Love and Sleep (21 page)
A brown pelican, coasting over the cove, just then fell, as though slain, toward the water below. Belly-flopped in, and arose with a fish. Rose off the water, sailed on, shedding streams.
"Huh,” Winnie said. “Did you feel that?"
"What?” His senses all pricked up, afraid.
"That."
"When?"
"Just now."
Winnie snapped her fingers, having remembered all of a sudden the thing she wanted to tell her son, the thing he needed to know, about the path not taken, and how we always choose the way we most want. Almost as suddenly she forgot again, as though her own finger-snap had been a hypnotist's, to wake her; and in the same moment Pierce discovered, in the name of his wild Kentucky girl, the name of his lost son.
The wide ripples rising on the cove dispersed. As it had now been doing for some time, the world continued to turn (at the rate of one second per second) from what it had been and into what it was to be.
"That old man is dead,” Winnie said. “Is that right?"
"Boney Rasmussen,” Pierce said. “This last summer."
"And of course the writer. Fellowes Kraft. What a name."
"Yes. A few years before I got there."
"Well, son.” She looked at her watch, and at the evening. “I think—don't you?—that at least it's time for a drink."
In the former time, when the world was not as it has since become, wonders and unlikelihoods were more common; Coincidence, restless, constant Coincidence, was a greater engine then, though few minds or hearts perceived all that it brought about, any more than the present age is aware of its own true springs. You can't tell, when you're asleep and dreaming, that you sleep; only when you're awake can you tell the difference.
There was a highland then, the Faraway Hills, that lay a hundred miles or so away from the Cumberland counties and about as far to the west of New York City. From the top of its central massif, a weary climber could reward himself with a look into three states—north into New York, east into New Jersey, south into Pennsylvania. A good-sized river (the Blackbury) ran through these folded hills, and there were towns and villages along the river and above the river's valley. One by the river was called Fair Prospect; a road wound from Fair Prospect up into a cleft of the Faraways, to lead eventually in one direction over a hump of wooded hills and back down to the river, to the town of Blackbury Jambs; and in another direction to the smaller town of Stonykill.
Before it reached that fork, the road passed a drive, closed by a rusty chain; and down that drive, alone on a knoll like a toy castle, stood an oddly suburban little villa, red-brick Tudor style, which had been the home of Fellowes Kraft, author of
Bitten Apples
and
A Passage at Arms
and
The Werewolf of Prague
and the others Pierce read as a boy; and behind the house a garden. On a day in June, late in that age of the world, a young woman sat cross-legged on the warm earth of the garden; in the cradle of her legs was an open book, her finger on a passage, this:
Divine love, Giordano Bruno believed, is expressed in the endless unstinting production of things; love in man is expressed in an endless, insatiable hunger for the productions of infinity.
The book was by Fellowes Kraft, his very first, though she had saved it for last to read; she had read all the others. Her name was Rosalind Rasmussen.
Giordano Bruno was the first man in Western history to conceive of the physical universe as literally infinite and unbounded, actually filled with stars that were suns around which planets like ours circled, out to infinity; and unlike Pascal in the next century the infinity never frightened or appalled him or made him feel small. He wrote in
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
: “The gods take pleasure in the multiform representation of multiform things, in the multiform fruits of all talents; for they have as great pleasure in all the things that are, and in all representations made of them, as in taking care that they be, and giving order and permission that they be made.” As pleased as though he were one of them himself, Bruno rejoiced in the Gods’ fecundity, and thought himself large enough to contain or at least to represent all that they so generously made.
Abashed and troubled, Rosie lifted her eyes from the page. Abashed, because she wasn't sure she understood, nor whether the sense she made of it was what Kraft had meant; troubled, because it seemed so carelessly, cheerfully voracious, and it made her feel thin and renunciatory, who could take the things of this world only one by one or a few at a time before a sort of surfeit came over her, and she had to withdraw.
"Mommy!” said her daughter Sam, blond and four years old, who had been having her own way with the endless production of things, in this garden anyway. “Yets pick flowers."
Were they hers to pick? No one else would pick them; Fellowes Kraft was dead, and he had no heirs except a Foundation, the Rasmussen Foundation, whose employee she herself was.
"Come on yets."
"Wait hon. Let me get scissors."
It would make a great painting, she thought (Rosie was a painter, or had been or tried to be one, and would or imaginably could be one again in another time): it would show the riot of tall flowers in the June sun, realistically rendered, looking on helpless and aghast as the strong blond kid strains to break or uproot one of their number, tougher than it looks. Jaw set and bare feet firmly planted, but her hair more delicate than petals.
In Rosie's heart, or in the space within her where her heart ought to be, she felt stir into being that painful hard thing that had mysteriously come to replace, not the muscle itself, but the other, the heart's heart.
She looked up. From where she sat, she could see the window of the little room where Kraft had used to write his books; but because of the sun on its glass casements and the black vacuity of the screen, she couldn't see inside, where Pierce Moffett was reading the pages of a book of Kraft's, his very last book, as the one Rosie read was the first.
The novelist Fellowes Kraft, though he is now known chiefly (if he is known at all) for the shelf of historical fictions that Pierce read one after the other and one after the other largely forgot, had taken a kind of pride in being good at several different kinds of literary jobbery. Amid the K's in a few dozen libraries, largely unread now for many years but still bearing unremovably their Dewey Decimal numbers, were a couple of biographies too (
Bruno's Journey
, 1931, the one Rosie Rasmussen sat reading;
The Winter King
, 1940). There was a popular history (
Elizabethan People
, 1953); there were also a children's story (
Astray
, 1959), a book of ghost stories, a couple of travel books, a hardboiled detective novel (
Scream Bloody Murder
, 1939), and even a piece of pornography (
Skin Deep
, n.d., Herm Press).
But though he thought of himself as a quick brown fox living by his wits in “the hilly country on the borderlands of literature” (where one reviewer located his works), he was actually a slow and fussy writer, who spent more time on his pages and worried more over their fate than he ever admitted. His historicals as a result were too short to truly engross fans of their genre, and his entire
oeuvre
too small to support him. As he grew older, he found himself less and less able to build up the likenesses (or “likelinesses” as he used to call them) of historical personages, or to give imaginative force to their supposed actions; he wrote less and less more and more slowly, as though slipping into successively lower gears. When a small family foundation awarded him a stipend to help him continue, he seemed to stop altogether.
"The trouble is,” he wrote to his new patron, Boniface Rasmussen, called Boney for more than one reason, “that all I seem capable of these days is
description
, I mean the stuff that used to be deplored in book reports when I was in high school—'I liked the story, but there was too much description.’ And a novel, Boney, is like a family photo album, in this respect: that in the future, no one is going to care about your nature shots, your sunsets and distant mountains (never really satisfactory anyway, and done not so much better than many another snapshooter could do them); nor about your pictures of famous monuments or buildings. All they will care much to look at will be people, the faces of people they can recognize."
Except for a little memoir, then, privately printed (
Sorrow, Sit Down
, 1960), he produced nothing in the last years of his life; or so Pierce Moffett was given to understand when he was taken to Fellowes Kraft's house to examine his literary remains, on behalf of the Rasmussen Foundation. There in Kraft's study or office he opened a gray cardboard box on the novelist's desk, and lifted out a pile of yellow typing paper, strangely light, a large manuscript, an unfinished novel whose existence had not before been suspected; and sat down in the stillness of the dead man's house to look at it.
There was no title page. The first page had an epigraph, which was ascribed (in pencil) to Novalis, whom Pierce had never read:
I learn that I am knight Parsifal.
Parsifal learns that his quest for the Grail is the quest of all men for the Grail.
The Grail is just then coming into being, brought forth by a labor of making in the whole world at once.
With a great groan the world awakes for a moment as from slumber, to pass the Grail like a stone.
It is over; Parsifal forgets what he set out to do, I forget that I am Parsifal, the world turns again and returns to sleep, and I am gone.
Pierce Moffett was then midway through the course of his thirty-fifth year. The room was what the builders and sellers of the house would have called a
den
, not really intending the old metaphor in the word, the place to which a predator retreats to hide and devour what it has caught. The chain of circumstances that had brought him there, to sit in Fellowes Kraft's oaken swivel chair, was so long and strange it could not but hint at the workings of Fate, even to Pierce, who didn't believe in Fate; his coming to be there, right there in that deep den, was as just as it was unlikely, as though his arrival were the end of a quest, an end that could have been achieved only by singleness of purpose and unerring Coincidence.
When he had gone down from Noate University (without getting a doctorate, surprising everyone, including his graduate advisor Frank Walker Barr), Pierce had taken a job teaching history and literature at a small college in New York City. It was just at that time when students from coast to coast (around the world too, in Paris and Prague and even China) had begun to hear eldritch music; those who could hear it had become transformed, almost overnight it seemed, delighting or terrifying their teachers. Before, they had listened, or felt obliged to pretend to listen; now they wanted to talk. The world was not as they had been told it was, and somehow they had found out what it
really
was, and now they were going to make their teachers (and parents and governors) listen.
And what they wanted to tell (to tell Pierce at any rate) were stories.
It was as though for many years people, well-educated kids in Pierce's part of the world, had gone without stories of a certain kind, big strange news about the meaning and direction of things, secret true histories, the world in a parable; now suddenly they were gorging heedlessly on them, beggars at a banquet, a little of this, some of that. One of Pierce's students, quivering with emotion, had told him that once upon a time humankind had lived free on the earth, eating the fruits that came forth in their seasons, and harming nothing; but then laws and property had been invented, and that had spoiled everything.
How did they come upon such stories, who seemed to read little except bright-colored comics and the jackets of records? Pierce wondered. Did a stratum of stories lie deep in our common mentality, if we had one, that could be bent up and exposed by such geologic heavings as were then going on?
Or was it the other way around, and the periodic return of heroes (look, here they are, their stories were being told in those same comic books!) announced or even brought about the upheaval they seemed to embody?
From age to age we pass on stories, which do not seem to be inside us; we seem instead to be inside them, taking place. What if (Pierce began then to wonder) they turned out to be not primitive guesses about how things came to be, or ramparts shored up against darkness and fear, or lessons in life; what if they were true allegories (though you may not ever crack the code) about what the world is made of, why things are as they are and not some different way instead, which arise just because we are made by the same laws that made the universe?
The occult processes of physics and the history of biological evolution must be encoded in the toils of his own working brain, written there where perhaps they could be read, like a book. The Cross burning in the saint's brain might be nothing more (and therefore nothing less) than an apprehension of the foursquare carbon atom that in fact composed it.
He began then to collect stories, searching for evidence of what he had perceived, undaunted by the fact that he did not himself know what laws governed the universe, or what it was made of. While the children's crusade pressed on around him into the future, Pierce turned back, into the history he was supposed to have already learned at Noate; he struck, in wonder and delight, a thick vein of gold lying beneath the overburden of common clay and rocks he had picked over in college, and had called History and Renaissance Studies; he followed it back until it brought him, unexpectedly but inevitably, to the frontiers of a country he knew.
He never cracked the code, and gradually fell back into an old and unexamined Cartesianism (there is the world, out there, marvelously full of this and that; here am I, in here, examining it, storing up like a tourist closetsful of souvenirs of my passage through it, which retain or do not retain the smell of those places), but by then he had collected a marvelous anthology of stories, another history of the world, for there is more than one.