DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (19 page)

Rosie ceased her gathering to snort at this. Spofford took the hatful from her and inhaled its autumnal odor. “So what’s it
mean?”

“It just tells why we are the way we are, and not some different way instead.”

Rosie now looked up too, attending.

“What it means,” Pierce said, “is that the soul inside you, when it reaches here, when it becomes part of your little forming
body, however that happens, which don’t ask me, comes already clothed in a body, which is made somehow out of stellar or planetary
influences …”

“The astral body,” Val guessed.

“Yes,” Pierce said. “I guess so. Yes, exactly.”

“Sure,” Val said with an air of negligent triumph, one for me.

“So each spirit or astral body would have to be different, depending on how the planets were arranged, against what stars,
in what houses, when you came down through.”

Spofford contemplated Saturn, following with his mind’s eye the baby soul’s journey. Little mite slung around by the huge
planet’s gravity, awed certainly by the cold-ringed humongous wall of it. Storing up maybe as it shot past its whole lifetime’s
worth of vertiginous dreams. He felt a moment’s pity. Except that it wasn’t true. If there was anything he knew for sure it
was that his soul had been made right here, in these hills; that it didn’t precede the coupling that one night of those two,
old folks now and gone to Florida; and that it was still a long way from being finished. He took Rosie’s hand.

“Anyway wow,” Val said, neck bent, mouth agape. “Really.”

They all looked away down that river of sky, where beasts and birds, weapons, furniture and folks were swept along. They didn’t
remember, not any of them, how each had sailed it, in the boat of the soul.

Out and down into the spheres through the door open in Cancer: with that sign in fact, they say, painted on its sails. Carried
down into the outermost sphere, thickening and growing real; as it passes Saturn earning Saturn’s gift, or suffering his blow,
anyway laying down its Saturnian nature, however thick it might be; and then, older by that much, passing on, trimming the
sails, wondering. After some æons coming into great Jupiter’s gravity, where Rosie got her generosity and
sense (Val had showed her, Jupiter in her first house, the House of Life), and wrapped thereby in another wrapping; and after
who knows what length of time going through the locks or the baffle into the next sphere: Mars red as rust. And maybe our
soul would rather not be detained there, feeling not so fly any longer nor so full of possibility as once it did and already
probably forgetful why it has set out at all, no help for it though, here are Mars’s things piled like the trophy of a warrior,
sword, shield, helm.

And oh all that dark starlit waste that lies still between where it has come from and the small place to which it goes, a
child off too young to school or camp, it might be fun there but it might be no fun at all. But now the Sun at least comes
closer, or we on our way come closer to it, God bless the warmth; hungry, we take in as much as we are able (but what if it’s
pale and far off as we go by, its face averted, in a sad house, in the winter of the year? Then won’t the soul need warmth,
want warmth, fear warmth ever after?). Venus then—this is the map we are following, there are other maps—Venus next, in a
good mood if we’re lucky, perhaps on Earth far away they are looking up at her just then, just as the Sun has gone to rest
(so it seems to them on Earth) and she has that smile, that smile at once placid and stirring, and she has it for us too as
we go by, to share in, to have. Mercury, next to her, with his caduceus, watch out, he has a smile of his own, of complicity
maybe, what’s
he
up to? And his finger against his lips, telling us to be quiet now about it. All.

He’s last.

Only the moist Moon left to pass, bag of waters, all sorrows and birth-pangs: strange that when men stood upon her at last
they found her to be dry dust, but their souls were after all wrapped in bodies by then and shut in their moon-suits, and
the journey back up must be very different; whenever we make our way back anywhere, hearts and heads heavy and alive, won’t
we find that the treasures have vanished, the trunks are empty?

Anyway our soul pauses there, in the Moon’s sphere, throat now full of tears; marvelling at blue-green Earth and its wrappings
of air, fire, and water. It can no longer remember why it doesn’t want to go that way; burdened now with its misshapen burdens
but getting used to them; restless and already homesick but thinking well maybe it’s just anticipation, the end of the journey,
which has after all been long: thinking too of the warm womb and its sea. Oh let’s get it over with.

And mightn’t it happen then that, long afterward, grown up now and all this forgotten—just as the lookers-up in the side yard
of Val’s Faraway Lodge have all forgotten it, and yet been shaped for good by
it—you will meet another, one who took the same journey you took at nearly but not quite the same time, through similar but
different heavens? Someone whose growing soul was made of just what you just barely missed, what you need but lack, which
you can’t know or name but which now you recognize, feeling, even as you meet, the possibility of being, at last, filled up:
knowing, knowing for sure, that the more you are in the company of this soul, this complementary soul, the more you will be
repaired?

Oh then be afraid.

A quarter moon had risen and wiped away all but the brightest stars when, hours later, Rose Ryder drove in at the gates of
the Winterhalter estate; the gates open, the big yellow stucco house unvigilant. She turned down Pierce’s drive, turning off
her headlights; the tall unmown grass was white and alive in the moonlight. She cut the engine of the Asp as it topped the
last rise before the little bungalow came into view, and coasted in silence (she could hear the brush of grasses against the
car’s undercarriage) down to the house. No lights were lit there.

She had come to see him, unable not to, but was silent now so as not to wake him. Without her braking it the car rolled to
a stop, and she stepped out. If she left it here, and was allowed to stay, then by morning dew would have covered its seats
and the steering wheel, the volume of poetry (Rilke) and the Bible (King James) that lay on the floor. It was time to put
the top up anyway for the year, it was time, it was time.

Rose circled what she wanted, but not always out of caution. Sometimes out of caution, like any wise animal approaching found
food, why this bounty, why left here so carelessly, is there some reason to avoid. But other times not out of caution; other
times she circled, approached, retreated, approached again, waited: waited for whatever drew her (she knew it would) to overcome
whatever kept her away. Circled close and closer, finally close enough to be seized.

She walked up to the door but didn’t knock or open it or call at the keyhole, only stood listening for a time, more to something
that might speak within her than to anything she might hear from the house. (Pierce was able to see or picture her there,
her head lowered, lips parted, arms crossed.) Then she stepped back from the door and into the moon’s light, her brief red
dress gone black and her eyes alight and her tawny skin pale (Pierce could see all that too, and the slim wristwatch on her
wrist; could even see—if not just at that moment then certainly when he looked back in after years—the glitter of wetness
on her lip after she touched it with her tongue) and she went around the house into the darkness of the pines.

Pierce lay open-eyed and still in his bed within the house, awakened by—what was it that had awakened him? Was it the car’s
approach and sudden silence (we can come to know the sound of a car as we can a familiar footstep, he was surprised to learn
this) or was it the close of its door, or simply an alteration of the universal
spiritus
that filled the space between her and him? Now she had come around to the back porch, and Pierce thought he could hear her
try the screen door, as they had done together in the former world wherein they had met. Had she come in that way? There was
a noise at his bedroom window, it made him start, bat or bug though, not her. He sent out his spirit herwards.

Once when she was twelve or so, thirteen, her father had burned brush on some long-neglected acres of the farm, and she and
her brother had helped tend it. Maybe it was a blowy day, or the wind increased; maybe she was just inexperienced with fires,
how you made a fire do what you wanted though it was so huge and dangerous, like a trained tiger: she didn’t know it wasn’t
out of control, she only worked furiously around its perimeters as her males did, raking and pushing the burning brush toward
its consuming mouth, feeling the astonishing burn on her face and eyelids (her eyelashes later crumbling away to black dust
in her fingers) but then at last ceasing to struggle against it and only standing in its aura, her breath short and her nipples
hard (her father and brother staring, stirred too she thinks now by her being stirred): her whole being held as in a hand
that might close.

Pierce knew that story (or would later imagine knowing it, so vividly as made no difference), and he had a fire too in his
own past. She knew
that
story, and had thought of her own fire when he told it to her, how he had set a forest on fire by accident in Kentucky when
he was a kid. By now she had come through the door from the porch into the kitchen. It was the fire’s quickness Pierce had
marvelled at, how quick it became uncontrollable, how surprising it was that it so soon could not be stamped out. She stepped
into the dining room, his office, smelled the stove’s breath, the books, and from the darkness he seized her.

Hand over her mouth and arm around her body. That hand closing. He cried out at the same moment he grasped her, shouting one
wordless word into her ear: and it was that shout (she told him later) that made her come.

O
nce in a medical text, another of his uncle Sam’s maybe, Pierce had seen illustrations of the body in which the sizes of the
various parts and organs were drawn relative to the numbers of nerve endings each possessed: the weird homunculus that resulted
remained in his memory ever after. The nerve-poor torso and shanks were shrunken and small, the calves not half the size of
the sensitive feet, and the hands were larger still, with great fingertips like a frog’s; from the small skull protruded huge
seeing eyes, big nose with bigger nostrils, lips like loaves, the slab of tongue protruding from between them as big as the
whole of the breast. When he closed his eyes and concentrated, he knew that this fellow was the one his inner sense knew and
went by, not the image in the mirror; he could feel him; he thought that the blind would have this body and no other.

A fig leaf, he remembered, exiguous surely, had in that picture covered the penis (it was only a man that was shown) but which
was certainly great big in the mind’s map, big as could be desired, heavy-shafted and helmet-headed, however disappointing
it might be to the colder measuring eye. Her great hand though (or his) still big enough to grasp it easily, for her parts
had to be as large as his to meet him everywhere, her lips like his, her tongue etc. What was odd was that as their neural
fibers fire and grow warm and the parts that are most crowded with them enlarge even further, their eyes adjust the rest in
proportion, though never quite catching up; so they both grow gigantic, as measured by the details of their largest parts,
the flocked and dark and blood-rich parts: the purple-brown lips filmed with shining liquid, the tender eye-corner where the
great globular tear forms, the drop of clear syrup in the blind cyclops eye of.

Meanwhile they forget how to speak, they become beings of another order, or unfold those beings from somewhere within themselves,
giant
and giantess, who take his place and hers there on the shiplike, the prairielike bed: and that was why they did what they
did. They learned what things they must do in order to become those beings and so, for a time, cease to be themselves.

Vacatio
, absence from which they always returned too soon, unsustainable for long. The desire is boundless, the act a slave to limit,
law of diminishing returns, in the kiln of actuality anyway, if not in the pyramid scheme of the
Ars Auto-amatoria
. The erotic bond wastes away, says Bruno, through all the senses by means of which it is created; which is why the lover,
like a child building a castle by the sea, continually struggles to shore up his work, “desiring to transform himself into
the beloved, pass through her and into her by all the portals of sense through which knowledge comes, eyes, tongue, mouth,
and so on.”

And so on.

On a night as he sat on his bed waiting for her, with his
impedimenta
and tricks and traps around him, Pierce thought in a kind of helpless wonderment that there must be a whole different way
of forging bonds or links, a way that everybody of course knows about, that’s common knowledge. Just time, probably, basically,
time spent in love; the slow accumulation of shared things; life choices accepted and lived with. Husband and wife. Laughter
and tears. Years go by. Whatever.

But he was sure he didn’t have those means; and if he had not these means here, he thought he would not have any; would no
longer be able to draw from her, or cause her to produce, as the alchemist produces his quintessence from the sufferings of
his
prima materia
, her spirit-stuff for him or before him. And at that he thought of what he had prepared for her this night, and his heart
dilated and his loins grew conscious, experiencing in advance what he would do, what she would say and feel, as if it were
already over.

In Pierce’s bedroom, the bedroom Rose called Invisible, besides the big bed Pierce had brought from the City (spoils of his
life there, a life which had required and could also afford such a barge and its fittings) there stood another, narrower bedstead.
It had been there from the beginning, had been the first thing they had both seen in this room in the moonlight. It was of
bony iron. Somewhen the springs had worn away or broken, and had been replaced by wooden slats. There was a bare mattress
too, its ticking stained but by what, smelling more sad and old than foul; circled here and there with o’s of orange rust
where buttons had come off.

On this night she asked him if he would please cover it before she. He said no.

She sat down on the bed’s edge and he gave her a small faceted glass of bitter-green liquid. It was a Catalan concoction that
his former
lover, whom he called Sphinx when he named her to himself, had brought him home from Europe once; it was called
Foc y Fum
, and the label showed a house burning down. Fire & Smoke? She was naked now except for the long socks she would not do without.
He had her drink it off, regarding her kindly, speaking softly to her about this and that.

“No more,” she said.

“Finish it.”

In the room’s corner glowed a small electric fire, Moloch’s mouth, great grimace with orange teeth and constant growl. More
heat, never enough.

And all these things too became part of the forming seal,
impresa
on the labile stuff of his spirit, on his as much as on hers, perhaps more on his than hers: the heater, and the green bottle,
the narrow bed. How she held out her hands to him when he asked, watching with close attention his every move, but lifting
her eyes to his now and then, her eyes from which he drank,
foc y fum
.

Now. Take the glass away. Begin.

When she was bound to the iron bed he went about her with his hands, an acrobat going about the ring before his performance,
tugging on every rope, imagining them failing. As he did so he spoke to her. “How sweet I roamed from field to field,” he
said, “and tasted all the summer’s pride; till I the Prince of Love beheld, who in the sunny beams did glide.”

“Pierce,” she said or breathed.

Pierce only answered: “He showed me lilies for my hair, and blushing roses for my brow; he led me in his gardens fair, where
all his golden pleasures grow.”

The delicacy of her hand, the tension of its hundred muscles, for a moment he watched her test, too, what she could do and
not. Without a word he put his hand between her legs, not roughly but not kindly, a physician’s or breeder’s assessment. My
God how fast it started in her.

“Pierce I can’t. I’m afraid. Pierce not tonight.”

No more seeing: he bound her eyes in imitation silk, knotting it firmly against her silken slew of hair, not easy. He wanted
to ask if or what she saw but knew he couldn’t. Then: “All right, Rose,” he said, and withdrew.

He had among his possessions a Polaroid camera that long ago his mother had bought his uncle Sam for Christmas. Now, like
Sam’s dressing gown, it was his. The little black-and-white pictures it made were a lot like the pictures that his cousin
Bird used to get from her
Hawkeye box camera: dim, sometimes barely scrutable, hiding and revealing at once.

Rose didn’t know he had taken it out. She could tell nothing. Pierce? she asked again, and he made no answer. He opened the
camera’s body, and its folded neck extruded, bearing its one hawk eye. The noise of its clicking into place startled her,
she tensed against her bonds with a sudden shudder, it was something to be used against her, but what. Pierce saw in the foggy
viewfinder a tiny scene, broadened at the edges, all lines leading outward to nowhere, inward to the human figure at the center.

The eye is the mouth of the heart. What it eats is not light, though light is its mode or means: what it eats is Recognition,
which the heart can chew on, which the soul can know. There always had to be time in their meetings for this cold collation,
this scavenging and scarfing by his eyes, filling him with a repletion not different from hunger as he looked.

Tic.

The camera was obsolete even then, his roll of film was the last the pharmacy in the Jambs had for sale and out of date. But
there the image was, light curdling on the retinal oblong of white paper that you peeled from behind the camera’s eye. There
is the shine of her thigh, there is the parting of her lips; there even is the parting of her buttocks, and the shadow revealed
or hidden there. Right away you had to coat the image with a sort of slime, sliding a little spongy bar provided by the manufacturer
over the surface, if you didn’t it would fade faster than memory. Pierce did that.

“Pierce?”

No more talking. He bound her mouth. She could still raise three fingers if she needed to. He showed her she could. “With
sweet May dews my wings were wet,” he said. “And Phoebus fired my vocal rage.” He leaned close to her and spoke into her ear:
“He caught me in his silken net. And shut me in his golden cage.”

At last he put his ear against her, between her breasts, to hear her heart tapping fast and fearfully, ready to receive he
thought or guessed. Years later when about to pass into sleep she will be revisited by that—his warm strange ear upon her—and
awake with a start, her heart filling painfully. Or she will forget it with the rest.

He unbound himself.

* * *

They had come so far from where they had started. We’ve all come so far. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that why we can’t stop hunting,
restless, dissatisfied, champing at a bit that never becomes familiar? Or is that so only for those born under that leaden
star (as deeply embedded in her chart as his, she knew it but had been misled about its meaning) that governs the liver, in
whose glossy sheen (Aristotle says) the most desirable things are reflected for the hungry soul to see?

They were exiles here. He had once known it, and forgotten, and then forgotten that he had forgotten. She knew it though:
had just learned or relearned it, after a long forgetting had seen it, shocking and familiar at once. Not in her borrowed
Terrier sedan, not on that night of wind coming down the Shadow River road, no before that—but it was indeed what she had
been fleeing from that night. She was fleeing in the wrong direction, though—Beau Brachman would say we tend to: not out but
further in, as into a maze.

She had said almost nothing to Pierce about her first weekend in Conurbana, embarrassed maybe or wary, and he had not pressed
her. Then she began going there every few days, a drive of an hour or two in her restless scarlet roadster; she returned to
the Faraways the same day, or she stayed the night. She said little to him also about what went on there, sometimes volunteering
vague cheerful remarks, sometimes leaving it up to him to ask, or not: as though it were a series of probing and maybe slightly
shameful medical procedures she was undergoing, too intimate to discuss at length, from which she returned refreshed, alert,
gay.

“Oh we study,” she said once. “We’ll take a word, a word out of the Greek, and see how it appears in different places in English
in the Bible, translated differently. To see how the meaning changes.”

“Like.”

“Like
parhesia
. “

“
Parhesia
,” Pierce said. He searched his inward schoolroom. Greek came just before lunch, the smells of macaroni and cheese drifting
up from the refectory; by the big knocking radiator, beneath the crucifix, was the wooden stand where the big Liddell and
Scott was chained; he felt it urgent he find the word before she told him. “Openness, frankness.”

She pointed a gunlike finger at him, you got it. “But it’s translated in lots of different ways in English. So we look it
up and see. It takes a while.”

“Hm.”

“It’s interesting.”

“Mm.”

More than the theodicy it was the company he pondered. Her cheerful evasiveness was that of a woman with a new lover, or an
old one, which is what Pierce assumed. Mike Mucho, her
quondam
, and her boss at The Woods too in some sense; inventor or developer of the new science of Climacterics which had absorbed
or occupied Rose when she and Pierce first met, forgotten now apparently. He fished delicately for certitude on this matter,
but
parhesia
was no part of his relation with her, or hers with him, and it was too late to start now.

“Are there other people from The Woods at these things?”

“Oh yes sure. Some of them have moved there or I guess live there.”

“In Conurbana.”

“It’s nice. There’s always somebody to stay with.”

Whatever it was that she had learned, or now confessed or professed, whatever she dabbled in during her time away, did not
or had not yet altered her nighttime tastes. She said she was happy, and she was, but it seemed to him that she had actually
grown hungrier too, and in more than one way. She ate and drank with luminous avidity. She talked about her life and the future
as though impatient for their unfolding. And she listened as eagerly, if anything more eagerly, to the stories he spoke into
her ear, in which she featured, she or her eidolon—the small she within her, the she whom together they had discovered or
made.

She wore a fur-collared coat when next she came to his house, and the smell of the cold night air caught in it reminded Pierce
of his mother, the city, time. He brought her into the bedroom before she took it off.

“We can’t be too long,” she said. They were going tonight to a poetry reading, some old friends or acquaintances of hers,
mostly male. She herself kept a sheaf of much-handled poems she would show to no one. “They said really eight.”

“Just come in,” he said. He brought her, still talking, to the bed, to face the wall by the bed. For a long moment she would
not see what he faced her toward.