Little, Big

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 natural 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?

If they had, she thought she could awaken it this night.

She had broken the case, in fact, some months before; the answer came, not from her occult researches, but from such mundane or sublunary places as her old encyclopaedia (tenth Britannica), the sixth volume of Gregorovius on Medieval Rome, and (a great folio in double columns, with a hasp to lock it up) the Prophecies of Abbot Joachim da Fiore. It was certainty that had taken all her arts, and that had to be bought at the cost of much labor, and much time. There was no doubt, now, though. She knew, that is, Who. She did not know How, or Why; she knew no more than she had known who the children of the children of Time were, whose champion Russell Eigenblick might be; she didn’t know where those cards were which he was in, or in what sense he was in them. But she knew Who: and she had summoned the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to hear that news.

They had disposed themselves around the chairs and sofa of her dimly-lit and crowded drawing-room or study on the ground floor.

“Gentlemen,” she said, gripping the back of an upright leather chair like a lectern, “more than two years ago you gave me the assignment of discovering the nature and intentions of Russell Eigenblick. You have had an unconscionable wait, but I think tonight I can at least provide you with an identification; a recommendation as to the disposition of the case will be far harder. If I can make one at all. And if I can make one, then you—yes, even you—may be incapable of acting on it.”

There was an exchange of glances at this, subtler than one sees on stage, but with the same effect of registering mutual surprise and concern. It had once before occurred to Hawksquill that the men she dealt with were not the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club at all, but actors hired to represent them. She suppressed the notion.

“We all know,” she went on, “the tales, found in many mythologies, of a hero who, though slain on the field of battle or otherwise meeting a tragic end, is said not to have died at all, but to have been home away to somewhere, elsewhere, an isle or a cave or a cloud, where he sleeps; and from where, at his people’s greatest need, he will issue, with his paladins, to aid them, and to rule then over a new Golden Age. Rex Quondam et Futurus. Arthur in Avalon; Sikander somewhere in Persia; Cuchulain in every other fen or glen of Ireland; Jesus Christ himself.

“All these tales, moving as they are, are not true. No trials of his people awakened Arthur; Cuchulain is able to sleep through the mutual slaughter of his, protracted over centuries; the Second Coming, continually announced, has been delayed past the virtual end of the Church that so much counted on it. No: whatever the next World-Age brings (and that age lies anyway well in the to-come) it will not bring back a hero whose name we know. But…” She paused, assailed by a sudden doubt. Said aloud, the absurdity of it seemed greater. She even flushed, ashamed, as she went on: “But it happens that one of these stories is true. It’s not one we would ever have thought to be true, even if it were one we remember and tell, and for the most part it isn’t; it and its hero are much forgotten. But we know it to be true because the necessary conclusion of it has occurred: the hero has awakened. Russell Eigenblick is he.”

This shot fell less heavily among her hearers than she had expected it to. She felt them withdraw from her; she saw, or perceived, their necks stiffen, their chins draw down doubtfully into expensive haberdashery. There was nothing for it but to go on.

“You may wonder,” she said, “as I did, what people Russell Eigenblick has returned to aid, We as a people are too young to have cultivated stories like those told of Arthur, and perhaps too self-satisfied to have felt the need of any. Certainly none are told of the so-called fathers of our country; the idea that one of those gentlemen is not dead but asleep, say, in the Ozarks or the Rockies is funny but not anywhere held. Only the despised ghost-dancing Red Man has a history and a memory long enough to supply such a hero; and the Indians have shown as little interest in Russell Eigenblick as in our Presidents, and he as little in them. What people then?

“The answer is: no people. No people: but an Empire. An Empire which could, and once did, comprise any people or peoples regardless, and had a life, a crown, borders and capitals of the greatest mutability. You will remember Voltaire’s dig: that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Yet in some sense it existed until (as we have thought) its last Emperor, Francis II, resigned the title in 1806. Well: my contention is, gentlemen, that the Holy Roman Empire did not pass away then either. It continued to exist. It continued, like an amoeba, to shift, crawl, expand, contract; and that while Russell Eigenblick slept his long sleep (exactly eight hundred years by my reckoning)—while, in effect, we all slept—it has crept and slid, shifting and drifting like the continents, until it is now located here, where we sit. How exactly its borders should be drawn I have no idea, though I suspect they may be identical with this country’s. In any case we are well within it. This city may even be its Capital: though probably only its Chief City.”

She had ceased looking at them.

“And Russell Eigenblick?” she asked of no one. “He was once its Emperor. Not its first, who was of course Charlemagne (about whom the same sleep-wake story was for a while told) nor its last, nor even its greatest. Vigorous, yes; talented; uneven in temperament; no administrator; steady, but generally unsuccessful, in war. It was he who, by the way, added the ‘holy’ to his Empire’s name. About 1190 he chose, with the Empire generally at peace and the Pope for the moment off his back, to go on crusade. The Infidel only briefly felt his scourge; he won a battle or two, and then, crossing a stream in Armenia, he fell from his horse, and was too weighted down by his armor to get out. He drowned. So says Gregorovius, among other authorities.

“The Germans, though, after many later reverses, came to disbelieve this. He hadn’t died. He was only asleep, perhaps beneath the Kyffhauser in the Hartz Mountains (the place is still pointed out to tourists) or perhaps in Domdaniel in the sea, or wherever, but he would return, one day; return to the aid of his beloved Germans, and lead German arms to victory and a German empire to glory. The hideous history of Germany in the last century may be the working-out of this vain dream. But in fact that Emperor, despite his birth and his name, was no German. He was Emperor of all the world, or at least all Christendom. He was heir to French Charlemagne and Roman Caesar. And now he has shifted like his ancient borders, and has changed no allegiances in doing so, only his name. Gentlemen, Russell Eigenblick is the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, yes, die alte Barbarossa, reawakened to rule over this strange latter age of his Empire.”

This last sentence she had spoken, her voice rising, against a growing swell of murmurs, protests, and standings-up among her hearers.

“Absurd!” said one.

“Preposterous!” said another, like a spit.

“Do you mean to say, Hawksquill,” said a third, more reasonably, “that Russell Eigenblick supposes himself to be this resurrected Emperor, and that…”

“I have no idea who he supposes himself to be,” Hawksquill said. “I’m only telling you who he in fact is.”

“Then answer me this,” said the member, raising his hand to silence the hubbub Hawksquill’s insistence raised. “Why is it just now that he returns? I mean didn’t you say that these heroes return at the time of their people’s greatest need, and so on?”

“Traditionally they are said to, yes.”

“Then why now? If this futile Empire has lain doggo for so long…”

Hawksquill looked down. “I said it would be hard for me to make a recommendation. I’m afraid that there are essential pieces of this puzzle still withheld from me.”

“Such as.”

“For one,” she said, “the cards he speaks of. I can’t now go into my reasons, but I must see them, and manipulate them…” There was an impatient uncrossing and recrossing of legs. Someone asked why. “I supposed,” she said, “you would need to know his strength. His chances. What times he considers propitious. The point is, gentlemen, that if you intend to suppress him, you had better know whether Time is on your side, or on his; and whether you are not futilely ranging yourselves against the inevitable.”

“And you can’t tell us.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. Yet.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the senior member present, rising. “I’m afraid, Hawksquill, that, your investigations in this case being so prolonged, we’ve had to come to a decision ourselves. We came tonight chiefly to discharge you of any further obligation.”

“Hm,” said Hawksquill.

The senior member chuckled indulgently. “And it doesn’t really seem to me,” he said, “that your present revelations do much to alter the case. As I remember my history, the Holy Roman Empire had not a lot to do with the life of the peoples who supposedly comprised it. Am I right? The real rulers liked having the Imperial power in their hands or under their control, but in any case did what they liked.”

“That was often so.”

“Well then. The course we decided on was the right one. If Russell Eigenblick turns out to be in some sense this Emperor, or convinces enough people of it (I notice, by the way, he continually puts off announcing just who he is, big mystery), then he might be more useful than the reverse.”

“May I ask,” Hawksquill said, motioning forward the Maid of Stone who stood mumchance in the doorway with a tray of glasses and a tall decanter, “what course of action you decided on?”

The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club settled back in their seats, smiling. “Co-optation,” said a member—one of those who had most vigorously protested Hawksquill’s conclusions. “The power of certain charlatans,” he went on, “isn’t to be despised. We learned that in last summer’s marches and riots. The Church of All Streets fracas. Et cetera. Of course such power is usually short-lived. It’s not real power. All wind, really: A storm soon passed. They know it, too…”

“But,” said another member, “when such a one is introduced to real power—promised a share in it—his opinions indulged—his vanity flattered…”

“Then he can be enlisted. He can be used, frankly.”

“You see,” said the senior member, waving away the drink-tray offered him, “in the large scheme, Russell Eigenblick has no real powers, no strong adherents. A few clowns in colored shirts, a few devoted men. His oratory moves; but who remembers next day? If he stirred up great hatreds, or mobilized old bitternesses—but he doesn’t. It’s all vagueness. So: we’ll offer him real allies. He has none. He’ll accept. There are lures we have. He’ll be ours. And damn useful he might prove, too.”

“Hm,” Hawksquill said again. Schooled as she had been in the purest of studies, on the highest of planes, she had never found deception and evasion easy. That Russell Eigenblick had no allies was, anyway, true. That he was a cat’s-paw for forces more powerful, less namable, more insidious than the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club could imagine, she ought by rights to inform them: though she herself could not yet name those forces. But she had been released from the case. They wouldn’t anyway—she could see it in their smug faces—probably listen to her. Still she blushed, fiercely, at what she withheld from them, and said, “I think I’ll have a drop of this. Will no one join me?”

“The fee,” said a member, watching her closely as she poured for him, “need not be returned, of course.”

She nodded at him. “When exactly do you put your plan into execution?”

“This day next week,” said the senior member, “we have a meeting with him in his hotel.” He rose, looking around him, ready to go. Those members who had accepted drinks swallowed them hastily. “I’m sorry,” the senior member said, “that after all your labors we’ve gone our own way.”

“It’s no doubt just as well,” Hawksquill said, not rising.

They looked at each other—all standing now—in that unconvincing manner, this time expressing thoughtful doubt or doubtful thought, and took a muted leave of her. One hoped aloud as they went out that she had not been offended; and the others, as they inserted themselves into their cars, pondered that possibility, and what it might mean for them.

Hawksquill, alone, pondered it too.

Released from her obligation to the Club, she was a free agent. If a new old Empire were rearising in the world, she couldn’t but think it would give her new and wider scope for her powers. Hawksquill was not immune to the lure of power; great wizards rarely are.

And yet no New Age was at hand. Whatever powers stood behind Russell Eigenblick might not, in the end, be as strong as the powers the Club could bring against them.

Whose side then, supposing she could determine which side was which, would she be on?

She watched the legs her brandy made on the sides of the glass. A week from today… She rang for the Maid of Stone, ordered coffee, and readied herself for a long night’s work: they were too few now to spend one asleep.

A Secret Sorrow

Exhausted by fruitless labor, she came down some time after dawn and went out into the bird-loud street.

Opposite her tall and narrow house was a small park which had once been public but which was now sternly locked; only the residents of those houses and private clubs which faced on it, viewing it with calm possessiveness, had keys to the wrought-iron gates. Hawksquill had one. The park, too chock-full of statues, fountains, birdbaths and such fancies, rarely refreshed her, since she had more than once used it as a sort of notepad, sketching quickly on its sunwise perimeter a Chinese dynasty or a Hermetic mathesis, none of which (of course) she was now able to forget.

But now in the misty dawn on the first day of May it was obscure, vague, not rigorous. It was air mostly, almost not a City air, sweet and rich with the exhalation of newborn leaves; and obscurity and vagueness were just what she required now.

As she came up to the gate she used, she saw that someone was standing before it, gripping the bars and staring within hopelessly, obverse of a jailed man. She hesitated. Walkers-abroad at this hour were of two kinds: humdrum hard workers up early, and the unpredictable and the lost who had been up all night. Those seemed to be pajama bottoms protruding from beneath this one’s long overcoat, but Hawksquill didn’t take this to mean that he was an early riser. She chose a grand-lady manner as best suited to the encounter and, taking out her key, asked the man to excuse her, she’d like to open the gate.

“About time too,” he said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said; he had stood aside only slightly, expectantly, and she saw that he intended to follow her in. “It’s a private park. I’m afraid you can’t come in. It’s only for those who live around it, you see. Who have the key.”

She could see his face now clearly, with its desperate growth of whisker and its wrinkles etched deeply with filth; yet he was young. Above his fierce yet vacant eyes a single eyebrow ran.

“It’s damned unfair,” he said. “They’ve all got houses, what the hell do they need a park for too?” He stared at her, rageful and frustrated. She wondered if she should explain to him that there was no more injustice in his being locked out of this park than out of the buildings that surrounded it. The way he looked at her seemed to require some plea; or then on the other hand perhaps the injustice he complained of was the universal and unanswerable kind, the kind Fred Savage liked to point up, needing no spurious or ad-hoc explanations. “Well,” she said, as she often did to Fred.

“When your own great-grandfather built the damn thing.” His eyes looked upward, calculating. “Great-great-grandfather.” He pulled, with sudden purpose, a glove from his pocket, put it on (his medicus extending naked from an unseamed finger) and began brushing away the new-leaving ivy and obscuring dirt from a plaque screwed to the rusticated red-stone gate-post. “See? Damn it.” The plaque said—it took her a moment to work it out, surprised she had never noticed it, the whole history of Beaux-Arts public works could have been laid on its close-packed Roman face and the floweret nailheads that held it in place—the plaque said “Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900.”

He wasn’t a nut. City-dwellers in general and Hawksquill in particular have a sure sense, in these encounters, of the distinction—fine but real—between the impossible imaginings of the mad and the equally impossible but quite true stories of the merely lost and damned, “Which,” she said, “are you, the Mouse, the Drinkwater, or the Stone?”

“I guess you wouldn’t know,” he said, “how impossible it is to get a little peace and quiet in this town. Do I look like a bum to you?”

“Well,” she said.

“The fact is you can’t sit down on a God damn park bench or a doorway without ten drunks and loudmouths collecting as though they were blown together. Telling you their life stories. Passing around a bottle. Chums. Did you know how many bums are queer? A lot. It’s surprising.” He said it was surprising but in fact he seemed to feel it was just what was to be expected and no less infuriating for that. “Peace and quiet,” he said again, in a tone so genuinely full of longing, so full of the dewy tulip-beds and shadowed walks within the little park, that she said: “Well, I suppose an exception can be made. For a descendant of the builder.” She turned her key in the lock and swung open the gate. For a moment he stood as before those final gates of pearl, wondering; then he went in.

Once inside his rage seemed to abate, and though she hadn’t intended it, she walked with him along the curiously curving paths that seemed always about to lead them deeper within the park but in fact always contrived to direct them back to its perimeters. She knew the secret of these—which was, of course, to take those paths which seemed to be heading outward, and you would go in; and with subtle motions she directed their steps that way. The paths, though they didn’t seem to, led them in to where a sort of pavilion or temple—a tool shed in fact, she supposed—stood at the park’s center. Overarching trees and aged bushes disguised its miniature size; from certain angles it appeared to be the visible porch or corner of a great house; and though the park was small, here at the center the surrounding city, by some trick of planting and perspective, could hardly be perceived at all. She began to remark on this.

“Yes,” he said. “The further in you go, the bigger it gets. Would you like a drink?” He pulled from his pocket a flat clear bottle.

“Early for me,” she said. She watched, fascinated, as he undid the bottle and slid a good bit of it down a throat no doubt now so flayed and tanned it couldn’t feel. She was surprised then to see him shaken by big involuntary shudders, and his face twisted in disgust just as hers would have been if she’d tried that gulp. Just a beginner, she thought. Just a child, really. She supposed he had a secret sorrow, and was pleased to contemplate it; it was just the change she needed from the hugeness she had been struggling with.

They sat together on a bench. The young man wiped the neck of his bottle on his sleeve and recapped it carefully. He slid it into the pocket of his brown overcoat without haste. Strange, she thought, that glass and clear cruel liquid could be so comforting, so tenderly regarded. “What the hell is that supposed to be?” he said.

They faced the square stone place that Hawksquill supposed to he a tool shed or other facility, disguised as a pavilion or miniature pleasure-dome. “I don’t know exactly,” she said, “but the reliefs on it represent the Four Seasons, I think. One to a side.”

The one before them was Spring, a Greek maiden doing some potting, with an ancient tool very like a trowel and a tender shoot in her other hand. A baby lamb nestled near her and like her looked hopeful, expectant, new. It was all quite well done; by varying the depth of his cutting, the artist had given an impression of distant fields newly turned and returning birds. Daily life in the ancient world. It resembled no spring that had ever come to the City, but it was nonetheless Spring. Hawksquill had more than once employed it as such. She had for a time wondered why the little house had been placed off-center on its plot of ground, not square with the streets around the park; and after a little thought saw that it faced the compass points, Winter facing north and Summer to the south, Spring east, and Autumn west. It was easy to forget, in the City, that north was only very approximately uptown—though not easy for Hawksquill, and apparently this designer had thought a true orientation important too. She liked him for it. She even smiled at the young man next to her, a supposed descendant, though he looked like a City creature who didn’t know solstice from equinox.

“What good is it?” he said, quietly but truculently.

“It’s handy,” said Hawksquill. “For remembering things.”

“What?”

“Well,” she said. “Suppose you wanted to remember a certain year, and the order in which events happened then. You could memorize these four panels, and use the things pictured in them as symbols for the events you want to remember. If you wanted to remember that a certain person was buried in the spring, well, there’s the trowel.”

“Trowel?”

“Well, that digging tool.”

He looked at her askance. “Isn’t that a little morbid?”

“It was an example.”

He regarded the maiden suspiciously, as if she were in fact about to remind him of something, something unpleasant. “The little plant,” he said at length, “could be something you began in the spring. A job. Some hope.”

“That’s the idea,” she said.

“Then it withers.”

“Or bears fruit.”

He was thoughtful a long time; he drew out his bottle and repeated his ritual exactly, though with less grimace. “Why is it,” he said then, his voice faint from the gin that had washed it, “that people want to remember everything? Life is here and now. The past is dead.”

She said nothing to this.

“Memories, Systems. Everybody poring over old albums and decks of cards. If they’re not remembering, they’re predicting. What good is it?”

An old cowbell rang within Hawksquill’s halls. “Cards?” she said.

“Brooding on the past,” he said, regarding Spring. “Will that bring it back?”

“Only order it.” She knew that, reasonable as they might seem, people like this who live on the street are differently composed from people who live in houses. They have a reason for being where they are, expressed in a peculiar apprehension of things, a loss of engagement with the ordinary world and how it goes on, often unwilled, She knew she must not press questions on him, pursue a subject, for like the paths in this place that would only lead her away. Yet she wanted very much now not to lose contact. “Memory can be an art,” she said schoolmarmishly. “Like architecture. I think your ancestor would have understood that.”

He lifted eyebrows and shoulders as though to say Who knows, or cares.

“Architecture, in fact,” she said, “is frozen memory. A great man said that.”

“Hm.”

“Many great thinkers of the past”—how she had caught this teachery tone she didn’t know, but she couldn’t seem to relinquish it, and it seemed to hold her hearer—“believed that the mind is a house, where memories are stored; and that the easiest way to remember things is to imagine an architecture, and then cast symbols of what you wish to remember on the various places defined by the architect.” Well, that surely must have lost him, she thought, but after some thought he said:

“Like the guy buried with the trowel.”

“Exactly.”

“Dumb,” he said.

“I can give you a better example.”

“Hm.”

She gave him Quintillian’s highly-colored example of a law-case, freely substituting modern for ancient symbols, and spreading them around the parts of the little park. His head swiveled from side to side as she placed this and that here and there, though she had no need to look. “In the third place,” she said, “we put a broken toy car, to remind us of the driver’s license that expired. In the fourth place—that arch sort of thing behind you to the left—we hang a man, say a Negro all dressed in white, with pointed shoes hanging down, and a sign on him: INRI.”

“What on earth.”

“Vivid. Concrete. The judge has said: unless you have documentary proof, you will lose the case. The Negro in white means having it on paper.”

“In black and white.”

“Yes. The fact that he’s hanged means we have captured this black-and-white proof, and the sign, that it is this that will save us.”

“Good God.”

“It sounds terribly complicated, I know. And I suppose it’s really not any better than a notebook.”

“Then why all that guff? I don’t get it.”

“Because,” she said carefully, sensing that despite his outward truculence he understood her, “it can happen—if you practice this art—that the symbols you put next to one another will modify themselves without your choosing it, and that when next you call them forth, they may say something new and revelatory to you, something you didn’t know you knew. Out of the proper arrangement of what you do know, what you don’t know may arise spontaneously. That’s the advantage of a system. Memory is fluid and vague. Systems are precise and articulated. Reason apprehends them better. No doubt that’s the case with those cards you spoke of.”

“Cards?”

Too soon? “You spoke of brooding over a deck of cards.”

“My aunt. Not my aunt really,” as though disclaiming her. “My grandfather’s aunt. She had these cards. Lay them out, think about them. Brood on the past. Predict things.”

“Tarot?”

“Hm?”

“Were they the Tarot deck? You know, the hanged man, the female pope, the tower…”

“I don’t know… How would I know? Nobody ever explained anything to me.” He brooded. “I don’t remember those pictures, though.”

“Where did they come from?”

“I dunno. England, I guess. Since they were Violet’s.”

She started, but he was lost in thought and didn’t see. “And there were some cards with pictures? Besides the court cards?”

“Oh yeah. A whole slew of ’em. People, places, things, notions.”

She leaned back, interlacing her fingers slowly. It had happened before that a place which she had put to multiple memory uses, like this park, came to be haunted by figments, hortatory or merely weird, called into being simply by the overlap of old juxtapositions, speaking, sometimes, of a meaning she would not otherwise have seen. If it were not for the sour smell of this one’s overcoat, the undeniable this-worldness of the striped pajamas beneath it, she might have thought him to be one of them. It didn’t matter. There is no chance. “Tell me,” she said. “These cards.”

“What if you wanted to forget a certain year?” he said. “Not remember it, but forget it. No help there, is there? No system for that, oh no.”

“Oh, I suppose there are methods,” she said, thinking of his bottle.

He seemed sunk in bitter reflection, eyes vacant, long neck bent like a sad bird’s, hands folded in his lap. She was casting about for words to form a new question about the cards when he said: “The last time she read those cards for me, she said I’d meet a dark and beautiful girl, of all cornball things.”

“Did you?”

“She said I’d win this girl’s love through no virtue I had, and lose her through no fault of my own.”

He said nothing else for a time, and (though not sure now that he heard or registered much of anything she said to him) she ventured softly: “That’s often the way, with love.” Then, when he didn’t respond: “I have a certain question that a certain deck of cards might answer. Does your aunt still…”

“She’s dead.”

“Oh.”

“My aunt, though. I mean she wasn’t my aunt, but my aunt. Sophie.” He made a gesture which seemed to mean This is complex and boring, but surely you catch my drift.

“The cards are still in your family,” she guessed.

“Oh, yeah. Never throw out anything.”

“Where exactly…”

He raised a hand to stop her question, suddenly wary. “I don’t want to go into family matters.”

She waited a moment and then said: “It was you who mentioned your great-great-grandfather, who built this park.” Why suddenly was she visted with a vision of Sleeping Beauty’s castle? A chateau. With a hedge of thorn, impassable.

“John Drinkwater,” he said, nodding.

Drinkwater. The architect… A mental snap of fingers. That hedge wasn’t thorn. “Was he married to a woman named Violet Bramble?”

He nodded.

“A mystic, a seer of sorts?”

“Who the hell knows what she was.”

Urgency suddenly compelled her to a gesture, rash perhaps, but there was no time to waste. She took from her pocket the key to the park and held it up before him by its chain, as old mesmerists used to do before their subjects. “It seems to me,” she said, seeing him take notice, “that you deserve free access here. This is my key.” He held out a hand, and she drew the key somewhat away. “What I require in exchange is an introduction to the woman who is or is not your aunt, and explicit directions as to how to find her. All right?”

As though in fact mesmerized, staring fixedly at the glinting bit of brass, he told her what she wanted to know. She placed the key in his filthy glove. “A deal,” she said.

Auberon clutched the key, his only possession now, though Hawksquill couldn’t know that, and, the spell broken, looked away, not sure he hadn’t betrayed something, but unwilling to feel guilt.

Hawksquill rose. “It’s been most illuminating,” she said. “Enjoy the park. As I said, it can be handy.”

A Year to Place Upon It

Auberon, after another scalding yet kindly draught, began, closing one eye, to measure out his new demesne. The regularity of it surprised him, since its tone was not regular but bosky and artless. Yet the benches, gates, obelisks, marten-houses on poles, and the intersections of paths had a symmetry easily adduced from where he sat. It all depended from or radiated outward from the little house of the seasons.

That was all hopeless guff she had instructed him in, of course. He did feel bad about inflicting such a lunatic on his family, not that they would notice probably, hopeless themselves; and the price had not been resistable. Odd how a man of wide sympathies like himself started such hares and harebrains wherever he went.

Outside the park, framed in sycamores from where he sat, was a small classical courthouse (Drinkwater’s too for all he knew), surmounted with statues of lawgivers at even intervals. Moses. Solon. Etc. A place to put a law-case, certainly. His own infuriating struggle with Petty, Smilodon & Ruth. Those coffered brass doors not yet open for business the locked entrance to his inheritance, the egg-and-dart molding the endless repetition of delay and hope, hope and delay.

Stupid. He looked away. What was the point? No matter how gracefully the building accepted his case in all its complexity (and as he glanced again sidelong at it he saw that it could and did) it was needless. How could he forget all that? The doles they eked out to him, enough to keep him from starvation, enough to keep him signing (with an increasingly furious scrawl) the instruments, waivers, pleas and powers they presented him with as those stony-eyed immortals there proffered tablets, books, codices: the last of the last had bought this gin he now drank of, and more than was left in the bottle would be necessary for him to forget the indignity of his pleading for it, the injustice of it all. Diocletian counted out wrinkled bills from petty cash.

Hell with that. He left the courthouse outside. In here there was no law.

A year to place upon it. She had said that the value of her system was how it would cast up, spontaneously, what you didn’t know out of the proper arrangement of what you did.

Well: there was a thing he didn’t know.

If he could believe what the old woman had said, if he could, wouldn’t he then set to work here, commit every tulip-bed and arrowheaded fence-post, every whitewashed stone, every budding leaf to memory, so that he could distribute among them every tiny detail of lost Sylvie? Wouldn’t he then march furiously sniffing up and down the curving paths, like this mutt that had just entered with his master, searching, searching, going sunwise then antisunwise, searching until the one single simple answer arose, the astonishing lost truth, that would make him clutch his brow and cry I see?

No, he would not.

He had lost her; she was gone, and for good. That fact was all that excused and made reasonable, even proper, his present degradation. If her whereabouts were revealed to him now, though he had spent a year trying to learn them, he would avoid them of all places.

And yet. He didn’t want to find her, not any more; but he would like to know why. Would like to know (timidly, subjunctively) why she had left him never to return, without a word, without, apparently, a backward glance. Would like to know, well, what was up with her nowadays, if she was all right, whether she thought of him ever, and in what mode, kindly or otherwise. He recrossed his legs, tapping one broken shoe in the air. No: it was just as well, really; just as well that he knew the old woman’s batty and monstrous system to be useless. That Spring could never be the spring she had blossomed for him, nor that shoot their love, nor that trowel the tool by which his rageful and unhappy heart had been scored with joy.

In the First Place

He hadn’t at first found her disappearance all that alarming. She’d run off before, for a few nights or a weekend, where and for what reasons he never pressed her about, he was cool, he was a hands-off guy. She hadn’t ever before taken every stitch of clothes and every souvenir, but he didn’t put it beyond her, she could bring them all back in an hour, at any hour, having missed a fleeing bus or train or plane or been unable to bear whatever relative or friend or lover she had camped with. A mistake. The greatness of her desires, of her longing for life to come out right even in the impossible conditions under which hers was lived, led her into such mistakes. He rehearsed fatherly or avuncular speeches with which, unhurt and unalarmed and not angry, he would counsel her after he welcomed her back.

He looked for notes. The Folding Bedroom though small was such a chaos that he might easily have overlooked one; it had slipped down behind the stove, she had propped it on the windowsill and it had blown out into the farmyard, he had closed it up in the bed. It would be a note in her huge, wild round hand; it would start “Hi!” and be signed with x’s for kisses. It had been on the back of something inconsequential, which he had thrown out even as he searched through inconsequential papers for it. He emptied the wastebasket, but when its contents lay around his ankles he stopped the search and stood stock still, having suddenly imagined another sort of note entirely, a note with no “Hi!” and no kisses. It would resemble a love letter in its earnest, overwrought tone, but it wouldn’t be a love letter.

There were people he could call. When (after endless trouble) they had had a phone put in, amazing George Mouse, she had used to spend a good amount of time talking to relatives and quasi-relatives in a rapid and (to him) hilarious mixture of Spanish and English, shouting with laughter sometimes and sometimes just shouting. He had taken down none of the numbers she called; she herself often lost the scraps of paper and old envelopes she had written them on, and had to recite them out loud, eyes cast upward, trying out different combinations of the same numbers till she hit on one that sounded right.

And the phone book, when (just hypothetically, there was no immediate need) he consulted it, listed surprising columns, whole armies in fact, of Rodriguezes and Garcias and Fuenteses, with great pompous Christian names, Monserrate, Alejandro, such as he had never heard her use. And talk about pompous names, look at this last guy, Archimedes Zzzyandottie, what on earth.

He went to bed absurdly early, trying to hurry through the hours till her inevitable return; he lay listening to the thump and hum and squeak and wail of night, trying to sort from it the first intimations of her footfalls on the stair, in the hail; his heart quickened, banishing sleep, as he heard inhis mind’s ear the scratch of her red nails on the door. In the morning he woke with a start, unable to remember why she wasn’t next to him; and then remembered that he didn’t know.

Surely around the Farm someone would have heard something, but he would have to be circumspect; he restricted himself to inquiries that, if they ever got back to her, would reveal no possessive distress or fussy prying on his part. But the answers which he got from the farmers raking muck and setting out tomatoes were even less revealing than his questions.

“Seen Sylvie?”

“Sylvie?”

Like an echo. A kind of propriety kept him from approaching George Mouse, for it could be that it was to him she had fled, and he didn’t want to hear that from George, not that he had ever felt competition from his cousin, or jealousy, but, well, he didn’t like any of the possible conversations he could imagine himself and George having on the subject. A weird fear was growing in him. He saw George once or twice, trundling a wheelbarrow in and out of goat sheds, and studied him secretly. His state seemed unchanged.

At evening he fell into a rage, and imagined that, not content with leaving him flat, she had engineered a conspiracy of silence to cover her tracks. “Conspiracy of silence” and “cover her tracks,” he said aloud, more than once that long night, to the furnishings of the Folding Bedroom which were none of them hers. (Hers were at that moment being exclaimed over, one by one, elsewhere, as they were taken from the drawstring bags of the three brown-capped flat-faced thieves who had abstracted them; exclaimed over in cooing small voices one by one before being put away in a humpbacked trunk bound in black iron, to wait for their owner to come and claim them.)

And in the Second Place

The bartender at the Seventh Saint, “their” bartender, didn’t appear for work that night or the next or the next, though Auberon came every night to question him. The new guy wasn’t sure just what had happened to him. Gone to the Coast, maybe. Gone, anyway. Auberon, having no better post from which to keep vigil when he could no longer bear the Folding Bedroom or Old Law Farm, ordered another. One of those periodic upheavals in bar life had taken place among the clientele lately. As evening drew on, he recognized few regulars; they seemed to have been swept away by a new crowd, a crowd that did superficially resemble the crowd Sylvie and he had known, were in fact the same people in every respect except that they were not. The only familiar face was Leon’s. After an inward struggle and several gins, he managed a casual question.

“Seen Sylvie?”

“Sylvie?”

It might well be, of course, that Leon was hiding her in some apartment uptown. It might be that she had gone to the Coast with Victor the bartender. Sitting his stool before the broad brown window night after night, watching the crowds outside pass, he concocted these and several other explanations of what had happened to Sylvie, some pleasing to him, some distressing. He fitted each out with motives planted in the past, and a resolution; what she would do and say, and what he. These would grow stale, and like a failing baker he would remove them, still pretty but unsold, from his case, and replace them with others. He was at this on the Friday after her disappearance, the place packed with laughing folks more bent on pleasure, more exquisite than the diurnal crowd (though he couldn’t be sure they weren’t the same). He sat his stool as on a solitary rock amid their foamy rushing back and forth. The sweet scent of liquor mingled with their mingled perfumes, and all together they made the soughing sea-noise which, when he became a television writer, he would learn to call “walla”. Walla walla walla. Far away, waiters tended to the banquettes, drawing corks and laying cutlery. An older man, white-templed less it seemed from age than by choice but with an air of subtle ruin about his nattiness, poured wine for a dark, laughing woman in a broad-brimmed hat.

The woman was Sylvie.

One explanation that had occurred to him for her disappearance was her disgust with her poverty; often she had said, as she pawed furiously through her thrift-shop clothes and dime-store valuables, makeshifting an outfit, that what she needed was a rich old man, that she’d turn tricks if she only had the nerve—I mean look at this clothes, man! He looked now at her clothes, nothing he had ever seen before, the hat shading her face was velvet, the dress nicely constructed—lamplight fell, as though guided there, into its decolletage and lit the amber roundness of her breast; he could see it from where he sat. A small roundness.

Should he leave? How could he? Turmoil nearly blinded him. They had ceased laughing together, and raised their glasses now, topped up with lurid wine, and their eyes met like voluptuaries greeting. Good God, what nerve to bring him here. The man took an oblong case from within his jacket, and opened it to her. It would contain icy jewels blue and white. No, it was a cigarette case. She took one and he lit it for her. Befcre he could be harrowed by the characteristic way she had of smoking her occasional cigarette, as individual as her laugh or her footstep, thronging crowds intervened. When they parted, he saw her take up her purse (also new) and rise. The john. He hid his head. She would have to pass by him where he sat. Flee? No: there was a way, he thought, to greet her, there must be, but only seconds in which to find it. Hi. Hello. Hello? Heh-lo, fancy meeting… His heart was mad. Having calculated the moment at which she must pass by, he turned, supposing his face to be composed and his heart-thuds invisible.

Where was she? He thought a woman just then passing near him in a black hat was she, but it wasn’t. She had disappeared. Passed by him quickly? Hidden from him? She would have to pass him again on her return. He’d keep watch now. Maybe she’d leave, covered with shame, sneak away sticking Mr. Rich with the bill but no favors. The woman he had for a moment thought to be her—in fact years and inches different, with a practised lurch and a gravelvoiced excuse-me—worked her way past him, and through the massed exquisites, and took her seat with Mr. Rich.

How could he even for a moment have thought… His heart turned to an ember, to a cold clinker. The cheerful walla of the bar faded away into a sound of silence, and Auberon had a sudden horrible percipience, like a dropped ball of mental string madly unwinding, of what this vision meant, and what would now, must now, become of him; and he raised a trembling hand for the bartender, pushing bills urgently across the bar with the other.

And in the Third

He arose from his bench in the park. Traffic had grown loud as day grew bright, the City flinging itself against this enclave of morning. Without reservations now, but with a strange hope in his heart, he moved sunwise around the small pavilion and sat again, before Summer.

Bacchus and his pards; the flaccid wineskin and the checkered shade. The faun that follows, the nymph that flies. Yes: so it was, so it had been, so it would be. And below all this pictured lassitude was a sort of fountain, the sort where water gushes from a lion’s or a dolphin’s mouth: only this wasn’t a lion or a dolphin but a man’s face, a medallion of grief, a tragic mask with snaky hair; and the water was not issuing from his sad-clown mouth but from his eyes, falling in two slow and constant trickles down his cheeks and chin into a scummy pool below. It made a pleasant sound.

Hawksquill meanwhile had gone to her car in its underground den, and slipped into its waiting seat which was clad in leather as smooth as the backless gloves she then drew on. The wooden wheel carved for her grip and polished by her hands backed the long wolflike shape neatly around and faced it outward; with a clanking the garage door opened and the car’s growl opened fanwise into the May air.

Violet Bramble. John Drinkwater. The names made a room: a room where pampas grass stood in heavy floor vases purple and brown, and there were Ricketts drawings on the lily-patterned walls, and the drapes were drawn for a seance. In the fruitwood bookcases were Gurdjieff and other frauds. How could anything like a world-age be born there, or one die? Moving uptown in knight’s-moves as the clotted traffic forced her, her impatient tires casting up filth, she thought: yet it may well be; may well be that they have kept a secret for all these years, and a very great secret too; and it may be that she, Hawksquill, had come close to a very great mistake. It would not be the first time… The traffic around her loosened as she set out on the wide north road; her car threaded through it like a needle through old cloth, picking up speed. The boy’s directions had been eccentric and wandering, but she wouldn’t forget them, having impressed each one in place on an old folding Monopoly board she kept in her memory for just such a use.

Earth rolled its rotundity around, tilting the little park where Auberon sat one, two, three days more faceupwards to the changeless sun. The warm days were growing more frequent, and though never matching quite the earth’s regular progress, the warmth was already more constant, less skittish, soon not ever to be withdrawn. Auberon, hard at work there, hardly noticed; he kept on his overcoat; he had ceased to believe in spring, and a little warmth couldn’t convince him.

Press on, press on.

Not Her But This Park

The struggle was, as it had always been, to think rightly about what had happened, to come to conclusions that took in all aspects, that were mature; to be objective. There were multitudes of reasons why she might have left him, he knew that well, his faults were as numerous as the paving-stones of those walks, as rooted and thorny as that blooming hawthorn. There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.

No, her leaving him was sad, and a puzzle; it was her disappearance that was insane and maddening. How could she leave not a wrack behind? He had thought of her abducted, murdered; he had thought of her planning her own vanishing, just to drive him mad with bafflement, but why would she want such a madness? Certainly he had raged, frantic, at George Mouse, unable to bear it, tell me you son of a bitch where she is, what you’ve done with her, and saw his madness reflected in George Mouse’s honest fear as he said “Now now, now now,” and groped amid his souvenirs for a baseball bat. No, he had not gone about his searching in the most lucid frame of mind, but what the hell was to be expected?

What the hell was to be expected, when after four gins at the Seventh Saint he would see her passing by in the crowds outside the window, and after five find her sitting on the adjacent stool?

One trip only to Spanish Harlem, where he had seen her replicated on a dozen street corners, in halter tops, with baby carriages, chewing gum on crowded stoops, dusky roses all of them and none of them her, and he had abandoned that search. He had forgotten utterly, if he ever really knew, just which of these buildings on highly individual hut at the same time identical streets had been the ones she had taken him to; she might be in any of those aqua living rooms, watching through the plastic lace of curtains as he passed, any of those rooms lit by aeqeous television and the red points of votive candles. Even worse was the checking of jails, hospitals, madhouses, in all of which the inmates had obviously taken over, his calls were shunted from thug to loony to paralytic and finally cut off, by accident or on purpose, he had not made himself clear. If she had fallen into one of those public oubliettes… No. If it was madness to choose to believe she had not, he would rather be mad.

And in the street his name would be called. Softly, shamefacedly; happily, with relief; peremptorily. And he would stand looking up and down the avenue, searching, stock still amid the traffic, unable to see her but unwilling to move lest she lose sight of him. Sometimes it was called again, even more insistently, and still he would see nothing; and after a long time move on, with many halts and backward glances, having at last to say out loud to himself that it wasn’t her, wasn’t even his name that had been called, just forget it; and curious passersby would covertly watch him reason with himself.

Mad he must have seemed, but whose God damn fault was that? He had only tried to be sensible, not to become fixated and obsessed with the imaginary, he had struggled against it, he had, though he had succumbed in the end; Christ it must be hereditary, some taint passed down to him through the generations like colorblindness…

Well, it was over now. Whether or not it was possible for the park and the Art of Memory to yield up to him the secret of her whereabouts didn’t interest him; that was not what he was at work on there. What he hoped and believed, what seemed to him promised by the ease with which the statuary and greenery and footpaths accepted his story, was that once he had committed the whole of his year-long agony to them—no hope or degradation, no loss, no illusion unaccounted for—then he would someday remember, not his search, but these intersecting pathways that, leading always inward, led always away.

Not Spanish Harlem but that wire basket just outside the fence, with a cerveza Schaefer and a mango pit and a copy of El Diario crushed in it, MATAN as always in the headline.

Not Old Law Farm but that old marten-house on a pole, and its battling noisy occupants coming and going and building nests.

Not the Seventh Saint Bar & Grill but Bacchus in basrelief, or Silenus or whoever that was supported by goat-footed satyrs nearly as drunk as their god.

Not the weird pursuing pressure of his madness, inherited and inescapable, only that plaque fixed to the gate where he had entered: Mouse Drinkwater Stone.

Not the false Sylvies that had afflicted him when he was drunk and defenseless but the little girls, skipping rope and playing jacks and whispering together as they eyed him suspiciously, who were always the same yet always different, perhaps only in different outfits.

Not his season on the street but the seasons of this pavilion.

Not her but this park.

Press on, press on.

Never Never Never

The cold compassion of bartenders, he came to see, was like that of priests universal rather than personal, with charity for all and malice toward almost none. Firmly situated (smiling and making ritual and comforting gestures with glass and cloth) between sacrament and communicant, they commanded rather than earned love, trust, dependence. Best always to placate them. A big hello, and the tips subtle but sufficient.

“A gin, please, Victor, I mean Siegfried.”

Oh God that solvent! A season’s worth of summer afternoons dissolved in it as his father once, in a rare burst of enthusiasm for the sciences, had in school dissolved something blue-green (copper?) in a beaker of clear acid till it did not exist at all, didn’t stain its solvent with even the faintest veridical residue; what had become of it? What had become of that July?

The Seventh Saint was a cool cavern, cool and dark as any burrow. Through the windows the white heat showed the more blank and violent to his eyes when they were accustomed to the dark; he looked out at a parade of blinking, harrowed faces, bodies as nearly unclothed as decency and contrivance allowed them to be. Negroes turned gray and oily and white people red; only the Spanish bloomed, and even they sometimes looked a little blown and wilted. The heat was an affront, like winter’s cold; all seasons were errors here, two days only excepted in spring and a week in autumn full of huge possibilities, great glamor and sweetness.

“Hot enough for you?” said Siegfried. This was he who had replaced Auberon’s first friend Victor behind the Seventh Saint bar. Auberon had never enjoyed any rapport with this thick, stupid one, named Siegfried. He sensed an unpastoral cruelty in him, an enjoyment almost in others’ weaknesses, a Schadenfreude shadowing his ministry.

“Yes,” Auberon said. “Yes, it is.” Somewhere, far off, guns were fired. The way to avoid being disturbed by these, Auberon had decided, was to regard them as fireworks. You never anyway saw the slain in the streets, or as rarely as you saw the dead bodies of rabbits or birds in the woods. Somehow they were disposed of. “Cool in here, though,” he said with a smile.

Sirens wailed, going elsewhere. “Trouble someplace,” Siegfried said. “This parade.”

“Parade?”

“Russell Eigenblick. Big show on. You didn’t know?”

Auberon made gestures.

“Jeez, where you been? Did you know about the arrests?”

“No.”

“Some guys with guns and bombs and literature. Found them in the basement of some church. They were a church group. Planning some assassination or something.”

“They were going to assassinate Eigenblick?”

“Who the hell knows? Maybe they were his guys. I forget exactly. But he’s in hiding, only there’s this big march on today.”

“For him or against him?”

“Who the hell knows?” Siegfried moved off. If Auberon wanted details, let him get a paper. The bartender had just been making conversation; he had better things to do than be grilled. Auberon drank, abashed. Outside, people were hurrying by, in groups of two and three, looking behind them. Some were shouting, others laughing.

Auberon turned from the window. Surreptitiously, he counted his money, contemplating the evening and the night ahead. Soon he would have to move downward in the drinker’s scale, from this pleasant—more than pleasant, necessary, imperative—retreat to less pleasant places, brightly-lit, naked, with sticky plastic bars surmounted by the waxy faces of aged patrons, their eyes fixed on the absurdly cheap prices posted on the mirror before them. Dram shops, as old books had it. And then? He could drink alone, of course, and wholesale so to speak: but not in Old Law Farm, not in the Folding Bedroom. “Another of these,” he said mildly, “when you get a chance.”

He had that morning decided, not for the first time, that his search was over. He wouldn’t sally forth today to follow illusory clues. She couldn’t be found who wanted not to be found. His heart had cried out, But what if she does? What if she is only lost, and searching for you even as you search for her, what if only yesterday you came within a block of one another, what if at this moment she sits somewhere nearby, on a park bench, a stoop, Somehow unable to find her way back to you, what if she is even now thinking He’ll never believe this crazy story (whatever it would be) if only I find him, if only; and the tears of loneliness on her brown cheeks… But that was all old. It was the Crazy Story Idea, and he knew it well; it had once been a bright hope, but it had over time condensed to this burning point, not a hope but a reproach, not even (no! No more!) a spur; and that was why it could be snuffed.

He’d snuffed it, brutally, and come to the Seventh Saint. A day off.

There was only one further decision then to make, and he would (with the help of this gin, and more of the same) make that today. She hadn’t ever existed at all! She was a figment. It would be hard, at first, to convince himself of how sensible a solution this was to his difficulty; but it would grow easier.

“Never existed,” he muttered. “Never never never.”

“Wazzat?” said Siegfried, who usually couldn’t hear the plainest request for replenishment.

“Storm,” Auberon said, for just then there was a sound which if it wasn’t cannon was thunder.

“Cool things off,” said Siegfried. What the hell could he care, Auberon thought, aestivating in this cave.

Out of the roll of thunder came the more rhythmic beats of a big bass drum far downtown. More people were in the streets, driven forward by or perhaps heralding the oncoming of something big which they looked now and again over their shoulders at. Police cruisers shot into the intersections of street and avenue, blue lights revolving. Among those coming up the street—they were walking heedlessly in the middle of the roadway, that looked exhilarating to Auberon—were several wearing the blousy shirts of many colors worn by Eigenblick’s adherents; these, and others in dark glasses and narrow suits, with what could have been hearing aids stuck into their ears but probably were not, discussed things with the sweating policemen, making gestures. A portable conga band, contrapuntal to the far-off beating bass drum, proceeded northward, surrounded by laughing brown and black people and by photographers. Their rhythms hurried the negotiators. The suited men seemed to command the police, who were helmeted and armed but apparently will-less. The thunder, more distinct, rolled again.

It seemed to Auberon that he had discovered, since coming to the City, or at least since he had spent a lot of time staring at crowds, that humanity, City humanity anyway, fell into only a few distinct types—not physical or social or racial, exactly, though the qualities that could be called physical or social or racial helped qualify people. He couldn’t say just how many of these types there were, or describe any of them at all precisely, or even keep any of them in his mind when he didn’t have an actual example before him; but he found himself continually saying to himself, “Ah, there’s one of that sort of person.” It certainly hadn’t helped in his search for Sylvie that, however distinct she was, however utterly individual, the vague type she belonged to could throw up cognates of her everywhere to torment him. A lot of them didn’t even look like her. They were her sisters, though; and they harrowed hini, far more than the jovens and lindas that superficially resembled her, like those that, on the lean muscled arms of their boyfriends or honorary husbands, now followed the conga band up the street, dancing. A larger group, of some status, was coming into view behind them.

These were decently dressed matrons and men, walking abreast, black women with broad bosoms and pearls and glasses, men in humble pork-pie hats, many skinny and stooped. He had often wondered how it is that great fat black women can grow faces, as they get older, that are hard, chiseled, granitic, tough and leathery, all that is associated with the lean. These people supported a street-wide banner on poles, with half-moon holes cut in it to keep it from being filled like a sail and carrying them off, whose letters, picked out in sequins, spelled out CHURCH OF ALL STREETS.

“That’s the church,” Siegfried said—he had moved his glass-wiping activities nearer the window in order to watch. “The church where they found those guys.”

“With the bombs?”

“They got a lot of nerve.”

Since Auberon still didn’t know whether the bombers found in the Church of All Streets were for or against whoever this parade was for or against, he supposed this could be true.

The Church of All Streets contingent, the decent poor mostly as far as Auberon could see but with one or two Eigenblick blousons marching beside them, and one of the hearing-aides watching them too, was escorted by the many-eyed press on foot and in vans, and by armed horsemen, and by the curious. As though the Seventh Saint were a tidepool, and the tide were rising, two or three of these spilled through its doors, bringing in the hot breath of day and the odor of their marching. They complained loudly of the heat, more in high-pitched whistles and low groans than in words, and ordered beers. “Here you are, take this,” said one, and held out something to Auberon on his yellow palm.

It was a narrow strip of paper, like a Chinese cookie fortune. Part of a sentence was crudely printed on it, but the sweat of the man’s hand had obscured part of that, and all Auberon could make out was the word “message”. Two of the others were comparing similar strips of paper, laughing and wiping beer-foam from their lips.

“What’s it mean?”

“That’s for you to figure out,” the man said gaily. Siegfried put a drink in front of Auberon. “Maybe if you make a match, you win a prize. A lottery. Huh? They’re handing ’em out all over town.”

And indeed now outside Auberon saw a line of whitefaced mimes or clowns cakewalking along in the wake of the Church of All Streets, doing simple acrobatics, firing cap pistols, tipping battered hats, and distributing among the jostling crowd that thronged around them these small strips of paper. People took them, children begged for more, they were studied and compared. If no one took them, the clowns let them flutter away into a breeze that was beginning to rise. One of the clowns turned the handle of a siren he had hung around his neck, and an eerie wail could be faintly heard.

“What on earth,” Auberon said.

“Who the hell knows,” Siegfried said.

With a crash of brass instruments, a marching band began, and the street was suddenly filled with bright silken flags, barred, starred, snapping and furling in the thunder-wind. Great cheers rose. Double eagles screamed from some banners, double eagles with double hearts aflame in their bosoms, some clutching roses in their beaks, myrtle, swords, arrows, bolts of lightning in their talons; surmounted with crosses, crescents, or both, bleeding, effulgent or aflame. They seemed to stream and flutter on the terrific wave of military sound rising from the band, which was not uniformed but dressed in top hats, tails, and paper bat-wing collars. A royal-blue gold-fringed gonfalon was born before them, but was gone before Auberon could read it.

The bar patrons went to the window. “What’s going on? What’s going on?” The mimes or clowns worked the borders of the march, handing out slips, avoiding grabbing hands dexterously as they somersaulted or rode each other’s shoulders. Auberon, well oiled by now, was exhilarated, as they all were, but he as much because he had no idea for what all this crazy energy was being expended as for the quick-stepping, flag-waving thing itself. More refugees barged through the doors of the Seventh Saint. For a moment the music grew loud. They weren’t a good band, cacaphonous in fact; but the big drum kept the time.

“Good God,” said a haggard man in a wrinkled Suit and a nearly brimless straw fedora. “Good God, those people.”

“Check it out,” said a black man. More entered, black, white, other. Siegfried looked startled, at bay. He’d expected a quiet afternoon. A sudden chattering roar drowned out their orders, and outside, descending right into the valley of the street, a sharpstuttering helicopter hove, hovered, reascended, scanning, raising winds in the streets; people clutched their hats, running in circles like farmyard fowl beneath a hawk. Commands issued from the copter in meaningless shouts of gravelly static, repeated over and over just as meaninglessly but more insistently. In the street, people shouted back defiance, and the helicopter rose away, turning carefully. Cheers and raspberries for the dragon’s going.

“Whaddy say whaddy say?” the partrons asked each other.

“Maybe,” Auberon said to no one, “warning them it’s about to rain.”

It was. They didn’t care. More conga artists were passing, nearly swamped by throngs, all chanting to their beat: “Let it fall, let it rain; let it fall, let it rain.” Fights were breaking out, shoving contests mostly, girl-friends shrieked, bystanders pulled apart contestants. The parade seemed to be turning into a swarming culture, and growing a riot. But car horns honked, insistently, and the millers were parted by several black limousines with fast-fluttering pennants on their fenders. Hurrying beside the cars were many of the suited, dark-spectacled men, looking everywhere and nowhere, faces grim, not having fun. The scene had darkened, quickly, ominously, the harsh dusty orange light of late afternoon snuffed like a klieg-light. Black clouds must have extinguished the sun. And even the neat haircuts of the suited aides were ruffled by the rising wind. The band had ceased, only the drum went on, sounding threnodic and solemn. Crowds pressed closely around the cars, curious, perhaps angry. They were warned away. Wreaths of dark flowers dressed some of the cars. A funeral? Nothing could be seen within their tinted windows.

The patrons of the Seventh Saint had grown quiet, respectful or resentful.

“The last best hope,” the sad man in the straw fedora said. “The goddam last best goddam hope.”

“All over,” said another, and drank deeply. “All over but the shouting.” The cars passed away, the crowds falling in behind them, filling up their wake; the drum was like a dying heartbeat. Then, as uptown the band rang out again, there was a terrific crash of thunder, and everyone in the bar ducked at once, and then looked at one another and laughed, embarrassed to have been startled. Auberon finished his fifth gin in a gulp, and, pleased with himself for no reason but that, said “Let it fall, let it rain.” He thrust his empty glass toward Siegfried, more commandingly than he usually did. “Another.”

The rain began all at once, big drops spattering audibly on the tall window and then falling in great volumes, hissing furiously as though the city it fell on were red-hot. Rain coursing down the tinted glass obscured the parade’s events. It looked now like ranks of people wearing hoods, holes cut out for eyes, or paper masks like welder’s masks, carrying clubs or batons, were coming behind the limos and meeting some resistance; whether they were part of the parade or another show in opposition to it was hard to tell. The Seventh Saint filled rapidly with clamoring folk fleeing the rain. One of the mimes or clowns, his white face running, came in bowing, but certain shouts of greeting seemed to him hostile; he bowed out again.

Thunder, rain, sunset swallowed up in stormy darkness; crowds pouring through the pouring streets in the glare of streetlights. Breaking of glass, shouts, tumult, sirens, a war on. Those in the bar rushed out, to see or join in, and were replaced by others fleeing, who had seen enough. Auberon held his stool, calm, happy, lifting his drink with a suggestion of extended pinkie. He smiled beatifically at the troubled man in the straw fedora, who stood next to him. “Drunk as a lord,” he said. “Quite literally. I mean lunk as a drord is when a lord is drunk. If you follow me.” The man sighed and turned away.

“No, no,” Siegfried shouted, waving his hands before him like shutters: for barging in were a bunch of Eigenblick adherents, their colored shirts plastered to their bodies with rain, supporting one among them who had been hurt: a spiderweb of blood over his face. They ignored Siegfried; the crowd, murmuring, let them in. The man next to Auberon stared openly and truculently at them, speaking in his mind to them in unguessable words. Someone vacated a table, upsetting a drink, and the wounded one was lowered into a chair.

They left him there to recuperate, and pushed to the bar. The man in the fedora was displaced elsewhere. A brief mood seemed to pass over Siegfried’s face that he wouldn’t serve them, but he thought better of it. One mounted the stool next to Auberon, a small person over whose shivering back was draped someone else’s colored shirt. Another rose on tiptoe, glass raised high, and gave a toast: “To the Revelation!” Many cheered, for or against. Auberon leaned toward the person next to him and said, “What revelation?”

Excited, shivering, brushing rain from her face, she turned to Auberon. She’d got her hair cut, very short, like a boy’s. “The Revelation,” she said, and handed him a slip of paper. Not wanting to look away from her now that she was next to him, afraid if he looked away she would not be there when he looked back, he held the paper up to his near-blinded eyes. It said: No fault of your own.

Doesn’t Matter

In fact there were two Sylvies beside him, one for each eye. He clapped a hand over one eye and said, “Long time no see.”

“Yah.” She looked around at her companions, smiling, still shivering, but caught up in their excitement and glory.

“So where did you get to anyway?” Auberon said. “Where’ve you been? By the way.” He knew he was drunk, and must speak carefully and mildly so that Sylvie wouldn’t see and be ashamed of him.

“Around,” she said.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, and would have gone on to say I don’t suppose if you weren’t really Sylvie here now that you’d tell me so, but this was drowned out by further toasts and comings and goings, and all he said was, “I mean if you were a figment.”

“What?” Sylvie said.

“I mean how’ve you been!” He felt his head wobbling on his neck, and stopped it. “Can I buy you a drink?” She laughed at that: drinks for Eigenblick’s people were not to be bought tonight. One of her companions caught her up and kissed her. “Fall of the City!” he cried hoarsely, been shouting all day no doubt. “Fall of the City!”

“Heeeey!” she answered, a kind of agreement with his enthusiasm rather than exactly with his sentiment. She turned back to Auberon then; she lowered her eyes, she moved her hand toward him, she was about to explain everything; but no, she only picked up his drink, sipped from it (raising her eyes to him over its rim) and put it down again with a grimace of disgust.

“Gin,” he said.

“Tastes like alcolado,” she said.

“Well, it’s not supposed to be good,” he said, “only good for you,” and heard in his own voice a joking Auberon-and-Sylvie tone that had been so long absent from it that it was like hearing old music, or tasting a long-untasted food. Good for you, yes, for a further thought about her figmentary nature was trying to crack his consciousness like an oyster-knife, so he drank again, beaming at her as she beamed at the merry madness that boiled around them. “How’s Mr. Rich?” he said.

“He’s okay.” Mum, not looking at him. He wasn’t to pursue such subjects. But he was desperate to know her heart.

“You’ve been happy, though?”

She shrugged. “Busy.” A small smile. “A busy little girl.”

“Well, I mean…” He stopped. The last dim bulb of reason in his brain showed him Silence and Circumspection, and then went out. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately, you know, well, you could’ve guessed, about us and all, I mean you and me; and what I figured out is that really it’s basically okay, and all right, really.” She had cupped her cheek in her hand, and was looking up at him rapt yet inattentive, as she had always been at his disquisitions. “You moved on, is all, right? I mean things change, life changes; how could I complain about that? I couldn’t have any argument with that.” It was suddenly sweetly clear: “It’s as though I were with you like in one stage of your development—like a pupa stage, or a nymph stage. But you outgrew that. Became a different person. Like a butterfly does.” Yes: she had broken from the transparent shell which was the girl he had known and touched; and (as he had the empty isinglass sculptures of locusts when he was a kid) he had preserved the shell, all he had of her, all the more precious for its terrible fragility and the perfect abandonment it embodied. She meanwhile (though out of his sight and ken, imaginable only by induction) had grown wings and flown: was not only elsewhere but something else as well.

She wrinkled her nose and opened her mouth in a huh? “What stage?” she said.

“Some early stage,” he said.

“What was the word, though?”

“Nymph,” he said. Thunder crashed; the eye of the storm had passed; rain wept again. And was this before him then nothing but the old transparency? Or her in the flesh? It was important to get these things straight right off the bat. And how anyway could it be that her flesh was what he was most intensely left with, and was it the flesh of her soul or the soul of her flesh? “It doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice thick with happiness and his heart awash in the gin of human kindness; he forgave her everything, in exchange for this presence, whatever it was. “Dozen madder.”

“Listen, it really doesn’t,” she said, and raised his own glass to him before sipping it gingerly again. “Go with the flow, y’know.”

“Trooty is booth, booth trooty,” he said “that is all ye know on earth, and all…”

“I need to go,” she said. “To the john.”

That was the last thing he clearly remembered, that she returned from the john, though he hadn’t expected her to; when he saw her returning, his heart rose as it had when she had turned to face him on the stool next to him; he forgot that he had denied her thrice, had decided to decide she had never existed; that was absurd anyway, when here she was, when in the pelting rain outside (this glimpse only he had) he could kiss her: her rain-wet flesh was as cold as any ghost’s, her nipples as hard as unripe fruit, but he imagined that she warmed.

Sylvie & Bruno Concluded

There are charms that last, keeping the world long suspended in their power, and charms that do not last, that drain quickly away and leave the world as it was. Liquor is well known for not lasting.

Auberon was wrenched awake just after dawn, after a few hour of deathlike unconsciousness. He knew instantly that he should be dead, that death was his only appropriate condition, and that he was not dead. He cried out softly and hoarsely,, “No, oh God no,” but oblivion was far away and even sleep had fled utterly. No: he was alive and the wretched world was around him; his staring eyeballs showed him the Folding Bedroom’s crazed map of a ceiling, so many Devil’s Islands in plaster. He didn’t need to investigate to find that Sylvie wasn’t next to him.

There was, however, someone next to him, bound up in the damp sheet (it was hot as hell already, chill sweat circled Auberon’s neck and brow). And someone else was speaking to him; speaking from a corner of the Folding Bedroom, soothingly, confidentially: “Oh for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green…”

The voice came from a small red plastic radio, an antique with the word Silvertone across it in bas-relief script. Auberon had never known it to work before. The voice was black, a silky DJ’s voice, black but cultured. God, they’re everywhere, Auberon thought, overwhelmed with horrid strangeness, as a traveler sometimes is to find so many foreigners in other lands. “Away! Away! For I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy…”

Auberon climed slowly like a cripple from the bed. Who the hell was this beside him anyway. A brown shoulder big with muscle could be seen; the sheet breathed softly. Snored. Christ what have I done. He was about to draw down the sheet when it moved of its own accord, snuffling, and a shapely leg, flat-shinned, with curly dark hair, came out like a further clue; yes it was a man, that was certain. He carefully opened the door of the toilet, and took out his overcoat. He put it on over his nakedness, feeling with loathing the clammy touch of its lining against his skin. In the kitchen he opened cupboards with trembling skeleton’s hands. The dusty vacuity within the cupboards was for some reason ghastly. In the last he opened there was a bottle of Doña Mariposa rum with an inch or two of amber fluid in it. His stomach turned; but he took it out. He went to the door, with a glance at the bed—his new friend still slept— and then out.

He sat on the stairs in the hallway, staring into the stairwell, the bottle in both hands. He missed Sylvie and comfort so dreadfully, with such a parched thirst, that his mouth hung open and he leaned forward as though to scream or vomit. But his eyes wouldn’t yield tears. The vivifying fluids had all been drawn from him; he was a husk; the world was a husk too. And this man in the bed. He unscrewed (it took some application) the cap of the rum bottle, and, turning its accusatory label away from him, he poured fire on his sands. Darkling I listen. Keats, in smoothie blackface, slid out under the door and insinuatingly into his ear. Now more than ever seems it rich to die. Rich: he drank the last of the rum and rose, gasping and swallowing bitter spittle. To thy high requiem become a sot.

He recapped the empty bottle and left it on the stair. In the mirror hung over the pretty table at the hall’s end he caught a glimpse of someone forlorn. The very word is like a bell. He looked away. He went into the Folding Bedroom, a golem, his dry clay animated briefly by rum. He could speak now. He went to the bed. The person there had thrown off his sheet. It was Sylvie, only modeled in male flesh, and no charm: this goatish boy was real. Auberon shook his shoulder. Sylvie’s head rolled on the pillow. Dark eyes opened momentarily, saw Auberon, and closed again.

Auberon bent over the bed and spoke into his ear. “Who are you?” He spoke carefully and slowly. Might not understand our lingo. “What is you name?” The boy rolled over, woke, brushed his hand over his face from forehead to chin as though to magic away the resemblance to Sylvie (but it stayed) and said in a morningroughened voice, “Hey. What’s happening?”

“What is your name?”

“Hey, hi. Jesus Christ.” He lay back on the pillow, smacking his lips. He rubbed his knuckles in his eyes like a child. He scratched and stroked himself shamelessly, as though pleased to find himself to hand. He smiled at Auberon and said, “Bruno.”

“Oh.”

“You membah.”

“Oh.”

“We got frone outta dap bah.”

“Oh. Oh.”

“Boy you was drunk.”

“Oh.”

“Membah? You coont even…”

“Oh. No. No.” Bruno was looking at him with easy affection, still stroking himself.

“You said Jus wait,” Bruno said, and laughed. “That was you lass words, man.”

“Oh yes?” He didn’t remember; but he felt a weird regret, and almost laughed, and almost wept, that he had failed Sylvie when she was Sylvie. “Sorry,” he said.

“Hey listen,” Bruno said generously.

He wanted to move away, he knew he ought; he wanted to close his coat, which hung open. But he couldn’t. If he did so, if he let this cup pass away from him, then the last dry dregs of last night’s charm within it would not be licked up, and they might be all he had forever. He stared at Bruno’s open face, simpler and sweeter than Sylvie’s, unmarked by his passions, strong though Sylvie had always said they were. Friendly: tears, double-distilled because there was so little water within to draw on, burned the orbits of his eyes: friendly was the word to describe Bruno. “Do you,” he said, “have a sister?”

“Shichess.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know,” Auberon said, “where she is?”

“Nah.” He dismissed her with an easy gesture, her own gesture translated. “Ain’t seen her in munce. She gets around.”

“Yes.” If he could just put his hands in Bruno’s hair. Just for a moment; that would be enough. And close his burning eyes. The thought made him faint, and he leaned against the headboard.

“A real mof,” Bruno said. With an unself-conscious languor he disposed himself on the bed so that there would be room there for Auberon.

“A what?”

“A mof. Sylvie.” Laughing, he linked his thumbs together, and with his hands made a winged creature. He made it fly a little, smiling at Auberon; and then made it, wings fluttering, summon Auberon to follow it.

How Far You Have Gone

Fled is that music.

Sure that Burno slept as his sister did, dead to the world, Auberon took no precautions to be quiet; he hauled out his belongings from chest and closet and flung them around. He unfolded his crushed green knapsack and into it put his poems and the rest of the contents of his study, his razor and his soap, and as many of his clothes as would go wadded in; he stuffed what money he could find into the pockets of it.

Gone, gone, he thought; dead, dead; empty, empty. But by no incantation could he exorcise even the palest, most illusory ghost of her from this place; and so there was only one thing to do, and that was flee. Flee. He strode from side to side of the room, looking hastily into drawers and shelves. His abused sex swung as he walked; at last he drew shorts and pants over it, but it glowed reproachfully even hidden. The deed had proved more operose than he’d expected. Oh well, oh well. Forcing a pair of socks into the knapsack’s pocket he found something he had left there: something wrapped in paper. He dug it out.

It was the present he had had from Lily the day that he had left Edgewood to come to the City and seek his fortune; a small present, wrapped in white paper. Open it when you think of it, she’d said.

He looked around the Folding Bedroom. Empty. Or as empty as it would ever be. Bruno weighted the dishonored bed, and his coat of many colors hung on the velvet chair. A mouse, or a brief hallucination of one (had it already come to that? He felt that it had) sped across the floor of the kitchen and hid itself. He tore open Lily’s little package.

It turned out to be a small machine of some sort. He stared at it uncomprehendingly for some time, turning it in his sticky and still-trembling fingers, before he realized what it was: it was a pedometer. The handy kind that attaches to your belt and tells you, whenever you look at it, how far you’ve gone.

Bottom of a Bottle

The little park was filling up.

Why had he not known that love could be like that? Why hadn’t anyone told him? If he had known, he would never have embarked on it; or at least not so gladly.

Why did he, a young man of some intelligence after all, and of good family, know nothing about anything at all?

He had even been able to suppose, when he left Old Law Farm for the streets of the City foul with summer and decline, that he fled Sylvie rather than merely pursuing her farther and in even less warm directions. Drunkards, Great-aunt Cloud had used to say, drink to escape their troubles. If that was his case—and surely he had tried his best to become a drunkard—then how could it be that, not every time but often enough, he found Sylvie there, just there where Cloud said drinkers find surcease, at the bottom of a bottle?

Well: press on. Autumn was harvest, of course, the bound wheat-sheaf, the hale fruit. And faintly in the distance, cheeks puffed out and eyebrows fierce, Brother North-wind came on apace.

Was the girl who with a sickle cut the heavy-eared grain the same one who set out shoots in spring with a little trowel? And who was the oldster, huddled up on the earth piled with riches, brooding in profile? Thinking of winter…

In November the three of them—he, and she, and Fred Savage, his mentor in bumhood, who had begun appearing to him as often in that season as Sylvie did, though more solidly than she— rode a park bench, somewhat afloat in the darkening city, huddled up but not uncomfortable; the newspapers inside Fred Savage’s overcoat crackled when he moved, though he moved only to lift brandy to his lips. They had done singing, and reciting drinker’s poetry—.

and sat quiet now contemplating that fearful hour before the City’s lights are lit.

“Old Man Hawk’s in town,” Fred Savage said.

“Wazzat?”

“Winter,” Sylvie said, thrusting her hands into her armpits.

“Gonna move these bones,” Fred Savage said, crackling, sipping. “Gonna move these old cold bones to Florida.”

“All right,” Sylvie said, as though at last somebody had said something sensible.

“Old Man Hawk is not my friend,” Fred Savage said. “Price of a Greyhound to outrun that boy. Philly, Baltimore, Charleston, Atlanta, J’ville, St. Pete. Miami. Ever see a pelican?”

He hadn’t. Sylvie, from ancientest childhood, summoned them up, frigates of the Caribbean evening, absurd and beautiful. “Yas yas,” Fred Savage said. “Beak holds more than his belican. Tears out the feathers of his bosom, and feeds they young ones on the blood of his heart. His heart’s blood. Oh Fonda.”

Fred had taken the autumn off, and perhaps the rest of his life as well. He had come to Auberon’s aid, in his most need to be by his side, just as he had said he would on the day when he had first guided him through the City to the offices of Petty, Smilodon & Ruth. Auberon didn’t question this providence, or any other the City gave. He had thrown himself on the City’s mercy, and found that, like a strict mistress, she was kind to those who submitted utterly, held nothing back. By degrees he learned to do that; he who had always been fastidious, and more fastidious than that for Sylvie’s sake, grew filthy, City dirt worked itself into his fabric ineradicably, and though when drunk he would walk for blocks to find public facilities, damn few of them and dangerous too, between these spurts of scrupulosity he mocked himself for them. By autumn his knapsack was a useless rag, a cerement, and anyway had ceased to be large enough to hold a life lived on the streets; so like the rest of the secret City’s epopts he carried paper shopping bags, one inside the other for strength, advertising in his degraded person many great establishments in turn.

And so he went on, hooded in gin, sleeping in streets sometimes full of riot, sometimes quiet as a necropolis, always as far as he was concerned empty. He learned from Fred and from ancients who had instructed Fred that the great days of the secret commonwealth of bums were over, the days when there were kings and wise men on Lower Broadway, the days when the City was marked with their glyphs whose code only the initiate could read, when the drunk, the gypsy, the madman and the philosopher had their ranks, as firm as deacon, sexton, priest and bishop. Of course, over. Join any enterprise, Auberon thought, and you’ll find its great days are over.

He didn’t need to beg. The money he extracted from Petty, Smilodon & Ruth was given him as much to rid their offices of his noisome figure as for any right he had to it—he knew that, and took to appearing there only at his most hideous, often with Fred Savage in tow—but it was enough for a drunk’s few dietary needs, and the odd flop when he feared freezing to death pillowed in booze as some of his buddies’ buddies had reportedly done, and for gin. He never sank to fulsome wine, he gave himself credit for that, he resisted that final degradation even though it was apparently only in the transparent fire of gin that Sylvie (like a Salamander) could sometimes appear.

His topside knee was growing cold. Why his knee should grow cold first he didn’t know; neither his toes nor his nose had felt it yet. “Greyhound, huh,” he said. He recrossed his legs and said, “I can raise the price.” He asked Sylvie: “You want to go?”

“Sure I do,” Sylvie said.

“Sure I do,” said Fred.

“I was speaking to, I wasn’t speaking to you just then,” Auberon said.

Fred put his arm gently around Auberon’s shoulder. What ghosts plagued his friends he was always careful to be kind to. “Well, sure she do,” he said, his yellow eyes opening enough to gaze on Auberon in a way Auberon had never decided was predatory or kindly. “And bes’ of all,” he said, smiling, “she don’t need a ticket.”

Door into Nowhere

Of all the lapses and losses of his sodden memory, the one that troubled Auberon most later on was that he couldn’t remember whether or not he had gone to Florida. The Art of Memory showed him a few ragged palms, some stucco or concrete-block buildings painted pink or turquoise, the smell of eucalyptus; but if that was all, solid and unremovable though it seemed, it might well be imagination only, or only remembered pictures. Just as vivid were his memories of Old Man Hawk on avenues as wide as wind, perched on the gloved wrists of doormen along the Park, his beard of feathers rimy and his talons sharp to grip the entrails. But he had, Somehow, not frozen to death; and surely even more than palms and jalousies, a City winter survived on the street would, he thought, stick in the memory. Well: he hadn’t been paying close attention: the only thing that really engaged him were those islands where red neon signs beckoned to the wanderer (they were always red, he learned) and the endless replication of those flat bottles clear as water, in some of which, as in a box of children’s cereal, there would be a prize. And the only thing he vividly recalled was how, at the end of winter, there were no more prizes. His drunkenness was empty. There were only the lees left to drink; and he drank them.

Why had he been in the bowels of the old Terminus? Had he just returned by train from the Sunshine State? Or was it chance? Seeing three of most things, a damp leg where he had pissed himself some time before, in the small hours he strode purposefully (though going nowhere; if he didn’t stride purposefully he would take a header; this walking business was more complicated than most people supposed) down ramps and through catacombs. A fake nun, wimple filthy and eyes alert (Auberon had long ago realized this figure was a man) shook a begging cup at him, more in irony than expectation. He passed on. The Terminus, never silent, was as silent now as it ever was; the few travelers and the lost gave him a wide berth, though he glowered at them only to make them singular, three of each was too many. One of the virtues of drink was how it reduced life to these simple matters, which engaged all the attention; seeing, walking, raising a bottle accurately to the hole in your face. As though you were two years old again. No thoughts but simple ones. And an imaginary friend to talk to. He stopped walking; he had come up against a more-or-less solid wall; he rested and thought Lost.

A simple thought. One simple singular thought, and the rest of life and time a great flat featureless gray plain extending in all directions; consciousness a vast ball of dirty fuzz filling it to its limits, with only the hooded fire of that one thought alive within it.

“What?” he said, starting away from the wall, but no one had spoken to him. He looked around at the place where he stood: a vaulted intersection where four corridors met in a cross. He stood in a corner. The ribbed vaulting, where it joined in descending to the floor, made what seemed to be a slot or narrow opening, but which was only joined bricks; a sort of slot, which, it seemed, if you faced into it you might peer through.

“Hello?” he whispered to the darkness.

“Hello?” Nothing.

“Hello.” Louder this time.

“Softer,” she said.

“What?”

“Speak real soft,” Sylvie said. “Don’t turn around now.”

“Hello. Hello.”

“Hi there. Isn’t this great?”

“Sylvie,” he whispered.

“Just like you were right next to me.”

“Yes,” he said; “yes,” he whispered. He pressed his consciousness forward into the darkness. It folded up closed for a moment, then opened again. “What?” he said.

“Well,” she said, in a small voice, and after a darkling pause, “I think I’m going.”

No, he said. No, I bet not, I bet not; why?

“Well, I lost my job, see,” she whispered.

“Job?”

“With a ferry. A real old guy. He was nice. But boring. Back and forth all day…” He felt her withdraw somewhat. “So I guess I’ll go. Destiny calls,” she said; she said it self-mockingly, making light of it to cheer him.

“Why?” he said.

“Whisper,” she whispered.

“Why do you want to do this to me?”

“Do what, baby?”

“Well why don’t you just God damn go then? Why don’t you just go and leave me alone? Go go go.” He stopped, and listened. Silence and vacuity. A deep horror flew over him. “Sylvie?” he said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Where? Where are you going?”

“Well, further in,” she said.

“Further in where?”

“Here.”

He gripped the cold bricks to steady himself. His knees were falling back and forth from locked to loose. “Here?”

“The further in you go,” she said, “the bigger it gets.”

“God damn it,” he said. “God damn it, Sylvie.”

“It’s weird here,” she said. “Not what I expected. I’ve learned a lot, though. I guess I’ll get used to it.” She paused, and the silence filled the darkness. “I miss you, though.”

“Oh god,” he said.

“So I’ll go,” she said, her whisper already fainter.

“No,” he said, “no no no.”

“But you just said…”

“Oh god Sylvie,” he said, and his knees gave way; he knelt heavily, still facing into the darkness. “Oh god,” and he thrust his face into the nonexistent place he spoke into, and said other things, apologizing, begging abjectly, though for what he no longer knew.

“No, listen,” she whispered, embarrassed. “I think you’re great, really, I always did. Don’t say that stuff.” He was weeping now, uncomprehending, incomprehensible. “Anyway I have to,” she said. Her voice was already faint and distant, and her attention turning elsewhere. “Okay. Hey, you should see all the stuff they gave me… Listen, papo. Bendicion. Be good. G’bye.”

Early train-takers and men come to open tawdry shops passed him later, still there, long unconscious, on his knees in the corner like a bad boy, face wedged into the door into nowhere. With the ancient courtesy or indifference of the City, no one disturbed him, though some shook their heads sadly or in disgust at him as they passed: an object-lesson.

Ahead and Behind

Tears were on his cheeks too in the little park where he sat, having salvaged this, the last of Sylvie, the living end. When he had at last awakened in the Terminus still in that position, he didn’t know how or why he had come to be there; but he remembered now. The Art of Memory had given it all back to him, all, to do with what he could.

What you didn’t know; what you didn’t know arising, spontaneously, surprisingly, out of the proper arrangement of what you did: or rather what you knew all along but didn’t know you knew. Every day here he had come closer to it; every night, lying awake at the Lost Sheep Mission, amid the hawkings and nightmares of his fellows, as he walked these paths in memory, he approached what he didn’t know: the simple single lost fact. Well, he had it now. Now he saw the puzzle complete.

He was cursed: that’s all.

Long ago, and he knew when though not why, a curse had been laid on him, a charm, a disfigurement that made him for good a searcher, and his searches at the same time futile. For reasons of their own (who could say what, malevolence only, possibly, probably, or for a recalcitrance in him they wanted to punish, a recalcitrance they had however not punished out of him, he would never give in) they had cursed him: they had attached his feet on backwards, without his noticing it, and then sent him out that way to search.

That had been (he knew it now) in the dark of the woods, when Lilac had gone away, and he had called after her as though his heart would break. From that moment he had been a searcher, and his searching feet pointed Somehow in the wrong direction.

He’d sought Lilac in the dark of the woods, but of course he’d lost her; he was eight years old and only growing older, though against his will; what could he expect?

He’d become a secret agent to plumb the secrets withheld from him, and for as long as he sought them, for just so long were they withheld from him.

He’d sought Sylvie, but the pathways he found, seeming always to lead to her heart, led always away. Reach toward the girl in the mirror, who looks out at you smiling, and your hand meets itself at the cold frontier of the glass.

Well: all done now. The search begun so long ago ended here. The little park his great-great-grandfather made he had remade into an emblem as complete, as fully-charged, as any trump in Great-aunt Cloud’s deck or any cluttered hall in Ariel Hawksquill’s memory mansions. Like those old paintings where a face is made up of a cornucopia of fruit, every wrinkle, eyelash, and throat-fold made of fruits and grains and victuals realistic enough to pluck up and eat, this park was Sylvie’s face, her heart, her body. He had dismissed from his soul all the fancies, laid here all the ghosts, deposited the demons of his drunkenness and the madness he’d been born with. Somewhere, Sylvie lived, chasing her Destiny, gone for reasons of her own; he hoped she was happy. He had lifted the curse from himself, by main strength and the Art of Memory, and was free to go.

He sat.

Some sort of tree (his grandfather would have known what kind, but he didn’t) was just in that week casting off its leaflike blooms or seeds, small silver-green circles that descended all over the park like a million dollars in dimes. Fortunes of them were rolled toward him by wastrel breezes, piled against his unmoving feet, filled his hat-brim and his lap, as though he were only another fixture of the park to be littered, like the bench he sat on and the pavilion he looked at.

When he did rise, heavily and feeling Somehow still inhabited, it was only to move around from Winter, which he was done with, back to Spring, where he had begun; where he now was. A year’s circuit. Winter was old Father Time with sickle and hourglass, his ragged domino and beard blown by chappy winds, and a disgusted expression on his face. A lean, slavering dog or wolf was at his phthisical feet. Green coins fell across them, catching in the relief; green coins fell whispering from Auberon as he rose. He knew what Spring, just around the corner, would be; he’d been there before. There seemed suddenly little point in doing anything any more but making this circuit. Everything he needed was here.

Brother North-wind’s Secret. Ten steps was all it took. If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? He’d always thought that was put wrong. Shouldn’t it be, If Winter comes can Spring be far ahead? Ahead: as you advance through the seasons, first winter comes, and then spring is not far ahead. “Right?” he said aloud to no one. Ahead, behind. It was probably he who had it wrong, who saw it from some peculiar useless personal point of view no one else shared, no one. If winter comes… He turned the corner of the pavilion. Can spring be far ahead, behind… Someone was just then turning the other corner, from Spring into Summer.

“Lilac,” he said.

She glanced back at him, half gone around the corner; glanced back at him with a look he knew so well yet had for so long not seen that it made him feel faint. It was a look which said, Oh I was just going away somewhere, but you caught me, and yet it didn’t mean that, was just pretty coquetry mixed with some shyness, he’d always known that. The park around him grew unreal, as though in the act of silently blowing away. Lilac turned toward him, her clasped hands swinging before her, her bare feet taking small steps. She had (of course) grown no older; she wore (of course) her blue dress. “Hi,” she said, and brushed her hair away from her face with a quick motion.

“Lilac,” he said.

She cleared her throat (long time since she’d spoken) and said, “Auberon. Don’t you think it’s time for you to go home?”

“Home,” he said.

She took a step toward him, or he one toward her; he held out his hands to her, or she hers toward him. “Lilac,” he said. “How do you come to be here?”

“Here?”

“Where did you go,” he said, “that time you went?”

“Go?”

“Please,” he said. “Please.”

“I’ve been here all the time,” she said, smiling. “Silly. It’s you who’ve been in motion.”

A curse; only a curse. No fault of your own.

“All right,” he said, “all right,” and took Lilac’s hands, and lifted her up, or tried to, but that wouldn’t work; so he linked his hands like a stirrup, and bent down, and she put her small hare foot into his hands, and her hands on his shoulders, and so he hoisted her up.

“Kind of crowded in here,” she said as she made her way within. “Who are all these people?”

“Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Now,” she said, settled in, her voice already faint, more his than hers, as it had always been, after all, after all; “nowwhere do we go?

He drew out the key the old woman had given him. It was necessary to unlock the wrought-iron gate in order to leave, just as it was in order to enter. “Home, I guess,” Auberon said. Little girls playing jacks and plucking dandelions along the path looked up to watch him talk to himself. “I guess, home.”

Hawksquill’s powerful Vulpes translated her back to the City in a near-record time, and yet (so her watch told her) perhaps still not under the wire. Though she was now in possession of all the missing parts of the problem of Russell Eigenblick, the learning of those parts had taken longer than she had expected.

Not a Moment Too Soon

All along the road north she had planned how she might present herself to the heirs of Violet Drinkwater in such a way—as antiquarian, collector, cultist—that the cards would be shown her. But if she had not herself been predicted in them (Sophie knew her at once, or recognized her very quickly) they would certainly not have been yielded up to her at all. That she proved to he as well a tenuous cousin of Violet Bramble’s descendants had helped too, a coincidence that surprised and delighted that strange family as much as it interested Hawksquill. And even so days went by as she and Sophie pored over the cards. More days she spent with the last edition of The Architecture of Country Houses, whose peculiar contents none of them seemed to be very familiar with; and though, as she studied and pored, the whole story—or as much of it as had so far happened—gradually came clear under her cockatoo scrutiny, still all the while the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club advanced toward the fateful meeting with Russell Eigenblick, and still Hawksquill’s loyalties remained unplaced, and her path obscure.

It was obscure no more. The children of the children of Time: who would have thought? A Fool, and a Cousin; a Journey, and a Host. The Least Trumps! She smiled grimly, circling around the mammoth Empire Hotel in which Eigenblick had installed himself, and decided on a charm, a thing she rarely resorted to.

She inserted the Vulpes into the cavernous parking garage beneath the hotel. Armed guards and attendants patrolled the doors and elevators. She found herself in a line of vehicles being checked and examined. She stilled the car’s growl, and took a Morocco-leather envelope from the glove-box. From this she extracted a small white fragment of bone. It was a bone taken from a pure black cat which had been boiled alive in the tenement kitchen of La Negra, an espiritista for whom Hawksquill had once had occasion to do a great favor. It might have been a toebone, or part of the maxillary process; certainly La Negra didn’t know; she’d hit on it only after a whole day’s experimenting before a mirror, separating the bones carefully from the stinking carcass and putting each in turn into her mouth, searching for the one that would make her image in the mirror disappear. It was this one. Hawksquill found the processes of witchcraft vulgar and the cruelty of this one especially repellent; she wasn’t herself convinced that there was one bone among the thousand-odd bones in a pure black cat that could make one invisible, but La Negra had assured her that the bone would work whether she believed it or didn’t; and she was glad to have the gift just now. She looked around her; the attendants had not yet noticed her car; she left the keys in the lock, thoughtfully; put the little bone into her mouth with a grimace of disgust, and disappeared.

Extracting herself unnoticed from the car took some doing, but the attendants and guards paid no attention to the elevator doors opening and closing on no one (who could predict the vagaries of empty elevators?) and Hawksquill walked out into the lobby, going carefully in the company of the visible so as not to brush against them. The usual unsmiling raincoated men stood at intervals along the walls or sat in lobby armchairs behind dummy newspapers, fooling no one, being fooled by no one but she. At an unseen signal, they began to change their stations just then, like pieces on a board. A large party was coming through the swift-bladed revolving doors, preceded by underlings. Not a moment too soon, Hawksquill thought, for this was the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club proceeding into the lobby. They didn’t gaze around themselves inquiringly as ordinary men might on entering such a place, but, spreading out slightly as though more fully to take possession here, they kept their eyes ahead, seeing the future and not the transitory forms of the present. Under each arm was the glove-soft case, on each head the potent homburg long ridiculous on any but men like these.

They sorted themselves into two elevators, those with the highest standing holding the doors for the others, as ancient male ritual dictates; Hawksquill slipped into the less crowded one.

“The thirteenth?”

“The thirteenth.”

Someone punched the button for the thirteenth floor with a forceful forefinger. Another consulted a plain wristwatch. They ascended smoothly. They had nothing to say to one another; their plans were made, and the walls, they well knew, had ears. Hawksquill remained pressed against the door, facing their blank faces. The doors opened, and neatly she sidled out; just in time too, for there were hands thrust forward to take the hands of the club members.

“The Lecturer will be right with you.”

“If you could wait in this room.”

“Can we order anything up for you. The Lecturer has ordered coffee.”

They were shepherded leftward by alert suited men. One or two young men, in colored blouses, hands clasped behind them in an uneaseful at-ease, stood by every door. At least, Hawksquill thought, he’s wary. From another elevator a red-coated waiter came out carrying a large tray which bore a single tiny cup of coffee. He went rightwards, and Hawksquill followed him. He was admitted through double doors and past guards, and so was Hawksquill at his heels; he came up to an unmarked door, knocked, opened it, and went in. Hawksquill put an invisible foot in the door as he closed it behind him, and then slipped in.

Needle in the Haystack of Time

It was an impersonally-furnished sitting-room with wide windows looking out over the spiky city. The waiter, muttering to himself, passed Hawksquill and exited. Hawksquill took the fragment of bone from her mouth and was carefully putting it away when a farther door opened and Russell Eigenblick came out, yawning, in a blackish, bedragoned silk dressing-gown. He wore on his nose a pair of tiny half-glasses which Hawksquill hadn’t seen before.

He started when he saw her, having expected an empty room.

“You,” he said.

Without much grace (she couldn’t remember ever having done quite this before), Hawksquill lowered herself onto one knee, bowed profoundly, and said, “I am your Majesty’s humble servant.”

“Get up,” Eigenblick said. “Who let you in here?”

“A black cat,” Hawksquill said, rising. “It doesn’t matter. We haven’t much time.”

“I don’t talk to journalists.”

“I’m sorry,” Hawksquill said. “That was an imposition. I’m not a journalist.”

“I thought not!” he said, triumphantly. He snatched the spectacles from his face as though he had just remembered they were there. He moved toward an intercom on the phony Louis Quatorze desk.

“Wait,” Hawksquill said. “Tell me this. Do you want, after eight hundred years of sleep, to fail in your enterprise?”

He turned slowly to regard her.

“You must remember,” Hawksquill went on, “how once you were abased before a certain Pope, and were forced to hold his stirrup, and run beside his horse.”

Eigenblick’s face was suffused. It grew a bright red different from the red of his beard. He rifled fury at Hawksquill from his eagle eyes. “Who are you?” he said.

“At this moment,” Hawksquill said, gesturing toward the farther end of the suite, “men await you who intend to abase you in just such a degree. Only more cleverly. So that you will never notice being clipped. I mean the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club. Or have they presented themselves to you under some other name?”

“Nonsense,” Eigenblick said. “I’ve never heard of this so-called club.” But his eyes clouded; perhaps, somewhere, somewhen, he had been warned… “And what could you mean about the Pope? A charming gentleman who I’ve never met.” His eyes not meeting hers, he picked up his little coffee and drank it off.

But she had him: she saw that. If he didn’t ring to have guards eject her, he would listen. “Have they promised you high position?” she asked.

“The highest,” he said after a long pause, gazing out the window.

“It might interest you to know that for some years those gentlemen have employed me on various errands. I think I know them. Was it the Presidency?”

He said nothing. It was.

“The Presidency,” Hawksquill said, “is no longer an office. It’s a room. A nice one, but only a room. You must refuse it. Politely. And any other blandishments they may offer. I’ll explain your next moves later…”

He turned on her. “How is it you know these things?” he said. “How do you know me?”

Hawksquill returned his gunlike look with one of her own, and said, in her best wizard’s manner, “There is much that I know.”

The intercom buzzed. Eigenblick went to it, looked thoughtfully at the array of bottons on it, finger to his lips, and then punched one. Nothing happened. He pushed another, and a voice made of static spoke: “Everything is ready, sir.”

“Ja,” Eigenblick said. “Moment.” He released the button, realized he hadn’t been heard, pressed another, and repeated himself. He turned to Hawksquill. “However it is you’ve found out these things,” he said, “you have obviously not found out all. You see,” he went on, a broad smile on his face and his eyes cast upward with the look of one confident of his election, “I’m in the cards. Nothing that can happen to me can deflect a destiny set elsewhere long ago. Protected. All this was meant to be.”

“Your Majesty,” Hawksquill said, “perhaps I haven’t made myself clear…”

“Will you stop calling me that!” he said, furious.

“Sorry. Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. I know very well that you are in the cards—a deck of very pretty ones, with trumps at least obstensibly designed to foretell and encourage the return of your old Empire; designed and drawn, I would guess, some time in the reign of Rudolf II, and printed in Prague. They have been put to other uses since. Without your being, so to speak, any the less in them.”

“Where are they?” he said, suddenly coming toward her, avaricious hands like claws held out. “Give them to me. I must have them.”

“If I may go on,” Hawksquill said.

“They’re my property,” Eigenblick said.

“Your Empire’s,” she said. “Once.” She stared him into silence, and said: “If I may go on: I know you’re in the cards. I know what powers put you there, and—a little—to what end. I know your destiny. What you must believe, if you are to accomplish it, is that I am in it.”

“You.”

“Come to warn you, and to aid you. I have powers. Great enough to have discovered all this, to have found you out, needle in the haystack of Time. You have need of me. Now. And in time to come.”

He considered her. She saw doubt, hope, relief, fear, resolution come and go in his big face. “Why,” he said, “was I never told about you?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “because they didn’t know about me.”

“Nothing is hidden from them.”

“Much is. You would do well to learn that.”

He chewed his cheek for a moment, but the battle was over. “What’s in it for you?” he said. The intercom buzzed again.

“We’ll discuss my reward later,” she said. “Just now, before you answer that, you’d better decide what you will tell your visitors.”

“Will you be with me?” he said, suddenly needful.

“They mustn’t see me,” Hawksquill said. “But I’ll be with you.” A cheap trick, a cat’s bone; and yet (she thought, as Eigenblick punched at the intercom) just the thing to convince the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, if he remembered his youth at all, that indeed she did have the powers she claimed. With his back to her, she disappeared; when he turned to face her, or the place where she had been, she said, “Shall we go meet the Club?”

Crossroads

The day was gray, a certain pale and moist gray, when Auberon descended from the bus at the crossroads. He had had words with the driver about being let off at this particular place; had had difficulty at first in describing it, then in convincing the driver that he actually passed such a spot. The driver shook his head slowly in negative as Auberon described, his eyes not meeting Auberon’s, and said “Nope, nope,” softly, as though lost in thought; a transparent lie, Auberon knew, the man simply didn’t want to make the slightest variation in his routine. Coldly polite, Auberon described the place again, then sat in the first place behind the driver, his eyes peeled; and tapped the driver when the place approached. Got out, triumphant, a sentence forming on his tongue about the hundreds of times the man must have passed this place, if that was the level of observation to be found in the men the public was urged to leave the driving to, etc.; but the door hissed shut and the long gray bus ground its gears like teeth and lurched away.

The fingerboard he stood by pointed as always down the road toward Edgewood; more haggard, leaning at a more senescent angle, the name more time-erased than he remembered or than it had been when he had last seen it, but the same. He started down the looping road, brown as milk-chocolate after the rain, stepping along cautiously and surprised by the loudness of his footfalls. He hadn’t understood how much he had been deprived of during his months in the City. The Art of Memory could make a plan of his past where all this had perhaps a place, but it couldn’t have restored to him this fullness: these odors, sweet and moist and vivifying, as though the air had a clear liquid texture; the constant low nameless sound filling up the air, whispering loud to his dull ear, pricked out with birdsong; the very sense of volume, of far distances and middle distances made up out of lines and groups of new-leaving trees and the roll and heap of the earth. He was able to survive outside all this well enough—air was air, after all, here or in the City—but, once plunged down within it again, he might have felt returned to a native element, might have uncurled within it, soul expanding like a butterfly sprung from its confining coccoon. In fact he did stretch his arms out, breathe deeply, and quote a few lines of verse. But his soul was a cold stone.

As he went along, he felt himself to be accompanied by someone: someone young, someone not in a lank brown overcoat, someone not hung over, someone who tugged at his sleeve, reminding him that here he’d used to pull his bike over the wall to return by secret ways to the Summer House and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, there he’d fallen out of a tree, there bent down with Doc to hear the mutter of closeted woodchucks. It had all happened once, to someone, to this insistent someone. Not to him… The gray stone pillars topped with gray oranges rose up where and when they always would. He reached up to one to touch the pitted surface, clammy and slick with spring. Down at the end of the drive his sisters awaited him on the porch.

Now for God’s sake. His homecoming was to be no more secret than his leaving—and as he thought this, he realized for the first time that he had intended it to be secret, had supposed himself able to slip back into the house without anyone’s noticing he had been gone for some eighteen months. Foolish! And yet the last thing he wanted was a fuss made over him. Too late, anyway, for as he stood by the gate-posts uncertainly, Lucy had spied him and leapt up waving. She pulled Lily after her to run and greet him; Tacey more regally kept to the peacock chair, dressed in a long skirt and one of his old tweed jackets.

“Hi, hi,” he said, casual but suddenly aware of the figure he must cut, unshaven and bloodshot, with his shopping bag and the City dirt beneath his nails and in his hair. So clean and vernal Lucy and Lily seemed, so glad, that he was torn between drawing back from them and kneeling before them to beg their forgiveness; and though they embraced him and took his bag from him, talking both at once, he knew they read him.

“You’ll never guess who came here,” Lucy said.

“An old woman,” Auberon said, glad that once in his life he could be sure he guessed right, “with a gray bun. How’s Mom? How’s Dad?”

“But who she is you’ll never guess,” Lily said.

“Did she tell you I was coming? I never said it to her.”

“No. But we knew. But guess.”

“She is,” Lucy said, “a cousin. In a way. Sophie found out. It was years ago…”

“In England,” Lily said. “Do you know the Auberon you’re named after? Well, he was Violet Bramble Drinkwater’s son…”

“But not John Drinkwater’s! A love child…”

“How do you keep all these people straight?” Auberon asked.

“Anyway. Back in England Violet Bramble had an affair. Before she married John. With someone named Oliver Hawksquill.”

“A swain,” Lily said.

“And got pregnant, and that was Auberon. And this lady…”

“Hello, Auberon,” Tacey said. “How was the City?”

“Gee, just great,” Auberon said, feeling a hard lump rise in his throat and water spring to his eyes. “Great.”

“Did you walk?” Tacey asked.

“No, the bus, actually.” They were silent a moment at that. No help for it. “So listen. How’s Mom? How’s Dad?”

“Fine. She got your card.”

A horror swept him as he thought of the few cards and letters he had sent from the City, evasive and bragging, or uncommunicative, or horribly facetious. The last one, Mom’s birthday, he had found, oh God, unsigned in a trash can he was examining, a bouquet of smarmy sentiments; but his silence had been long and he was drunk and he sent it. He saw now that it must have been to her like being stabbed cruelly with a butter knife. He sat down on the steps of the porch, unable just for the moment to go further.

An Awful Mess

“Well, what do you think, Ma?” Daily Alice asked as she stood looking into the dank darkness of the old icebox.

Momdy was examining the stock inside the cupboards. “Tuna wiggle?” she said doubtfully.

“Oh dear,” Alice said. “Smoky will give me a look. You know that look?”

“Oh, I do.”

“Well.” Beneath her gaze the few damp items on the slatted metal shelves seemed to shrink away. There was a constant drip, as in a cave. Daily Alice thought of the old days, the great white refrigerator chock-full of crisp vegetables and colorful containers, perhaps a varnished turkey or a diamondback ham, and neatly wrapped meats and meals asleep in the icy-breathing freezer. And a cheerful light that winked on to show it all, as on a stage. Nostalgia. She put her hand on a luke-cold milk bottle and said, “Did Rudy come today?”

“No.”

“He’s really getting too old for that,” Alice said. “Lifting big blocks of ice. And he forgets.” She sighed, still looking within; Rudy’s decline, and the general falling-off in the amenities of life, and the not-so-hot dinner probably awaiting them all, all seemed contained within the zinc-lined icebox.

“Well, don’t hold the door open, dear,” Momdy said softly. Alice was closing it when the swinging doors of the pantry opened.

“Oh my God,” Alice said. “Oh, Auberon.”

She came quickly to embrace him, hurrying to him as though he were in deep trouble and she must instantly rescue him. His harrowed look, though, came less from the trouble he was in than from the trip he had just taken through the house, which had assaulted him unmercifully with memories, odors he’d forgotten he knew, scarred furniture and worn rugs and garden-exhibiting windows that filled his eyesight to the brim, as if it had been half a lifetime and not a year and a half he’d been away.

“Hi,” he said.

She released him. “Look at you,” she said. “What is it?”

“What’s what?” he said, attempting a smile, wondering what degradation she read in his features. Daily Alice raised a wondering finger and traced the line of his single eyebrow across his nose. “When did you grow that?”

“Huh?”

Daily Alice touched the place above her own nose where (though faintly, because of her lighter hair) she bore the mark of Violet’s descendants.

“Oh.” He shrugged. He hadn’t actually noticed; he hadn’t been studying mirrors much lately. “I dunno.” He laughed. “How do you like that?” He stroked it himself. Soft and fine as baby hair, with one or two coarser hairs springing from it. “I must be getting old,” he said.

She saw that that was so; that he had crossed in his absence some threshold beyond which life is consumed faster than it increases; she could see the marks of it in his face and the backs of his hands. A hard lump formed in her throat, and she embraced him again so that she wouldn’t have to speak. Over her shoulder, to his grandmother, Auberon said, “Hi Momdy, listen, listen, don’t get up, don’t.”

“Well, you’re a bad boy, not to have written your mother,” Momdy said. “To tell us you were coming. Not a thing for supper.”

“Oh, that’s okay, that’s okay,” he said, releasing himself from his mother and coming to kiss Momdy’s feathery soft cheek. “How have you been?”

“The same, the same.” She looked up at him from where she sat, studying him shrewdly. He’d always had the sense his grandmother knew some discreditable secret about him, and if she could just squeeze it between the thick layers of her usual discourse, it would be revealed. “I go on,” she said. “You’ve grown.”

“Gee, I don’t think so.”

“Either that or I’d forgotten how big you’d got.”

“Yeah, that’s it… Well.” The two women looked him over from the heights of two generations, seeing different views. He felt examined. He knew he ought to take off his overcoat, but he had forgotten exactly what was underneath it; he sat instead at the far end of the table and said again, “Well.”

“Tea,” Alice said. “How about some tea? And you can tell us all your adventures.”

“Tea would be great,” he said.

“And how’s George?” Momdy asked. “And his people?”

“Oh, fine.” He hadn’t been to Old Law Farm in months. “Fine, same as ever.” He shook his head in amusement at funny George. “That crazy farm.”

“I remember,” she said, “when that was really such a nice place. Years ago. The corner house, that was the one the Mouse family first lived in…”

“Still do, still do,” Auberon said. He glanced at his mother, who was busy with teapot and water at the big stove; surreptitiously she brushed her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and then saw that he’ caught her at it, and turned to face him, teapot in her hands.

“… and after Phyllis Townes died,” Momdy was going on, “well that was a protracted illness, her doctor thought he’d chased it down to her kidneys, but she thought…”

“So how was it, really?” Alice said to her son. “Really.”

“Really it wasn’t so hot,” Auberon said. He looked down. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, oh well,” she said.

“For not writing and all. There wasn’t much to say.”

“That’s okay. We were afraid for you, that’s all.”

He lifted his eyes. He really hadn’t thought of that. Here he’d been swallowed down by the teeming terrible City, swallowed as by a dragon’s mouth and hardly been heard of again; of course they’d been afraid for him. As it had once before in this kitchen, a window rose within him and he saw, through it, his own reality. People loved him, and worried about him; his personal worth didn’t even enter into it. He lowered his eyes again, ashamed. Alice turned back to the stove. His grandmother filled the silence with reminiscence, the details of dead relatives’ sickness, remission, relapse, decline and death. “Mm, mm-hm,” he said, nodding, studying the scarred surface of the table. He had sat, without choosing to, at his old place, at his father’s right hand, Tacey’s left.

“Tea,” Alice said. She put the teapot on a trivet, and patted its fat belly. She put a cup before him. And waited, then, hands folded, for him to pour it, or for something; he glanced up at her and was about to try to speak, to answer the question he saw posed in her, if he could, if he could think of words, when the double doors of the pantry flew open and Lily and the twins came in, and Tony Buck.

“Hi Uncle Auberon,” the twins (Bud the boy and Blossom the girl) shouted in unison, as though Auberon hadn’t quite arrived yet and they had to call far to be heard. Auberon stared at them: they seemed to be twice the size they had been, and they could talk: they hadn’t been able to when he left, had they? Hadn’t he last seen them still carried fore and aft by their mother in a canvas carrier? Lily, at their insistence, began to go through cupboards, looking for good things to eat, the twins were unimpressed by the solitary teapot but certainly it was time for something. Tony Buck shook Auberon’s hand and said, “Hey, how was the City?”

“Oh, he;, swell,” Auberon said in a tone like Tony’s, hearty and no-nonsense; Tony turned to Alice and said, “So Tacey said maybe we should have a couple rabbits tonight.”

“Oh, Tony, that would be terrific,” Alice said.

Tacey herself came through the door then, calling Tony’s name. “Is that okay, Ma?” she said.

“It’s great,” Alice said. “Better than tuna wiggle.”

“Kill the fatted calf,” Momdy said, the only one there to whom the phrase would have occurred. “And fricassee it.”

“Smoky’ll be so happy,” said Alice to .Auberon. “He loves rabbit, but he can’t ever feel it’s his place to suggest it.”

“Listen,” Auberon said, “don’t make any fuss just for…” He couldn’t, in his self-effacement, bring himself to say personal pronouns. “I mean just because…”

“Uncle Auberon,” said Bud, “did you see any muggerds?”

“Hm?”

“Muggerds.” He curved his fingers predatorily at Auberon. “Who get you. In the City.”

“Well, as a matter of fact…” But Bud had noticed (he hadn’t ever quite taken his eyes from her) that his sister Blossom had acquired a cookie of a sort that hadn’t been offered to him, and he had to hurry to put in a claim.

“Now out, out!” said Lily.

“You wanna go see the rabbits die?” her daughter asked her, taking her hand.

“No, I don’t,” said Lily, but Blossom, wanting her mother with her for the dread and fascinating event, pulled her by the hand.

“It only takes a second,” she said reassuringly, drawing her mother after her. “Don’t be afraid.” They went out through the summer kitchen and the door that led to the kitchen-garden, Lily, Bud and Blossom, and Tony. Tacey had filled a cup for herself and one for Momdy, and with them backed out the pantry doors; Momdy followed her.

Grump grump grump said the doors behind them.

Alice and Auberon sat alone in the kitchen, the storm of them having passed as quickly as it came on.

“So,” Auberon said. “It seems like everybody’s fine here.”

“Yes. Fine.”

“Do you mind,” he said, rising slowly like an old man, much tried, “if I get myself a drink?”

“No, sure,” Alice said. “There’s some sherry there, and other things, I think.”

He got down a dusty whiskey bottle.

“No ice,” said Alice. “Rudy didn’t come.”

“He still cuts ice?”

“Oh yes. But he’s been sick lately. And Robin, you know, his grandson—well, you know Robin; he isn’t much help. Poor old man.”

Absurdly, this was the last straw. Poor old Rudy… “Too bad, too bad,” he said, his voice shaky. “Too bad.” He sat, his glassful of whiskey the saddest thing he had ever seen. His vision was clouded and sparkling. Alice rose slowly, alarmed. “I made a real mess of it, Ma,” he said. “A real awful mess.” He put his face in his hands, the awful mess a harsh, gathering thing in his throat and breast. Alice, unsure, came and put her arm tentatively around his shoulder, and Auberon, though he hadn’t done so in years, never even for Sylvie, not once, knew he was about to sob like a child. The awful mess gathered weight and force and, pressing its way out, opened his mouth and shook his frame violently, causing sounds he had not known he could make. There there, he said to himself, there there: but it wouldn’t stop, release made it grow, there were vast volumes of it to be expelled, he put his head down on the kitchen table and bawled.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said when he could speak again. “Sorry, sorry.”

“No,” Alice said, her arm around his resistant overcoat; “no, sorry for what?” He raised his head suddenly, throwing off her arm, and, after another gasping sob, ceased, his chest heaving. “Was it,” Alice said softly, warily, “the dark girl?”

“Oh,” Auberon said, “partly, partly.”

“And that stupid bequest.”

“Partly.”

She saw peeking from his pocket a hanky, and pulled it out for him. “Here,” she said, shocked to see in his streaming face not her baby boy in tears, but a grownup she hardly knew transformed by grief. She looked at the hanky she offered him. “What a pretty thing,” she said. “It looks like…”

“Yes,” Auberon said, taking it from her and mopping his face. “Lucy made it.” He blew his nose. “It was a present. When I left. Open it when you come home, she said.” He laughed, or cried again, or both, and swallowed. “Pretty, huh.” He stuffed it back in his pocket and sat, back bent, staring. “Oh God,” he said. “Well, that’s embarrassing.”

“No,” she said, “no.” She put her hand over his. She was in a quandary; he needed advice, and she couldn’t give it to him; she knew where advice could be got, but not whether it could be given to him there, or whether it was right for her to send him. “It’s all right, you know,” she said, “it really is, because,” and then bethought herself. “Because it’s all right; it’ll be all right.”

“Oh sure,” he said, sighing a great, shuddering sigh. “All over now.”

“No,” Alice said, and took his hand more firmly. “No, it’s not all over, but… Well, whatever happens, it’ll all be part of, well part of what’s to be, won’t it? I mean there’s nothing that couldn’t be, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know,” Auberon said. “What do I know.”

She held his hand, but oh, he was too big now for her to gather him to her, hug him, cover him up with herself and tell him all, tell him the long, long tale of it, so long and strange that he would fall asleep long before it was over, soothed by her voice and her warmth and the beat of her heart and the calm certainty of her telling: and then, and then, and then: and more wonderful than that: and strange to say: and the way it all turns out: the story she hadn’t known how to tell when he was young enough to tell it to, the story she knew now only when he was too big to gather up and whisper it to, too big to believe it, though it would all happen, and to him. But she couldn’t bear to see him in this darkness, and say nothing. “Well,” she said, not releasing his hand; she cleared her throat of the huskiness that had gathered there (was she glad, or the reverse, that all her own storms of tears had been wept, years ago?) and said, “Well, will you do something for me, anyway?”

“Yes, sure.”

“Tonight, no, tomorrow morning—do you know where the old gazebo is? That little island? Well, if you follow that stream up, you come to a pool—with a waterfall?”

“Sure, yes.”

“Okay,” she said. She took a deep breath, said “Well” again, and gave him instructions, and pledged him to follow them exactly, and told him something of the reasons why he must, but not all; and he agreed, in a cloud, but having wept out before her any reservations he might have had to such a scheme, and such reasons.

The door to the kitchen-garden opened, and Smoky came in through it; before he came around the corner of the summer kitchen, though, Alice had patted Auberon’s hand, smiled, and pressed her forefinger to her lips, and then to his.

“Rabbit tonight?” Smoky was saying as he came into the kitchen. “What’s all the excitement?” He did an extravagant double-take when he saw Auberon, and books slipped from beneath his arm to the floor.

“Hi, hi,” said Auberon, glad at least to have taken one of them by surprise.

Slowly I Turn

Sophie had also known that Auberon was on his way home, though the bus had thrown off her calculations by a day. She was full of advice, and had many questions to ask; but Auberon wanted no advice, and she saw that her questions would get no answers either, so she didn’t ask them: what information he chose to offer was all she would get for the moment, scantily though it clothed his City months.

At dinner she said: “Well. It’s nice to have everybody back. For one night.”

Auberon, devouring victuals like a man who’s lived for months on hot dogs and day-old Danish, looked up at her, but she had looked away, not conscious apparently of having said anything odd; and Tacey began a story about Cherry Lake’s divorce after only a year of marriage.

“This is delicious, Ma,” Auberon said, and helped himself again, wondering.

Later, in the library, he and Smoky compared cities: Smoky’s, from years ago, and Auberon’s.

“The best thing,” Smoky said, “or the exciting thing, was the feeling you always had of being at the head of the parade. I mean even if all you did was sit in your room, you felt it, you knew that outside in the streets and in the buildings it was going forward, boom boom boom, and you were part of it, and everybody everywhere else was just stumbling along behind. Do you know what I mean?”

“I guess,” Auberon said. “I guess things have changed.” Hamletish in a black sweater and pants he’d found among his old clothes, he sat somewhat folded up in a tall buttoned leather chair. One light lit shone on the brandy bottle Smoky had opened. Alice had suggested he and Auberon have a long talk; but they were having difficulty finding subjects. “It always felt to me like everybody everywhere else had forgotten all about us.” He held out his glass, and Smoky put an inch of brandy in it.

“Well, but the crowds,” Smoky said. “The bustle, and all the well-dressed people; everybody hurrying to appointments…”

“Hm,” Auberon said.

“I think it’s…”

“Well I mean I think I know what you say you thought, I mean that you think it was…”

“I think I thought…”

“I guess it’s changed,” Auberon said.

A silence fell. Each stared into his glass. “So,” Smoky said. “Anyway. How did you meet her?”

“Who?” Auberon stiffened. There were subjects he had no intention of discussing with Smoky. That with their cards and their second sight they could probe his heart and learn his business was bad enough.

“The lady who came,” Smoky said. “That Miss Hawksquill. Cousin Ariel, as Sophie says.”

“Oh. In a park. We fell into conversation… A little park that said it was built by, you know, old John and his company, back when.”

“A little park,” Smoky said, surprised, “with funny curving paths, that…”

“Yeah,” Auberon said.

“That lead in, only they don’t, and…”

“Yeah.”

“Fountains, statues, a little bridge…”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I used to go there,” Smoky said. “How do you like that.”

Auberon didn’t, really. He said nothing.

“It always reminded me,” Smoky said, “for some reason, of Alice.” Suddenly flung back into the past, Smoky with great vividness remembered the small summery park, and felt—tasted, almost, with the mind’s tongue—the season of his first love for his wife. When he was Auberon’s age. “How do you like that,” he said again, dreamily, tasting a cordial in which a whole summer’s fruits were long ago distilled. He looked at Auberon. He was staring into his glass gloomily. Smoky sensed that he was approaching a sore spot or subject. How odd, though, the same park… “Well,” he said, and cleared his throat. “She seems like quite a woman.”

Auberon ran his hand over his brow.

“I mean this Hawksquill person.”

“Oh. Oh, yes.” Auberon cleared his throat, and drank. “Crazy, I thought, maybe.”

“Oh? Oh, I don’t think so. No more than… She certainly had a lot of energy. Wanted to see the house from top to bottom. She had some interesting things to say. We even crawled up into the old orrery. She said she had one, in her house in the City, different, but built on the same principles, maybe by the same person.” He had grown animated, hopeful. “You know what? She thought we could get it working again. I showed her it was all rusted, because, you know, the main wheel for some reason sticks out into the air, but she said, well, she thought the basic works are still okay. I don’t see how she could tell that, but wouldn’t that be fun? After all these years. I thought I’d have a shot at it. Clean it up, and see…”

Auberon looked at his father. He began to laugh. That broad, sweet, simple face. How could he have ever thought… “You know something?” he said. “I used to think, when I was a kid, that it did move.”

“What?”

“Sure. I thought it did move. I thought I could prove that it moved.”

“You mean by itself? How?”

“I didn’t know how,” Auberon said. “But I thought it did, and that you all knew it did, and didn’t want me to know.”

Smoky laughed too. “Well, why?” he said. “I mean why would we keep it a secret? And anyhow, how could it? What would be the power?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” Auberon said, laughing more, though the laughter seemed likely to deliquesce into tears. “By itself. I don’t know.” He rose, unfolding himself from the buttoned chair. “I thought,” he said, “oh, hell, I can’t recreate it, why I thought it was important, I mean why that was important, but I thought I was going to get the goods on you…”

“What? What?” Smoky said. “Well why didn’t you ask? I mean a simple question…”

“Dad,” Auberon said, “do you think there’s ever been a simple question around here you could ask?”

“Well,” Smoky said.

“Okay,” Auberon said. “Okay, I’ll ask you a simple question, okay?”

Smoky sat upright in his chair. Auberon wasn’t laughing any more. “Okay,” he said.

“Do you believe in fairies?” Auberon asked.

Smoky looked up at his tall son. Through the whole of their lives together, it had been as though he and Auberon had been back to back, fixed that way and unable to turn. They had had to communicate by indirection, through others, or by craning their necks and talking out the sides of their mouths; they had had to guess at each other’s faces and actions. Now and then one or the other would try a quick spin around to catch the other unawares, but it never worked, quite, the other was still behind and facing away, as in the old vaudeville act. And the effort of communication in that posture, the effort of making oneself clear, had often grown too much for them, and they’d given it up, mostly. But now—maybe because of what had happened to him in the City, whatever that was, or maybe only increase of time wearing away the bond that had both held them and held them apart, Auberon had turned around. Slowly I turn. And all that was left then was for Smoky himself to turn and face him. “Well,” he said, “ ‘believe’, I don’t know; ‘believe’, that’s a word…”

“Uh uh,” said Auberon. “No quotes.”

Auberon stood over him now, looking down, waiting. “Okay,” Smoky said. “The answer is no.”

“Okay!” Auberon said, grimly triumphant.

“I never did.”

“Okay.”

“Of course,” Smoky said, “it wouldn’t have been right to say so, you know, or really ask right out what was what here; I never wanted to spoil anything by not—not joining in. So I never said anything. Never asked questions, never. Especially not simple ones. I just hope you noticed that, because it wasn’t always easy.”

“I know,” Auberon said.

Smoky looked down. “I’m sorry about that,” he said; “about deceiving you—if I did, I suppose I didn’t; and sort of spying on you all the time, trying to figure it out—when all the time I was supposed to know about it all, the same as you.” He sighed. “It’s not so easy,” he said. “Living a lie.”

“Wait a sec,” Auberon said. “Dad.”

“None of you seemed to mind, really. Except you, I think. Well. And it didn’t seem that they minded, that I didn’t believe in them, the Tale went on and all, just the same-didn’t it? Only I did, I admit, feel a little jealous; anyway I used to. Jealous of you. Who knew.”

“Listen, Dad, listen.”

“No, it’s all right,” Smoky said. If he were going to face front then he would by God face front. “Only… Well, it always seemed to me that you—just you, not the others—could have explained it. That you wanted to explain it, but couldn’t. No, it’s all right.” He held up his hand to forestall whatever evasion or equivocation his son was about to make. “They, I mean Alice, and Sophie, and Aunt Cloud—even the girls—they said everything they could, I think, only nothing they could say was ever an explanation, not an explanation, even though maybe they thought it was, maybe they thought they’d explained it over and over and I was just too dumb to grasp it; maybe I was. But I used to think that you—I don’t know why—that I could maybe understand you, and that you were always just about to spill the beans…”

“Dad…”

“And that we got off on the wrong foot, way back, because you had to hide it, and so you sort of had to hide from me…”

“No! No no no…”

“And I’m sorry, really, if you felt I was always spying on you and intruding and all, but…”

“Dad, Dad, will you please just listen a second?”

“But well, as long as we’re asking simple questions, I’d like to know what it was that you…”

“I didn’t know anything!” His shout seemed to awaken Smoky, who looked up to see his son twisted up in an attitude of recrimination or confession, and a mad light in his eye.

“What?”

“I didn’t know anything!” Auberon knelt suddenly before his father, his whole childhood giddily inverted; it made him want to laugh insanely. “Nothing!”

“Cut it out,” Smoky said, puzzled. “I thought we were getting down to brass tacks here.”

“Nothing!”

“Then how come you were always hiding it?”

“Hiding what?”

“What you knew. A secret diary. And all those weird hints.

“Dad. Dad. If I knew anything you didn’t know—if I did—would I have thought that old orrery was going around and nobody was admitting to it? And what about the Architecture of Country Houses, that you wouldn’t explain to me…”

“I wouldn’t explain! It was you who thought you knew what it was…”

“Well, and what about Lilac?”

“What about her?”

“Well, what happened to her? Sophie’s, I mean. Why didn’t anybody tell me?” He gripped his father’s hands. “What happened to her? Where did she go?”

“Well?” Smoky said, frustrated beyond endurance. “Where did she?”

They stared at each other wildly, all questions, no answers; and at the same moment saw that. Smoky clapped his hand to his brow. “But how could you have thought I… that I… I mean wasn’t it obvious I didn’t know…”

“Well, I wondered,” Auberon said. “I thought maybe you were pretending. But I couldn’t be sure. How could I be sure? I couldn’t take a chance.”

“Then why didn’t you…”

“Don’t say it,” Auberon said. “Don’t say, Why didn’t you ask. Just don’t.”

“Oh, God,” Smoky said, laughing. “Oh, dear.”

Auberon sat back on the floor, shaking his head. “All that work,” he said. “All that effort.”

“I think,” Smoky said, “I think I’ll have another taste of that brandy, if you can reach the bottle.” He hunted up his empty snifter, which had rolled away into the darkness. Auberon poured for him, and for himself, and for a long time they sat in silence, glancing now and again at each other, laughing a little, shaking their heads. “Well, isn’t that something,” Smoky said.

“And wouldn’t it really be something,” he added after a while, “if none of us knew what was what. If we, if you and I, marched up now to your mother’s room…” He laughed at the idea. “And said, Hey…”

“I don’t know,” Auberon said. “I bet…”

“Yes,” Smoky said. “Yes, I’m sure. Well.” He remembered Doc, years ago, on a hunting expedition Smoky and he had made one October afternoon: Doc, who was himself Violet’s grandson, but who had advised Smoky that day that it was best not to inquire into some things too deeply. Into what’s given; what can’t be changed. And who could tell now just what Doc himself had known, after all, what he had carried with him to the grave. On the very first day he had come to Edgewood, Great-aunt Cloud had said: The women feel it more deeply, hut the men perhaps suffer from it more… He had come to spend his life with a race of expert secret-keepers, and he had learned much; it was no wonder really that he’d fooled Auberon, he’d learned from masters how to keep secrets, even if he had none to keep. Yet he did have secrets, he suddenly thought, he did: though he couldn’t tell Auberon what had happened to Lilac, there was more than one fact about her and about the Barnable family that he still kept to himself, and had no intention of ever telling his son; and he felt guilty about that. Face to face: well. And was it suspicion of some such thing which made Auberon rub his brow, staring again into his glass?

No; Auberon was thinking of Sylvie, and of what his mother had instructed him to do tomorrow in the woods above the lake island, the outlandish thing; and how she had pressed her finger to her lips, and then to his, enjoining silence on him when his father came into the room. He raised his forefinger and stroked the new hair that had recently and unaccountably joined his two eyebrows into one.

“In a way, you know,” Smoky said, “I’m sorry you made it back.”

“Hm?”

“No, of course I don’t mean I’m sorry, only… Well, I had a plan; if you didn’t write or show up soon, I was going to set out to find you.”

“You were?”

“Yup.” He laughed. “Oh it would have been quite an expedition. I was already thinking of what to pack, and all.”

“You should have,” Auberon said, grinning with relief that he had in fact not.

“It might have been fun. Seeing the City again.” He was lost a moment in old visions. “Well. I probably would have got lost myself.”

“Yes.” He smiled at his father. “Probably. But thanks, Dad.”

“Well,” Smoky said. “Well. Gosh, look at the time.”

Embracing Himself

He followed his father up the wide front staircase.

The stairs creaked where and when they always had. The nighttime house was as familiar to him as the day-house, as full of details he had forgotten he knew.

They parted at a turning of the corridor.

“Well, sleep well,” Smoky said, and they stood together in the pool of light from the candle Smoky held. Perhaps if Auberon hadn’t been encumbered with his squalid bags and Smoky with the candle, they would have embraced; perhaps not. “You can find your room?”

“Sure.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

He took the fifteen and a half steps—bumping his flank against the absurd commode he always forgot was there—and put out his hand, and it touched his faceted glass knob. He lit no light once inside, though he knew that a candle and matches were there on the night-table, knew how to find them, knew the scarred underside of the table where he could strike the match. The odor (his own, cold, faint, but familiar, with an admixture of child’s smell, Lily’s twins who had camped there) spoke in a constant old murmur to him of past things. He stood unmoving for a moment, seeing by smell the armchair where much of his childhood’s happiness had been had, the armchair just large enough and unsprung enough for him to curl in with a book or a pad of paper, and the calm lamp beside it, and the table where cookies and milk or tea and toast could glow warmly in the lamplight; and the wardrobe from out whose door, when left ajar, ghosts and hostile figures used to steal to frighten him (what had become of those figures, once so familiar? Dead, dead of loneliness, with no one to spook); and the narrow bed and its fat quilt and its two pillows. From an early age he’d insisted on having two pillows, though he’d only rested his head on one. He liked the rich luxury of them: inviting. All there. The weight of the odors was heavy on his soul, like chains, like old burdens reassumed.

He undressed in the dark and crawled into the cold bed. It was like embracing himself. Since the adolescent spurt of growing that had brought him to Daily Alice’s height, his feet, when he was in this bed, curled down over the end, and had made two depressions there in the mattress. His feet found them now. The lumps were where they had always been. There was in fact only one pillow, and it smelled vaguely pissy. Cat? Child? He wouldn’t sleep, he thought; he couldn’t decide whether he wished he had been bold enough to gulp more of Smoky’s brandy or glad that this agony was his now, a lot to make up for, starting tonight. He had, anyway, plenty to occupy his wide-awake thoughts. He rolled over carefully into Position Two of his unvarying bedtime choreography, and lay that way long awake in the suffocating familiar darkness.

No, I understand now,” Auberon said, calm in the woods—it was so simple, really. “I didn’t, for a long time, but I do now. You just can’t hold people, you can’t own them. I mean it’s only natural, a natural process really. Meet. Love. Part. Life goes on. There was never any reason to expect her to stay always the same—I mean ‘in love,’ you know.” There were those doubt-quotes of Smoky’s, heavily indicated. “I don’t hold a grudge. I can’t.”

“You do,” Grandfather Trout said. “And you don’t understand.”

Nothing for Something

He had gone out at dawn, awakened by that abrasive thing like thirst or need that always awoke him at dawn since he’d become a drunkard. Unable to recapture sleep, unwilling to stare at the room, his room, which in the untender dawn looked alien and un- familiar, he d dressed. Put on his overcoat and hat against the misty chill. And climbed up through the woods, past the lake island where the white gazebo stood up to its knees in mist, up to where a falls fell melodiously into a deep dark pool. There, he’d done as his mother had instructed him, though believing none of it or trying to believe none of it. But, believe it or not, he was after all a Barnable, Drinkwater on his mother’s side; his great-grandfather didn’t refuse his summons. He couldn’t have if he’d wanted to.

“Well, though, but I’d like to explain to her,” Auberon said. “Tell her… Tell her, anyhow. That I don’t mind. That she has my respect for making the decision she did. So I thought if you knew where she was, even approximately where…”

“I don’t,” said Grandfather Trout.

Auberon sat back from the pool’s edge. What was he doing here? If the one piece of information he had wanted—the one piece which of all pieces he should not any longer care to seek—was to be still withheld from him? How could he anyway have asked for it? “What I don’t understand,” he said at last, “is why I have to go on making such a big deal out of it. I mean there are lots of fish in the sea. She’s gone, I can’t find her; so why do I cling to it? Why do I keep making her up? These ghosts, these phantoms…”

“Oh, well,” said the fish. “Not your fault. Those phantoms. Those are their work.”

“Their work?”

“Don’t want you to know it,” said Grandfather Trout, “but yes, their work; just to keep you sharp set; lures; no worry there.”

“No worry?”

“Just let ’em pass by. There’ll be more. Just let ’em pass by. Don’t tell them I told you so.”

“Their work,” Auberon said. “Why?”

“Oh, well,” Grandfather Trout said guardedly. “Why; well, why…”

“Okay,” Auberon said. “Okay, see? See what I mean?” An innocent victim, tears sprang to his eyes. “Well, hell with them anyway,” he said. “Figments. I don’t care. It’ll pass. Phantoms or no phantoms. Let ’em do their worst. It won’t last forever.” That was saddest of all; sad but true. A trembling sigh covered him and passed. “It’s only natural,” he said. “It won’t last forever. It can’t.”

“It can,” Grandfather Trout said. “It will.”

“No,” Auberon said. “No, you think it will sometimes. But it passes. You think—Love. It’s such a whole, such a permanent thing. So big, so—separate from you. With a weight of its own. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“But that’s not so. It’s just a figment too. I don’t have to do its bidding. It just withers away on its own. When its over after all you don’t even remember what it was like.” That’s what he had learned in his little park: that it was possible, reasonable even, to discard his broken heart like a broken cup; who needed it? “Love: It’s all personal. I mean my love doesn’t have anything to do with her—not the real her. It’s just something I feel. I think it connects me to her. But it doesn’t. That’s a myth, a myth I make up; a myth about her and me. Love is a myth.”

“Love is a myth,” Grandfather Trout said. “Like summer.”

“What?”

“In winter,” Grandfather Trout said, “summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.”

Auberon raised his eyes to the crook-fingered trees that rose above the sounding pool. Leaves were uncurling from ten thousand tips, What he was being told, he saw, was that he had accomplished nothing in the little park by Art of Memory, nothing at all; that he was as burdened as ever, unrelievably. That couldn’t be so. Could he really love her forever, live in the house of her forever, inescapably?

“In summer,” he said, “winter is a myth…”

“Yes,” said the trout.

“A report, a rumor, not to be believed.”

“Yes.”

He had loved her and she had left him, without reason, without farewell. If he loved her always, if there was no death of love, then she would always leave him, always without reason, always without farewell. Between those eternal stones bright and dark he would be ground small forever. It couldn’t be so.

“Forever,” he said. “No.”

“Forever,” said his great-grandfather. “Yes.”

It was so. He knew, eyes blind with tears and heart black with terror, that he had exorcised nothing, not one moment, not one glance, no, he had by his Art only refined and burnished every moment of Sylvie that he had been given, not one of them was returnable now forever. Summer had come, and all serene autumns and all winters peaceful as any grave were myth and no help.

“No fault of your own,” Grandfather Trout said.

“I must say,” Auberon said, wiping tears and snot from his face with the sleeve of his coat, “you’re not a lot of comfort.”

The trout answered nothing. He hadn’t expected thanks.

“You don’t know where she is. Or why I should be done by this way. Or what I should do. And then you tell me it won’t pass.” He sniffed. “No fault of my own. Big help that is.”

There was a long silence. The fish’s wavering white form regarded him and his grief unblinking. “Well,” he said at last. “There is a gift in it for you.”

“Gift. What gift.”

“Well, I don’t know. Exactly. But I’m sure there’s a gift. You don’t get nothing for something.”

“Oh;” Auberon could sense the fish’s effort to be kind. “Well. Thanks. Whatever it is.”

“Nothing to do with me,” Grandfather Trout said. Auberon stared into the water’s silky folded surface. If he had a net. Grandfather Trout sank slightly and said, “Well, listen.” But after that he said nothing more; and by slow degrees sank out of sight.

Auberon rose. The morning mist had burned away, the sun was hot, and the birds were ecstatic—it was all that they had hoped it would be. He made his way down the stream through all this gladness, and out along the path to the pasture. The house, beyond whispering trees, was pastel in the morning, and seemed to be just opening its eyes. A dark smudge in the spring, he stumbled through the pasture, wet to his knees with dew. It can last forever: it will. There would be a bus he could catch at evening, a bus that by a roundabout path met another bus that went south along the gray highways, through thickening suburbs, to the broad bridge or to the tiled tunnel, and then out onto the horrid streets that led by old geometries smoked and full of wretchedness to Old Law Farm and the Folding Bedroom in the City where Sylvie was or was not. He stopped walking. He felt himself to be a dry stick, that dry stick that the Pope in the story gave to the sinful knight who had loved Venus, and who would not be redeemed until it blossomed. And there was no blossoming in him.

Grandfather Trout, within whose pool spring was also unfolding, fringing his private holes with tender weed and bringing bugs to term, wondered if there really would be a gift for the boy. Probably not. They didn’t give out such things when they didn’t have to. But the boy had been so sad. What harm in telling him? Give him heart. Grandfather Trout’s was not an affectionate soul, not now, not after all these years; but this was after all spring, and the boy was after all flesh of his flesh, or so they said. He hoped anyway that if there was a gift in it, it wouldn’t be one that would cause the boy any great suffering.

Quite Long-Sighted

“Of course I’d always known about them,” Ariel Hawksquill said to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. “In the practical, or experimental, stage of my studies, they were always a nuisance. Elementals. The experiments seemed to draw them, like a bowl of peaches drawing a cloud of fruit flies from nowhere, or a walk in the woods drawing chickadees. There were times I couldn’t go up and down the stairs to my sanctum—where I worked with the glasses and mirrors and so on, you know—without a crowd of them at my heels and head, Annoying. You couldn’t ever be sure they weren’t affecting your results.”

She sipped at the sherry the Emperor had ordered for her. He was pacing the parlor of his suite, not paying close attention. The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club had departed in some confusion, not sure whether any conclusion had been come to, and feeling vaguely fleeced. “What,” Barbarossa said, “do we do now? That’s the question. I think the time is ripe to strike. The sword’s unsheathed. The Revelation should come soon.”

“Hm.” The difficulty was that she had never thought of them as having wills. Like angels, they were forces only, emanations, condensations of occult energy, natural objects really and no more wilful than stones or sunlight. That they had shapes which seemed to be able to contain wills, had voices and faces with changeful expressions and flitted about with apparent purpose, she had ascribed to that quiddity of human perception that sees faces in the blotches of plaster walls, hostility or friendliness in landscapes, creatures in clouds. Once see a Force, and you will see it with a face, and a character; no help for it. But the Architecture of Country Houses saw the matter very differently: it seemed to state that if there were creatures who were merely expressions of natural forces, the will-less emanations of shaping wills, the medium of spirits who knew what they were doing, then those creatures were men and not fairies. Hawksquill was unwilling to go so far, but she was forced to think that yes, they did have wills as well as powers, and desires as well as duties, and weren’t blind, no, quite long-sighted in fact; and where did that leave her?

She really didn’t feature being a mere link in a chain woven by other powers, and having nothing to say in the matter, as her upstate cousins apparently thought of themselves. For sure she had no intention of being a subaltern in their army, which is how she supposed they thought of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whatever he thought of the matter. No: with no side was she ready to throw in her lot that completely. The mage is by definition he who manipulates and rules those forces at whose direction the common run blindly live.

She was on thin ice, in fact. The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club could never have been an opponent worthy of her powers. And by as much as she outclassed those gentlemen, by just as much, perhaps, was she outclassed by those who operated Russell Eigenblick. Well: it was anyway to be a contest worthy of her, at last; at last she and what she knew, now when her powers were at their height and her senses sharpest, would be tested as far as they could be tested; and if found wanting, there would at least be no dishonor in the losing.

“Well? Well?” said the Emperor, sitting down heavily.

“No Revelation,” she said, and rose. “Not now, if ever.”

He started, and his eyebrows shot up.

“My mind is changed,” Hawksquill said. “It might be just the thing to be a President for a while.”

“But you said…”

“As far as I know,” Hawksquill said, “that office’s powers are legally intact; only disused. Once installed, you could turn them on the Club. They’d be surprised. Throw them…”

“Into prison. Have them done secretly to death.”

“No; but perhaps into the toils of the Legal System at least; from which, if recent history is any guide, they will not emerge for a long time, and then considerably weakened, and much poorer—nickeled and dimed to death, as we used to say.”

He grinned at her from his chair, a long, wolfish, conspirator’s grin which almost made her laugh. He crossed his large blunt fingers over his stomach and nodded, pleased. Hawksquill turned to the window, thinking Why him? Why him of all people? And thought: if the mice in a household were suddenly given some vote or say in its management, whom would they elect housekeeper?

“And I suppose,” she said, “in many ways, being President of this country, just now, wouldn’t be altogether different from being Emperor of your old Empire.” She smiled at him over her shoulder, and he looked up at her from under his red brows to see if he were being mocked. “The same splendors, I mean,” Hawksquill said mildly, raising her glass to the window light. “The same joys. The same sorrows… How long, in any case, did you expect to reign now?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. He yawned hugely, complacently. “From now on, I suppose. Ever after.”

“That’s what I thought,” Hawksquill said. “In that case, there’s no need to be hasty, is there?”

From the east, across the ocean, evening was gathering; a complex, lurid sunset was spilled in the west as from a broken vessel. From this window’s height, out of its orgulous expanse of glass, the struggle between them could be observed, a show laid on for the rich and mighty who lived in high places. Ever after… It seemed to Hawksquill, watching the battle, that the whole world was just at that moment lapsing into a long dream, or perhaps awaking from one; it was impossible to tell which. But when she turned from the window to remark on this, she saw that the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was asleep in his chair, snoring softly, his faint breath blowing out the hairs of his red moustache and his face as peaceful as any sleeping child’s: as if, Hawksquill thought, he had never really awakened at all.

Ever After

“Oho,” George Mouse said when at last he opened the door of Old Law Farm to find Auberon on the stoop. Auberon had been long pounding and calling (somewhere in his wanderings he had lost all his keys) and now faced George ashamed, the prodigal cousin.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hey,” George said. “Long time no hear from.”

“Yeh.”

“You had me worried, man. What the hell was that about, running off? Hell of a thing.”

“Looking for Sylvie.”

“Oh, yeah, hey, you left her brother in the Folding Bedroom. A sweet guy, really. So you find her?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

They stood facing each other. Auberon, still bemused by his own sudden reappearance in these streets, could not think of a way to ask George to take him back, though it seemed that it was for that that he stood before him. George only smiled and nodded, his black eyes alert to something not present: stoned again, Auberon supposed. Though May was just unfolding in Edgewood, the City’s single week of spring had come and passed, and summer was full there already, putting forth its richest odors, like a lover in heat. Auberon had forgotten.

“So,” George said.

“So,” Auberon said.

“Back in Bigtown, huh?” George said. “Were you thinking…”

“Can I come back?” Auberon said. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, no. Swell. Lot’s to do just now. The Folding Bedroom’s empty… How long were you thinking?…”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Auberon said. “From now on, I guess. Ever after.”

He was a flung ball, that’s all, he saw that clearly now; flung outward from Edgewood at first, leaping high, bounding to the City, then ricocheting madly within that maze, the walls and objects he struck the determiners of his way, until (not by his choice) he had been flung back Edgewoodwards again to carom there, angles of incidence equaling angles of reflection; and then back again to these streets, to this Farm. And even the most tensile of balls must have a stop, must bounce more lowly, then more lowly, and at last roll only, parting the grass; then, resisted even by the grass, must slow, and with a little rocking motion come to rest.

Three Lilacs

George seemed then to realize that they stood there in an open door, and, darting his head out for a quick look down the fearful street to see who might be approaching, drew Auberon within and locked the door behind them, as he had once before on a winter night in another world.

“You got some mail and stuff,” he said as he led Auberon down the hall and down the stairs to the kitchen; and then said something more, about goats and tomatoes, but Auberon heard nothing more because of a sudden roaring of blood in his ears and a fearful thought about a gift, which filled up his head; a roaring and a thought which continued to fill up his head while George aimlessly searched amid the treasures of the kitchen for the letters, stopping to put questions and make remarks. Only when he saw that Auberon neither heard nor answered did he apply himself and come up with two long envelopes, which had been put in a toast-rack along with some ancient dunning letters and souvenir menus.

A glance told Auberon that neither was from Sylvie. His fingers trembled, though pointlessly now, as he opened them. Petty, Smilodon & Ruth were pleased to inform him that Doctor Drinkwater’s will had at last been settled. They included an accounting which showed that, less advances and costs, his share of the settlement was $34.17. If he would come in and sign some papers he would receive this amount in full. The other envelope, a heavy wove paper with an expensive-looking logo, yielded up a letter from the producers of “A World Elsewhere.” They had gone very carefully over his scripts. The story ideas were terrific and vivid but the dialogue was somewhat unconvincing. Still, if he cared to work over these scripts or try another, they thought a place could be found for him soon among the show’s junior writers; they hoped to hear from him, or were anyway hoping last year. Auberon laughed. At least he’d have, perhaps, a job; perhaps he would continue Doc’s endless chronicle of the Green Meadow and the Wild Wood, though not in the way Doc would have.

“Good news?” George said, making coffee.

“You know,” Auberon said, “There’s some very strange things going on in the world lately. Very strange.”

“Tell me about it,” George said, meaning the opposite.

Auberon realized that coming out of his long drunk he was just now noticing things that everyone else had already learned to live with. As though he were suddenly to turn to his fellow man and announce that, hey, the sky is blue, or point out that the aged trees along the street were in leaf. “Were there always big trees along this street?” he asked George.

“That ain’t the worst of it,” George said. “The roots are breaking up my basements. And just try to get through to the Parks Department. Hopeless.” He put coffee before Auberon. “Milk? Sugar?”

“Black.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” George said, stirring his coffee with a tiny souvenir coffee-spoon though he had put nothing in it. “Sometimes I think I’ll blow this burg. Go back into fireworks. There’s going to be big bucks in fireworks now, I bet, with all the celebrations.”

“Hm?”

“Eigenblick and all that. Parades, shows. He’s very into that stuff. And fireworks.”

“Oh.” Since his night and morning with Bruno, it had been a policy of Auberon’s not to think or ask questions about Russell Eigenblick. Love was strange: it could color whole passages of the world, and ever after they retained the color of love, whether that color was bright or dark. He thought of Latin music, souvenir T-shirts, certain City streets and places, the nightingale. “You were in fireworks?”

“Sure. You didn’t know that? Hey. The biggest. Name in the papers, man. It was a lot of laughs.”

“It wasn’t ever mentioned at home,” Auberon said, feeling the familiar exclusion. “Not to me.”

“No?” George looked at him strangely. “Well, it all came to a kind of sudden end. Just about the time you were born.”

“Oh yeah? How come?”

“Circumstances, man, circumstances.” He stared into his coffee, a pensiveness odd for George having fallen on him. Then, seeming to come to a decision, he said, “You know you had a sister, named Lilac.”

“Sister?” This was a new idea. “Sister?”

“Well, yeah, sister.”

“No. Sophie had a baby, named Lilac, that went away. I had an imaginary friend, named Lilac. But no sister.” He pondered. “I always kind of thought there were three, though. I don’t know why.”

“Sophie’s baby’s the one I’m talking about. I always thought the story up there was… Well, never mind.”

But Auberon had had enough. “No, uh-uh, wait a minute. No ‘never mind.’ ” George looked up startled and guilty at Auberon’s tone. “If there’s a story, I want to hear it.”

“It’s a long one.”

“All the better.”

George pondered. He got up, put on his old cardigan and sat down again. “Okay. You asked for it.” He thought for a time how to begin. Decades of odd drugs made him a vivid but not always a coherent story-teller. “Fireworks. Three Lilacs, did you say?”

“One was imaginary.”

“Shit. I wonder what makes the other two. Anyway, there was one in there that was false: like a false nose. I mean exactly like. That’s the fireworks story: that one.

“See, a long time ago, one day, Sophie and I… Well, it was one winter day when I went up to Edgewood, and she and I… But I didn’t think anything came of it, you know? Sort of a crazy fling. I wrote it off. I mean she had me fooled. Meanwhile, I knew there was a thing between her and Smoky.” He looked at Auberon. “Common knowledge, right?”

“Wrong.”

“You didn’t… They didn’t…”

“They never told me anything. I knew there’d been a baby, Lilac, of Sophie’s. Then she was gone. That’s all I knew.”

“Well, listen. As far as I know, Smoky still thinks he’s Lilac’s father. So, you know, mum is definitely the word on this story. Wazza matter?”

Auberon was laughing. “No, nothing,” he said. “Yeah, sure, mum’s the word.”

“Anyway. This is—what?—twenty-five years ago maybe. I’d gotten heavily into fireworks, because of Act Theory. Remember Act Theory? No? Jesus, things don’t last long in that line these days, do they. Act Theory, dig—God, I don’t know if I remember now how it worked myself, but it was this idea about how life works—how life is acts, and not thoughts or things: an act is a thought and a thing both at once, only it has this shape, see, so it can be analyzed. Every act, no matter what kind, pick up a cup, or a whole life, or like all of evolution, every act has the same shape; two acts together are another act with the same shape; all life is only one big act, made up of a million smaller ones, follow?”

“Not really.”

“Don’t matter. It was the reason I got into fireworks though, because a rocket has the same form as an act: initiation, burning, explosion, burning out. Only sometimes that rocket, that act, sets off another initiation, burning, explosion, and soon, get the picture? And so you can set up a display that has the same form as life. Acts, acts, all acts. Shells: inside one shell you can pack a bunch of others, which go off after the big one, packed in like a chicken is packed inside an egg, and inside that chicken more eggs with more chickens, and so on odd infinooty. Gerbs: a gerb has the same form as the feeling of being alive: a bunch of little explosions and burnings going on all the time, burning out, initiating, burning out, that all together make a picture, like thought makes pictures in the middle of the air.”

“What’s a gerb?”

“A gerb, man. Chinese fire. You know, that makes a picture of two battleships shooting at each other, and that turns into Old Glory.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Yeah. Lancework we call those. Just like thinking. A few people got that, too. Some critics.” He said nothing for a time, remembering vividly the river barge where he’d set off The Act Entrained and other shows. Darkness, and the slap of oily water; the smell of punk. And then the sky filled up with fire, which is like life, which is light that ignites and consumes and goes out and for a moment traces a figure in the air that can’t be forgotten but vihich, in a sense, was never there. And he racing around like a madman, shouting at his assistants, firing shells from the mortar, his hair singed, throat burning, coat motheaten from cinders, while his thought took shape above.

“About Lilac,” Auberon said.

“Yeah? Oh, yeah. Well, I’d been working for weeks for a new show. I had some new ideas about garnitures, and it was—well, it was my life, man, night and day. So one night…”

“Garnitures?”

“Garnitures are the part of the rocket that goes blooey at the end, like a flower. Y’see, you got your rocket, and here’s your case with your composition that burns and gets it aloft; and up here you got your, what you call your cap, and that’s where your garniture goes—stars, pinched stars, pumped stars—”

“Okay. Go on.”

“So I’m up on the third floor in this workshop I had fitted out up there—top floor, in case anything went, you know, the whole building wouldn’t go—it’s late, and I hear the bell ring. Bells still worked in those days. So I put down the case and stuff—you can’t just walk away from a roomful of fireworks, you know—and all the time the bell’s going, and I go down, who is this wise guy leaning on the bell. It was Sophie.

“It was a cold night, raining, I remember, and she had this shawl on, and that face in the shawl. She looked about dead, like she hadn’t slept for days. Big eyes like saucers, and tears, or maybe it was the rain on her face. She had this big bundle in her arms in another shawl, and I said what’s up and so on, and she said, ‘I’ve brought Lilac,’ and she pulled the shawl away from this thing she had.”

George shuddered, deeply, the shudder seeming to start at his loins and work upward till it flew off the top of his head, making his hair rise—the shudder of one whose future grave, they say, is somewhere stepped on. “Remember, man, I never knew about any of this. I didn’t know I was a daddy. I hadn’t heard from up that way in a year. And suddenly there’s Sophie, standing on the stoop like a bad dream saying Here’s your daughter, man, and showing me this baby, if that’s what it was.

“Man, this baby was in trouble.

“It looked old. I guess it was supposed to be about two now, but it looked about forty-five, a little withered bald guy, with this sly little face like some middle-aged furrier with troubles.” George laughed, a strange laugh. “It was supposed to be a girl, remember. God, it gave me a start. So we’re standing there, and the kid puts out its hand like this”—palm up, flat—“and checks the rain, and pulls the scarf over its head. Hey. What could I say? The kid made itself clear. I brought them in.

“We came in here. She set the kid up in that high chair. I couldn’t look at it, but I like couldn’t look away. And Sophie told me the story: her and me, that afternoon, strange as it may seem, she’s figured the dates blahblahblah, Lilac is my kid. But—dig this—not this one. She’s figured it out: the true Lilac got changed, one night, for this one. This one isn’t real at all. Not the real Lilac, not even a real baby. I’m stunned. I’m reeling around saying What! What! And all the time”—he started laughing again, helplessly—“this kid is sitting there with this attitude—I can’t describe it—this sneer on its face like okay, okay, I’ve heard this tripe a million times—like it was bored—and all I could think was that it needed a cigar in its mouth, just to complete the picture.

“Sophie was like in shock. Shivering. Trying to tell me all this stuff at once. Then she stopped, couldn’t go on. It seems the kid was all right at first, she never knew the difference; she couldn’t even tell what night it was when it happened, ’cause she seemed so normal. And beautiful. Only quiet. Real quiet. Like passive. Then—a few months before—it started to change. Very slowly. Then faster. It started to sort of wither. But it wasn’t sick. Doc checked it at first, all okay, big appetite, smiling—but getting old, like. Oh God. I put an afghan around her and started making tea and I’m saying Calm down! Calm down! And she’s telling me how it dawned on her what must have happened—I just wasn’t convinced yet, man, I thought this kid should see a specialist—and then how she started hiding it from everybody, and they started asking hey, how’s Lilac, how come we never see her around anymore.” Another fit of unwilled laughter. George was on his feet now, acting out the parts of the story, especially his own bewilderment, and suddenly he turned wide-eyed to the empty high chair. “Then we look. The kid is gone.

“Not in the chair. Not underfoot.

“The door’s open. Sophie’s dazed, she lets out a little cry—Ah!—and looks at me. See, I was its daddy. I was supposed to do something. That’s why she’d come and all. God. Just the thought of this thing running around loose in my house gave me the willies. I went out in the hall. Nobody. Then I saw it climbing up the stairs. Stair by stair. It looked—what’s the word—purposeful: like it knew where it was going. So I said, ‘Hey, wait a second, buster—’ I couldn’t think of it as a girl—and I reached for its arm. It felt weird, cold and dry, like leather. It looked back at me with this look of hate—who the fuck are you—and it gave a pull away, and I pulled back, and—” George sat again, overcome. “It tore. I tore a hole in the god damn thing. Rrrrip. A hole opened up near its shoulder, and you could look in, like into a doll—empty. I let go fast. It didn’t seem to be hurt, it just flapped the arm, like damn now it’s busted, and crawled on; and its blanket was coming off, and I could see there were some other cracks and splits here and there—at the knees, you know, and the ankles. This kid was falling apart.

“Okay. Okay. What could I think then? I came back in here. Sophie’s bundled up, with these big eyes. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It ain’t Lilac. And it ain’t mine, either.’

“She broke down. Like dissolved. That was the last straw. She just melted, man it was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen—‘You’ve got to help me, you’ve got to’—you know. Okay, Okay, I’ll help; but what in hell am I supposed to do? She didn’t know. Up to me. ‘Where is she?’ Sophie asked me.

“ ‘Went upstairs,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s cold. There’s a fire up there.’ And she suddenly gave me this look—horrified, but just too tired to do anything or even really feel anything—I can’t describe it. She grabbed my hand and said, ‘Don’t let her go near the fire, please, please!’

“Now what’s that about? I said, ‘Look, you just sit here and get warm and I’ll see.’ What the hell I was going to see I didn’t know. I picked up the baseball bat—be prepared, you know—and I went out, and she was still pleading: ‘Don’t let her get near the fire.’

George mimed creeping up the stairs, and entering the second-floor drawing-room. “I go in, and there it was. By the fire. Sitting on the whatchacallit, the hearth there. And I can not believe my eyes: because as it sits there it’s reaching into the fire—yes!— reaching into the fire and picking out, you know, glowing embers: picking them out, and popping them into its mouth.”

He came close to Auberon, this could not be believed unless he gripped Auberon’s wrist in pledge of his truthfulness. “And crunching them.” George made the gesture: like eating a walnut. “Ca-runch. Ca-runch. And smiling at me—smiling. You could see the coals glowing inside its head. Like a jack o’lantern. Then they’d go out, and it’d pick out another. And boy, it was getting a lot livelier behind this, Chipper, you know, a little refreshment; it jumps up, does a little dance. Naked now, too, Like a little broken evil plaster cherub. I swear-to-god nothing: nothing has ever scared me like that. I was so scared I couldn’t think, I just moved. You know? Too scared to be scared.

“I went over to the fire. I picked up the shovel. I dug up a whole lotta hot stuff from deep inside the fire. I showed it: mmm mmm good. Follow me, follow me. Okay, it wants to play this game, hot chestnuts, very hot chestnuts, come on, come on, we went out and up the stairs, it keeps reaching for the shovel; uh-uh, no no, I keep leading it on.

“Now listen, man. I don’t know if I was crazy or what. All I knew was that this thing was evil: I mean not evil evil, because I don’t think it was anything, I mean it was like a doll or a puppet or a machine, but moving on its own, like awful things in dreams that you know aren’t alive, piles of old clothes or mounds of grease that suddenly get up and start threatening you, okay? Dead, but moving. Animated. But evil, I mean an awful evil thing to have in the world. All I could think of was: get rid of it. Lilac or no Lilac. Just. Get. Rid of it.

“So anyway it’s following me. And up on the third floor across from the library is my, you know, my studio. Okay? Get the picture? The door is closed, of course; I closed it when I came down, always did, can’t be too careful. So I’m fumbling with it, and the thing is looking at me with these eyes that weren’t eyes, and oh shit any minute now it’s going to figure out the scam. I shove the shovel under it’s nose. The damn door won’t open, won’t open, then it does—and—”

With a mighty imaginary gesture, George heaved the shovelful of live coals into the studio filled with charged fireworks. Auberon held his breath.

“And then for the kid—”

With a swift, careful kick, side of the foot, George propelled the false Lilac into the studio also.

“And then the door!” He flung shut the door, staring at Auberon with the same wild horror and hurry that must have been in his eyes that night. “So done! Done! I flew down the stairs. ‘Sophie! Sophie! Run!’ She’s still sitting in that chair—right there—paralyzed. So I picked her up—not exactly carried her, but like a bum’s rush, because I can already hear the noises upstairs—and get her out into the hall. Bang! Blooey! Out the front door.

“And we stood out there in the rain, man, just looking up. Or anyway I looked up, she just sort of hid her head. And out the studio windows comes my whole show. Stars. Rockets. Magnesium, phosphorus, sulfur. Light for days. Noise. Stuff is falling all around us, hissing in the puddles. Then blowey! Some big cache goes up, and puts a hole right through the roof. Smoke and stars, boy we lit up the neighborhood. But the rain had got a lot worse; and pretty soon it was out, about the time the cops and the fire-trucks got there.

“Well, I had the studio pretty well reinforced, you know, steel door and asbestos and stuff, so the building didn’t go. But by God if there was anything left of that kid, or whatever it was…” .

“And Sophie?” Auberon said.

“Sophie,” George said. “I told her: ‘Listen, it’s all right. I got it.’

“ ‘What?’ she says. ‘What?’

“ ‘I got it,’ I said. ‘I blew it up,’ I said. ‘Nothing left of it.’

“And hey: do you know what she said to me?”

Auberon could not say.

“She looked up at me—and man I don’t think anything I saw that night was as bad as her face just then—and she said: ‘You killed her.’

“That’s what she said. ‘You killed her.’ That’s all.”

George sat down, weary, depleted, at the kitchen table. “Killed her,” he said. “That’s what Sophie thought, that I’d killed her only child. Maybe that’s what she still thinks, I don’t know. That old George killed her only child, and his too. Blew her up, in stars and stripes forever.” He looked down. “Man, I don’t want to see somebody look at me the way she did that night, not ever again.”

“What a story,” Auberon said, when he could find his voice again.

“See, if,” George said. “If it was Lilac, but just transformed in some weird way…”

“But she knew,” Auberon said. “She knew it wasn’t really Lilac.”

“Did she?” George said. “Who knows what the hell she knew.” A dark silence rose. “Women. How do you figure ’em.”

“But,” Auberon said, “what I don’t understand is, why they would have brought her that thing in the first place. I mean if it was such a fake.”

George eyed him suspiciously. “What ‘they’ is this?” he asked.

Auberon looked away from his cousin’s inquiry. “Well, they,” he said, surprised and oddly embarrassed that this explanation was coming out of his mouth. “The ones who stole the real one.”

“Hm,” George said.

Auberon said nothing further, having nothing further to say on that head, and seeing quite plainly and for the first time in his life just why silence had been kept so well among those whom he had used to spy on. Having them for explanation felt in fact like having none at all, and he found himself now, willy-nilly, sworn to the same silence; and yet he thought he would not ever again be able to explain a single thing in the world without recourse to that collective pronoun: they. Them.

“Well, anyway,” he said at last. “That accounts for two.”

George raised his eyebrow in question.

“Two Lilacs,” Auberon said. He counted them off: “Of the three I thought there were, one was imaginary, mine, and I know where she is.” In fact he felt her, deep within, take notice of his mention of her. “One was false. That’s the one you blew up.”

“But if,” George said, “if that was the real one, only Somehow changed… Naaah.”

“No,” said Auberon. “That’s the one that’s left, the one that’s unaccounted for: the true one.” He looked out the casement at the gloaming which was stealing now over Old Law Farm as well as over the high towers of the City. “I wonder,” he said.

“I wonder…” George said. “I’d give a lot to know.”

“Where,” Auberon said. “Where, where.”

Thinking of Waking

Far, far, and dreaming: turning in her sleep, restless, and thinking of waking, though she would not wake yet for many a year; an itch in her nose, and a yawn in her throat. She even blinked, but saw nothing through sleeping eyes but dream: a dream, amid the spring she slept in, of autumn: of the gray vale where, on the day of her tour, the stork that bore her and Mrs. Underhill had at last put its feet on terra firma or something like it, and how Mrs. Underhill had sighed and dismounted, and how she, Lilac, had reached out to put her arms around Mrs. Underhill’s neck and be helped down… She yawned; having learned how to do it, she was now apparently unable to stop, and couldn’t decide whether she liked the sensation or not.

“Sleepy,” Mrs. Underhill said.

“Where is this?” Lilac said when she had been set on her feet.

“Oh, a place,” Mrs. Underhill said softly. “Come along.”

A broken arch, roughly carved, or finely carved and roughly weathered, stood before them; no walls extended from it, it stood alone astride the leaf-littered path showing the only way into the sere November wood beyond. Lilac, apprehensive yet resigned now, put her young small hand in Mrs. Underhill’s old huge one, and like any granny and child in a chill park from which summer and fun have fled, they went on to the gate; the stork stood alone on one red leg, preening her rumpled and disordered leathers.

They passed under the arch. Old birds’ nests and moss filled its coffers and reliefs. The carving was obscure, creatures inchoate or returning to chaos. Lilac passed her hand over it as they passed: the stuff it was made of was not stone. Glass? Lilac wondered. Bone?

“Horn,” said Mrs. Underhill. She took off one of her many cloaks, and dressed Lilac’s nakedness in it. Lilac kicked the brown leaves of the vale, thinking it might be nice to lie down in them, for a long time.

“Well, a long day,” said Mrs. Underhill, as though sensing this thought.

“It went too fast,” Lilac said.

Mrs. Underhill put her arm around Lilac’s shoulder. Lilac stumbled against her, her feet seeming to have lost contact with her will. She yawned again. “Aw,” said Mrs. Underhill tenderly, and she picked up Lilac with a single swift motion of her strong arms. She drew the cloak more tightly around her as Lilac nestled against her. “And was it fun?” she asked.

“It was fun,” Lilac said.

They had stopped before a great oak at whose foot a whole summer’s worth of leaves was piled. From a hollow in it an owl, just awakened, boomed softly to itself. Mrs. Underhill bent to lay her burden in the rustling leaves.

“Dream of it,” she said.

Lilac said something that made no sense, about clouds and houses, and then no more, for she was asleep. Asleep, never having noticed the moment when she began, dreaming of it already as she would go on dreaming of it from now on; dreaming of all that she had seen, and all that would come of it; dreaming of the spring when she would dream of the autumn when she fell asleep, and dreaming of the winter when she would wake; in the involution of her dream, turning and altering those things she dreamed even as she dreamed them and as elsewhere they came to pass. She drew up, though unaware she did so, her knees; she drew her hands close to her chin, which drew down, till she took the same S-shape she had taken when she had lived within Sophie. Lilac was asleep.

Mrs. Underhill tucked the cloak once more carefully around her, and then straightened up. With both hands she pressed the small of her back and bent backwards, as weary as she had ever been. She pointed to the owl, whose soft-blooming eyes were looking out from its house, and said, “You. Take care, watch well,” which those eyes could do as well as anypair she knew. She looked upward. Twilight, even the endless twilight of this November day, had nearly ended, and she with all her tasks left undone: the last of the year still unburied, and the rains that were to bury it (and a million insect larvae, a million bulbs and seeds) yet unpoured; the floor of heaven unswept of dirty cloud and its winter lamps still to be lit. Brother North-wind, she was sure, champed at his bit to be unleashed. It was a wonder, she thought, that day followed night, that the very earth turned at all, she had given it so little thought of late. She sighed, turned away, and (growing huger and older and more puissant than Lilac had ever supposed, or could imagine or even dream her to be) she expanded upward and outward toward these tasks without a backward look at her adopted grand-daughter asleep among the leaves.