AEgypt (13 page)

Down that road, the past did not grow darker with distance, but brighter; that way lay the morning lands, wise forefathers who knew what we have forgotten, radiant cities built by arts now lost.

Nor did that road go curling off to an ending lost amid the beasts: no, though far shorter than the road Pierce called History, it was in fact infinite, because just as its furthest age rolled back to its first days, the whole road completed a circle; the serpent took in its mouth the fast-dwindling tip of its tail. Nowadays history is made of time; but once it was made of something else.

Now that would be a story to tell his kids, wouldn't it, he thought. The story of that history not made of time; that history which is as different from History yet as symmetrical to it as dream is to waking.

As dream is to waking.

He pulled himself from his new armchair with some difficulty and went to the window; he turned out his lights and stood looking out into the never dark city.

There had been a morning once, when he was a child—how old had he been, not more than five or six—when he had awakened from frightening dreams, labyrinthine pursuit and loss, and his mother had tried to explain to him the nature of dreams, and why it is that, though you seem in them to be in mortal danger, you can't be hurt, not really. Dreams, she said, are only stories: except they aren't stories
outside,
like the ones in books, the stories Daddy tells. Dreams are your own stories,
inside.

Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning, whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of.

Funny, he thought; funny funny funny. In fact he had begun to feel funny, as though the rotation of the earth could be felt through his naked feet. Maybe he hadn't really lost his vocation, after all; maybe he had just misplaced it, had long ago closed the door by mistake on the one story that could not be outgrown: this story about how there is a story. That old closed door had blown open in the winds that were rising, and there were other doors beyond it, door after door, opening backward endlessly into the colored centuries.

When he had first begun teaching at Barnabas, because of his rather ambiguous degree in Renaissance Studies Pierce had been set to teaching not only history but freshman lit, or Introduction to World Literature, a course that still had compulsory status then. Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes all fled past in the first semester, well over most of the students’ heads, slow-flapping pterosaurs dimly glimpsed; Pierce supposed that if in later life they met any of those authors, it would be nice to be able to claim they had once before been introduced.

When he got to Dante, whom he had always found a trial, Pierce used to employ a trick he had learned from Dr. Kappel at Noate, who had taught him the equivalent freshman course and had also found Dante unsympathetic. At the beginning of class, as Dr. Kappel had, he would draw a circle on the blackboard.

"The world,” he would say.

A hatch mark on the world's edge. “Jerusalem. Beneath Jerusalem is Hell, going down sort of spirally or in a cone shape like this.” A spiral to the center of the world circle. “In here are the souls of the damned, as well as many of the fallen angels. In the very center, in a frozen pit, a gigantic figure: the Devil, Satan, Lucifer.” A little stick man. “Now.” He drew a blip on the far side of the world, opposite Jerusalem. “Over here is a seven-level mountain, Purgatory, standing all alone in the empty southern sea. Here on various levels are more of the dead, lesser sinners whose crimes have been forgiven but not paid for."

With a sweep of chalk, he next drew a circle around the earth circle, and a crescent on it. “Above the earth, circling it, the moon. Above the moon, the sun.” More circles, extending outward: “Mercury. Venus. Mars.” When he had got seven circles indicated around the circle of the earth, one more: “The stars, all fixed, turning around the earth once in twenty-four hours.” He tapped the board with his chalk: “Outside it all, God. With myriads of angels, who keep it all rolling in order around the earth."

Then he would step back, contemplating this picture, and he would ask, “Now what's the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe here, which is the picture Dante presents us with in his poem?"

Silence, usually.

"Oh, come on,” Pierce would say. “The very first most evident thing about this picture."

A timid guess, usually from a girl: “It's very religiously inspired...."

"No no no,” Pierce would say, grinning, “no, the
very
first thing we notice.” And grabbing up his copy of Dante, still grinning, flourishing it at them: “It's
not true
! It's not true. There isn't any hell in the middle of the earth with the Devil stuck in it. False. Not so. There is not a seven-story mountain in the empty southern sea, or an empty southern sea either.” He regarded his picture again, pointing out its features. His students had begun to dare to chuckle. “The earth, ladies and gentlemen, is not in the center of the universe, or even of the solar system. Sun, planets, stars going around it: not the case. About God outside it all I give no opinion, but he's difficult to believe in in exactly this form. I would think.

"So.” Turning to them again, fun over: “It's not true. This is not a true story and does not take place in the universe we live in. Whatever it is about this book that is important, and I think it
is
important,” eyes lowered here reverently for a moment, “it's not that it is informative about the world we live on or in. What we are going to have to discover is how it can be important to us anyway. In other words, why it is a Classic."

And then it was on, easily or at least more easily, into the dark wood, the sages and the lovers, the burning popes, the shit and spew, the dark journey downward and the light journey upward. It was a good trick, and Pierce had perfected it over two or three semesters when, one late autumn day, he turned from the completed picture to ask: “Now what is the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe?” And found himself regarded by a pirate band (with its captives) which made up his Intro to World Lit class, their eyes dully alive, mouths slightly open, at peace and fascinated.

"What,” he said, without his wonted vigor, “is the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe?"

They seemed to stir, noticing many things but uncertain which was first; they seemed, some of them, beguiled by his mandala, as though he had drawn it to entrance them. Others seemed asleep, or elsewhere, their abandoned bodies breathing softly. Those who took a hectic interest giggled at a joke or a game different from the one Pierce was playing. And Pierce felt grow within him the horripilating conviction that the distinction he was about to make would not be understood; that he did not, after all, wholly understand it himself any longer.

"It's not true,” he said, gently, as to sleepwalkers he was afraid to wake. “It's really really not true."

Making his way out of the building that day, past the squatting groups of beggars and the pamphleteers’ tables, Pierce found himself wondering how Frank Walker Barr was getting on with
his
classes these days. Old Barr, kind Barr, gently, tentatively suggesting that there might remain in this cold and clinker-built world some pockets yet of mystery, some outlying villages that had not yet been pacified, perhaps never to be reduced; Barr telling stories, insisting on the worth of stories, always with that saving chuckle—well it was coals to Newcastle now, it was worse than that, time had turned around and brought in a new sign,
these kids believed the stories they were told.

"Well it makes a lot of sense,” Julie said to him. “
Astronomically
there might be a long time to wait; but if we were in the cusp we could feel it, and be influenced by it, and see the signs; and we do—I do.” Sitting cross-legged on his bed—their bed—she was coating, with dreamy care, her nails in bright lacquers, attempting a suite of symbols, star, moon, eye, sun, crown. “The cusp might be this blank time, anything can happen, the old age of one world and beginning of another; you're poised right at the change, and all things that were are now going to be different, everything conceivable is just for a second possible, and you see, like coming toward you out of the future, the next people, and you're watching them come forward, beautiful, and you're waiting to hear what they'll say, and wondering if you'll understand them when they speak.” She held up her mystic hand to Pierce. “It makes a lot of sense,” she said.

They're just going to dream their new world-age into being, Pierce marveled; but how otherwise did new world-ages come to be? You have to be on their side, he thought, you have to be: a pity and a love welled up in him for the children, the ragged ranks on pilgrimage along the only way there was to go, after all, making up the future as they went. And in the thought-cloud over every head a single question mark.

What they needed—what he was coming to need himself, for that matter—was not more stories so much as an
account
: an account, an explanation of why these world-tales, exactly these and not others, should be now abroad again, after long sleep, and why, though they could not on the face of it be true, they could just now seem to be true, or to be coming true. An account; a model; some means by which those who fed on notions as on bread might be able to tell which ones were really news and which were the old dreams still being dreamed, were
stories inside
which the human race had never completely awakened from, or did not know it had awakened from: for those who do not know they have awakened from a dream are condemned to go on dreaming it unaware.

Because the Age of Aquarius, no, it was fatuous, wasn't it? Surely it was not the age but the heart, it wasn't even all hearts, that turned from gold to lead and back to gold again; Moses had horns because of some error in translation from Hebrew to Latin or Latin to English, Jesus was as much Lamb or Lion as he was Fish, and the world turned on a bent tree for reasons of its own, which had nothing to do with us. To start
assenting
to one of these huge stories or another—well, what did you do with all the other stories, for one thing, just as big and just as compelling, that appeared in the fabric of history if the fabric (a shot silk, a changeable taffeta) were looked at in a different light? No, surely Barr had only wanted to suggest that economic and social forces could not by themselves generate the bizarre facts of human history, and that to be unable to experience the titanic shuffling on and off stage of windswept allegories was to miss not only half the fun of history but to exclude yourself from how history, man's long life on earth, has been actually experienced by those who were creating it, which is just as much the historian's subject, after all, as the in-fact material conditions and discoverable actions are.

Let's just not be too hasty: that's all Barr was telling his students, his gray-suited and crew-cut students back at the end of the Age of Reason. Let's recognize—though it surprises and confuses us, it's so—that the facts are not finally extricable from the stories. Outside our stories, outside ourselves, is the historyless, inhuman, utterly
other
physical world; and within our human lives within that world are our stories, our ramparts, without which we would go mad, as a man prevented from dreaming in the end goes mad. Not true, no: only necessary.

But the Age of Reason was a shuttered mansion; what Pierce heard constantly now was how the real world that had seemed so clinker-built to Barr was beginning to come apart under investigation. Relativity. Synchronicity. Uncertainty. Telepathy, clairvoyance, gymnosophists of the East levitating, turning their skins to gold by thought alone. Wishing maybe made it so, for the skilled wisher trained long enough in the right arts, arts so long suppressed by the Holy Office of imperial Reason that they had atrophied, languishing in prison. Strong acids, though, might dissolve those bonds, cleanse the doors of the senses, let the light of far real heavens in. That's what Pierce heard.

So what if Barr was wrong? What if inside and outside were
not
such exclusive categories, nor all the truth on one side of the equation? Because Moses
did
have horns, in some sense; Jesus
was
a fish; if those were only stories inside, like a dream, still they were outside any individual; nor could dreaming make them match the in-fact behavior of the constellations, which apparently they did. How come? How did that come to be? How for that matter had the centuries come in Pierce's mind to be colored panels which nothing he learned about could not be fitted instantly into, and from where came his certainty that the more highly colored and complete his crowded canvases became, the more he grasped history in its fullness? If he really did grasp history in its fullness, then were his colors inside or outside?

What if—made of its stuff after all, made of its not-so-solid atoms and electrons, woven utterly into its space-time continuum, its Ecology (new word found lying on the age's doorstep to be adopted and brought up)—what if man, and man's thought, and man's stories, embodied not only man's truth but truths about
outside
too, truths about how not only the human world but the whole great world as well goes on? What if those old, oft-told, eternally returning, so-compelling stories were compelling because they contained a coded secret about how the physical (or “so-called” physical) world operates, how it came to cast up man, and thus thought, and thus meaning, in the first place?

None of them were true, none of those stories! Not a single one of them. All right. But what if they were
all
true? The universe is a safe, a safe with a combination lock, and the combination of the lock is locked up inside the safe: that chestnut had given him an enormous comfort as an existentialist at Noate, a bitter pleasure. But we are the safe! We are made of dust: all right: then dust can think, dust can know. The combination is, must be, locked inside our hearts, our own pumping blood, our spinning brains and the stories they weave.