by John Crowley
No. It was Sylvie who had set him on that path; or rather Sylvie’s absence.
Sylvie’s absence. And what if Sylvie’s absence, what if her presence in his life in the first place, God what if her very love and beauty had been plotted from the beginning, to make him a drunk, to teach him those skills, to train him in pathfinding, to immure him at Old Law Farm for years to wait for news without knowing he waited, to wait for Lilac to come with promises or lies to stir his heart’s ashes into flame again, and all for some purpose of their own, which had nothing to do with him, or with Sylvie either?
All right: supposing there was to be this Parliament, supposing that that wasn’t just lies as well and that he would come Somehow face to face with them, he had some questions to ask, and some good answers to get. Come to that, let him only find Sylvie, and he had some tough questions he could put to her about her part in all this, some damn tough questions; only let him find her. Only, only let him find her.
Even as he thought this he saw, leaping from the last stair of a rachitic escalator, down there, a blond girl in a blue dress, bright in the brown darkness.
She looked back once and (seeing that they saw her) turned around a stanchion where a notice was posted: HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS.
“I think this is the way,” George called. A train roared through just at that moment, as they were gathering to run downward; the wind of its passage snatched at their hats, but their hands were quicker. “Right?” George said, hand on his hat, shouting over the trains enfilade.
“Yup,” Fred said, holding his. “I was about to say.”
They went down. Auberon followed. Promises or lies, he had no choice, and for sure they had known that all along too, for had it not been they who had at first thus cursed him? He sensed with a terrible clarity all the circumstances of his life, not excepting this foul underground now and these stairs down, take hands in a chain one after another, not one left out; they linked up, they unmasked, they seized him by the throat, they shook him, shook him, shook him till he woke up.
Fred Savage was returning from the woods with a bundle of sticks to feed the fire.
“Mess o’ folks out there,” he said with satisfaction as he stuck sticks into the embers. “Mess o’ folks.”
“Oh yeah?” George said with some alarm. “Wild animals?”
“Could be,” Fred said. His white teeth shone. In watch cap and poncho he looked ancient, a shapeless hump, like a wise old stumpwater toad. George and Auberon hunched a little closer to the feeble flames, and pricked up their ears, and looked around them into the complex darkness.
A Family Thing
They had not come very far into this wood from the river’s edge, where the ferry had let them off, before darkness overtook them and Fred Savage called a halt. Even as the ancient, gray, knocking, creaking boat had slid downstream along its line they watched the red sun sinking behind the still-leafless great trees, bitten into rimson bits by undergrowth, and then swallowed. It had all looked fearsome and strange, yet George said: “I think I’ve been here. Before.”
“Oh yeah?” Auberon said. They stood together in the bow. Fred, sitting astern, legs crossed, made remarks to the aged aged ferryman, who said nothing in response.
“Well, not been here,” George said. “But sort of.” Whose adventures here, in this boat, in those woods, had he known about, and how had he come to know about them? God, his memory had turned to a dry sponge lately. “I dunno,” he said, and looked curiously at Auberon. “I dunno. Only—” He looked back at the shore they had come from, and at the one they slid toward, holding his hat against the river breezes. “Only it seems—aren’t we going the wrong way?”
“I can’t imagine that,” Auberon said.
“No,” George said, “can’t be …” Yet the feeling persisted, that they travelled back-toward and not away-from. It must be, he thought, that same disorientation he sometimes experienced emerging from the subway into an unfamiliar neighborhood, where he got uptown and downtown reversed, and could not make the island turn around in his mind and lie right, not the street-signs nor even the sun’s position could dissuade him, as though he were caught in a mirror. “Well,” he said, and shrugged.
But he had jogged Auberon’s memory. He knew this ferry too: or at any rate he had heard of it. They were approaching the bank, and the ferryman laid up his long pole and came forward to tie up. Auberon looked down on his bald head and gray beard, but the ferryman didn’t look up. “Did you,” Auberon said, “did you once,” now how was he to put this, “was there a girl, a dark girl once, who, a time some time ago, well worked for you?”
The ferryman with long, strong arms hauled on the ferry’s line. He looked up at Auberon with eyes as blue and opaque as sky.
“Named Sylvie?” Auberon asked.
“Sylvie?” said the ferryman.
The boat, groaning against its stub of dock, came to rest. The ferryman held out his hand, and George put into it the shiny coin he had brought to pay him with.
“Sylvie,” George said by the fire. His arms were around his drawn-up knees. “Did you think,” he went on, “I mean I sort of thought, didn’t you, that this was sort of a family thing?”
“Family thing?”
“All this, I mean,” George said vaguely. “I thought it might only be the family that got into this, you know, from Violet.”
“I did think that,” Auberon said. “But then, Sylvie.”
“Yeah,” George said. “That’s what I mean.”
“But,” Auberon said, “it still might, I mean all that about Sylvie might be a lie. They’ll say anything. Anything.”
George stared into the fire a time, and then said: “Mm. Well, I think I have a confession to make. Sort of.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sylvie,” George said. “Maybe it is family.”
“I mean,” he went on, “that maybe she’s family. I’m not sure, but … Well, way back when, twenty-five years ago, oh more, there was this woman I knew. Puerto Rican. A real charmer. Bats, completely. But beautiful.” He laughed. “A spitfire, in fact. The only word. She was renting at the place, this was before the Farm, she was renting this little apartment. Well, to tell the truth she was renting the Folding Bedroom.”
“Oh. Oh,” Auberon said.
“Man, she was something. I came up once and she was doing the dishes, in a pair of high heels. Doing the dishes in red high heels. I dunno, something clicked.”
“Hm,” Auberon said.
“And, well.” George sighed. “She had a couple of kids somewhere. I got the idea that whenever she got pregnant she’d go nuts. In a quiet way, you know. So, hey, I was careful. But.”
“Jeez, George.”
“And she did sort of go off the deep end. I don’t know why, I mean she never told me. She just went—and went back to P.R. Never saw her again.”
“So,” Auberon said.
“So.” He cleared his throat. “So Sylvie did look a lot like her. And she did find the Farm. I mean she just showed up. And never told me how.”
“Good grief,” Auberon said, as the implications of this sank in. “Good grief, is this true?”
George held up an honest palm. “But did she …”
“No. Said nothing. Name wasn’t the same, but then it wouldn’t have been. And her mother was off, she said, gone, I never met her.”
“But surely you, didn’t you …”
“To tell you the truth, man,” George said, “I never really inquired into it too closely.”
Auberon was silent a time, marveling. She had been plotted, then; if all their lives were, and she was one of them. He said: “I wonder what she … I mean I wonder what she thought.”
“Yeah.” George nodded. “Yeah, well, that’s a good question all around, isn’t it. A damn good question.”
“She used to say,” Auberon said, “that you were like a …”
“I know what she used to say.”
“God, George, then how could
you have …”
“I wasn’t sure. How could I be sure? They all look sort of alike, that type.”
“Boy, you’re really given to that, aren’t you?” Auberon said in awe. “You really …”
“Gimme a break,” George said. “I wasn’t sure. I thought, hell, probably not.”
“Well.” The two cousins stared into the fire. “That does explain it, though,” Auberon said. “This. If it is family.”
“That’s what I thought,” George said.
“Yeah,” Auberon said.
“Yeah?” Fred Savage said. They looked up at him, startled. “Then what in hell ‘m I doin’ here?”
He looked from one to the other, grinning, his dull, living eyes amused. “Y’see?” he said.
“Well,” George said.
“Well,” Auberon said.
“Y’see?” Fred said again. “What in hell ‘m I doin here?” His yellow eyes closed and opened, and so did the many yellow eyes in the woods behind him. He shook his head as though at a puzzle, but he wasn’t really puzzled. He never seriously asked such a question, what was he doing where he was, except when it amused him to watch others consider it in consternation. Consternation, and considering, thought itself in fact, were mostly a spectacle to him; a man who had long since given up making any distinction between the place behind his closed black lids and the place before him when they were open, he was hard to confuse, and as for this place, Fred Savage didn’t really wonder; he didn’t bother himself supposing he had ever lived anyplace else.
“Teasin’,” he said softly and kindly to his two friends.
“Teasin’.”
He kept vigil for a while, or slept, or both, or neither. Night passed. He saw a path. In the blue dawn, birds awaking, fire cold, he saw the same path, or another, there between trees. He woke George and Auberon, a huddled pile, and with his index brown and gnarled and dirt-clogged as a root, he pointed it out to them.
A Watch and a Pipe
George Mouse looked around himself, swept with uneasy wonder. He had been feeling, since the first steps they had taken on the path which Fred had found, that none of it was as strange as it ought to be, or as unknown to him. And here in this spot (no different otherwise, as thick with undergrowth, as overwhelmed with towering trees) the feeling had grown much stronger. His feet had stood in this place before. In fact they had rarely been far from it.
“Wait,” he said to Fred and Auberon, who were stumbling ahead, looking for the path’s continuation. “Wait a sec.” They stopped, looking back.
George looked up, down, left, right. Right: there, he could sense more than see it, was a clearing. Air more gold and blue than the forest’s gray was beyond that row of guardian trees.
That row of guardian trees …
“You know,” he said, “I get the feeling we haven’t come all that far, after all.”
But the others were too far on to hear him. “Come on, George,” Auberon called.
George pulled himself from the spot, and followed. But he had taken only a few steps when he felt himself drawn back.
Damn. He stopped.
The forest was, it was hard to believe it of a mess of vegetation but it was so, the forest was like a huge suite of rooms, you stepped through doors continually out of one place into a very different place. Five steps were all it had taken him to leave the place where he had felt so familiar. He wanted to go back; he wanted very much to go back.
“Well, just wait a second,” he called out to his companions, but they didn’t turn back, they were already elsewhere. The calls of birds seemed louder than George’s own call. In a quandary, he took two steps in the direction they had gone, and then, drawn by a curiosity stronger than fear, returned to the place where the clearing could be glimpsed.
It didn’t seem far. There seemed even to be a path in that direction.
The path led him down, and almost at once the guardian trees and the patch of sunlight he had seen were gone. Very soon after that the path was gone too. And very soon after that George forgot completely what had caused him to take this way.
He walked on a bit, his boots sinking into soft earth, and his coat clawed at by harsh, marsh-living bushes. Where? For what? He stood stock still, but began to sink, and pulled himself forward. The forest sang all around him, blocking his ears to his own thoughts. George forgot who he was.
He stopped again. It was dark yet bright, the trees all in a moment seemed to have bloomed a chartreuse cloudiness, spring had come. And why was he here, afraid, in this place, when and where was this, what had become of him? Who was he? He began searching in his pockets, not knowing what he would find but hoping for a clue as to who this was here and what he was doing.
From one pocket he pulled out a blackened pipe, which meant nothing to him though he turned it and turned it in his hand; from the other he pulled out an old pocket watch.
The watch: yes. He couldn’t read its moustached face, which was grinning at him disconcertingly, but this was definitely a clue. A watch in his hand. Yes.
He had, no doubt (he could almost remember it) taken a pill. A new drug he was experimenting with, a drug of astonishing, of just unheard-of potency. That had been some time ago, yes, by the watch, and the pill had done this to him: had snatched away his memory, even his memory of having taken the pill, and set him to struggle in a wholly imaginary landscape, my God a pill so potent that it could build a forest complete with bilberries and birdsong inside his head for the homunculus of himself to wander in! But this imaginary woods was still interpenetrated, faintly, by the real: he had in his hand the watch, the watch by which he had intended to time the new drug’s working. He had had it in his hand the whole time, and had only now, because the pill’s effect was wearing off, imagined that he had taken it out of his pocket to consult it—had imagined that he had taken it out because with the pill’s wearing off he was coming to himself again, by slow stages, and the real watch was intruding into the unreal forest. In a moment, any moment, the terrible leaf-jewelled forest would fade and he would begin to see through it the room where he in fact sat with the watch in his hand: the library of his townhouse, on the third floor, on the couch. Yes! Where he had sat motionless for who knew how long, the pill made it seem a lifetime; and around him, waiting for his response, his description, would be his friends, who had watched with him. Any second now their faces would swim into reality, as the watch had: Franz and Smoky and Alice, coalescing in the dusty old library where they had so often sat, their faces anxious, gleeful, and expectant: what was it like, George? What was it like? And he would for a long time only shake his head and make inarticulate round noises, unable till firm reality reasserted itself to speak of it.
“Yes; yes,” George said, near to tears of relief that he remembered, “I remember, I remember;” and even as he was saying that, he slipped the watch back into his pocket, turning his head in the greening landscape. “I remember …” He pulled a boot from the mud, and the other boot, and no longer remembered.
A row of guardian trees, and a clearing where sunlight fell, and a suggestion of cultivation. On ahead. Ahead: only now he was stumbling downward over mossy rocks black with wetness, stumbling toward a ravine through which a cold stream ran rushing. He breathed its moist breath. There was a rude bridge there, much fallen, where floating branches caught and white water swirled; looks dangerous; and a hard climb beyond that; and as he put a cautious foot on the bridge, afraid and breathing hard, he forgot what it was he toiled toward, and at the next step (a loose crosspiece, he steadied himself) forgot who he was that toiled or why, and at the next step, the middle of the bridge, realized that he had forgotten.
Why did he find himself staring down into water? What was going on here anyway? He put his hands into his pockets hoping to find something that would give him a clue. He took out an old pocket watch, which meant nothing to him, and a blackened, small-bowled pipe.
He turned the pipe in his hands. A pipe: yes. “I remember,” he sai
d vaguely. The pipe, the pipe. Yes. His basement. Down in the basement of a building on his block he had discovered an ancient cache, an amazing, a hilarious find. Amazing stuff! He had smoked some, in this pipe, that must be it: there in that blackened bowl. He could see bits of cindery consumed resin, it was all in him now, and this—this!—was the effect. Never, never had he known a rush so total, so involving! He had been swept away; he was no longer standing where he had been standing when he had put match to the pipe’s contents—on a bridge, yes, a stone bridge up in the Park, where he had gone to share a pipe with Sylvie—but in some weird woods, so real he could smell them, so swept away that he seemed to have been clambering forgetful of who he was in this woods for hours, forever, when in fact (he remembered, he remembered clearly) he had only at this moment lowered the pipe from his lips—here it still was in his hands, before his eyes. Yes: it had reappeared first, first sign of his alighting from a no doubt quite short but utterly ravishing rush; Sylvie’s face, in an old peau-de-soie black hat, would come next. He was even now about to turn to her (the hash-created woods discreating themselves and the littered brownish winter Park assembling itself around him) and say: “Hm, ha, strong stuff, watch it, STRONG stuff;” and she, laughing at his swept-away expression, would make some Sylvie remark as she took the pipe from him:
“I see, I remember,” he said, like a charm, but he had already a terrible percipience that this was not the first time he had remembered, no indeed, once before he had remembered it all but remembered it all differently. Once before? No, oh no, perhaps many times, oh no oh no: he stood frozen as the possibility of an endless series of remembrances, each one different but all made out of a small moment in the woods, occurred to him: an infinite series endlessly repeated, oh I remember, I remember, each one extending a lifetimewards out from one small, one very small moment (a turn of the head only, a step of the foot) in an absolutely inexplicable woods. George, seeing it so, felt he had been suddenly—but not suddenly, for a long, an immemorial time—condemned to hell.
