Little, Big

by John Crowley

  No! It was too awful to think of: dying. Dying out. Sophie knew (none better) that they had not ever thought of her with love, didn’t in any human sense care about her at all, or any being like her. They had stolen Lilac from her, and though that had not been for any intention of hurting Sophie, it hadn’t been for any love they bore Lilac either, presumably, but only for reasons of their own. No, Sophie had no reason to love them; but the thought of their passing away utterly was unbearable: like thinking of a winter with no end.

  And yet she thought she could soon count out the few remaining.

  She assembled her deck, and spread it all in a fan before her; then she drew out court cards one by one to represent the ones she already knew of, laying them in groups with low cards for their courts or children or agents, insofar as she could guess at them.

  One for sleep, and four for seasons; three to tell fates, two to be Prince and Princess; one to go messages, no, two to go messages, one to go and one to come back again … It was a matter of discriminating between functions, and learning which were whose, and how many were needed for it. One to bring gifts; three to bear gifts away. Queen of Swords and King of Swords and Knight of Swords; Queen of Coins and King of Coins and ten low cards for their children …

  Fifty-two?

  Or was it only that at that number (with only the Least Trumps, the plot which they acted out, left uncounted) her deck ran out?

  There was a sudden clanging noise above her head, and Sophie ducked; it sounded as though a full and heavy set of fire-irons had tumbled over in the attic. Smoky, at work in the orrery. She glanced up. The crack in the ceiling seemed to have lengthened, but she doubted that it really had.

  Three for labor, two to make music, one to dream dreams …

  She thrust her hands into her sleeves. Few, anyway; not hosts. The taut plastic over the window was a drumskin, tapped on by wind. It seemed—it was hard to tell—that it had begun to snow again. Sophie, abandoning the count (she still didn’t know enough; it was wrong, and more than wrong on an afternoon like this, to speculate when you knew so little) gathered up the cards and put them away in their bag in their box.

  She sat for a while, listening to the taps of Smoky’s hammer, hesitant at first, then more insistent, then ringing as though he struck a gong. Then they fell silent, and the afternoon returned.

  Carrying a Torch

  “Summer,” Mrs. MacReynolds said, lifting her head slightly from the pillow, “is a myth.”

  The nieces and nephews and children around her looked at each other in thoughtful doubt or doubtful thought.

  “In winter,” the dying old woman went on, “summer is a myth; a report, a rumor, not to be believed….”

  The others drew closer to her, watching her fine face, her fluttering blue lids. Her head lay so lightly on its pillow that her blue-rinsed coiffure was unmussed, but this was for sure her last gasp; her contract had run out, and would not be renewed.

  “Never,” she said, and then paused a long time in limbo while Auberon thought further: never forget me? Never break faith, never say die, never never never? “Never long,” she said. “Only wait; only have patience. Longing is fatal. It will come.” They had begun to weep around her, though they hid it, for the old lady would have been impatient with tears. “Be happy,” she said, even more faintly. “For the things …” Yes. There she goes. Bye, Mrs. MacR. “The things, children—the things that make us happy—make us wise.”

  One last look around. Lock glances with Frankie MacR., the black sheep: he won’t forget this, a new leaf turns for him. Music up. And dead. Auberon skipped two spaces and made three memorial asterisks across the page, and drew it out.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay?” said Fred Savage. “Done?”

  “Done,” Auberon said. He shuffled the twenty or so pages together, his hands clumsy in gloves from which the ends of the fingers had been cut off, and jammed them in an envelope. “G’ahead.”

  Fred took the envelope, thrust it smartly beneath his arm, and with a mocking suggestion of salute, made to leave the Folding Bedroom. “ ‘M I spose to wait?” he asked, hand on the door. “While they reads over this?”

  “Ah, don’t bother,” Auberon said. “It’s too late now. They’ll have to just do it.”

  “Oookay,” Fred said. “Later, m’man.”

  Auberon built up the fire, pleased with himself. Mrs. MacReynolds was among the last of the characters whom he had inherited from the creators of “A World Elsewhere.” A young divorcée thirty years ago, she had tenaciously and cleverly held on to her part, through alcoholism, remarriage, religious conversion, grief, age and illness. Done now though. Contract terminated. Frankie was about to go off on a long trip, too; he would return—his contract had years to run, and he was the producer’s boyfriend as well—but he would return a changed man.

  A missionary? well, yes, in a sense; perhaps a missionary …

  More ought to happen, Sylvie had said once on a certain day to Fred Savage; and in the long interpenetration of Auberon’s vision of “A World Elsewhere” and the show as he had found it, a lot had. He couldn’t believe it at first to be so, but it seemed that the turgid, long-drawn-out pointlessness of its plot had been due simply to a lack of inventiveness on the writers’ parts. Auberon, in the beginning anyway, suffered from no such lack, and besides, there were all those tedious and unlikable people who had to be disposed of, whose passions and jealousies Auberon had a hard time understanding. The death rate had therefore been high for a while; the shriek of tires on rainy roads, the horrid crunch of steel on steel, the shout of sirens had been nearly continuous. One young woman, a drug-addicted Lesbian with an idiot child, he could not contractually eliminate; so he magicked her away in favor of her identical twin sister, long-lost and a very different character. That had taken a few weeks to accomplish.

  The producers blanched at the speed with which crises came and passed in those days; the audience, they said, couldn’t bear such storms, they were used to tedium. But the audience seemed to disagree, and while eventually it came to be a somewhat different audience, it was no smaller, or not measurably so, and more fiercely devoted than ever. Besides, there were few enough writers who could produce the amounts of work Auberon could, at the new and sharply reduced salaries being offered, and so the producers, struggling for the first time in their profession with tight budgets, flirting with bankruptcy, counting assets and debits late into the night, gave Auberon his head.

  So the actors spoke the lines which Fred Savage carried to them from Old Law Farm every day, meekly trying to infuse some reality and humanity into the strange hopes, intimations of high events, and secret expectancy (calm, sad, impatient, or resolved) which had come to infect characters they had played for years. There were not the many secure berths for actors that there had been in the days of the old affluence, and for every character released from the box of Auberon’s foreknowledge there were scores of applicants, even at fees that would have been scoffed at in the now-lost Golden Age. They were grateful to be embodying these peculiar lives, working toward or away from whatever huge thing it was which seemed always in preparation, yet never revealed, and which had kept their audience on gentle tenterhooks now for years.

  Auberon laughed, staring into the fire and already formulating new gins and defeats, embroglios and breakthroughs. What a form! Why hadn’t anyone before caught the secret of it? A simple plot was required, a single enterprise which concerned all the characters deeply, and which had a grand sweet simple single resolution: a resolution, however, that would never be reached. Always approached, keeping hopes high, making disappointments bitter, shaping lives and loves by its inexorable slow progress toward the present: but never, never reached.

  In the good old days, when polls were as common as house-to-house searches were now, pollsters asked viewers why they liked the bizarre torments of the soap operas, what kept them watching. The commonest answer was that they liked soap operas because soap o
peras were like life.

  Like life. Auberon thought “A World Elsewhere,” under his hands, was coming to be like a lot of things: like truth, like dreams; like childhood, his own anyway; like a deck of cards or an old album of pictures. He didn’t think it was like life—not anyway like his own. On “A World Elsewhere,” when a character’s greatest hopes were dashed, or his task all accomplished, or his children or friends saved by his sacrifice, he was free to die or at least to pass away; or he changed utterly, and reappeared with a new task, new troubles, new children. Except for those whose embodying actors were on vacation or ill, none simply came to a stop, all their important actions over, haunting the edges of the plot with their final scripts (so to speak) still in their hands.

  That was like life, though: like Auberon’s.

  Not like a plot, but like a fable, a story with a point, which had already been made. The fable was Sylvie; Sylvie was the sharply-pointed, unenigmatic yet brimful and undepletable allegory or tale that underlay his life. Sometimes he was conscious that this view robbed Sylvie of the intense and irreducible reality which she had had, and no doubt somewhere went on having, and when he saw that he felt a sudden shame and horror, as though he had been told or had told a shocking and defaming lie about her; but those times grew less frequent as the story, the fable, grew more perfect, took on other and more intricately refracting facets even as it grew shorter and more tellable; underlying, explaining, criticizing and defining his life even as it grew less something that had actually happened to him.

  “Carrying a torch,” George Mouse called it, and Auberon, who had never heard the old phrase, thought it just, because he thought of the torch he carried not as a penitential or devotional one, but as Sylvie. He carried a torch: her. She flared brightly sometimes, sank low other times; he saw by her, though he had no path in particular he wanted to see. He lived in the Folding Bedroom, he helped out on the Farm; one year was not different from the next. Like a long-time cripple, he put aside the better part of the world, not always aware he did so, as not being for the use of such as he: he was not any longer someone to whom things happened.

  He suffered from some odd disorders, living as he did in his most vigorous years. He couldn’t sleep much beyond dawn on any but the deepest of winter mornings. He grew able to see faces in the chance arrangements of his room’s fixtures and furnishings, or rather unable not to see them: faces wicked, wise or foolish, figures gesturing to him, weirdly distorted or wounded, able to express emotions that affected him without themselves having them, animated without being alive, which he found faintly disgusting. He pitied, against his will, the ceiling light fixture, two blank Phillips-head screws the eyes, and a light bulb stuck in its stupid, gaping ceramic mouth. The flowered curtains were a crowd, a congress, or rather two: the flower people, and the people made of background, outlined by flowers, peering through flowers. When the whole room had become unrelievably populated, he actually visited a psychiatrist, though he told no one about it. The man said he suffered from man-in-the-moon syndrome, not uncommon, and suggested that he get out more; a cure, though, he said, would take years. Years.

  Get out more: George, a constant and a choosy philanderer, not much less successful now than he had been in youth, introduced him to many women, and the Seventh Saint provided others. But talk about ghosts. Now and then two of these real women rolled into one (when on occasion he could persuade them to be so rolled) gave him a rude bliss, if he concentrated, that was intense. But his imaginings, working on the sturdy though desperately fine stuff of memory, were of a different order of intensity altogether.

  He would not have had it so; he honestly believed that. He even knew, in moments of great clarity, that it would not have been so had he not been who he was, that his disability didn’t lie in what had happened to him at all, but in his flawed nature, that not everyone, perhaps no one but he, would have ended up thus becalmed after being touched only by Sylvie as though in passing—what a stupid and antique disease that was, and one that had been all but eliminated from the modern world, he resented deeply at times that he should be, apparently, the last victim of it and thus excluded, as though by some rule of common hygiene, from the broad banquet that the City, even in decline, could still show. He wished, he wished he could do as Sylvie had done: say Fuck destiny, and escape. And so he could, too, he just wasn’t trying very hard; he knew that, too, but there it was: flawed. And it was no comfort to think that perhaps to have such a flaw, to be thus inadequate to the world, was just what it was to be in the Tale he could no longer deny that he was in: that perhaps the Tale was the flaw, that the flaw and the Tale were the same thing; that being in the Tale meant nothing more than being suited to your role in it and good for nothing else, like having a cast in your eye, by which you saw always something elsewhere, but which to everyone else (even most of the time to yourself) seemed only a disfigurement.

  He rose, annoyed with his thoughts for having fallen into that old bag. There was work to do; that should be enough; most of the time it was, and he was grateful. The amount he accomplished, and the pittance he was paid, would have astonished the mild and affable man (dead now of an accidental overdose) to whom Auberon had first shown scripts. Life had been easy then…. He poured himself a small whiskey (gin was verboten, but his adventure had left him with a persistent small habit, more like a sweet tooth than an addiction) and addressed himself to the mail which Fred had brought from uptown. Fred, his old guide, was his associate now, and so described to Auberon’s employers. He was farmhand as well, and memento mori or at least an object-lesson of some kind for Auberon; he could not now any longer get along without him, or so it seemed to him. He tore open an envelope.

  “Tell Frankie he’s going to break his mother’s HEART carrying on like that. Doesn’t he see that, how can he be so BLIND. Why doesn’t he get a good woman and settle down.” Auberon never got used to the suspension of disbelief his viewers were capable of, it always gave him a guilty thrill. Sometimes he felt the MacReynolds’s were real, and it was the viewers, like this lady, who were imaginary; pale fictions hungering after the flesh-and-blood life Auberon created. He tossed the letter into the woodbox. Settle down, huh; a good woman. Not a chance. Lot of blood under the bridge before Frankie settles down.

  He saved for the last a letter from Edgewood, some weeks in transit, a good long one from his mother, and settled to it like a squirrel to a large nut, hoping to find something within he could use for next month’s episodes.

  Something He Could Steal

  “You asked what happened to the Mr. Cloud that Great-aunt Cloud was married to,” she wrote. “Well, that’s really sort of a sad story. It happened a long time before I was born. Momdy sort of remembers. His name was Harvey Cloud. His father was Henry Cloud, the inventor and astronomer. Henry used to spend his summers up here, he had that pretty little cottage where the Junipers later lived. I think he had a lot of patents he lived on. Old John had put some money into his inventions—engines, I think, or astronomical things, I guess; I don’t know what. One of his things though was the old orrery at the top of the house—you know. That was an invention of Henry’s—I mean not orreries in general, they were invented by a Lord Orrery believe it or not (Smoky told me that). But Henry died before it was finished (it cost a lot of money I think) and about that time Nora, Great-aunt Cloud, married Harvey. Harvey was working on it too. His father’s son. I saw a picture of him once that Auberon took, in his shirtsleeves and a stiff collar and tie (I guess he wore them even when he was working), looking very fierce and thoughtful, standing next to the engine of the orrery before they installed it. It was HUGE and complicated and took up most of the picture. And then when they were done installing it (John was long dead by then) there was an accident, and poor Harvey fell off the very tip-top of the house and was killed. I guess then everybody forgot about the orrery, or didn’t want to think about it. I know Cloud never talked about it. You used to hide out up there, I remember. Now, you know, Smoky�
��s up there all the time, trying to see if it will ever run, and studying books on machinery and clockwork—I don’t know how he’s doing.

  “So he used to just live here, Harvey I mean, with Nora, in her room; and go up and work on the orrery; and then he fell off. So there you are.

  “Sophie says to tell you to be careful of your throat because of bronchitis, in March.

  “Lucy’s baby’s going to be a boy.

  “Isn’t the winter dragging on!

  “Your loving mother.”

  Well. Still further dark or at least odd corners in his family’s life he hadn’t known about. He remembered saying once to Sylvie that nothing terrible had ever happened in his family. That was before he had learned much about the true and false Lilacs, of course; and here now was poor Harvey Cloud, a young husband, tumbling off the roof at the moment of his greatest triumph.

  He could work that in. There was nothing, he had begun to think, that he couldn’t work in. He had a gift for such work: a real gift. Everybody said so.

  But meanwhile, his scene switched back to the City. This was the easy part, a rest from the other, more complex scenes; it was all simple in the City—predation, chase, escape, triumph and defeat; the weak to the wall, and only the strong survive. He chose, from a long row of them which had replaced George’s anonymous paperbacks on the shelf, one of Doc’s old books. He had sent to Edgewood for them when he had become a writer, and they had proved very useful, as he had thought they might. The one he had was one of the Gray Wolf’s adventures; and, sipping his whiskey, he began to thumb through it, looking for some material he could steal.

  Escapements