DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (9 page)

She put down the can of beer she had lifted to her lips. “Why did you say that?”

He pondered, staring at her, as though the reason had to come from her.

“Well,” he said at length. “Phæton. It’s a story about fathers too. As well as about.” He smiled. “About reckless driving.”

She began to laugh, the sudden laugh from the throat and the gut that rushes forth when tension breaks. He laughed too, the
two of them staring at each other and laughing aloud like devils delighting.

Too cold when the sun went down to eat on the little gray deck. She made a fire in the big stone fireplace that it seemed
the house had been built around, and which would surely remain long after it was gone, like a house of eld; and when the pine
and birch had roared for a long time (she kept rolling the logs into the fire-mass, never enough) he took the black fire shovel
that leaned against the stones and shovelled out enough live coals to fill her little hibachi. On it they grilled her wieners
and burgers, and sitting on the floor before the hearth ate them with slaw and beans: comfort food for her, he had decided,
and wondered if she had marshmallows to toast. It was this meal, this sort, that they had met over, at that party by the Blackbury.

They drank more of the beer he had brought, she trying to incite or invite a certain recklessness and at the same time hold
it in check, like a woman with a half-tamed cheetah on a leash; she knew what it was for but not always how to use it. He
helping her with a word or a look, moving a third fresh bottle out of her reach at last.

For now it was she who was to be examined, whose powers of mentation and whose colored memories were to be unrolled, for a
particular
purpose they had agreed on without discussion. Hot enough now from the fire that she could be undressed for this examination:
she did this herself at his request or command, he watching, remaining dressed himself.

She approached him where he sat on the battered couch. “No hon you take the little stool there.”

It was a three-cornered stool of leather and wood, maybe North African, strung with rawhide, the seat somewhat saddlelike.
She looked at him a moment, and at it, then lowered herself onto it.

“Now I want to ask you first,” he said. He tipped the shade of the standing lamp away from himself and toward her; the lamplight
fell on her, spotlight, third degree. He himself was in shadow. “I want to ask first about this guy. Your husband. The one
who first.”

“Oh God.” She put her arms defensively before her for a moment, but then lowered them when Pierce, very slightly, shook his
head. “Him, well. Yes we sort of eloped. He was, I think, in fact crazy. I’m still afraid of him.”

He had her tell just how afraid he had made her: a dark muscled mechanic just past teenhood, her high-school crush, though
not till they were out of school and he had gone through one wife—a girl who had graduated visibly pregnant two years ahead
of Rose—had they got together. And where now were this other wife and child? Who knew?

“He had amazing eyes,” she said. “Cutter eyes. When he came home in certain, well, moods. His eyes were like, just. Like weapons.”

“Certain moods,” Pierce said.

“Well.” She threw her hair from her eyes with a lift of her head.

“Was he suspicious of you?”

“He was sure I was fucking somebody.”

“Were you?”

“He’d want me to prove that I wasn’t.” Now her hands were moving slightly, small beasts stirring. Pierce watched them; they
seemed to have their own intentions, of which they were becoming conscious.

“How could you do that?”

“Well he had ways that he thought proved it.”

“What ways?”

Her own eyes—likewise amazing—were turning inward now as they should: not clouding so much as growing bright but sightless,
sheeted in ice but not cold, her lower lids beginning to rise over them. “Oh I don’t remember now really. He was just so crazy.”

“Rose. What ways.”

She said nothing for a long moment. Her hands were on the insides of her thighs, which were kept apart by the prow of the
stool. He let her
remember or imagine what ways. All this had happened in some bleak black city or town up in New York state; he could see the
muscled tattooed forearm, the can of beer he was never without, damper and raiser of his notions. The oilcloth of the kitchen
table. The linoleum whereon she had knelt.

What was his name? Wesley. Wes. She alluded to him at other times, but it was only at times like these that he grew a reality.
They worked carefully together over it, with pauses for thought, his to frame questions, hers to answer them.

“Well Rose how could you have allowed him to do those things.”

“Jesus, I was I guess just so young. And scared. I was just so scared of him.”

“And how did that make you feel? Being so scared.”

Pause for the deciding of this, her lips parting.
How did that make you feel?
He asked not because he thought she could answer, but because the question itself so visibly stirred her. This was how it
made her feel: made her lips open in this way, and her hands migrate. “It.” Pause. “It made me excited.”

“You learned that?”

“Yes.”

“And how did that make you feel, Rose. That excitement. I mean were you.”

Pause. Pause. The air in which they sat heated now by the fire and the delicate archæology under way.

“I was ashamed.”

“Uh-huh.” He crossed his legs differently, uncomfortable. “And how did that make you feel, that shame?”

“It made me feel.” Pause pause. “I guess more excited.”

Her hands had now met between her spread legs, one hiding what the other did. Pierce at this point could and sometimes did
instruct her to stop; other times he chose not to notice.

And he would proceed with his little interrogatory until he decided (or gauged) that she had got far enough, and suggested
that she go now into the bedroom; and she would rise obediently and go on silent feet, her long stride like a big cat’s—and
after a time he would follow and find her; and if there were no further exactions to be made, if he had prepared nothing further
or considered that she needed nothing further (he could consult only his own heat to guess) he would begin at once to fuck
her, often not removing his own clothes; coaching her still, talking, talking, until at length, often at great length, they
produced between them, hothouse-fashion, her orgasm, a great bloom sometimes that astonished both of them.

Tonight though there was more to do.

“Rose,” he said to her softly. “Over there by the door, on the table there, is the brown paper bag I brought in. That one.”

“What,” she said, a breath only, her eyes not leaving his face. He took her head in his hands and turned it toward the door,
where the bag lay.

“That. Would you get it now please and open it.”

She rose, obedient, and went to take the bag; brought it back to the bed.

“Open it please, Rose.”

That implacable Soft Voice, where had he learned it, how did he know how to use it, how to speak gravely and with that awful
kindness, as though they both labored together here under an injunction, a necessity that must be yielded to. When it was
really he alone who laid the tasks upon her. This one being the next.

“Oh Christ,” she said.

“See someone like you,” he said. “Who can deny so much, pretend so much that things haven’t happened. You need to have sex
happen to you that you can’t deny. That goes on reminding you,
proving
to you through the day that you did the things you did.”

“Oh Pierce.”

“We’re going to help you remember. We’re going to make sure you remember tonight. Is that all right, Rose?”

He took her head lightly again in his hands, feeling with awe and delight the soul within awake and arise as she sought for
a way out of this one; felt her find it, and find that it was nothing but the way to which he had turned her: the way that
led further in.

“I asked: Is that all right?”

This she did not answer for a moment, but he could see that she would; the word gathered again in her despite herself; all
she was waiting for was for it to become unrefusable.

“Yes,” she said at length, not quite aloud.

“You need this, don’t you?” He waited. Nothing this time, but the air around their bodies palpably heated further. “Rose.”

“Oh please I can’t.”

“You can, Rose. You can whisper if you have to.”

Nothing still. She had turned to soft smoke in his arms. He drew her ear to his lips. “Say it, Rose.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Yes what.”

“Yes I need it.”

There. He wound her hair in his hand. She had begun to weep, shuddering. He pressed her cheek into the pillow, and opened
her with
his knee. No more talking, no more Soft Voice, a remorseless engine now, though inside him his heart was great and he wanted
nothing more than to smother her with tenderness and gratitude, put away the things and kiss away her tears. But no it was
not the time for that.

As he worked, he heard or overheard in some space of his soul phrases spoken, a voice, narrating the things he did to her
even as he did them, things even that he had not yet done or dared to do.
He knelt before her and placed his cheek against the hot marks he had made
. It was a voice he was coming to be familiar with, accompanying these encounters.
She offered to him the gift of her crying-out
. As though he were able to do the deeds and at the same time, even somewhat in advance, read a histrionically somber and
slightly phony account made long afterward.

One winter’s day she had fled Wes and the creeper apartment they shared in that town, fled with only a couple of suitcases
(her round hatbox one of them) and three hundred dollars in bills; she took a taxi—Wes allowed her no car in his absence and
had taken away her keys—to the train station, and, her heart beating fast, bought from the incurious agent a one-way to New
York City. She was twenty-one.

Pierce, in his unsleeping bag before the fire, followed her to the station, the slush gray, the fur trim of her boots wet;
her knuckles white where she gripped that bag. (She also lay asleep, in her bed in the room beyond, it was her house and therefore
her privilege to take the bed, she had invited Pierce to share it but it was narrow and he would never sleep, he lay then
in the bag awake of course anyhow.) On that train to New York, where she had no friends and yet toward which she went as much
as she went away from Troy or Schenectady or wherever it had been, unwise and yet more knowledgeable than before, aware of
something, of a her within her now awakened—on that train she sat next to a gent with a Mephisto beard and tinted glasses,
and fell into conversation with him; and accepted, somehow unable to refuse, his offer to help her in the city toward which
they both travelled, where he actually had a lot of friends.

Handed on then from party to party, stranger to stranger, as in a quadrille, she might well have drawn quickly close (there
is no chance in dreams, or it is all chance) to a connection with Pierce, one that Pierce also might have been making his
way toward. For of course he had been a New Yorker too then. So, back in that city, that city deep within, in that past which
he made for himself, they
did
draw closer together: because just now the past was up for shaping, just as the future was. As a novelist might discover
while he works a key plot element,
one he all along needed but did not know he needed, that requires but a quick flip back to the earliest pages, a name change,
a small biographical detail added—done—so the present could shape the past now in the time of the ending of the world.

A long time ago, and deep within. How do you like that. That warehouse in the film district, porno district too; winter, the
smell of the damp overcoats the actors had discarded. Masks. He put his own on. A woman assigned to play opposite him, hi,
already naked and masked and soon writhing in imitation lust in his arms, though he did not yet know her name. And together
they two and everyone else there looked upon Rose. Masked too for her role, her starring role, so that later in the Faraways
he could not nor could she recognize.

And so Pierce was now, thereafter, connected to her, by a bond he would never know he had been able to forge. To forge: which
means both to make and to fake. In the time of the ending of the world those things are not always different.

He started awake, then, on the unforgiving floor. The fire was embers, still alive though beneath a hide of ash. Day was coming.
He would not sleep again; he was grateful he had been granted so much. Thank you Morpheus, ungenerous god. He unzipped the
mummy case he was ensconced in (What other males had made use of it? It had a smell he could not identify) and stood, still
mostly clothed and yet not therefore ready for the day.

At the door of her bedroom he stood for a moment watching. Her dark head deep in its pillow and its dreams, where do they
go. From where he stood she seemed entirely gratified, at peace. Sleep, the innocent sleep.

On the table beside her bed still lay the books and letters that he had found there yesterday, when he had arrived before
her and found the place deserted: Bulfinch’s mythology, open to the Greeks, the children of Apollo; Phæton. A letter, unfinished,
to her father, that he had read.

He felt again the little creepy thrill he had felt last night on the porch, to find how easily she could be fooled.

Though whether he had actually fooled her, or only induced in her—or helped her induce in herself—a willed suspension of disbelief
(the same sort of state, he supposed, he was trying to induce in the readers of his book, who were to be thought of as equally
ready to believe) he couldn’t know.

He watched her for a time, and then before his steady gaze awoke her he turned away, and as silently as possible got his shoes
and coat and slipped out the glass door onto the deck. He went down the drive and to his car; he let out the brake and allowed
the car to slide soundlessly
down the incline and out to the empty road. He started it then, and turned around to head back down the valley of the Shadow
and away. He drove far and fast, out of the town of Blackbury Jambs and out of the county, leaving behind for good his house
by the river and that pile of paper on the desk in the study. The Faraways closed up behind him in the folds of autumn mist
as he fled, as though they had not been. When he hit the interstate he turned north, or south, and kept going, as fast as
his Steed could carry him.