Love and Sleep (23 page)

His book, as he had at first conceived it, was a book about stories; a book about how a past world, once whole, had broken apart, and forgot itself, and yet persisted in stories, in maxims, in turns of phrase and habits of mind and childhood rhymes whose import is lost.

It was to have been about how, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a philosophical system with roots in the deep past—a system that included alchemy, astrology, the GrAEco-Roman pantheon, sympathetic magic, the theory of four elements and four humors, and the tall tales of a thousand years—had dominated thought in Europe. When what would become modern science began to come forth from that mental universe, it seemed at first to many to be a new and powerful extension of the same magical thinking. Science, after a struggle, established itself as different from magic, in fact the
opposite
of magic; and then it and its historians and epigones proceeded to bury its roots, paper over and deny the connections.

But the older system had not been erased, the bad brother, the secret sharer; it had persisted, in popular culture and in stories and in countless metaphors we use continually; its history was embedded in puzzles we stumble on (that Pierce had stumbled on) everywhere in the attics and basements of common thought.

Where are the four corners of the world? Who are the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-o? Why are there seven days in the week and not nine or five? Where do the little cherubs come from, that decorate Valentines, and why does love have wings? How does music have charms to soothe the savage breast? There is more than one history of the world: one of them patent and sensible, the other one blind, unrecognized, and yet issuing from our mouths and our actions daily, unexpungable. Why do we bless someone who sneezes? Why are there nine choirs of angels, and what are angels anyway, where did
they
come from?

Pierce knew all these things, and more. He knew why
cosmic
and
cosmetic
have the same root; he knew why you stuff a cold and starve a fever. He knew why we have always supposed that Gypsies could tell fortunes: it's because they come from Egypt, though they don't, and Egypt is preeminently the land of magic and of secret wisdom, though it isn't. And Pierce knew why that was too, that was a story he wanted to tell: how when he was a kid he had excavated an imaginary country that turned out not to have been imaginary at all, or not, at any rate, to have been imagined by him alone.

He had offered this book to a New York literary agent—a book about the past—and she had transformed it (page by page, lunch by lunch) into a book about the future. Pierce had not resisted, but lately when he read and endlessly reread the curling and cup-ringed pages of his proposal he had been feeling (besides the weird satisfaction he always took in the taste of his own prose) a sense of willed overstatement that had made him swallow with embarrassment.

The bus traversed back and forth down the green foothills, crossed and recrossed the river, and then entered onto the broad artery leading to the city. Across the degraded flatlands the lanes grew ever more clogged with traffic pressing toward the distant brownish towers of Dis, which for a long time seemed to grow no closer, until all the traffic rushed together into the aortic tunnel, abandon all hope, and out into the scarred old heart of it, always a surprise somehow to find it surrounding you, Heraclitean, the same but never the same.

Marveling at the filth and the crowds of wildly various humans, both more extreme than he seemed to remember (had he lost a carapace, an ability not to notice things?), Pierce went down stairs and escalators into deeper bolges with the damned throng, looking in his pockets for the address Julie Rosengarten had given him, the restaurant where she would meet him and (he hoped) buy his lunch.

Uptown. Couple of stops.

It was because he had needed badly to get out of this town and start over elsewhere, because he had needed money, needed some way to make a living other than the little college, that he had conceived of writing a book, and offered the idea to Julie Rosengarten, the owner and sole employee of the Astra Literary Agency. She listened to his stories and read the first draft of his proposal, and told him that she needed more than that to sell.

Like more what?

Well she thought it was interesting about Egypt and its shadow country, and how its magic persisted down through the centuries, only now coming to light again. What magic? She wanted more of that. She wanted Pierce not only to outline old sciences, but to intimate new ones; she wanted him to send out a call from his own potent subjectivity, newly awakened by his occult studies, to the latent powers in the souls of his readers.

She wanted—it took him a while to understand this—a book of magic, a new black book,
clavis Salmonis, ars magna
. That, she said, she could sell.

"It's a new age, Pierce,” she'd said to him. “All that stuff is coming back."

Pierce had promised to try. He had many qualifications for writing such a book, and he had one serious disqualification, or drawback, or what might be construed as a drawback or maybe a sort of sidewise advantage: he did not, himself, believe in magic. Even if he could derive from his history books and his source books any exact description of what might be done, any new-old practice, he just could not bring himself to instruct anyone in it; even to make a little convincing the recipes and procedures that had been the actual end-product of all that vast past intellection, it would be necessary to cast over them a lot of rhetorical glamour, sidestepping or mistranslating the incomprehensible physiology and the unworkable physics, in order to keep out of sight the great cAEsura (Pierce at least sure felt it) between what we do, today, which at least works, and what they did, which didn't.

He actually pulled off this trick in miniature, in the scant pages of his proposal, and it had sold the book to a giant publisher of paperbacks, as Julie said it would; and then he had come to a halt, unable to think how to do it in large, in a real book. He had got no further with it when he moved to Blackbury Jambs, where at length he had come upon the box of paper on Kraft's desk. And found that Kraft had faced and satisfactorily solved the very problem Pierce could not.

Once, the world was not as it has since become,
Kraft said, or revealed, or pretended to reveal.
It once worked in a different way from the way it works now; it had a different history, and thus a different future. Its very flesh and bones, the physical laws that governed it, were other than the ones we know.

"I've never heard of this writer,” Julie Rosengarten said, who faced him across the table of a calm and superior restaurant, a nicer place than she had taken him to on other occasions, maybe she was doing well. “Who is he?"

"A novelist. He was sort of popular once. He became sort of a hermit; lived alone, working on this huge..."

"Is it going to be published?"

"Not possible,” Pierce said. “It's just an idea. One long idea. This idea."

Julie rested her chin in the cup of her hand, and the many bracelets she wore slid down along her arm with a whisper of wood and metal. “So,” she said.

"So suppose it was so,” Pierce said. “Think what the consequences of that would be."

"Well I guess I can't really imagine. I'm not even sure I can imagine what you're saying."

"It might mean,” he said, “that once the physical laws that govern the universe were such that certain practices we read about really worked the way they were said to work, even though now they no longer do. Alchemy, for instance. Judicial astrology, or astrological medicine. Automata. Prophecy."

"Well did they? I mean I think they did, really. Probably. Some of them.” Julie, he suspected, might now and then try a little innocent witchery, crystals, cards,
magia naturalis.

"They didn't,” Pierce said. “Or rather put it this way: either those techniques and sciences of the past did work, and ours don't; or ours do, and not theirs. If they could turn base matter into gold, then ‘gold’ and ‘matter’ weren't then what we know they are now.” He drank from the glass of amber whiskey that had been put before him. “Well maybe they weren't. Maybe they weren't always what they are now. Maybe they
became
the way they are now."

"Well gee. It seems like we'd know. If this was really part of our history. Changes like that."

"No. If there were such a change, then when it was past there'd be almost no way of demonstrating that it had happened. The new laws obtain, and not the old ones. Now gold can't be made from base matter by fire, and
now it never could have been
: the laws of the universe, the nature of things, make it impossible."

He had read to this conclusion once, and then he had pondered it for a long time before he saw what he had here, which was an explanation for the history of magic that answered every need, solved every historical crux, satisfied the skeptic and the ardent seeker both, and had only the one drawback of its complete absurdity.

"It's like the old paradox: if everything suddenly got twice as big as it is, I mean atoms and all, would you be able to tell? As far as we can show by investigation, the same physical laws have always been in operation; we just haven't always known them."

"Well then how could you ever find out that it was even so? That these changes happen?"

"You can't.
You can only know they happen if you pass through one, and recognize it for what it is.
How else would you ever stumble on such a mad idea."

She crossed her arms before her, puzzlement in her dark-lashed light eyes; there was a pretty flush to her cheeks, where a few brown freckles were sown. Been to the beach, he guessed.

"So you see what that would mean,” he said. “Don't you."

"
What
Pierce would it mean."

He wasn't surprised that she didn't immediately understand. He had had to rehearse it for his own inward ear periodically over the last weeks, to remember just how it went, the perfect logic of it, the satisfaction. “It means,” he said, leaning toward her, “that if I, and you, and whoever else, have imagined the possibility of such changes; if we have discovered the possibility of their happening, and seen at what times in the past they might have happened; then it must be because we sense that one is under way right now."

"One?” she said.

"A change. A change in the laws by which the universe is governed."

She looked at him sidewise, out of one eye, like a bird. “Now? Right now?"

"Now when I'm telling it. Now when I'm writing this book. Now in this decade, this year."

He watched her understand this, and see what it meant for the project she was representing for him; and it was as though he could see her mind's eyes cross, and refocus.

"Not only that,” Pierce said. “It seems that the souls or minds who perceive this happening—who guess that a change is under way, that old laws have lost their force, and new laws haven't yet been imposed—it seems that they can actually affect the shape of the coming world. Construct its laws and its meaning. That's what Giordano Bruno did. What Galileo and Newton did."

"They did?"

"They moved the sun,” Pierce said, showing his palms, QED. “They made the earth turn."

She laughed at last, in delight he thought or hoped.

"Well but why?” she asked. “I mean why should it be just now that this change happens? If it does. Is it the stars, or..."

"Not the stars, apparently. There was a lot of talk in the 1590s about the stars. There were predictions of big stuff that would happen, astrologically, in 1588, and in 1600. But it wasn't the cusp of a new age, even by their own astrology. Neither is this."

"Aquarius."

"Two hundred years away. That's not it."

"Well what then."

"I don't know. It just happens, apparently. Every once in a while.” A devilish exhilaration was rising in him. “Every little once in a while."

Julie looked at him, rolling a remnant of bread between her fingers, waiting for this to make sense. But this was the part of Kraft's scheme that didn't puzzle Pierce. He didn't see why the stuff of reality had to be seamless, or why the true springs of things shouldn't be blind, inaccessible to reason. He thought it likely.

"I don't know,” she said. “It sounds sort of like a trick."

"It's not a trick,” Pierce said. “It's a story."

He told her Kraft's story, the core of it, how twice in the last two thousand years a slip or seam, a rumple in the ground of being, had allowed observers around the world to perceive that the net of space and time is not quite stable, but like the shifting plates and molten core of Mother Earth can move beneath the feet of diurnality; can move, was moving, had moved before and would again.

He told her how only the greatest masters of the workings of the world would ever notice the subtle changes taking place, and even they would doubt themselves, and discount the evidence, blame their own tools or failing skills; if they tried to express what they knew, their contemporaries would not understand it, and the coming age would misread what they said and wrote, would take their writings for allegory or failed prophecy.

Which, when the change was past, was all they were.

He told her how, in Kraft's scheme, between the old world of things as they used to be, and the new world of things as they would be instead, there has always fallen a sort of passage time, a chaos of unformed possibility in which all sorts of manifestations could be witnessed. Then safe old theurgies and charms have suddenly turned on their practitioners and destroyed them; then huge celestial beings have been formed, born out of the assembling of smaller ones, who become the larger ones’ parts and organs; then great AEgypt has been revealed again, and her children have recognized one another, by signs no one before understood.

Then the wise have forgathered, and prepared.

"AEgypt,” Julie said. “Huh."

The last such a passage time happened to fall at the cusp of two centuries as well, the sixteenth and the seventeenth of our era, the time when Kraft's book took place; and hadn't Jean Bodin the encyclopAEdist said in those days (Pierce knew this, though he couldn't remember how he came to know it, sheep's wool caught in the great mental briar patch) that there was a sudden awful plague of evil spirits around, working all sorts of mischief? Bodin blamed it on the arrogant magicians, willing to call forth dAEmons of air, fire, water, who then seized on the unwary and inhabited them. Kraft said: the passage time, breeding spirits as the sun breeds bees in the guts of dead lions. Elementals,
dAEmonii
, incubi and succubi, salamanders. Look into a crystal or a dish of clear water: someone looks back at you.