Little, Big Part 49

"It won't be long," Alice said. That too she was sure of, or believed or hoped she was sure of; she tried, searching in herself, to find that certainty: to find the calm delight, the grat.i.tude, the exhilaration she had felt when she had begun to understand what conclusion it was all to have, the half-scared, half-puissant sense that she had lived her whole life as a chick inside an egg, and then got too big for it, and then found a way to begin to break it, and then had broken it, and was now about to come forth into some huge, airy world she could have had no inkling of, yet bearing wings to live in it with that were still untried. She was sure that what she knew now, they would all come to know, and other things still more wonderful, and more wonderful yet; but in the cold old room at the dark end of night, she couldn't quite feel it alive within her. She thought of Smoky. She was afraid; as afraid as if a "Sophie," she said softly. "Do you think it's death?"

Sophie had fallen asleep, her head resting against Alice's shoulder. "Hm?" she said.

"Do you think that dying is what it really is?"

"I don't know," Sophie said. She felt Alice trembling beside her. "I don't think so. But I don't know."

"I don't think so either," Alice said.

Sophie said nothing.

"If it is, though," Alice said, "it isn't a what I thought."

"You mean dying isn't? Or that place?"

"Either." She pulled the afghan more closely around them. "Smoky told me, once, about this place, in India or China, where ages ago when somebody got the death sentence, they used to give him this drug, like a sleeping drug, only it's a poison, but very slow-acting; and the person falls asleep first, deep asleep, and has these very vivid dreams. He dreams a long time, he forgets he's dreaming even; he dreams for days. He dreams that he's on a journey, or that some such thing has happened to him. And then, somewhere along, the drug is so gentle and he's so fast asleep that he never notices when, he dies. But he doesn't know it. The dream changes, maybe; but he doesn't even know it's a dream, so. He just goes on. He only thinks it's another country."

"That's spooky," Sophie said.

"Smoky said he didn't think it was so, though."

"No," Sophie said. "I bet not."

"He said, if the drug was always supposed to be fatal in the end, how would anybody know that's what its effect was?"

"Oh."

"I was thinking," Alice said, "that maybe this is like that."

"Oh, Alice, how awful, no."

But Alice had meant nothing awful; it seemed to her no dreadful issue, if you were condemned to death, to make out of death a country. That was the similarity she saw: for she had perceived, what none of the others had and Sophie only dimly and backwardly, that the place they had been invited to was no place. She had perceived in her own growing larger that there was no place there distinct from those who lived in it: the fewer of them, the smaller their country. And if there were now to be a migration to that land, each emigrant would have to make the place he traveled to, make it out of himself. It was what she, pioneer, would have to do: make out of her own death, or what just now seemed like her death, a land for the rest of them to travel to. She would have to grow large enough to contain the whole world, or the whole great world turn out to be small enough after all to fit within the compa.s.s of her bosom.

Smoky for sure wouldn't believe in that either. He'd find it hard, anyway. She thought then that he had found the whole thing hard; that however patient he had grown, however well he had learned to live with it, he had never and would never find it easy. Would he come? More than anything else she wanted to be sure of that. Could he? She was sure of so many things, but not sure of that; long ago she had seen that the very thing that had earned Smoky for her might be the cause of her losing him, that is, her place in this Tale. And there it still was, the bargain held; she felt him even now to be at the end of a long and fragile cord, that might part if she tugged it, or slip from her fingers, or from his. And she would leave now without farewell lest it be for good.

Oh Smoky, she thought; oh death. And for a long time thought nothing else, only wis.h.i.+ng, without making the wish, that this issue were not the issue it must have, the only issue it could have or ever had.

"You will watch out for him," she whispered; "Sophie, you have to see that he comes. You have to."

But Sophie was asleep again, the afghan drawn up to her chin. Alice looked around herself, as though waking; the windows were blue. Night was pa.s.sing. Like someone coming to consciousness with the cessation of pain, she gathered around herself the world, the dawn, and her future. She stood then, easing herself away from her sleeping sister. Sophie dreamed that she did so, and partly woke to say, "I'm ready, I'll come," and then other words that made no sense. She sighed, and Alice tucked the afghan around her.

Above her, there were footsteps again, coming downward. Alice kissed her sister's brow, and blew out the dim lamp; blue dawn filled the room when the yellow flame was gone. It was later than she had thought. She went out into the hall; Smoky came running down to the landing on the stairs above her.

"Alice!" he said.

"Yes, hush," she said. "You'll wake everybody."

"Alice, it works." He gripped the newel at the stair's turning, as though he might fall. "It works, you have to come see."

"Oh?" Alice said.

"Alice, Alice, come see! It's all right now. It's all right, it works, it goes around. Listen!" And he pointed upward. Far, far off, barely discernible amid the dawn noises of peepers and first birds, there was a steady metallic clacking, like the ticking of a vast clock, a clock inside which the house itself was contained.

"All right?" Alice said.

"It's all right, we don't have to leave!" He paused again to listen, rapt. "The house won't fall apart. There'll be light and heat. We don't have to go anywhere!"

She only looked up, from the bottom of the stair.

"Isn't that great?" he said.

"Great," she said.

"Come see," he said, already turning back up the stairs.

"Okay," she said. "I'll come. In a minute."

"Hurry," he said, and started upwards.

"Smoky, don't run," she said.

She heard his climbing footsteps recede. She went to the hall-mirror, and from a peg beside it took her heavy cloak, and threw it around her. She glanced once at the figure in the mirror, who looked aged in the dawn light, and went to the great front door with its oval gla.s.s, and opened it.

The morning was huge, and went on in all directions before her, and blew coldly past her into the house. She stood a long time in the open doorway, thinking: one step. One step, which will seem to be a step away, but which will not be; one step into the rainbow, a step she had long ago taken, and which could not be untaken, every other step was only further. She took one step. Out on the lawn, amid the rags of mist, a little dog ran toward her, leaping and barking excitedly.

Itur in antiquam silvam, stabula alta ferrarum.

a"Aeneid, Book VI While Daily Alice thought and Sophie watched and slept, while Ariel Hawksquill flew along foggy country roads to meet a train at a northern station, Auberon and George Mouse sat close to a small fire, wondering what place it was that Fred Savage had led them to, and unable to remember in any clear way just how they had got there.

Storm of Difference They'd started off some time ago, it seemed to them; they'd begun by making preparations, going through George's old trunks and bureaus outfitting themselves, though since they had had not much idea at all of what dangers or difficulties they would meet, this had been haphazard; George found and tossed out sweaters, flaccid knapsacks, knitted caps, galoshes.

"Say," Fred said, tugging a cap over his wild hair. "Long time since I wore one of these here."

"What good is all this, though?" Auberon said, standing aside, hands in his pockets.

"Well, listen," George said. Better safe than sorry. Forewarned is forearmed."

"You'd about need to be four-armed," said Fred, holding up an immense poncho, "for thisere to do you much good."

"This is stupid," Auberon said. "I mean a"

"Okay, okay," George said angrily, flouris.h.i.+ng a large pistol he had just then found in the trunk, "okay, you decide, Mr. Know-it-all. Just don't say I didn't warn you." He thrust the gun in his belt, then changed his mind and tossed it back. "Hey, how about this?" It was a twenty-bladed jackknife with a thousand uses. "G.o.d, I haven't seen this in years."

"Nice," Fred said, levering out the corkscrew with a yellow thumbnail. "Ver' nice. And handy."

Auberon went on watching, hands in pockets, but made no further objection; after a moment he no longer watched. Ever since Lilac's appearance at Old Law Farm he had had immense difficulty in remaining for any length of time in the world; he seemed only to enter and leave particular scenes, which had no connection with each other, like the rooms of a house whose plan he couldn't fathom, or didn't care to try to fathom. He supposed, sometimes, that he was going mad, but though the thought seemed reasonable enough and an explanation of sorts, it left him oddly unmoved. For sure an enormous difference had suddenly come over the nature of things, but just what that difference was he couldn't put his finger on: or rather, any individual thing he did put his finger on (a street, an apple, any thought, any memory) seemed no different, seemed to be now just what it had always been, and yet the difference remained. "Same difference," George often said, about two things that were more or less alike; but for Auberon the phrase had come to designate his sense of one thing, one thing that had Somehow becomea"and was probably now for gooda"more or less different.

Same difference.

Probably, though (he didn't know, but it seemed likely) this difference hadn't come about suddenly at all, it was only that he had suddenly come to notice it, to inhabit it. It had dawned on him, is all; it had grown clear to him, like breaking weather. And he foresaw a time (with only a faint shudder of apprehension) when he would no longer notice the difference, or remember that things had ever been, or rather not been, different; and after that a time when storms of difference would succeed one another as they liked, and he would never notice.

Already he found himself forgetting that something like an occluded front seemed to have swept over his memories of Sylvie, which he had thought as hard and changeless as anything he owned, but which when he touched them now seemed to have turned to autumn leaves like fairy gold, turned to wet earth, staghorn, snails' sh.e.l.ls, fauns' feet.

"What?" he said.

"Put this on," George said, and gave him a sheath knife on whose sheath, dimly printed in gold, were the words "Ausable Chasm," which meant nothing to Auberon; but he looped it through his belt, not able to think just then why he might rather not.

Certainly this drifting in and out of what seemed to be chapters of fiction with blank pages in between had helped out with a hard task he had had to do: wrapping up (as he had thought he would never need to) the tale told on "A World Elsewhere." To wrap up a tale whose wrapping-up was in the very nature of it not conceivablea"hard! And yet he had only had to sit before the nearlyshot typewriter (so much had it suffered) for concluding chapters to begin to unfold as clearly, as cleverly, as impossibly as an endless chain of colored scarves from the empty fist of a magician. How does a tale end that was only a promise of no ending? In the same way as a difference comes to inhabit a world that is otherwise the same in all respects; in the same way that a picture which shows a complex urn alters, as you stare at it, to two faces contemplating each other.

He fulfilled the promise, that it wouldn't end: and that was the end. That's all.

Just how he had done it, just what scenes he stabbed out on the twenty-six alphabetical b.u.t.tons and their a.s.sociates, what words were said, what deaths came to pa.s.s, what births, he couldn't remember afterwards; they were the dreams of a man who dreams he dreams, imaginary imagination, insubstantialities set up in a world itself gone insubstantial. Whether they would be produced at all, and what effect they would have Out There if they were, what spell they might cast or break, he couldn't imagine. He only sent Fred off with the once-unimaginable last pages, and thought, laughing, of that schoolboy device he had once used, that last line that every schoolboy had once used to complete some wild self-indulgent fantasy otherwise uncompletable: then he woke up.

Then he woke up.

The phrases of his fugue with the world touched each other. The three of them, he, George, and Fred, stood booted and armed before the maw of a subway entrance: a cold spring day like a messy bed where the world still slept.

"Uptown? Downtown?" George asked.

Watch Your Step Auberon had suggested other doors, or what had seemed to him might be doors: a pavilion in a locked park to which he had the key; an uptown building that had been Sylvie's last destination as a Winged messenger; a barrel vault deep beneath the Terminus, nexus of four corridors. But Fred was leading this expedition.

"A ferry," he said. "Now if we's to take a ferry, we surely will cross a river. So now not countin' the Bronx and the Harlem, not countin' no Kills and no Spuyten Duyvil which is really th'ocean, not goan so far north as the Saw Mill, and settin' aside the East and the Hudson which got bridges, you still got a mess more of rivers to consider, yunnastan, only, here's the thang, they runnin' underground now all unseen; covered up with streets and folks' houses and plays-a-business; shootin' through ser-pipes and pressed down to trickles and rivulets and like that; stopped up, drove down deep into the rock where they turn into seep and what you call your groundwater; stillthere though, y'see, y'see, so we gots to first find the river to cross, and then we gots to cross it next; and if the mose of *em is underground, underground is where we gots to go."

"Okay," George said.

"Okay," Auberon said.

"Watch your step," Fred said.

They went down, stepping carefully as though in an unfamiliar place, though all of them were familiar with it, it was only The Train with its caves and dens, its mad signs pointing in contradictory directions, no help for the lost, and its seep of inky water and far-off borborygmic rumbles.

Auberon stopped, half-way down the stairs.

"Wait a sec," he said. "Wait."

"Wazza matter?" George said, looking quickly around.

"This is crazy," Auberon said. "This can't be right." Fred had gone ahead, had rounded the corner, waving them on. George stood between, looking after Fred and up at Auberon.

"Let's go, let's go," George said.

This would be hard, very hard, Auberon thought, following reluctantly; far harder to yield to than to the blank pa.s.sages and discomfitures of his old drunkenness. And yet the skills he had learned in that long bingea"how to yield up control, how to ignore shame and make a spectacle of himself, how not to question circ.u.mstances or at least not be surprised when no answers to questions could be founda"those skills were all he had now, all the gear he could bring to this expedition. Even with them he doubted he would get to the end; without them, he thought, he would not have been able to start off.

"Okay, wait," he said, turning after the others into deeper places. "Hold on."

And what if he had been put through that awful time, basic training, only so that now (snow-blind, sun-struck) he could live through this storm of difference, make his way through this dark wood?

No. It was Sylvie who had set him on that path; or rather Sylvie's absence.

Sylvie's absence. And what if Sylvie's absence, what if her presence in his life in the first place, G.o.d what if her very love and beauty had been plotted from the beginning, to make him a drunk, to teach him those skills, to train him in pathfinding, to immure him at Old Law Farm for years to wait for news without knowing he waited, to wait for Lilac to come with promises or lies to stir his heart's ashes into flame again, and all for some purpose of their own, which had nothing to do with him, or with Sylvie either?

All right: supposing there was to be this Parliament, supposing that that wasn't just lies as well and that he would come Somehow face to face with them, he had some questions to ask, and some good answers to get. Come to that, let him only find Sylvie, and he had some tough questions he could put to her about her part in all this, some d.a.m.n tough questions; only let him find her. Only, only let him find her.

Even as he thought this he saw, leaping from the last stair of a rachitic escalator, down there, a blond girl in a blue dress, bright in the brown darkness.

She looked back once and (seeing that they saw her) turned around a stanchion where a notice was posted: HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS.

"I think this is the way," George called. A train roared through just at that moment, as they were gathering to run downward; the wind of its pa.s.sage s.n.a.t.c.hed at their hats, but their hands were quicker. "Right?" George said, hand on his hat, shouting over the trains enfilade.

"Yup," Fred said, holding his. "I was about to say."

They went down. Auberon followed. Promises or lies, he had no choice, and for sure they had known that all along too, for had it not been they who had at first thus cursed him? He sensed with a terrible clarity all the circ.u.mstances of his life, not excepting this foul underground now and these stairs down, take hands in a chain one after another, not one left out; they linked up, they unmasked, they seized him by the throat, they shook him, shook him, shook him till he woke up.

Fred Savage was returning from the woods with a bundle of sticks to feed the fire.

"Mess o' folks out there," he said with satisfaction as he stuck sticks into the embers. "Mess o' folks."

"Oh yeah?" George said with some alarm. "Wild animals?"

"Could be," Fred said. His white teeth shone. In watch cap and poncho he looked ancient, a shapeless hump, like a wise old stumpwater toad. George and Auheron hunched a little closer to the feeble flames, and p.r.i.c.ked up their ears, and looked around them into the complex darkness.

A Family Thing They had not come very far into this wood from the river's edge, where the ferry had let them off, before darkness overtook them and Fred Savage called a halt. Even as the ancient, gray, knocking, creaking boat had slid downstream along its line they watched the red sun sinking behind the still-leafless great trees, bitten into crimson bits by undergrowth, and then swallowed. It had all looked fearsome and strange, yet George said:

"I think I've been here. Before."