Love and Sleep (24 page)
"Witches,” Julie said.
"Werewolves.” Pierce saw in his mind a troop of gray ones, moving over burnt ground, heads looking side to side for the prey they followed.
"Then gone,” Pierce said. Then gone, the time of passage past when they are possible: and all of them, or nearly all, retreat back into earth air water and fire, not only no longer existing but demonstrably never having existed; new laws, new powers just as great but different, come to be; the sky now infinite, and empty.
"And here we are,” he said.
"Here we are,” she said, but sounded no longer quite here; elevated slightly, exalted maybe.
"But if it's now our turn,” he said, softly. “If it is."
"Then all that stuff really could be coming back,” Julie said, as though she had not believed it before, when she had said it herself. “Magic
could
be done again."
"Well you don't know,” Pierce said. “All you know is, what's coming will be different from, work differently from, the way things work now. It might have more magic in it. It might have less. Giordano Bruno was sure that in his time the magic of a former age was coming back again. But when the passage time was over, it hadn't. The new age brought new powers in that no one could have imagined. So will the next."
"Like what powers."
"Keep your eyes open,” Pierce said. “Maybe they won't be occurring in million-dollar labs, won't be an extension of what we know now. Maybe they'll be entirely different, something we can't yet imagine. Maybe it'll be you who can have them."
He smiled teasingly at her, but his heart was in his mouth; he had not imagined that this would be as hard to say as it was turning out to be, like pushing forward a stack of chips when he held nothing but a pair of twos. One way magic really could be said to work, bad magic, was in convincing others that physical laws were bendable, even breakable, and that you knew how to do it, when you didn't at all.
And yet it was true: his myth (for that's what he was offering her, a myth, Kraft's myth) really described what happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when systems warred and there were battles and sudden reversals and defections, and for a time the issue was in doubt.
And it was as true right now: anyway a case could be made, Pierce could make it, that the same transit was now occurring, old physics and mechanics grown feeble, unable to explain observed reality, hunger for new truths,
expectation
of new truths, intimations of renewal, of a different
paradigm
(new word the thinker could not now do without, tossed backward by ongoing Time to grow up and multiply, like Deucalion's stones), new laws, new ones to break too.
Something entirely new is coming.
"Will people believe it?” Julie said, almost a whisper.
"I don't know. I don't know if I do."
"How are you going to convince them? You'll have to."
"Well,” Pierce said. “What if I could offer evidence. Some actual tangible evidence. What if I could find something, some sort of something somewhere, that has survived, unchanged, from the former state of things, something."
"Like what.” She leaned forward to hear, and he too to speak, conspirators, their folded hands nearly touching in the middle of the table.
"Well suppose,” Pierce said. “Suppose that were the story of this book. Suppose that the story of this book was the true story of how such a thing was sought for..."
"And found,” Julie said.
"Well."
"Pierce. Do you really really know there is such a thing?"
He would not say so. But he held her eyes with his and grinned.
There was only one syllable with which she could respond to this; and when she made it, little round sound of wonder or delight, his heart rose, and he nearly laughed with tenderness and remembrance: for it returned him instantly to the railroad flat, not forty blocks from here, where a decade before he and Julie had been lovers: in the days of the great Parade, when the doors of dawn had opened, and nothing was ever to be the same again.
After his lunch, Pierce went downtown on foot through the afternoon, walking without noticing where he walked, watching the unrolling of an inward movie, a movie being made even as it unrolled.
Did he really intend to suggest in his book that once-upon-a-time the useless procedures of magic had had effects, the lead had turned to gold, the dead had risen; but that then the world ("the world") had passed through some sort of cosmic turnstile and come out the other side different, so that now not only are the old magics inefficacious but now they always were? Was he going to say that?
He guessed he was. Certainly he was going to hint at it, utter it, assemble ambiguous evidence for it, hold his readers in suspense with a search through history for the proof of it, the one thing—event, artifact, place, word—that is still, indisputably, what it once was in the past age, as nothing else any longer is. Whatever it might be.
He was going to entertain the notion; oh more, he was going to fete it, he was going to wine and dine it; he was going to have his way with it amid the spilled cups and crushed fruit of an uproarious banquet. And he was going to father on it a notion more powerful than itself, a notion which would only be given birth to in his concluding pages:
only if we treat the past in this way, as though it was different in kind from the present, can we form any idea of how different from the present the future will be
.
The future, fast approaching now, when this passage time has ended, and all these broils and clashings are over; when the new science (
nuova scienza, novum organum, ars magna
) that we sense rising now over the horizon has been formulated, if
formulated
is how it will be made manifest; when the now-inconceivable is made conceivable, and the present, our present, can no longer be constructed intelligibly, or its technics made to work, a lost world.
He thought he could do it. For the first time he could imagine it done, could imagine the pile of manuscript, the finished book, shy and sly in its wrapper, open it and see.
He lifted his eyes from the street. He had arrived, he saw, at the Public Library, before the great stone lions, as he had after an earlier lunch with Julie, when she had first charged him to write a book about the future.
His father Axel loved these beasts. Loved libraries and books with a chivalric passion. Often when Axel had taken him to Manhattan for some treat they had passed by here, and studied them, and read their inscriptions; Axel had told him the sculptor's name. Why are they here? Pierce asked. To keep people out, Axel answered; a joke of Little Enosh's. To keep people out. They repeated the joke every time they passed by here.
He went up the wide steps, where as always lovers and vagrants and eaters of al-fresco lunch were disposed, and through the doors. Cool and large and solemn. There were books he could look for, he had always a mental list of questions to be answered; he was at loose ends; he could turn, too, and cross town, and take the next bus home.
Home. He saw green hills in his heart.
Mounting the stairs—though still not having made a decision—he came without real surprise on his father. Axel stood beneath the big painting on the first-floor landing of Milton dictating to his (bored or transfixed) daughters. He was studying it, or might be thought to be studying it, but Pierce—not having been noticed as yet, stopped on the stairs below the landing—knew better. Axel's eyes scanned the huge dark picture, but he too watched an inward movie; his lips moved, speaking his endless monologue; his hands searched in the pockets of his blazer, and pulled out papers, which he studied with the same dreamy interest as he did Milton, and then replaced. Axel could go through whole museums in this state of semi-trance, ravished by beauty, noting great moments in Art or History, and yet borne on his own currents mostly. Pierce had been with him often thus.
Should he turn now and flee, before he was seen?
He didn't dare turn away. Axel's heart would break if he caught sight of Pierce's back, and guessed Pierce was trying to avoid him.
Nothing for it. He climbed up, and nearly had to bump into Axel before Axel focused on him.
"Good god. Well! Pierce!"
"Hello, Axel."
"I was just. Milton. I come here, you know. You remember this moment. The blind daughters. Justify God's ways to Man."
"Yes."
"Well how are you? You didn't call."
"I just decided this morning. I had some business to do."
"Well. Well.” Axel Moffett looked up at his tall son, a head at least higher than himself, awed and delighted. “Your business is done?"
"Oh mostly."
"We'll have an evening then."
"Actually I was sort of thinking of going on."
"Oh no. No. Foolish. Two long bus rides in a single day. When you haven't been back in months. No, no. Come on, Pierce. We'll have a day, like we used to.” He nearly danced with eagerness before Pierce. “Aw come on."
They had, actually, used to walk the city a lot, when Pierce lived here; at Axel's insistence, usually, using up Pierce's days off unless Pierce fought him off. But Pierce was also fascinated by Axel; he had turned out, when Pierce had returned to the city as an adult and had found Axel still here, to be an entirely different person from the one he remembered: not, he thought, because Axel had changed, he was a fixed entity, but because so much of him had been hidden from Pierce as a boy.
"Oh all right,” he said at last, annoyed at himself for being unable to refuse; he had never been good at refusing. If he could not evade or avoid, he usually assented.
"Good, good,” Axel said, mightily pleased, taking his son's arm. “Oh Pierce. Well met. Well met by moonlight."
"It's
ill
met,” Pierce said. “The line is
Ill met by moonlight
."
"We'll go downtown,” Axel said. “Stretch our legs. Have you ever looked into the Little Church Around the Corner? It's an interesting story."
"Yes,” Pierce said. “You've told me."
Walking with Axel was a peculiar exercise, and somewhat conspicuous. Axel had a habit of spying small items on the street, papers or unrecognizable jetsam, and stooping to pick them up. Sometimes he carried what he found to a trash basket, a good citizen; more often he simply examined it and dropped it again, only to pick up another a few yards on. He had used to tell his exasperated son that he was on the lookout for money or other treasure; but had at length confessed it wasn't that at all, he just couldn't help it. He didn't cease talking while he picked and looked and discarded, and Pierce, striding ahead, had often to stop and return a pace or two. Pierce thought sometimes they must look like two silent-film comedians, the tall saturnine one, the short plump one, backing and filling in a sort of dance, or stopping in the midst of traffic to crane their necks at an unremarkable building, where Axel thought he had spied a caryatid, or a gargoyle, or a Palladian window.
"Look look, Pierce. Rustication. You see?” Axel ran his hand over the blocks of a building, carved to look roughly-quarried. “Imitating natural blocks of stone, you see? Why we might be in Rome."
"Uh huh. Rustication meant antique virtue when Roman architects used it. Then the Renaissance."
"Well yes. You see?
Rome never fell.
You see?"
Pierce hands in his pockets refrained from joining Axel in feeling the wall like a blind man. “Come on, Axel."
Had Axel got worse lately? Pierce remembered that when he was very young Axel had held a job, a real one, he had been a bookkeeper, Pierce thought. It was hard to imagine him employed now at anything except the all-but-unpaid jobs he did for Catholic charities or the temporary clerical work he sometimes got. The rents on the little building in Brooklyn he owned and lived in kept him alive. What would happen to him otherwise? Pierce thought sometimes with guilty horror of caring for him in some awful future; or refusing to.
"Your book's all about this,” Axel said, who had heard Pierce's descriptions and absorbed what he chose to. “Rome. Greece. Egypt. With that little ligature."
"Well."
"
Novus ordo seclorum
,” Axel said. “The pyramid on the dollar."
"Right.” Why is there a rusticated pyramid on the Great Seal of the United States, surmounted by the mystic eye? Because the Founding Fathers believed in AEgypt too.
It occurred to Pierce that perhaps his book was at bottom an explanation of Axel to himself: of the stories Axel had repeated endlessly to him, man and boy, the Story of Civilization. If every question, every history Axel loved to ponder were swept away, then only the one question would be left, naked as a needle: why did you let me go? The question little Pierce went on asking, no matter how often big Pierce told him the answer.
Axel conceived the idea of walking to Brooklyn, which was well beyond even Pierce's long legs; and somewhere downtown as evening came on they stopped in one of the low bars Axel favored, where Pierce looked into his wallet, and found it not up to a long crawl.
"Well come back to Brooklyn. We'll rustle something up. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine."
This idea appealed to Pierce so little that at length he drew out his credit card (since he could not, would not at any rate, simply send Axel home alone) and he and his father, to Axel's inexpressible delight, set themselves up in a pleasant wood-paneled restaurant, where large drinks were placed on the white cloth before them. It had struck Pierce before that he was always forced to eat lavishly when he ate on credit, since the cheap places didn't extend it.
For the remains of the evening, Axel suggested (hemming and hawing a bit, and holding out his glass for wine) that there were in this neighborhood some remarkable new clubs that had opened in recent months. Had Pierce heard of them? Axel laughed, as at the inexplicable turns of human folly. Cowboy and leather, he said, and extremes of histrionic indulgence, nothing hidden, nothing. He mentioned Tiberius's isle of Capri, and the court of Heliogabalus. Some glorious young men, though, Axel was forced to admit. There was one of these places very nearby, the Sixth Circle, Pierce caught the reference no doubt.