Love and Sleep (70 page)

"Love-sick,” Pierce said. His own heart had begun the steady rapid beat, little hard fist knocking at a cell-door, that had come to be nearly constant, had alarmed him enough to send him to a doctor, a real modern one, who listened and told him to relax.

"The soul ceases to be able to think of anything else, because the spirit can't reflect anything else. The phantasmal reflection of the other person, let loose in your spirit, takes on a sort of phony autonomy. It's not a person, remember—it's a creation of your own—but it can establish itself as a person. Since the poor soul can think of nothing else, the phantasm can actually come to supplant your own subjectivity, so that the phantasm of the beloved is there where you should be. You have
lost your heart
to her."

"What happens to you?” Pierce said.

"Gone.” Barr finished his drink. “If you don't get yourself back, you die. Can't feed yourself or dress yourself or."

For a moment Pierce felt his knees weaken, and the bright day darken, and thought he might be about to shame himself and embarrass his old teacher by fainting there on the boardwalk.

He would have said that this was not the first case of infection he had suffered; he would have said that he had rarely in his postpubertal life not been suffering it, or recovering from it, or seeking restlessly to contract it again. But oh this was different, this case. The man who walked beside Barr sucking the straw of his juice, who resembled an old student of Barr's met by strange chance at an out-of-the-way Florida resort, was in fact a golem no longer operated by himself, a shell hollowed by something certainly very much like a fatal disease; and the empty spaces within him filled with awful imaginary things, black matter the sun could not penetrate to.

"So is there,” he tried to say calmly, “a cure?” Barr looked at him curiously, and Pierce smiled down at Barr brightly, just curious. “I mean if they thought it was a disease, maybe they had a cure. I've never heard of one."

"They tried,” Barr said. “They might put you to bed. Try to get you to figure it out. Prayer. A vacation amid unexciting surroundings. And in some cases there was spontaneous remission, of course."

Certainly there was. Had Pierce not survived the process himself, and not once only, but more than once? Weaker but not dead, not yet.

This time, though.

"I,” he said, and Barr waited. “I."

He stopped then, and turned as though to look out over the miniature beach (man-made) and the vanishing cloudscape. But it was really to turn his still-smiling but (he could feel it) alarmingly unwell face away from his old teacher. He experienced the madman's awful bind: having to ask for help, from people who cannot conceive the spiritual difficulty you're in; and realizing that they can therefore give you no help; and so sinking deeper into darkness before their kind puzzled faces.

Smart whole ordinary people who could not imagine what had become of Pierce. Beau and Rosie Mucho and Spofford, when he had tried to explain, a child in the grip of night terrors, comforted by big safe grownups, a child who knows that grownups are beyond all such fears, which makes him even more afraid and alone. Of course they found it hard to believe, or to sympathize. Pierce himself found it hard to believe, dreadfully, wholly unlikely; his self, from whatever gray cold noplace it had been remanded to, looked back on Pierce in helpless and amazed dismay.

He walked with Barr up the beach road past the souvenir stands and food stalls, back to the iron grille of Barr's hotel. They both remarked again on the coincidence, coming upon one another here of all places, each as far from home as the other, and Barr said Small world; but Pierce had actually ceased to be surprised by these vatic encounters, any more than the errant knight is surprised to encounter the hermit in the wide forsaken forest, just the hermit he needs to meet. No Pierce was not surprised; it seemed to him that from now on he must probably meet his old mentor and guide at every hopeless juncture of his journey, or if not him someone just like him; and yet still he did not know to ask the question that would free him, or even that there was a question that could be asked.

Christ let him not die of it, he thought as he walked back to his mother's place: that would be so futile, so shaming, he would never be able to hold his head up among the dead.

"She was working at a psychotherapy center,” Pierce told his mother. “And that's where she fell in with this. Group."

They sat together again at evening on the marina deck of the little motel that Winnie owned a share in. The winter air was mild.

"It's called the Powerhouse International,” Pierce said, and gave a strangled chuckle. “The
Powerhouse,
yes. A quasi-Christian sort of Bible cult. They specialize in healing, at least the elite does. They claim a big success with mental patients."

Winnie shook her head, dismayed.

"I think an old lover of hers got her into it,” Pierce said. He could see them, the operatives of her newfound faith, the nightbirds roosting open-eyed in his inward darkness: Mucho the tool, Ray Honeybeare the torpid sorcerer; and farther behind them, somewhere in the Midwest where the cult had its home and temple, the cult's founder and head, the prophet-dragon, who appeared Oz-like in videotapes to instruct his followers and inductees. Rose had described the sessions; she said she thought Pierce would find them really interesting.

"A lot of people in cults get over it,” Winnie said. “You think they get swallowed up and never come out. But a lot do."

Cults were everywhere then, or seemed to be, gingerbread houses appearing on the path into which the young especially were tempted by the thousands. Cults were passage-time creatures, perhaps, compound monsters amazed at their own sudden new powers; or they were hopeless refuges to rush to in the upheaval of time, as passengers on a sinking liner rush to the uptipped stern, to cling together there; or they were symptoms of social or psychic distress that had always been there, and had only come to be noticed, or re-noticed. Or they were none of these things. Anyway Pierce had had fatidic dreams about them often in recent years, dreams of being in the power of one or another, as had many other sleepers; but till now he had always been able to tell he was dreaming.

"They believe they can alter the world in certain ways. Not just healing. They can, you know, get things through prayer. Find lost things. Have what they want."

"Oh for Pete's sake."

"If you ask for bread, you won't get a stone. Jesus said."

He had tried to tell Rose, calmly,
openly
, that he had a long history with this religion, had given it a lot of thought, not only its premises and dogmas but its passion too.
But you're not a Christian, Pierce
, she'd said to him, surprised.
You're a Catholic.

"If they still let you see her,” Winnie said. “You're supposed to be understanding, and not judge, and not get hysterical. I've read this. That just drives them deeper in.” She laughed a little, and looked at Pierce sideways. “Can you do that?"

"I haven't,” Pierce said. No he had raged at her, a furious village atheist, forgetting all his wisdom, his new infinite God at the infinitesimal heart of things; in inexplicable horror watched her fall helplessly asleep beneath their spell, though she laughed when he described it that way. Raged at himself, too, appalled at his unkindness, his lack of tact and tactic. He had gone, effectually, nuts, without knowing in the least why. He wasn't going to tell his mother that he had himself seen miracles, small ones, small elisions or alterations in time or matter, meaningless mostly but terrifying: the small undeniable signs which in a dream mean that reality is not as you have assumed it to be.

Well maybe he hadn't seen miracles. It was as
though
he had seen them, so exactly as though that he could not dispute them. He lived daily now in a world of as-though. Maybe not he alone either, maybe the distinction was failing everywhere in the world, metaphors imploding, tenor subsumed in vehicle.

He tipped back his chair with a foot against the deck's rail. Overhead great birds sailed the evening, winging with slow beats into the west, legs trailing behind. Rose Ibis, his bird book said, birds wholly unrelated to the Old World ibis sacred to Egypt, and to AEgypt.

"In Kentucky,” he said. “That orphan girl we took in that time, when you were gone?"

"Yes."

"She believed in a secret gospel,” Pierce said. “That her daddy figured out. About the end of the world."

"She did?” Winnie regarded him in amazement, that he should recall such a thing; she herself kept few useless memories.

"The devil threw this big rock at her daddy's house,” Pierce said.

"Oh yes?"

"To keep him from telling the news. That the end was coming. So his own troops I guess wouldn't lose heart. Who knows."

"Those people,” Winnie said.

That's what this felt like, Pierce realized: it felt like sitting on the steps of the dogtrot, in the summer of the end of the world, unable to save Bobbie, fending off from his inhabited heart the darkness she seemed to will herself into. No it didn't feel like it, it was it, as though it had never ceased.

But he knew now that nothing ever happens once, everything re-occurs as the cycles swing, each cycle is exactly like the last in another form, each age too no doubt; like one of those novels where all the characters are avatars of mythic personages, their commonplace acts reproducing all the turns of an ancient story, their names too echoing the old originals, though even that they don't recognize; thinking they are inventing their lives even as they are driven here and there by unsleeping Coincidence, obliged to carry it all out, down to murder, down to madness, before the last page.

"Pierce?” Winnie said. “Are you okay?"

He realized that for some time he had been bent over in his aluminum chair, pressing one hand against his chest.

"Are you in pain?"

"No. No.” He tried to straighten up, look normal. “I keep thinking my heart is somehow damaged. But no, don't worry, the doctor says no."

"Not broken?” Winnie said, and put her hand on his. “Isn't it funny that's where you feel it. Just as though."

Yes just as though. What transfer from head to heart, from organ of knowing to organ of circulation, made possible this awful hurt in the middle of his bosom? Why here of all places? “It used to be,” he said, “that people did believe it would break. And kill you."

"Well people still think that today,” Winnie said. “A lot of people do."

"Well sure,” Pierce said. “These concepts never really go away. In fact this book I am now writing."

He ceased speaking then, and his heart ceased its tapping in astonishment. The evening slowed, for an instant, to a halt.

Good god he had found it.

The heart in his breast swelled to sudden great size with understanding, and Pierce let out a cry, or a sob; and then he went on sobbing, emptying it of tears, though it seemed not to shrink at all.

He had found it. He had promised he could find it and he had.

What thing is it that we inherit from the distant past that has survived, unchanged, from the way things used to be? What is the one thing that has not lost its older nature or its powers?

Boney had wanted it to be an Elixir that would keep him alive forever. But it wasn't.

It had been within him, of course it had, all along; it had been within Pierce, was within everyone, always there right in our own backyards, well known to everyone too except the fool who goes out in search of it. It isn't even possible to think or talk without invoking it, referring to its powers and its reasons; whatever the surgeons find and handle when they crack the chest, everyone knows what it is, what work it has to do: it is there that the dry sticks of perceived reality are transformed into meaning, for the soul to feed upon. Even surgeons know it.

The heart. The heart yes in the bosom, for where else is it, it's no metaphor, it's
here, here, here
, and Pierce struck his own thrice. Here where the power was, and is, and always has been: just where magic said it proceeded from.

"Oh, son,” said Winnie. She rubbed a forefinger beneath her nose, and sniffed. She took his hand again. “Oh damn it all."

He had just come upon the end of his book. His ridiculous sobs modulated to a mad shriek of laughter. Yes his
book
. Worse than never having come upon it at all, he had come upon it now, the surprise ending of his book, now when he was certain that he could never, ever write it.

He was to lose everything, mind as well as heart, occupation too; it was all to be taken from him. The big payback, and he supposed he well and truly deserved it. Out of cursed restless Saturnian boredom and longing he had hurt his own magic heart, abused it fatally in the search for thrills to animate it, and it had finally gone haywire, shrunken and contracted in his bosom, and would no longer do its work, would do nothing but pump his poor blood, and sob.

As the winter night fell in the North the temperature dropped; on television he and Winnie and Doris, Winnie's partner and companion, watched people in overcoats and galoshes bending into the snowy wind of northern cities, or hopelessly shoveling out their submerged cars. Pierce thought of the storm enveloping his little shuttered house at the end of its by now erased drive. Twice since winter began, the water coming into the house had begun to freeze, and twice he had freed the plastic pipe of ice before it was too late. Now he wasn't there.

Snow and bitter cold were apparently general all over Europe too, snow drifting deep where it usually frosted lightly, and falling in big theatrical flakes on Mediterranean towns that had rarely seen it at all, where children held up their hands to be visited by the tiny beings, who vanished when they alighted. Commentators said it was perhaps the advancing edge of a new cold phase, the return maybe of the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century, when the river Thames had frozen solid every year, and festivals were held on the ice.

All was still and mild on Winnie's key, and on the waters of the cove beyond the motel's little marina. A tall heron stood on one leg in the sawgrass, asleep with its beak beneath its wing. Pierce could have seen it, silhouetted against the silver water, if he had lifted his head to look out.