by John Crowley
He took up a quick City stride, still grinning but trying to be alert. Keep your wits about you. After all, he thought, but got no further in the thought, for there came at that moment, crashing down the avenue or swarming up the side-streets or descending from the balmy sky like a ton of shrieking laughter, a thing that was like a sound but wasn’t one: the bomb that had fallen once on him and Sylvie, but double that or greater. It rolled over him, it might have been the truck that had missed him, yet it seemed to burst from his own person. Coursing away from him up the avenue, leaving him sundered, the thing seemed to make a vacuum behind it or within it that tugged at his clothes and ruffled his hair. Still his feet fell in good order—the thing had no power to hurt him physically at least—but the smile was quite wiped from his face.
Oh boy, they really mean business now; that was his thought. But he didn’t know why he thought it, or what business he thought they meant, or for that matter who he thought they were.
This Is War
At that moment, far to the west in a state whose name begins with I, Russell Eigenblick, the Lecturer, was on the point of rising from his folding chair to address another immense gathering. He had a small deck of index cards in his hands, a pimento-flavored belch in his throat (chicken a la king again) and a throbbing pain in his left leg, just below the buttock. He wasn’t feeling particularly justified. That morning, in the stables of his wealthy hosts, he had mounted a horse and trotted sedately around a small enclosure. Posing for photographers thus, he had looked confident (as always) and somewhat too small (as always, nowadays; upon a time, he had been well above average height). Then he had been induced to take a gallop over fields and meadows as barbered and neat as any chase he had ever ridden. A mistake, that. He hadn’t explained that it had been centuries since he’d last been on a horse; he seemed lately to have lost the strength for such provocative remarks. Now he wondered if an ungainly limp would mar his approach to the dais.
How long, how long, he thought. It wasn’t that he shunned the work, or resented the trials that were part of it. His paladins strove to ease the process for him, and he was grateful, but the squalid intimacies of this age, the backslapping and arm-taking, didn’t really bother him. He had never stood on ceremony. He was a practical man (or thought himself to be so), and if this was what his people—as he already thought of them—wanted of him, he could give it. A man who without complaint had slept amid the wolves of Thuringia and the scorpions of Palestine could suffer motels, could service aging hostesses, could catnap on planes. Only there were times (as now) when the strangeness of his long journey, too impossible to seize, bored him; and the great sleep with which he had grown so familiar tugged at him, and he longed to lay his heavy head once again on his comrades’ shoulders, and close his eyes.
His eyes were drifting closed even at the thought.
Then there came, bowling outward in all directions from its starting place, the thing Auberon in the City had felt or heard: a thing that turned the world for a moment to shot silk, or changed in a wink the changeable taffeta of its stuff. A bomb, Auberon had thought it to be; Russell Eigenblick knew it wasn’t a bomb but a bombardment.
Like a sharp restorative it shot throught his veins. His weariness vanished. He heard the end of the encomium which introduced him, and he sprang from his chair, eyes alight, mouth grim. He let flutter away, dramatically, the handful of notes for this Lecture as he mounted the dais; the vast audience, seeing this, gasped and cheered. Eigenblick gripped the edges of the lectern with both hands, leaned forward, and bellowed into the microphones that gaped before him to receive his words: “You must change your lives!”
A wave of astonishment, the wave of his own amplified voice washing the crowd, lifted them up, struck the back wall, and returned to break over him. “You must. Change. Your lives!” The wave curled back on them, a tsunami. Eigenblick gloried, sweeping the crowd and seeming to look deeply into every eye, into every heart: they knew it, too. Words crowded into his brain, formed sentences, platoons, regiments against whom resistance was hopeless. He unleashed them.
“The preparations are finished, the votes are in, the die is cast, the chips are down! Everything you most dreaded has already occurred. Your ancientest enemies have the whip hand now. To whom will you turn? Your fortress is all chinks, your armor is paper, your old laughter is a reproach in your throat. Nothing—nothing is as you supposed it to be. You have been deeply fooled. You have been staring into a mirror and supposing it to be the old road’s long continuation, but the road has run out, dead end, no through traffic. You must change your lives!”
He drew upright. Such winds were blowing in Time that he had difficulty hearing himself speak. In those winds rode the armed heroes, mounted at last, sylphs in battle-dress, hosts in the middle of the air. Eigenblick, as he harangued the open-mouthed mass before him, lashed them, threshed them, felt himself bursting restraints and coming forth whole at last. As though in a moment he had grown too large for an old worn carapace, with delicious itchy relief he felt it split and crack. He paused, until he knew it had all been shed. The crowd held its breath. Eigenblick’s new voice coming forth, loud, low, insinuating, made them shiver as one: “Well. You didn’t know. Oh, no. How were yoouu to know? You never thought. You for got. You hadn’t heard.” He leaned forward, looking out over them like a terrible parent, speaking rapidly, as though he spoke a curse: “Well, there will be no forgiveness this time. This time is once too often. Surely you see that, surely you knew it all along. You might, in your secretest heart, if you ever allowed yourself to suspect that this would happen, and you did suspect it, you did, you might have hoped that once again, once again there would be mercy, however undeserved; another chance, however badly bungled every other chance had been; that at the very last you would be ignored, you, only you would be missed out, overlooked, not counted, lost blameless in the cracks of the catastrophe that must engulf all else. No! Not this time!”
“No! No!” They cried out to him, afraid; he was moved, deep love for their helplessness, deep pity for their state filled him and made him powerful and strong.
“No,” he said softly, cooing to them, rocking them in the arms of his bottomless wrath and pity, “no, no; Arthur sleeps in Avalon; you have no champion, no white hope; nothing is left to you but surrender, don’t you see that, you do, don’t you? Surrender; that’s your only chance; show your rusted sword, useless as a toy; show yourselves, helpless, innocent of any of the causes or conclusions of this, aged, confused, weak as babes. And still. And still. Helpless and pitiable as you are”—he held out commiserating arms to them with great slowness, he could hold them all and comfort them—”eager to please as you are, full of love, asking only with softest tears in your big babe’s eyes for mercy, pity peace; still, still.” The arms descended, the big hands again gripped the lectern as though it were a weapon, a huge fire burst within Russell Eigenblick’s bosom, horrid gratitude engulfed him that he could lean down upon these microphones at last and say this: “Still it will not draw their pity, none of it, for they have none; or stay their awful weapons, for they have already been loosed; or change anything at all: for this is war.” Lower he bent his head, closer his satyr’s lips came to the aghast microphones, and his whisper boomed: “Ladies and gentle-MEN, THIS IS WAR.”
Unexpected Seam
Ariel Hawksquill, in the City, had felt it too: a change, like a flash of menopause, but not happening to herself but to the world at large. A Change, then; not a change but a Change, a Change glimpsed bowling along the course of space and time, or the world stumbling over a thick and unexpected seam in the seamless fabric.
“Did you feel that?” she said.
“Feel what, my dear?” said Fred Savage, still chuckling over the ferocious headlines of yesterday’s paper.
“Forget it,” Hawksquill said softly, thoughtful. “Well. About cards, now. Anything at all about cards? Think hard.”
“The ace of spades reversed,” Fred Savage said. �
��Queen of spades in your bedroom window, fierce as any bitch. Jack of diamonds, on the road again. King of hearts, that’s me, baby,” and he began to sing-hum through his ivory teeth, his buttocks moving slightly but snappily on the long, buttock-polished bench of the waiting room.
Hawksquill had come to the great Terminus to question this old oracle of hers, knowing that most evenings after work he could be found here, confiding strange truths to strangers; pointing out with an index finger brown, gnarled, and dirt-clogged as a root, certain items in yesterday’s paper which the train-takers around him might have missed, or discoursing on how a woman who wears a fur takes on the propensities of the animal—Hawksquill thought of timid suburban girls wearing rabbit-furs dyed to look like lynx, and laughed. Sometimes she brought a sandwich to share with him, if he were eating. Usually she went away wiser than she had come.
“Cards,” she said. “Cards and Russell Eigenblick.”
“That fella,” he said. He was lost awhile in thought. He shook out his paper as though shaking a troublesome notion from it. But it wouldn’t go.
“What is it?” she said.
“Now damn if there wasn’t a change just now,” he said, looking upward. “Sumpm … What was it, did you say?” “I didn’t say.” “You said a name.” “Russell Eigenblick. In the cards.”
“In the cards,” he said. He folded his paper carefully. “That’s enough,” he said. “That’ll do.”
“Tell me,” she said, “what you think.”
But she had pressed him too hard, always a danger, ask the great virtuosi for one more encore and they will turn petulant and surly. Fred rose—as far as he ever rose, remaining bent like a quizzical letter—and felt for something nonexistent in his pockets. “Gotta go see m’uncle,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a buck for the bus? Some kinda buck or change?”
From East to West
She walked back through the vast arching hall of the Terminus no wiser this time than when she had come, and more troubled. The hundreds who hurried there, eddying around the shrinelike clock in the center and washing up in waves against the ticket booths, seemed distracted, hard-pressed, uncertain of their fates: but whether more so than on any other day she wasn’t sure. She looked up: grown faint with age and long watching, the Zodiac painted in gold marched biaswise across the night-blue dome, pricked out with tiny lights, many of them extinguished. Her steps slowed, her mouth fell open; she turned, staring, unable to believe what she saw.
The Zodiac ran the proper way across the dome from east to west.
Impossible. It had always been one of her favorite jokes about this mad City that its grand center was watched over by a Zodiac that was backwards, the mistake of a star-ignorant muralist, or some sly pun on his star-crossed City. She had wondered what reversals might happen if—with proper preparation—one were to walk backwards through the Terminus beneath this backwards cosmos, but propriety had always kept her from trying it.
But look now. Here was the ram in his right place, and the hindquarterless bull, the twins and the crab, King Lion and the virgin and the double-panned scales. The poised scorpion next, with red Antares in his sting; the centaur with his bow, the fish-tailed goat, the man with the water-jug. And the two fishes bow-tied at the tails. The crowds flowed around her where she stood gawking, flowed without pause as they did around any fixed object in their path. Her looking upward was infectious, as in the hoary trick; others looked upward too, searching briefly, but, unable to see the impossible thing she saw, hurried on.
The ram, the bull, the twins … She struggled to retain her memory that they had been otherwise, had not always had this order, for they looked as old and immutable as the stars they pictured. She grew afraid. A Change: and what other changes would she find, out on the streets; what others lay in the to-come, yet to be manifested? What anyway was Russell Eigenblick doing to the world; and why on earth was she sure that it was Russell Eigenblick who was Somehow at fault? A sweet baritone bell struck, and echoed around her as she stared, not loud but clear, calm as though possessed of the secret: the Terminus clock, ringing the small time of the hour.
Sylvie?
The same hour was being rung in the pyramidal steeple of a building which Alexander Mouse had built downtown, the only steeple in the City that rang the hours for the public enlightenment. One of the four notes of its four-note tune was silenced, and the others fell irregularly into the channel of streets below, blown away by wind or muffled by traffic, so it was no help usually, but Auberon (unbarring and unbolting a door into Old Law Farm) didn’t care what time it was anyway. He gave a glance around himself to see that he wasn’t followed by thieves. (He’d already been robbed once, by two kids who, since he’d had no money, had taken the bottle of gin he was carrying, and then took and flung his hat to the ground and stepped on it with long sneakered feet as they went away.) He slipped in, and bolted and barred the door behind him.
Down the hall, through a brick-toothed rent George had made in the wall to give access to the next building, up that hall, up the stairs, gripping the banister iced thickly with generations of paint. Out a hall window onto a fire escape, a wave to the happy farmers at work with shoots and trowels down below, and back into another building, another hall, absurdly narrow and close, familiar in its gloom and joyful, for it led home. He glimpsed himself in the pretty mirror Sylvie had hung on the wall at the end of the hall, with a tiny table below it and a bowl of dried flowers, bien nice. The doorknob didn’t open the door. “Sylvie?” Not home. Not back from work, or out farming; or just out, the reborn sun caused the blue island lagoon in her blood to rise. He hunted out his three keys and peered at them in the dark, growing impatient. Ovoid-ended for the top lock, keystone-ended for the middle, oh hell! He dropped one, and had to get down on hands and knees, furious, and feel for it amid the irremediable antique filth of all City nooks and crannies. Here it was: huge, round-ended one for the police lock, which kept the police out, ha ha.
“Sylvie?”
The Folding Bedroom seemed oddly large, and, though sunlight poured in through all its little windows, Somehow not cheerful. What was it? The place seemed swept, but not tidy; cleaned, but not clean. There was a lot of stuff missing, he gradually realized; a lot of stuff. Had they been robbed? He went gingerly into the kitchen. Sylvie’s collection of unguents and such that clustered above the sink was gone. Her shampoos and hairbrushes, gone. It was all gone. All but his own old Gillette.
In the bedroom likewise. Her totems and pretty things, gone. Her china senorita, with a dead-white face and black spit-curls, whose top half separated from her flaring skirt which was really a jewel box, gone. Her hats hung on the back of the door, gone. Her crazy envelope of important papers and assorted snapshots, gone.
He tore open the closet door. Empty coat-hangers clanged, and his own overcoat hung on the door flung out startled sleeves, but there was nothing at all of hers there.
Nothing at all.
He looked around him, and then looked around him again. And then stood still in the middle of the empty floor.
“Gone,” he said.
BOOK FIVE: THE ART OF MEMORY
CHAPTER ONE
The fields, the caves, the dens of
Memory cannot be counted; their
fullness cannot be counted nor the
kinds of things counted that fill
them … I force my way in amongst
them, even as far as my power
reaches, and nowhere find an end.
—Augustine, Confessio
Upon a deep midnight, the Maid of Stone knocked with a heavy fist on the tiny door of the Cosmo-Opticon on the top floor of Ariel Hawksquill’s townhouse. “The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to see you.” “Yes. Have them wait in the parlor.” The moon behind the mirrored moon of the Cosmo-Opticon, and the dull glow of the City lights, were all that illuminated the heavens of glass; the blackish Zodiac and the constellations could not be read. Odd, she thought, how (reversing the natu
ral order) the Cosmo-Opticon was intelligible, ablaze, in the day, and obscure at night, when the real heaven’s panoply is full…. She rose and came out, the iron Earth with its enameled rivers and mountains clanging beneath her feet.
The Hero Awakened
A year had passed since she had looked up to see that the Zodiac painted on the night-blue ceiling of the Terminus had changed its old wrong order of march and went the way the world went. In that year, her investigations into the nature and origins of Russell Eigenblick had grown only more intense, though the Club had fallen oddly silent; no longer lately did they send her cryptic telegrams urging her on, and though Fred Savage showed up as usual at her door with the installments of her fee, these weren’t accompanied by the usual encouragements or reproaches. Had they lost interest?
