Love and Sleep (22 page)
And all that time Fellowes Kraft in the Faraways had been accumulating the pages of a book, this book, a book unlike any other he had ever written, as though he took dictation from another voice, the same voice that tempted Pierce, and called him on.
Pierce first suggested to Boney Rasmussen that the great typescript be taken out and photocopied, so that he could read it himself if he felt incapable of coming here to sit before it (he was old and not strong); but Boney had not wanted it to leave Kraft's house, as though were it to be taken out into the sunlight it might turn to dead leaves or crumble into gravedust. So every day Rosie Rasmussen drove Pierce from his apartment in Blackbury Jambs to Kraft's house in Stonykill to read by the light of Kraft's study window (the electricity was off in the house). And since Boney Rasmussen would not come to read them he, Pierce, was going to have to tell him the story, like an ancient bard, once upon a time.
He raised his eyes to the window, where now Rosie and Sam could be seen, gathering rosebuds.
Once upon a time—say right about the time of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, or at the beginning of the Piscean age—it seems that wise men in the city of Alexandria, or maybe somewhere older and deeper in the Old World than that, made by pure thought an astonishing discovery.
They discerned that time and the world do not flow evenly forward together, but are subject to quite sudden, total, and irreversible alterations. Every now and then the observable universe passes through a sort of turnstile or baffle and comes out different on the other side—different not only in its physical extensions and the laws that govern them, but different in its past and future too: once the world was all like
this;
then it changed; now it's like
this,
and always has been.
The
magi
who thus discovered the erstwhile existence of a lost, a no-longer-findable past supposed that of course it must have been better than the past recorded in their own standard (now transmogrified) histories, and far far better than the late era they themselves lived in. In that other past, they thought, the gods had lived on earth among men, and men had possessed arts and treasures now vanished. So they bent their minds to discovering what traces of that lost past might have survived unchanged into their degraded age; and in their researches created or re-created a dozen arts and a thousand works of varying degrees of worth.
Perceiving then that their own universe was itself in the process of taking a sharp turn or transformation (perceiving, indeed, that their discovery of periodic world-overturning transformations was only possible because one was under way), the wise brotherhood set about trying to preserve something of what they had found or created: something which would bear with it, like an ark, not only the powers and arts about to be lost once again, but also the memory of falls such as they were experiencing. They guessed that the chances were slim of any one part of their world surviving unchanged into the next, and so they created several such carriers—a jewel, an elixir, a cask, a personage wrapped in changeless sleep—and, as the frame of the universe they knew shook and tottered, they went in bands out to the four corners of the earth (which did have four corners then) to preserve and conceal these treasures, and to pass on to their descendants the knowledge and the duty to keep and guard them.
Inevitably, though, one by one, corroded or fouled by the alteration of space and time, the treasures decline into useless rubbish; the guardians forget what they are guarding, and why; the new age grows old, and if the stories are remembered they are remembered as that alone, as stories.
And as that age, too, draws to its end (now we are somewhere at the end of the Renaissance) amid awful rumor and wild speculation, a new body of wise men discerns that the upheaval of their time is but the latest in a series, told of in stories and encoded in the obscurities of ancient sciences and the recipes of magic-books. The wreckage of time, they conclude, is about to bring forth the treasures that the past laid up, as an earthquake breaks open tombs; and they will be the inheritors of the jewel, the
crater
, the person wrapped in deathlike sleep with emerald tablet gripped in his white fingers; the inheritors too of the duty to preserve and transmit at least one of these alive into the unknown new age now dawning, etc., and with it the knowledge, etc., etc., as before.
All this told in approximately reverse order, not without skill, but with the unreal lightness of a film run backward, the same eerie swapping of cause and effect. Unfinished, moreover; a Möbius strip still needing to be pasted end to end in order to become endless.
And it was all true: Pierce knew the history Kraft had built on well enough to see that. Strange but true. It was only inverted, as Pierce had once himself imagined History could be inverted, the real good guys being not the textbook victors but the others, the forgotten ones, who preserved among them a secret history opposite to the history everyone else is given to learn; exiles, made to suffer unfairly through the ages by harsh authorities, though their wisdom will triumph at last and in the end.
The great coincidence, sum of all the small and apparently unimportant ones that had guided and tugged and chivvied him gently to this room in this year, was that he already knew this story of Kraft's before he sat to read it.
It
was
all true: there really had once been a country of wise priests whose magic worked, encoded in the picture-language of hieroglyphics. That was what Pierce had learned in his recent researches. It did lie far in the past, though not in the past of Egypt. It had been constructed long after the actual Egypt had declined and been buried, its mouth stopped because its language could no longer be read.
And this magic Egypt really had been discovered or invented in Alexandria around the time of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, when a Greek-speaking theosophical cult had attributed some mystical writings of their own to ancient priests of an imaginary Egyptian past of temples and speaking statues, when the gods dwelt with men. And then that imagined country really had disappeared again as those writings were lost in the course of the Christian centuries that followed.
And when they were rediscovered—during the Renaissance in Italy, along with an entire lost past—scholars believed them to be really as ancient as they purported to be. And so a new Egypt, twice different from the old original, had appeared: ancient source of knowledge, older than Moses, inspiring a wild syncretism of sun-worship, obelisks, pseudo-hieroglyphs, magic and semi-Christian mysticism, which may have powered that knowledge revolution called science, the same science that would eventually discredit imaginary Egypt and its magic.
And yet even when the
real
Egypt had come to light again, the tombs broken open and the language read, the other country had persisted, though becoming only a story, a story Pierce had come upon in his boyhood and later forgot, the country he had rediscovered in the City in the days of the great Parade, when he had set out to learn the hidden history of the universe: the story he was still inside of, it seemed, inescapably.
AEgypt.
He had told his cousins when they asked him
Will we be in this story when we're grownups?
that they would, that it was a story about grownups; it wasn't make-believe, he had said, they hadn't made it up, they had discovered themselves in it. He had told them it would still be going on when they were grownups and they would be in it still. And so it had. And here again he was himself.
Pierce lifted his eyes from the eroded bluff the pile of pages made, face down on the left-hand side, face up on the right.
He had that day received his first check from the Rasmussen Foundation, made out in Rosalind Rasmussen's back-slanted left-handed script with schoolgirl circles dotting the i's, and signed in Boney Rasmussen's Palmer Method tracery. It was in his pocket.
What really was he being paid to do?
There was this huge typescript, which had been hiding so long in plain sight on Kraft's desk, which Pierce was now charged with deciding about.
There were Kraft's other papers, a dusty attic pile of liquor cartons which Pierce, heart sinking, had looked into as into another man's unwashed laundry. All through the house, floor to ceiling and in casual piles and in turnabout bookcases, were books, and he was to rummage in those, to see what of extraordinary value might turn up (his suggestion that a professional dealer be brought in to make an assessment had been dismissed gracefully, which puzzled him but pleased him too).
Above—or beneath—all these charges was another task, one that Boney Rasmussen had seemed to lay upon him without ever quite stating it: to look for something somewhere here—in the books, the book, the boxes—something that Kraft had lost or found, something which the old man (gaga maybe, probably) much desired and yet referred to in terms so delicate and tentative and shamefaced that Pierce had decided not to understand him.
And there was his own book, too, not to forget. For which another and larger check had also just arrived, signed by his agent Julie Rosengarten, the first half of an advance against the royalties of a book that was not yet half done, was not even half begun: a book that he could almost believe he need not ever actually write (he laughed a mad laugh in the hollow house) because he had found it here all done, like the shoemaker in the story; all but done, easily done, if he could only think of the right question to put to the place, and to Kraft's unlaid spirit that inhabited it.
When Pierce had first left the city, where he had long lived, and moved out to the Faraway Hills not so far away but a different world for sure, it was in order to write a book of his own: not a novel but a history of sorts, for a historian (of sorts) was what he was, or what he might aspire to be called; he had certainly taught a lot of history classes, and he had never, since Kentucky, ever seriously entertained another ambition.
He had been able to picture himself—in the third person, so to speak (the only way he had ever been able to imagine his own future, or lay plans for himself)—out in the country, working and living, serene or at least quiet after a long season in the funhouse of city high life. He had not pictured himself arriving here to step directly into this story he had stepped into, which had been spooling out meantime in these hills even as he had lived his own life and thought his own thoughts elsewhere: as though you could stumble over a path you had left forever long before, here blindly by chance intersecting the one you took instead.
Blindly.
It was his friend and city neighbor Brent Spofford who had got him here. Spofford had grown up in these hills, and then had returned to them after a long sojourn in the city and the Great World, from where Pierce had continued to send him an occasional budget of news, and to hear back from Spofford about seasons and labor. Spofford had found for Pierce the fine cheap apartment on Maple Street in Blackbury Jambs. And when Pierce's exit visa had at length been issued (that was how Pierce saw it at the time) and he was packed and prepared, Spofford came to the city in his pickup and carried Pierce and his belongings into the hills, where Pierce experienced that astonishing access of liberty and ease, in his life and in his soul, that inrush of unearned beauty that longtime city-dwellers are often whelmed by when they go to pretty country towns in the spring of the year.
He had at first supposed that he would be going back to the city regularly, unable to imagine that the little town and its environs could supply him with the excitements and possibilities he had learned to subsist on. Actually he had hardly gone back at all. But on the day after he finished reading the manuscript of Kraft's last novel, he found that he had packed an overnight bag, called his agent in the city, acquainted himself with the bus schedule, and prepared his mind to go to town.
And stood then in the middle of his little sitting room (less ready to go than he imagined himself to be, he had not got himself enough cash, he had not packed his toothbrush among other necessities, his heart was full) looking out and down into the scruffy back yard of the building whose second floor his apartment occupied, becoming aware that an old, old rose bush burdening the slat and wire fence between his and the next house's yard was in bloom.
It had been a briar patch when he arrived here in March. And now look. All by itself, untouched, unloved. He remembered the big bushes that went down the sloping lawn in Kentucky.
Something entirely different is coming.
This thought—it was not a thought but an understanding, a sudden conviction such as he had never had before, a clairvoyance distilled out of the June day and the roses and the tick of time's passing—neither surprised nor exalted him, nor made him afraid. It was a conclusion he came to, as simple and certain as a sum; only he had no idea what evidence, what multiplier or multiplicand, had been accumulating in him to be totted up just then. No idea.
Something entirely different is coming to you, that you can't imagine; and a different spirit to inhabit you, to meet it with.
He waited for more, stock still and not breathing, as though he had looked up to find a shy rare beast in his path that would flee him if he moved; but the message was done.
After a time he turned from the window, and shouldered his bag to go.
The bus (Pierce took the bus because he had no car, had never learned to drive or acquired a license) left from the little variety store on River Street, which was the main street of Blackbury Jambs, where the library and the three-story Ball Building and a bar and a coffee shop (the Donut Hole) looked out across the Blackbury River.
"Just rolling in,” said the lady who sold him his ticket, and indeed just then the windows of the store were darkened by the bulk of the bus drawing up before it. Pierce bought a local paper (the Faraway
Crier
) and one of the city papers; the bus snorted and exhaled the air of its brakes; the door swung open, the cheerful driver leapt smartly out, and Pierce, though gripped momentarily by a strange reluctance, boarded.