Sorcerer's Apprentice (14 page)

He lifted the baby off Lizzie's lap, pulling the covering from her face. That she was beautiful made his hands shake even more. She kept her fists balled at her cheeks. Her eyes were light, bread-colored, but latticed by blood vessels. Allan said to his father, without facing him, “I think I need boiled Hound's Tongue and Sage. They're in my bag. Bring me the water from the herbs in a bowl.” He hoisted the baby higher on his right arm and, holding the spoon of cold cereal in his left hand, praying silently, began a litany of every spell he knew to disperse suffering and the afflictions of the spirit. From his memory, where techniques lay stacked like crates in a storage bin, Allan unleashed a salvo of incantations. His father, standing nearby with a discolored spoon and the bowl, held his breath so long Allan could hear flies gently beating against the lamp glass of the lantern. Allan, using the spoon like a horseshoe, slipped the potion between her lips. “Eat, Pearl,” the apprentice whispered. “Eat and live.” Pearl spit up on his shirt. Allan closed his eyes and repeated slowly every syllable of every word of every spell in his possession. And ever he pushed the spoon of cereal against the child's teeth, ever she pushed it away, gagging, swinging her head, and wailing so Allan had to shout each word above her voice. He oozed sweat now. Wind changing direction outside shifted the pressure inside the room so suddenly that Allan's stomach turned violently—it was if the farmhouse, snatched up a thousand feet, now hung in space. Pearl spit first clear fluids. Then blood. The apprentice attacked this mystery with a dazzling array of devices, analyzed it, looked at her with the critical, wrinkled brow of a philosopher, and mimed the Sorcerer so perfectly it seemed that Rubin, not Allan, worked magic in the room. But he was not Rubin Bailey. And the child suddenly stopped its struggle and relaxed in the apprentice's arms.

Lizzie yelped, “Why ain't Pearl crying?” He began repeating, futilely, his spells for the fifth time. Lizzie snatched his arm with such strength her fingers left blue spots on his skin. “That's enough!” she said. “You give her to me!”

“There's another way,” Allan said, “another charm I've seen.” But Lizzie Harris had reached the door. She threw a brusque “Good-bye” behind her to Richard and nothing to Allan. He knew they were back on the ground when Lizzie disappeared outside. Within the hour she would be at Rubin's houseboat. In two hours she would be at Esther Peters's home, broadcasting his failure.

“Allan,” said Richard, stunned. “It didn't work.”

“It's never worked.” Allan put away the bowl, looked around the farmhouse for his bag, then a pail, and kissed his father's rough cheek. Startled, Richard pulled back sharply, as if he had stumbled sideways against the kiln. “I'm sorry,” said Allan. It was not an easy thing to touch a man who so guarded and for good reason, his emotions. “I'm not much of a Sorcerer, or blacksmith, or anything else.”

“You're not going out this late, are you?” His father struggled, and Allan felt guilty for further confusing him with feeling. “Allan.…”

His voice trailed off.

“There's one last spell I have to do.” Allan touched his arm lightly, once, then drew back his hand. “Don't follow me, okay?”

On his way to the river Allan gathered the roots and stalks and stones he required to dredge up the demon kings. The sky was clear, the air dense, and the Devil was in it if he fouled even this conjuration. For now he was sure that white magic did not reside in ratiocination, education, or will. Skill was of no service. His talent was for pa(o)stiche. He could imitate but never truly heal; impress but never conjure beauty; ape the good but never again give rise to a genuine spell. For that God or Creation, or the universe—it had several names—had to seize you,
use
you, as the Sorcerer said, because it needed a womb, shake you down, speak through you until the pain pearled into a beautiful spell that snapped the world back together. It had abandoned Allan, this possession. It had taken him, in a way, like a lover, planted one pitiful seed, and said, “‘Bye now.” This absence, this emptiness, this sterility he felt deep at his center. Beyond all doubt, he owed the universe far more than it owed him. To give was right; to ask wrong. From birth he was indebted to so many, like his father, and for so much. But you could not repay the universe, or anyone, or build a career as a Conjure Doctor on a single, brilliant spell. Talent, Allan saw, was a curse. To have served once—was this enough? Better perhaps never to have served at all than to go on, foolishly, in the wreckage of former grace, glossing over his frigidity with cheap fireworks, window dressing, a trashy display of pyrotechnics, gimmicks designed to distract others from seeing that the magician onstage was dead.

Now the Sorcerer's apprentice placed his stones and herbs into the pail, which he filled with river water; then he built a fire behind a rock. Rags of fog floated over the waste-clogged riverbank as Allan drew a horseshoe in chalk. He sat crosslegged in wet grass that smelled faintly of oil and fish, faced east, and cursed at the top of his voice. “I conjure and I invoke thee, O Magoa, strong king of the East. I order thee to obey me, to send thy servants Onoskelis and Tepheus.”

Two froglike shapes stitched from the fumes of Allan's potion began to take form above the pail.

Next he invoked the demon king of the North, who brought Ornia, a beautiful, blue-skinned lamia from the river bottom. Her touch, Allan knew, was death. She wore a black gown, a necklace of dead spiders, and entered through the opening of the enchanted horseshoe. The South sent Rabdos, a griffinlike hound, all teeth and hair, that hurtled toward the apprentice from the woods; and from the West issued Bazazath, the most terrible of all—a collage of horns, cloven feet, and goatish eyes so wild Allan wrenched away his head. Upriver, he saw kerosene lamplight moving from the direction of town. A faraway voice called, “Allan? Allan? Allan, is that you? Allan, are you out there?” His father. The one he had truly harmed. Allan frowned and faced those he had summoned.

“Apprentice,” rumbled Bazazath,
“student
, you risk your life by opening hell.”

“I am only that, a student,” said Allan, “the one who studies beauty, who wishes to give it back, but who cannot serve what he loves.”

“You are wretched, indeed,” said Bazazath, and he glanced back at the others. “Isn't he wretched?”

They said, as one, “Worse.”

Allan did not understand. He felt Richard's presence hard by, heard him call from the mystic circle's edge, which no man or devil could break. “How am I worse?”

“Because,” said the demon of the West, “to love the good, the beautiful is right, but to labor on and will the work when you are obviously
beneath
this service is to parody them, twist them beyond recognition, to lay hold of what was once beautiful and make it a monstrosity. It becomes
black
magic. Sorcery is relative, student—dialectical, if you like expensive speech. And this, exactly, is what you have done with the teachings of Rubin Bailey.”

“No,” blurted Allan.

The demon of the West smiled. “Yes.”

“Then,” Allan asked, “you must destroy me?” It was less a question than a request.

“That is why we are here.” Bazazath opened his arms. “You must step closer.”

He had not known before the real criminality of his deeds. How dreadful that love could disfigure the thing loved. Allan's eyes bent up toward Richard. It was too late for apologies. Too late for promises to improve. He had failed everyone, particularly his father, whose face now collapsed into tears, then hoarse weeping like some great animal with a broken spine. In a moment he would drop to both knees. Don't want me, thought Allan. Don't love me as I am. Could he do nothing right? His work caused irreparable harm—and his death, trivial as it was in his own eyes, that, too, would cause suffering. Why must his choices be so hard? If he returned home, his days would be a dreary marking time for magic, which might never come again, living to one side of what he had loved, and loved still, for fear of creating evil—this was surely the worst curse of all, waiting for grace, but in suicide he would drag his father's last treasure, dirtied as it was, into hell behind him.

“It grows late,” said Bazazath. “Have you decided?”

The apprentice nodded, yes.

He scrubbed away part of the chalk circle with the ball of his foot, then stepped toward his father. The demons waited—two might still be had this night for the price of one. But Allan felt within his chest the first spring of resignation, a giving way of both the hunger to heal and the anxiety to avoid evil. Was this surrender the one thing the Sorcerer could not teach? His pupil did not know. Nor did he truly know, now that he was no longer a Sorcerer's apprentice with a bright future, how to comfort his father. Awkwardly, Allan lifted Richard's wrist with his right hand, for he was right-handed, then squeezed, tightly, the old man's thick, ruined fingers. For a second his father twitched back in an old slave reflex, the safety catch still on, then fell heavily toward his son. The demons looked on indifferently, then glanced at each other. After a moment they left, seeking better game.

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CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Naturally, I wish to thank the sympathetic editors who first published these stories. Credit for the poem in “Alēthia” belongs to filmmaker Olivia Tappan (WGBH, Boston), who tells me she heard it long ago in a philosophy class, and I am deeply indebted to the late John Gardner for microscopically analyzing three of these stories and generally scolding me for my mistakes. Credit is also due to my wife, Joan, for just about everything I can think of, to Seattle martial-arts teacher Gray Cassidy for critiquing “China,” and to Dr. Richard Hart of Long Island University for his many years of friendship and philosophical support.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Education of Mingo” was originally published in Mother Jones, August 1977; “Exchange Value” appeared in Best American Short Stories 1982, and was originally published in Choice, 1981; “Menagerie” was first published in Indiana Review, Spring 1984; “China” first appeared in MSS, 1983; “Alēthia” was originally published in Antaeus #34, June 19, 1979; “Moving Pictures” first appeared in the September 1985 issue of North American Review; “Popper's Disease” and “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” both appeared for the first time in Callaloo—in February 1982 and February 1983 respectively.

Copyright © 1977, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986 Charles Johnson

Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

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Original Cover Painting by Merrill Joan Gerber

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