulative damage—the ones she had been subjected to, and her mother before her; and Bruno; her other nieces and nephews. Smothered with love, and left to sink or swim: what a system. Kids. And why did she think she could do it any differently? And yet she thought she could. With Auberon she might have kids. Sometimes her ghost children implored her to be born; she could almost see and hear them; she couldn’t resist forever. Auberon’s. She couldn’t do better, such a sweetie, good good man at heart, and for sure a hot number too: and yet. Often enough he treated her like a child herself. Not that she sometimes wasn’t one. But a child a mother … Uncle Daddy they both called him when he was in that mode or mood. He’d wiped her tears, though. He’d wipe her ass if she asked him to…. What a mean thing to think.
What if they grew old together? How would that be? Two little old people, apple-cheeked and crinkly-eyed and white haired, full of years and affection. Nice … She’d like to see that big house and all that it contained. But his family. His mother was almost six feet tall, coño. She imagined the vast race of them towering over her, looking down. Sport model. George said they were a sweet bunch. He’d got lost more than once in that house. George: Lilac’s father, though Auberon didn’t know it, and George had sworn her to secrecy. Lost. What was that about? George knew more, but what he wouldn’t say. What if Auberon lost one of her kids? White people. She’d have to keep a sharp eye out, running around at knee level to them, holding on to her babies.
But if all that weren’t her Destiny: or if she really had escaped Destiny, refused it, turned it down … If she had, then, oddly, she seemed to have more future, rather than less. Anything could happen if she were free of the cramp of Destiny. Not Auberon, not Edgewood, not this town. Visionary men and pursuits, visionary places, visionary selves crowded up on the borders of her train-lulled consciousness. Anything … And a long table in the woods, dressed in a white cloth, set for a banquet; and everybody waiting; and an empty place in the middle …
Her head, falling suddenly breastwards, dipped her in vertigo, and
she snapped awake.
Destiny, destiny. She yawned, covering her mouth, and then looked at her hand, and the silver ring on it. She’d worn it for years and years. Would it come off? She turned it. She tugged. She put her finger in her mouth to wet it. She pulled harder. Nope: stuck on good. But gently: yes, if she pushed gently from below … the silver circle slid upwards, over the big knuckle, and off. A strange lightness glowed around the naked finger, spreading outward from it to the rest of her; the world, the train, seemed to grow pale and insubstantial. She looked slowly around herself.
The package that had been beside her on the seat was gone.
She leapt up, filled with horror, jamming the ring back on her finger. “Hey! Hey!” she said out loud, to alarm the thief if he was still nearby; she charged out into the middle of the car, sweeping the other riders with her glance, they looked up at her curious and guiltless. She looked again at where she had been sitting.
The package was right there where it had been.
She sat again slowly, wondering. She put her ringed hand on the smooth white paper of the package, just to make sure it was really there. It was: though it seemed, unaccountably, to have grown larger as it traveled uptown.
Definitely larger. Out on the street, where breezes had blown away the rain and clouds and brought in a real spring day, first one of the few the City was ever allowed, she chased down the address written on the package, which no longer quite fit beneath her arm. “What is with this thing,” she said aloud as she walked briskly through a neighborhood she hadn’t ever visited much, a neighborhood of great, dark-stained apartment-hotels and aged brownstones. She tried holding the package this way, then that; never had she been given anything so clumsy to carry. But the spring was vivifying; she couldn’t have wished for a better day on which to carry messages through the streets; wingéd was just what she felt. And summer would come soon, hot as hell, she couldn’t wait; she unzipped, tentatively, then boldly, the front of her sweatshirt, felt the breeze lick at her throat and breast, and found the feeling good. And there, ahead, must be the building she had been sent to.
Lost for Sure
It was a tall, white building, or a building that had once been white; it was covered with gloomy cast figures of every description. Two wings of it stuck out, forming a dank dark courtyard between them. Far above, at the top of the building, a course of masonry joined these two wings, making an arch absurdly high, an arch for a giant to pass under.
Sylvie glanced up at this monstrous fancy, and then quickly away. Tall buildings gave her the willies, she didn’t like looking up at them. She stepped into the courtyard, where puddles from the recent rain showed lurid rainbows of oil, but then had no idea how to find Room 001 as she must. An ancient porter’s lodge there by the entrance seemed to have been shuttered up tight for years and years, but she went to it anyway and pressed a rusted bell, if this thing works I’ll …
She didn’t get to complete her condition, for even as she pressed down the bell’s black nipple a small shutter flew open in the little lodge, and showed her the top half of a head, long nose, small eyes, bald dome. “Hi, can you tell me …” she began, but before she could ask further, the eyes crinkled up in a smile or a grimace, and a hand arose; with a long index finger, the hand indicated Left, then Down, and the shutter banged shut.
She laughed. What the hell do they pay him for? That? She followed his instructions, and found herself going in, not the central entrance with its steps and glass doors, but a wrought-iron grille or gate that led to stairs, which went down into an open areaway. Sun didn’t reach that narrow place, a sort of slot made by the rising towers. She went down, down, down to the echo-y, cavern-smelling bottom, where there was a small door, let into the wall. A very small door; but there was no other exit. “This can’t be right,” she said, shifting the impossible package (it seemed to be changing shape, and had grown very heavy too). “I’m lost for sure.” But she pushed open the door.
It opened on a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor. Down at the far small end, someone was standing before a door, doing something: painting the door? He had a brush, and a paint-pot. Super, or super’s helper. Sylvie thought she’d ask further instructions from him, but when she called “Hi,” he looked back at her in alarm, and vanished through the door he’d been working on. She marched up to it anyway, reaching it with surprising suddenness, the corridor was shorter than it seemed, or seemed longer than it was, whichever; and the door at its end was even smaller than the one she’d come in by. If this keeps up, she thought, I’ll be crawling next…. On the door, in fresh white paint in an antique style, the number 001 was painted.
Laughing a little, a little nervously, uncertain now and not at all sure that an elaborate joke wasn’t being played on her, Sylvie knocked at the little door. “Wingéd Messenger,” she called.
The door opened a crack. A strange, outdoor, summer-gold light seemed to come through it from beyond. A very long, very knuckly hand was put around the door to open it further, and then a very widely grinning face looked out.
“Wingéd Messenger?” Sylvie said.
“Yes? What is it? What can we do for you?” He was the man she’d seen painting the number on the door, or someone just like him; or he was the man who’d directed her here. Or someone just like him.
“Package for you,” she said.
“Aha,” the little man said. His grin unabated, he opened the door wider so she could stoop to enter. “Do come in, then.”
“Are you sure,” she said, looking within, “that this is where I’m spose to be?”
“Oh, it certainly is.”
“Boy. It’s real little in here.”
“Oh, yes it is. Won’t you please step right on in.”
The Wild Wood
Out on the same May streets at evening, Auberon dawdling Farmwards through the brand-new spring thought of fame, and fortune, and love. He was returning from the offices of the production company that created and sustained “A World Elsewhere” and several other less successful ventures. He had there given into the manicured hands of a remarkably friendly but somewhat absent man of not much more than his own age two scripts for imaginary episodes of their famous soap. Coffee had been pressed on him, and the young man (who didn’t seem to have a lot of business on hand) had talked ramblingly about television, and writing, and production; huge figures of money were mentioned, and arcana of the business touched on—Auberon tried hard not to be astonished at the first and nodded sagely at the latter though he understood little enough of it; and then he’d been shown out, with invitations to drop around any time, by a secretary and a receptionist of near-legendary beauty.
Amazing and wonderful. Large vistas opened before Auberon on the crowded street. The scripts, his and Sylvie’s collaboration through long, hilarious and excited evenings, were shapely and thrilling, he thought, though not exquisite to look at, typed as they were on George’s old machine; no matter, no matter, his future was filled with expensive office equipment, and with long lunches, prize secretaries, hard work for great rewards. He would seize, from between the claws of the dragon who was denned in the heart of the Wild Wood, the golden treasure it guarded.
The Wild Wood: yes. There had been a time, he knew, say when Frederick Barbarossa was emperor of the West, a time when it had been beyond the log walls of tiny towns, beyond the edges of the harrowed land, that the forest began: the forest, where there lived wolves, and bears, witches in vanishing cottages, dragons, giants. Inside the town, all was reasonable and ordinary; there were safety, fellows, fire and food and all comforts. Dull, maybe, more sensible than thrilling, but safe. It was beyond, in the Wild Wood, that anything could happen, any adventure could be had; out there you took your life in your hands.
No more though. It was all upside down now. At Edgewood, upstate, night held no terrors; the woods there were tame, smiling, comfortable. He didn’t know if there were any locks that still worked on the many doors of Edgewood; certainly he’d never seen
any of them locked. On hot nights, he’d often slept out on open porches, or in the woods themselves, listening to the sounds and the silence. No, it was on these streets that you saw wolves, real and imagined; here you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing might be Out There, as once the doors of woodsmen’s huts were barred; horrid stories were told of what could happen here after the sun has set; here you had the adventures, won the prizes, lost your way and were swallowed up without a trace, learned to live with the fear in your throat and snatch the treasure: this, this was the Wild Wood now, and Auberon was a woodsman.
Yes! Greed for treasure bred daring in him, and daring made him strong; errant, armed, he strode through the crowd. Let the weak be gobbled up, he would not be. He thought of Sylvie, clever as a fox, woods-bred though born in the complacent safety of a jungle island. She knew this place; her greed was as great as his, greater, and her cunning matched it. What a team! And to think that not many weeks ago they two had seemed stuck in a deadfall, to have lost each other in trackless undergrowth, to be on the point of surrendering to it all, and parting. Parting. God, what chances she took! How narrow the odds were!
But he could believe, just now, this evening, that they would grow old together. The joy they took in each other, in abeyance all that cold bitter March, had flowered again bright and tough as clustered dandelions—that very morning, in fact, she had been late for work for a reason, a new reason; late, because a certain elaborate process had had to be successfully brought to conclusion—oh, God, the fabulous exertions they required of one another, and the rests those exertions required, a life could be spent in the one and then the other, he felt that his nearly had been so spent all in that morning. And yet unending: he felt it could be, saw no reason why it should not be. He drifted to a halt in the middle of an intersection, grinning, blind; his heartbeats seemed to be minted in gold as moment upon moment of that morning was relived within his breast. A truck blared at him, a truck desperate not to miss the light, its light, which Auberon was flouting. Auberon leapt from its path and the driver yelled something pointed but unintelligible at him. Struck down blinded by love, Auberon thought (laughing and safe on the far sidewalk), that’s how I’ll die, struck by a truck when I’m whelmed with lust and love and forget where I am.
