Love and Sleep (41 page)

Listen, Man, endowed with Mind: know that you are immortal, and that the cause of death is love.

ZOOM IN ON the sleeper's face, farther, to the glitter of bright seeing eye just perceivable between upper lid and lower. A tear forms, hangs spherical on the sleeper's lid, reflecting stars; tumbles down his cheek.

And now why do you delay? You who have received all? How is it that you let them suffer who can receive this knowledge at your hands? Will you not be a guide for them?

The armchair is rising purposefully like an ascending helicopter, turning toward the open portal and the night. The cause of death is love. O Spirit, Soul, First Man, don't stay mingled forever in Nature; awaken, remember who you are, how you have come to suffer here. Turn again, remake your journey, pass at last upward again through the jealous spheres, give back to them their ambiguous and heavy gifts, saying to each one Let me pass.

Beau was borne out over the sleeping Faraways on a single soprano voice, singing liltingly and sorrowfully without words; borne weightless between the sky powdered with stars and the hills’ green labial folds.

O world, planet, beautiful and strange. He loved it here, he did. He would always remember it, too, as a tourist remembers in odd moments the strange, the rich-smelling, the unlikely land he once briefly visited; it would remain with him when, all his work done, he turned, at last, toward home.

Down there, in the hills, in the woods along the Shadow River, there was a window lit: the lamp beside Val's bed turned on, the smoke of a cigarette rising into its double cone of light.

She couldn't sleep; she who could sleep away the winter days and nights rarely stayed asleep through a whole night of summer. She had turned on the light to read; and the book she turned her wakefulness into was the big dictionary from which she had read to Rosie at the Volcano. No reason not to continue her researches. Dennis her Pekingese slept at her feet, snoring Pekingese snores.

So. The father of little Eros was mostly, or usually, Hermes. Here was Hermes: “He is among the oldest of the AchAEan Gods, and like all those
divi
of the Youth of Mankind, he seems to combine in himself contrary functions, as though once-upon-a-time he were the God not of one thing but of the distinction, newly discovered by Man, between one thing and another. Thus Hermes is the God who guides souls down into the underworld and prevents their turning back to the sunlight and the sky; yet he is also the God who presides over the Anthesteria, the feast of the dead, when for a few hours those souls are allowed out upon the earth to take a meal with the living."

See, right there, Val said to herself, noting another instance of a general objection she had to the book: no distinction made between what people
believed
and what actually
happened
. What was a meal with the dead really like? How did it go on? Who washed up after? Come on.

"He is most famously the Messenger God and thus God of speech and the quick flow of language; but he is also a God of silence and not speaking, who keeps to himself the arcana of the alchemists. He is the God of merchants and commerce, and yet he is the God of thieves as well, sponsoring at once the shopkeeper who locks up his goods and the footpad who breaks the lock."

In his silvery oblong picture Hermes was just another marble hunky guy, like all of them. A child, an infant on his arm, but who. Val yawned a huge and multi-layered yawn, trying to think of a few representative people she knew who were governed by Mercury, and unable just then to locate any with certainty. No thieves that she knew of, or undertakers either.

"Hermes was long ago the male God of sexual attraction, as APHRODITE (
q.v.)
was the female; thus the little phallic
stele
set up in his honor at crossroads and marketplaces all over the ancient world, called
herms
in English, touched reverently by Pagan travelers, shunned or smashed by their Christian or Moslem supplanters. Combine Hermes’ power of spell-binding speech, his thieving ways, and his sexual function, and he becomes the patron God of seducers; when the Gods combined to give life to the lifeless mannequin PANDORA (
q.v.),
Hermes granted her his own power of antic and careless seduction. He is given the epithet ‘Whisperer’ for his skills, an epithet he shares with Aphrodite and his own child Eros; and it is in that character that we often see him."

Often see him! There you go again, Val thought; and lifting her eyes from the page she did vividly see him for a moment, slouch hat, sweet sleepy eyes, one finger raised to his smiling lips like the Sandman. Don't make a sound.

What would it be like to have gods? To meet them? To know one had been around? Like Santa Claus maybe. The book said how Jesus was hardly the first human child for whom a divine parent was claimed; girls in trouble all over the Ancient World used that dodge. Honest, it was a God, Daddy. He had this sort of glow about him.

Down the hall her mother's door opened, and Val listened to the pat of her bare feet down the linoleum toward the john. Years since Mama could make it through the night without a trip. Val listened for the toilet's flush.

Flush. All right.

Mama padded back to her room, at her door releasing a great sigh and a muttered prayer or imprecation or both. Mama got visits from God, pretty regular ones too. But never blamed Him for her own transgressions.

Val asked the darkness: Who is Una Knox?

Pierce awoke with a start in the same darkness out of a dream he couldn't remember; only that something precious had been taken from him, what, something he had acquired, but was it his? Anyway taken from him (he hunted, half-risen from the bed, in the deep backward for the vanishing sensations) and lost to him, and he bereft letting out an infant's bawl of loss and rage and grief, unassuageable, a howl so huge it woke him: so awful his back hair thrilled over and over again to feel just its echoes in his bosom.

He swung his legs over the bed's side. What the hell time is it anyway. He grasped the bedside clock and studied it, for a long moment unable to tell which hand was the longer one, neither of the two possible times seemed likely to him.

Quarter to one? Oh my lord, the night hardly begun.

The telephone ringing at that moment was shocking, like a sudden impalement, almost impossible to believe. Pierce pulled his shirt down modestly and hurried to answer.

"Pierce?” A timid small voice, but the one he somehow expected to hear. “You were asleep, right?"

"Actually wrong,” he said. “For some reason, awake."

"How are you?"

"How are
you
.” How long, he wondered, till his heart was no longer lifted on this awful wave rising in the dark every time he heard her voice, her real voice; or thought he glimpsed her, or woke from a dream of her: how long.

"Well, sick,” she said. “Pains in my, under my tummy. I think an infection or something."

"Damn,” he said. She had always been liable to bladder things, yeasts: Scorpio, that's where it gets you. As Dr. Johannes knew. “Sorry."

"I've been sort of out of circulation. But listen: I'm really sorry to call you so late..."

"Doesn't matter."

"...only I can't think who else to call."

He sat down on the bed, phone in his hand. “Sure,” he said.

"I'm in a situation,” she said. “I haven't really been able to hustle lately, you know? Because of being under the weather. And things have got really behind. And the landlord is now really impatient.” She had been a different sort of dealer once, with a higher profit margin. No more. She had made abnegations too, more successful (he thought) than his own.

"Do you have electricity yet?” he asked.

"Not yet,” she said. “Candlelight still. So listen. Tomorrow. Supposedly he locks the door on me."

"No."

"I just couldn't think who else to call. You know the place is rent-controlled. One-fifty is all it is."

"That's all?"

"Times two.” There was a pause. “I know you don't have a lot."

"I do have a lot. Comparatively. It just has to last me a long time."

"Oh god."

"It's okay,” he said, and clutched his brow. “It's fine. I mean really I owe it to you."

"Pierce,” she said, “you don't owe me anything."

"I know that.” The hand that had clutched his brow now covered his eyes.

"It's just you're a good guy."

"I know that too.” Just let her not speak tenderly to him, he couldn't bear it, he couldn't. “So, so. Can I mail you a check, or, or..."

There was a silence, a self-reproachful sigh. “You know I don't even have a bank account?"

He remembered, the wads of bills that would accumulate around their apartment, in the kitchen drawers, under the pillow. And now when she was legit she couldn't afford one. “Western Union,” he said. “Winged messenger. Tomorrow, right? The last day."

"I'll pay you back. You know that."

"You always do."

"Tell me how you've been. How you're doing."

"Oh,” he said. “Oh."

Darkness and distance between them, his night here, hers there; they both felt it. “Well it's real late,” she said. “I was up thinking. I just didn't think of you till late."

"Yes,” he said. “Well, so long as you did. Think of me."

"I'm gonna let you sleep,” she said.

He sat with the telephone in his lap for a time.

Sphinx he had used to call her, not only because of the hard question she had seemed to put to him, but because when in his turn he questioned her she wouldn't answer. He couldn't wish she wouldn't call, but the sound of her voice.

Like the poor dead coming forth at their festivals, all souls’ eve, offered their old foods by the living, though this must only increase their hunger unbearably, reminding them that they can never touch it again. They'd be better off remaining in the abode of night, drinking their waters of forgetfulness.

Should he have a drink? That was always an awful mistake, he just didn't have the constitution for it somehow, he would pay double and quickly for the brief solace.

He got up and turned on the light, and went to the bookshelves again, where the trouble had started; ran his eyes and hands down the shelves (he still hadn't got the books in any final logical order). It was simpler, he thought, when he had had fewer, then his hand would simply, ah here it is. The year 1952. The paper spine dried and splitting but every page still there.

Little Enosh: Lost Among the Worlds.

This was the famous year (famous among devotees, of whom Pierce had come to learn he wasn't the only one) of the Thinking Contest, the Inn of the Worlds, and the Mirror Mines, and the year that introduced the Robot, Rutha's servant, a jointed riveted boilerplate man with visibly nothing at all inside him, who liked to talk with Enosh about Higher Things. He talked in pretend math, supplemented with tiny icons of nuts and bolts.

Pierce took the little book back to his bed and clambered onto the rumpled sheets. From the darkness outside, winged things had already begun to collect against his screen.
Positive phototropism
: he heard Joe Boyd's voice.

And look at that: Down the dark street, on the opposite or left-hand side, Beau Brachman's second-story apartment was not yet dark. A bachelor, like himself, with good reason to be up and brooding no doubt. Pierce watched the mystery of the light and listened to the leaves; then he opened his book, knowing already what he would see.

So here's Amanda d'Haye looking down from the Realms of Light, and she crosses her arms and taps her foot in deep impatience; then takes out her fountain pen, which splashes tiny shiny paisleys of ink from its splayed point. She addresses a big letter, a square bond envelope brightly white:

Little Enosh

Inn of the Worlds

Care of Rutha

And here's Little Enosh in the Inn of the Worlds (a huge collapsing place made mostly of slats). He sits in the pose that in old medical books represented a man in the grip of Melancholy: elbow on table, cheek in hand.
Snwy
, says his snore.
Snsnwy. Smnglf
. The Uthras all asleep around him, catching flies.
If that letter ever GETS there we can guess what it will say!
Pierce knew. Now who'll she get to carry it?

"Hermes,” Val read, keeping her place in the dense column with a finger, “is identical with the Mercury of the Romans, and thus with the planet and the metal, all one thing; the fact that Mercury is the
prima materia
of the Art taught by Hermes is surely not coincidence. In the Greek mind Hermes was amalgamated with the Egyptian God THOTH (
q.v.).
In a famous passage in Plato this God is credited with the invention of writing, for which the other Gods rebuke him—he has invented an art of memory which means the end of remembering, a way of keeping secrets which will end by revealing all secrets; and he is advised not to hand it on to men, but of course he does."

Weary of night, weary of learning, weary of the ceaseless babble of the river and the frogs. Should she draw the blind?

"No doubt it is the conflation of these Gods that gives rise to Greek stories of a
Hermes AEgyptiacus
who writes books of secrets; the Greeks appended to him an Egyptian epithet of Thoth:
trismegistus, i.e.,
‘thrice great.’ To this figure, whether regarded as a god or a man, were later attributed dozens of writings purporting to contain secrets of cosmogony, magic, and redemption of the most profound and gnomic character, and they have been regarded with awe ever since. But—strangely—neither those who first claimed Hermes’ authority for these works, nor those who later read and pondered them, ever seem to be troubled that their author is an epigone of that Whisperer, Trickster, and Thief whose first recorded act was the stealing of the cattle of his uncle Apollo and then lying his way out of the consequences."

But Val had closed the book before she reached these parts, sure she had bored herself enough to sleep; the big book lay closed at the bottom of her bed (she never minded sleeping with Our Friends from Bookland as she called them) and the light was off; yet she lay still with eyes open, hands behind her head, watching the faint bloom of the window.