Love and Sleep (69 page)
The vigil lights in their red glasses shuddered; Sister Mary Philomel heard a far-off cry, a cat maybe, or a lost child, or a wind-tormented hinge. When she turned the key she felt a stirring, as though with the turning of the one key all the drawers and compartments within (which no one in her memory had ever seen) also opened one by one in sequence. She had the piercing feeling that she had not simply unlocked something but had started something into life, something that had long expected her, had awaited her, or someone like her, to come and do the proper thing at last.
Just at that time a white Tempest convertible (which had left the Interstate at Pikeville an hour before and driven almost under the windows of Queen of the Angels) passed through the vanished hamlet of Hogback and up and around the next flank of the mountain. Where the wide paved road parted to go up to the old strip mine on Hogback's side, the Tempest chose the other road, dirt, downward; the driver gratuitously cut the engine, and the ghostly car freewheeled silently around a bend through the crunching gravel and came to a halt by the creek's side.
The driver slid across the red upholstery and pushed open the passenger's door; got out. The bridge was the same, she thought, or was a new bridge not different from the old one; she stepped carefully across it on her narrow high heels.
Already she wanted to turn back; she wanted not to have come; but volition was not hers now, and whatever had replaced it within her carried her swiftly surely across the tumbling water and up the path. Past the great boulder, that had never been removed from the premises, left as a sign. The pines above on the mountain had grown, where on more than one night she had slept, long ago, long years ago. Was there a dog under the porch? None woke. She went up to the door; it was unlocked, unlatched in fact, and she pushed it open and went in, leaving it open behind her.
Home. No light but the gray spill of the television, on without sound, small figures in antic distress, swiftly changed for others. By it she saw the spavined couch, and the straightback chair her great-grandfather had made, the Bible laid on it.
She went past it toward the door of the only bedroom, open too. Beneath her feet as she approached the door the linoleum crackled. And the wind like to lift the little place right into the air, up into the treetops.
He was there.
He lay on his back on the mattress, shirtless, his great horny feet apart and one long arm fallen toward the floor. At first she thought he was not asleep, that his eyes saw; but when she came closer (in revulsion and awe but no fear) she could tell that he was absent. The wind wrenched the curtain at the open window.
She did not, or she could not, hesitate, but went to him where he lay; lifted the slack arm up and placed it by his side; put her red-nailed hands beneath his back (cold as a corpse, she thought) and pushed. As heavy as a corpse too. She set her feet again, unsteady in heels, and with a tiny bat-cry she rolled the man-doll over on its face. It didn't awaken. It could not.
Now his walking spirit, when at dawn he came back again, could not enter at the mouth from which he had gone out. He was caught outside.
And she turned and left, leaving the door open (he could not now return by it), past the devil's stone and back across the little bridge, this time twisting a heel in a crack. She bent to take off her shoes almost without stopping, then went more swiftly to the white car left waiting by the water's side; and she spurred it away in a spurt of earth and pebbles as the wind called after her aghast.
Oh don't you remember, don't you remember: there will be no record of it except as you remember it. One of the big pines on the knoll at Arcady blew down, shattering right at the hollow in its heart, in which a great beehive had been built; the bees rose in their numbers to meet the enemy, and were scattered. It blew shingles from the stable roof and turned the pages of
National Geographics
piled in the stable's attic; it rattled but could not open the locked door before which Boney Rasmussen had been standing stony and inert since his death in July.
Rosie Rasmussen sat up in bed, awakened by the wind too; or by a sound beyond her room, like an approaching footfall. Something the wind had done, doubtless. Alert and staring at the black oblong of the doorway, Rosie willed whatever it was to go away.
Go away.
But then, just as Rosie grew certain that some presence really was near her, another soft footfall came, and a small figure in white went past her door without looking in.
Oh lord Sam.
"Hon? Do you have to go?"
No she wasn't going toward the bathroom. Rosie got out of bed and went out into the hall, just in time to see Sam turn purposefully and go down the stairs.
Was it true you weren't supposed to wake them, that something awful happened if you did? No that was a myth, it sounded when she told it to herself just exactly like something made up, because of the strangeness, because of the fear of, of what.
"Sam,” she whispered, not loud enough.
Man listen to the wind.
Sam went down the stairs, holding the thick banister rail, unhesitating, down to the hall. What did she think, where did she think she went. Rosie after her, her neck and shoulders thrilling the way they did when she heard someone's eerie dream. She watched Sam's white nightshirt float down the hall toward the door out. When she reached it she stood on tiptoe and took hold of the knob, meaning to let herself out or the night in.
"No! Sam don't!” Rosie called, unable not to, following fast. “Don't!"
Sam turned from the door. Her body shook violently to see her mother, and the great front hall, and herself there; her eyes were huge.
"What's that?” she said, staring.
Then she shook again, and didn't stop. She fell to the floor before Rosie could reach her. Rosie tried to gather her up, but Sam was twisted rigid, her pupils were rolled away and her teeth clenched, a sort of wild roar coming from her throat.
A storm in her brain, Dr. Bock had called it. Like an electrical storm.
"Oh Christ,” Rosie said, trying to hold her. “Oh Jesus.” It was just past midnight on the twenty-first of September. The seizure went on for nearly a minute. Forever. “Oh Jesus,” Rosie pleaded or whispered. “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ."
"The heart,” Frank Walker Barr said to Pierce Moffett. “It has a history.” And he tapped his sternum, behind which his own heart presumably lay.
"Yes?” Pierce said.
"Today the heart is just a pump. A muscle. Liable to failure and needing care. But for centuries it was, really was, the seat of the feelings, interpreter of the world, source of emotional life."
The two walked together along an avenue of attenuated palms, whose high heads indicated an eastward breeze. At the avenue's end a little pyramid stood, guarded by sphinxes painted with cat's eyes and rosebud mouths.
"Once upon a time, of course,” Barr said, “the human person was composed differently from the way in which it's composed now. Once, it was made of distinct and incommensurable parts. Soul and body. Body and soul."
"Yes,” Pierce said.
"The soul was not material; it had no size, shape, density, weight, none of that. It did have parts, but never mind that for now. The body was all material, made out of the four elements, air fire earth and water, in subtly variable combinations."
Pierce nodded. He took from his pocket and donned a pair of brown sunglasses he had bought on his first trip to the Faraway Hills, in the former age of the world, before the passage time. The sand and sea darkened.
"Now the problem then was,” Barr said, “the relation between the two parts. The soul was wholly non-material, and the body was the opposite; therefore how can the soul apprehend the body and the material world? How can the body respond to the commands or aspirations of the soul? What could possibly connect them?"
He lifted a hand to indicate the pyramid ahead, that they should approach it rather than going around. He was a short man who gave the impression of being large, as though he were made of some heavy and powerful matter; yet his step was hesitant, and his arms in their drip-dry shirt were crooked a little at the elbow. He had been old even when Pierce had been his student.
"But of course you don't have to have this problem,” Pierce said, who was feeling the onset of familiar anxieties. “You set it for yourself, by dividing up the person."
"Right,” Barr said. “The Greeks did that. Setting the problem then to be solved by whoever thought that the Greeks were the last word on everything. Here's what they did eventually: they posited a third thing,
spirit, pneuma
in Greek, a word which had a lot of ambiguous meanings, including
breath
."
Soul, spirit: Pierce said he had been reading those words in old authors and hearing them in church since he was a kid and had never actually understood the difference, if there was one.
"Well,” Barr said. “There came to be. You've read Ficino, of course.
De vita coelitus comparanda
."
"Well, I've read
in
it,” Pierce said, blushing hotly, if not in his sun-red face in his heart.
"You know his distinctions, which were perhaps largely his own, but widely influential. The difference between soul and spirit was that spirit was matter, soul wasn't; spirit was an extremely fine, refined, superfine matter, a liquid airy fiery sort of stuff. It flowed all through the body, it was very
quick
, it was hot and it was somehow
shiny
or silvery or reflective, so that whatever the body's senses perceived was reflected in it."
Barr indicated the world, the vegetation, a pair of spiraling butterflies, the people around them who walked barefoot to and fro or gazed out over the sands shading their eyes.
"A sound comes in at the ear,” he said. “Or a sight comes in through the eye. It hits the shiny spirit, which is
stirred
by it, heats up with emotion (which is not material). And the soul, which can't perceive matter at all, having no organs to sense it with,
can
perceive reflections, which are immaterial, like light. And so the soul perceives what the body perceives, because it is incised or impressed or reflected in the spirit."
"So I'm not sure what this has to do with the heart,” Pierce said. The conversation had begun with Barr's mention of his own, not in good shape he said.
"The heart,” Barr said. “Right. You see spirit flowed all through the body. It comprised a sort of second body closely bound up with the physical one, this one."
"The astral body,” Pierce said, thinking of Beau Brachman.
"Yes,” Barr said. “Exactly. But it was in the
heart
that the spirit was generated, and from which it circulated; and that's where the material coming in through the senses was received and felt."
"Ah,” Pierce said. He had begun to perceive the shapes of certain old philosophical difficulties, brought to light by this idea; why people had once said what they had said, done what they had done. Bruno. Dee. “I see,” he said, though he didn't, quite.
"Spirit flowed out from the heart and returned to it; partly it was under the soul's control, partly it was subject to the body whose senses it served. The material senses received the data, the data heated up the spirit, the heart synthesized the image from all the senses and the soul perceived in it the immaterial reflection of the object, and considered: is this thing good? Bad? The will (which is part of the soul) could then choose it or reject it."
"Uh huh,” Pierce said.
"Take sex,” Barr said. “Love rather."
"Uh huh,” Pierce said, as though he had known this was coming, which darkly he had.
"You see a person. That person's physical qualities enter your senses. They are reflected in your spirit, which heats up as your feelings awake. The soul looks into this mirror, the spirit, and sees the reflection, and becomes entranced, or doesn't. Love."
They joined a dozen others who had also approached the pyramid and now waited there, some of them old and brown, some of them holding children by the hand, patient in the mild sun.
"She comes in through the eyes,” Barr said. “Not her physical person, but the image of her, projected somehow by her own eyes, source of her power to cause love."
"Beatrice and Dante,” Pierce said. Sweat had begun to form in a cool band over his forehead. “Petrarch and Laura."
"Remember, the soul, which is the only part of you that can love, can never perceive the body of the other person; it can only see, and love, the
reflection
of the other person in your heart, in your spirit."
"So you don't really fall in love with another person,” Pierce said lamely. “Just an idea."
"Not so silly, after all, is it?” Barr said smiling. He took off his straw hat, and wiped the band with his handkerchief. “The Renaissance Platonists pictured the whole personal mechanism differently, but they were no stupider about life than we are."
Now their turn had come. They went up to the wide window and the white counter where oranges were piled in cannonball fashion, small pyramids too; a black youth in a white cap at a rakish angle smiled at them. Arched over his window was painted the word FRESH in bold and convincing letters.
"Large or small?” Barr inquired of Pierce.
"Oh. Small,” Pierce said; and Barr held up two fingers to the counterman.
"They use Valencias,” Barr said. “I determined that. The best for juice.” He gave Pierce a cup of foamy juice and steaming ice that did not seem small at all.
"Another thing this picture could explain or account for,” Barr said as they turned away, “was what could go wrong with love, which seems to have gone wrong very frequently then."
"Amor hereos
,” Pierce said. “Burton talks about it."
"Yes. It was a part of melancholy. Well its etiology was part of this spirit theory. Now watch what happens. Suppose your spirit is a particularly hot, shiny, labile, fluid one. And you see or meet somebody who for all sorts of reasons—the stars mostly—matches perfectly your own spirit's ability to reflect. What can happen is that the image of the beloved can run rampant through the body, carried on the spirit; it can actually become an infection."