Love and Sleep (20 page)

Anyway he already had a mother.
Somewhere in the Realms of Light:
that was what the little rumpled scroll above the panels read, periodically reintroducing Enosh's seeker and savior, Amanda D'Haye.
Where could that boy have got to?
she was always saying in the first panel, as she packed her bag to set out. Behind her, vague and vast, vague because it lacked the heavy black outlining that in comics makes things things, was a realm that was also a palace and also a gigantic doubtful impassive face that watched Amanda depart (one stripey sock always escaping from her stuffed suitcase). Who was he?

Amanda was like her boy, mild and good, and as liable to get stuck herself in the Uthras’ clutches as Enosh was. That, in fact, was the invariable pattern, the artist cheerfully willing to enact and draw it again and again with subtle variations: Amanda D'Haye setting out to find Enosh, falling into the plots of Rutha which she is too innocent or simple-minded to perceive, and ending up in such trouble that in the end it is Enosh who must do the rescuing. After which he follows her dutifully toward home; and as Amanda, hands clasped in glee, imagines their imminent reunion in the Realms of Light, Enosh espies another world, pocked with craters, ringed with rings, circled by moons: his starship's track wavers, and a pretty question mark appears above his open face.

Pierce guessed, without admitting to himself that he had guessed, that it was Winnie and not Axel who bought the books of Enosh for him. Axel had not often, even in the beginning, sent much to his son, and had never actually written him a letter, being constitutionally unable to confine his thoughts within a square of white paper: but by that time he had ceased to call as well. Pierce came to suspect that his father had somehow drifted off or gone into hiding somewhere away from him, from where he could not call or write, where perhaps he was forbidden to communicate, or where, amnesiac, he could not remember how.

And he was right, as he would later come to know when after college he moved to New York City, found Axel again, and began to spend time with him. Then he would hear the stories (as Axel restaged them) of his long drunkenness in those years, of his abasement on the Bowery or somewhere like it (where they called him Doc, of course, or was it Professor), stories stark and graphic as a black-and-white movie, as comically sad as Little Enosh lost among the worlds. Axel told him that he had even dreamed in those days, or imagined in his delirium, that one day Pierce would appear, to rescue him; to take his hand (here Axel held out his own hand, a hand of human mercy, a rescuing hand) and lift him up.

"Fatherless,” Pierce in Florida said to Winnie, overcome momentarily with self-pity and the consciousness of a hard fate.

"Oh I don't know,” Winnie said. “I would have said rich in fathers.” But then she lowered her eyes and said: “I know."

He, fatherless; and Bobby too. Axel Moffett, childless. Sam's children, motherless; Sam, wifeless. He remembered the storm of tears, wholly unexpected, that had occurred in him when Winnie called to tell him Sam was dead, tears because he knew suddenly that Sam had suffered a loss that had never been, and could not now ever be, made up to him: a flood of awful fellow-feeling, the first in his life, with those who die.

A few days after that birthday, when he came in from the schoolroom for lunch, Winnie (a little shamefaced, a little amused) said “Guess what?” and gave Pierce a package that had come for him in the mail, from Brooklyn.

A rectangular block of unmistakable heft, wrapped in brown paper pieced out from a grocery bag, tied with grubby twine and addressed in a schoolmarmishly correct yet uncertain Palmer Method script which Pierce recognized instantly (it looked a lot like his own).

"Well open it,” Winnie said. Sam looked up from his sandwich. “Go ahead."

A book, of course, a hardback book with a paper jacket, one of that special class of books that had paper jackets but no library plastic covers. A novel, obviously, because of the paper jacket, and because the jacket showed a painting, a painting of an imaginary moment, chosen from the story within.

"Huh,” he said, turning the book in his hands, upside down, back to front, as though he had never handled such an object before. “Wow."

Gingerly he opened it. On the empty flyleaf, an inscription in pencil had been crossed out in pen:
For Rex, who will never read it. Love, Sandy.
The same pen that had crossed this out had written another in another corner:
My dear Son
, and below that
Love, Axel
, as though a long message were missing that should have come between. “Well,” he said.

On the next page the title again, and beneath it in small italics one of those little quotations that Pierce had noticed many old books had, like a magician's distracting patter before his trick, more mysterious usually than the book that followed. He read it.

One met the Duke ‘bout midnight, in a lane behind St. Mark's Church, with the leg of a man over his shoulder; and he howled fearfully; said he was a Wolf, only the difference was, a Wolf's skin is hairy on the outside, his on the inside; bade them take their swords, rip up his flesh, and try.

He read it again, conscious that time's passing had slowed for him and the light had brightened, and of his mother and Sam watching him in this moment which was his; feeling spoken to, softly and intimately, not quite yet intelligibly, by all the great wide world at once.

"Gee,” he said. He closed the book and looked again at the cover picture. Darkness in a city, a high-walled, narrow-laned Old World city; a black tower and a yellow moon; the only other lights a single window in the tower, and the torches of a pursuing crowd far down the twisted street: and the eyes of the one they pursued, yellow crayon-dashes, the lanterns of his eyes.

He showed it to Winnie. “Oh yes,” she said.

"Have you read it?” Pierce asked in wonder.

"No,” she said.
"He
liked them. There's lots more, I think. If you like that one we can send away for more."

"Huh,” Pierce said, still holding the book in both hands before him, still standing in the same spot, as though rooted to it by a transmission of energy, a summoning beam coming from far away, from the future, passing through the transformer of the book into his being and out through his feet, pinning him like the poor guy who grabs the hot wire.

For a long time afterward, he didn't read the book. He kept it on top of his bookcase, with those other select books which held apart the hemispheres of cloudy Earth. He would look at its spine, there among the others (it had a little leaping wolfhound imprint at the base), and imagine what was in it—not the events so much as the paragraphs, full of print, full of meaning. He looked on it as a book which his larger self must read, the self he felt struggling to extrude itself from the strangling husk of his childhood. When at last he did open it, on a night of rainy wind, it was with a reverence and an expectation that would have surprised and abashed its author.

The Werewolf of Prague
by Fellowes Kraft.

Like the rest of his
lares
and
penates
(Rockaway seashells, Bear Mountain sheath knife, the books of Enosh), he took the book with him on his later journeys—to school, to college, to the city—and somewhere along the way it had got lost. He supposed he had grieved for it, but there was a lot that got lost and trampled and left behind in those days. Anyway he did not think of it again until, in the musty library of a shuttered house in another state, he pulled it out from a row of similar ones, the author's own copies of his works, and opened it again.

"Yes,” Winnie in Florida said to him. “Quite a story."

"Yes.” The story that had all along lain ahead of him for him to fall into; the story that (he had come to see) every event had led him toward, beginning with the arrival of that book from Brooklyn, or beginning before that, as far back as anything can begin.

"To end up in the very same town he lived in,” Winnie marveled, not for the first time. “Coming upon it, just like that, when you'd read all his books."

"Yes. You remember?"

"Well I don't actually remember you reading them. You read such a lot. But didn't you? You've told me you did."

"I did.” He read them all, or all he could get from the State Library; read them one after the other, lived within each for a week or two weeks, and forgot it when the next arrived: each with its little wolfhound imprint at the base of the spine, each with its watercolor painting for a cover, gratifying and unrememberable as dreams.

"I guess that's always been a very nice area,” Winnie said. “Where he lived."

"Yes. Nice.” Pierce's heart and throat were filled with longing for it, as though he had not seen it in years, when in fact he had only left there yesterday: longing for the summer country he had first come to settle in, which seemed now alienated from him, maybe forever, blasted, and by more than winter.

What had he done to himself, what hurt had he done his heart, that he should think so?

"This woman, I suppose,” Winnie said, as though he had spoken aloud, as perhaps he had.

"Yes."

She put her hand on his; but she shook her head too, and made a face, wry or ironic, that he knew.

A day and a half before, Pierce had awakened in darkness after a few hours’ purgatorial sleep; had awakened from a dream that, though singularly dreadful, he right away recognized as cognate to a dozen others memory could lay hands on.

He spoke aloud a charm to keep him safe: “
Hypnerotomachia
,” he said. But this time it did no good; he doubted it really ever had, or ever would, for it was a charm of knowledge, and not of comfort, and knowledge was no longer any use to him, knowledge was what had hurt him.

Well by God he would not lie wide-eyed in the dark, as he had the last night and the night before that, listening to his own heart-taps and wishing. No!

So he got up, and dressed in the dark, and went out, and took the path that leads to the road that rises up the mountain; and his new demons collected to go along with him, fastened on him like Peter Pain. Everyman I will go with thee.

Up on the mountainside, he had been told, there was a place you could stand and look into three different states, north, south, and east. He would climb to it, he decided. Supposedly a monument stood there too, to a man who in the last century had had a vision at that spot, a vision of—no one had been able to tell him exactly of what: peace, he thought; the unity of all religions; hope.

Salt fluid burned his eyes. He could see the monument vividly with his mind's eye, an obelisk, a cube, a sphere, a tablet to which ivy clings, neglected amid winter foliage. And a foraging deer, who looks up wide-eyed to see him approach.

He studied the earth as he went up, as though searching a loved face for some sign of help: the frosted briars, and the brown milkweed loosing its seed; the lamplit windows of a farm, the lichened stone of its fence. In the driveway a truck, waiting for its driver, breathed white smoke and rumbled patiently. All there, all the same, wasn't it? He acknowledged that it was, and still beautiful, still the same. Only he could not touch it, it was no longer for him.

A long, actually an endless, hour later, he had come no closer to the path up to the monument, if there was a path, or a monument; he had mostly stood stock still, breathing whitely, while awful crimes of omission and commission were charged to him, which he could neither quite remember nor convincingly deny.

He had done that which he should not have done; that which he should have done he had not done; and he was here again where he had been.

As though he had come around a conical mountain on a rising road, and reached the place where he had been before, only one turn higher; and looking down could see his young self below, also struggling upward, also stock still.

Then, as now, he had failed to rescue someone he had been sent to rescue (oh what had her name been, a nursery rhyme, a fairy tale, he had not thought of her in years, where was she now? What had become of her?).

And when he came around to this place again on the path above, in the new age, he would doubtless fail again, forever, until he died, if he had not already done so.

But then the sun rose, and in a new sign. Like the escaping tooth of a great clock-gear, the mountain slipped to its next notch, and rested there.

Oh you dope, Pierce thought. What are you thinking?

The hot light flooded him indoors and out. He looked down to see that he was wearing shoes from two different pairs, he had pulled them on in the dark unseeing, unfeeling too. He clutched his brow. If he was not yet mad, he would soon be thought so by his neighbors; anyway if he went on walking the roads in the pre-dawn, arguing with unseen opponents, and wearing a brown left and a black right shoe.

He laughed aloud.

Turn back, he told himself; go home, pack a bag, get out of here. He couldn't do what he had been summoned to do, not this time any more than last time; but he could cut and run.

He could go see his mom.

He turned to go back. His demons, who had risen away from him momentarily like crows startled from their roadside carrion, settled once more upon him.

"You don't really have to tell me the whole story,” Winnie said to him, and touched his hand with hers. “Don't feel you have to. Really."

But he had come here just in order to tell it, the whole story, and so to cease telling it; to get from her the beginning of it, which would not be different from the end.

And would it have all been different, Pierce cried in his heart, if he had never been taken away from Brooklyn, if he had grown up instead with Axel; would he have understood it all differently, and not laid the trap for himself which he had laid, if he had not grown up with his cousins—grown up as one of them, an Oliphant, acerb, arrogant, shy—but as a different person, as the son of his father, as himself?

Was it enough, that old separation, enough to account for him, for the way he was: for the sins of avoidance and denial he had committed for twenty years, sins he had not until now even recognized as sins; for his irreparable sense that where he really belonged was always somewhere else, for a life of guilty and continual wishing? Was it enough?