DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (21 page)

“You’re walking toward the house, first of all. And there are trees. What kind, how big.”

“Tall dark pines. A bunch. You can’t see the house.”

“Hm,” said Pierce wisely. “Okay. The front path.”

“Can’t see it for the trees.”

“You go in the house,” Pierce said. Rose observing her own inward progress shuddered slightly. “And in the house is a cup.
Where, what kind.”

In the house in the dark pines, a house like her grandfather’s little one where he lived alone, unpainted and dusty but he
didn’t care, not about that or anything. It was that house and every house, like houses in dreams; this one she lay in now
too, dark too. In the dining room a cabinet, its insides wallpapered in roses.

“Just a cup,” she said. “In the china closet. Old. Not mine.” So old or maybe long unwashed that a dark or roughened place
could be seen on its lip, where drinkers’ mouths had worn away the glaze.

“A key,” Pierce said.

“A bunch,” she said. “On a knotted old twine hung inside the back door. Old black skeleton ones and little trunk keys and
clock keys and cabinet keys and all, all tied together. One’s the house key maybe.”

Pierce smiled on her, good work. “Outside,” he said. “A path leading away.”

“Little, and unfinished. Just worn by people walking.”

“There’s water there. Some water in some form.”

She closed her eyes. “The sea.” It rose, dark too, wholly unexpected, heaving black rollers, at the end of the path away.

Pierce laughed aloud. “The
sea?
”

“Sure.”

There were, he thought, one or two more items on Hildy’s list but he couldn’t remember them. “Okay,” he said, and told her
what the things he had named were supposed to stand for in the mental universe: the front path and the trees your past and
those who influenced you; the cup, love; the key, knowledge and its uses; the back path the future. The water, sex.

“An allegory,” he said.

“The sea,” she said, and laughed a little too. “But what’s it
mean?
”

“Well,” he said, foxy therapist, “what do
you
think it means?”

She rubbed her head against his chest. “Ask me another,” she said.

“I don’t know another.” He circled her cool shoulders with his arm. “I’ll tell you a story.”

She drew closer. “A story.”

“This story is about a little girl named Rose.”

“Ah.”

“And some of the unfortunate things that befell her.”

“I know this one.”

“Yes. Maybe you can help me tell it.”

She listened, and after a time Pierce’s big thumbs pulled down her pants, and he went on talking and she responded; but she
also walked in that house that she had built, looking for something, something that ought to be there but that he had not
named or asked for. The black pines darkened the windows and the sea unfolded on the shore.

In the far reaches of the night Pierce awoke, and found that she was awake too beside him. Perhaps her wakefulness had awakened
him. He watched her reach for her cigarettes, the flare of the match illuminating her shoulders and her downcast eyes like
a saint’s or angel’s candle in a devotional painting.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s sad to be going.”

“Yes.”

“It’s such a nice area. I’ve been happy. Mostly.”

“You can’t stay?” he asked. “I mean surely there are all kinds of jobs.”

“Nope,” she said. “Not for me.” She threw back her head, shook free her hair, exhaled invisible smoke. “Hopeless, hopeless.
No es posible
.”

They talked more. He knew there was a question it was incumbent upon him to ask now, but not exactly what it was; or he knew
what it was (he had to ask her to stay; to ask her, if she had nowhere to go, to stay here, for a while, from now on) but
he would not believe it was his to do. She put out the smoke, he fed at her burnt mouth. “Now sleep,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“You want some hot milk?”

“Oh yuck you’re kidding.”

After a time she seemed to sleep again, though he did not; he lay and studied the familiar strange shapes of his nighttime
bedchamber, the shirt and suit people in the wardrobe whose door had been left open, the great jewel that was the glass doorknob.
The new inkblot of his seal or emblem or
impresa
on the wall, unseeable. And late, so late or early that the night had begun to turn silver in the windows, he heard her weeping
beside him; felt the mattress they shared shaken slightly by her rhythmic sobs.

Then it was day. She had slept too long, she said, she was late, Pierce didn’t ask for what. He made her coffee hastily. Half-dressed
she drank it, near tears again it seemed, while she searched for her keys (they lay on the seat of her car where she had dropped
them, the memory had not yet reached her through the wreckage of the intervening night).

“There’s so much to
do
. Get an apartment. Do my studying. I have to take GRE’s,” she said. “I took them once before and did terrible. I can’t this
time. So I’m going to go take one of those courses they give, to prepare you.”

“Oh yes.”

“Big pain. I know I’ll do well though. And there’s the course I’m taking with them.”

“The Powerhouse,” he said.

“The Bible and Healing,” she said. She smiled, chipper. “It’s a big commitment.”

“Two hundred dollars,” he said. He jammed his hands in his pockets, and noticed that his heart had begun to beat more rapidly.

“I paid it,” she said. “A couple of bonds.”

“Your getaway money.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No no you shouldn’t have given it to them,” he said with sudden urgency, rising from his chair. “Listen, listen. If you need
it replaced, I’ll give it to you.”

“Pierce I’m not going to need it.”

“You never know, you never know,” he said. “You can’t be without your getaway stash. What if you need to get away? You have
to have it, you have to. Wait, wait.”

He went to his stained and ragged canvas bag, rummaged in its contents, and pulled out the envelope that contained five old
fifties, his share of Kraft’s own getaway fund, ironed flat from their years inside the
Life of Gresham
, where Pierce had found them. “Here,” he said. “Here take this.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Sure. It’s not even really mine. I mean it came to me by a strange coincidence, very strange, I don’t have any claim on it
but nobody else does either. I don’t want it. I want you to have it.”

“Pierce.”

“Don’t spend it ever. Keep it. That way if you ever, ever.”

She wouldn’t take the envelope from him, but she let him stuff it in her bag; she looked not at it but at him, his big lowered
busy head. She thought:
It’s so
.

When she’d told them, Mike and the others, that two hundred dollars was a lot for her to spend, they had laughed, and had
told her it would come back to her: not in a long time either but quickly, so quickly it would astonish her. And here it was
already, even before she had spent it. And from Pierce! She wanted to laugh now, or shout aloud: the foolish wonderful gratification
of it, the simple trick of it, which just now she got: that it was so even if it wasn’t so. It didn’t
need
to be so—didn’t need to have come to your pocket right from God’s hand—but it only happened if you believed it could be so.
And maybe that was the real, the best reason for its coming to you: just so you could learn that.

“Okay,” she said, her heart rich within her, the sweetness with which it was topped up rising to her throat. “And if you need
it back.”

“Sure,” he said. “To pay
my
fee.”

“Oh Pierce. Listen.”

But there wasn’t any way to say it, the sudden glistening web of the world’s construction she perceived, all things tied together
and connected. So they stood together in the brown yard for a time, and said little, how they would surely keep in touch,
even see a lot of each other maybe, how it wasn’t really that far, not that far at all.

“An hour’s drive. Hour and a half,” she said.

“Sure,” he said, carelessly. He saw in his mind’s eye the freeways, four and even six lanes, their perilous ramps and exits.
He had rarely driven his old Steed sedan on any but the dirt roads and two-lane blacktop, never crowded, of the Faraways;
to go farther was, he felt, beyond him, not after all a real driver.

But he said
Sure
and they held hands and smiled.

When we have come at last to the center of a maze (Beau Brachman called this one they stood in
Heimarmene
) it appears of course to be the end we sought. We sit down there (on the little bench of stone, in the sunlight and the odor
of boxwood) and wait for a bit. Whatever is to happen to us, we are sure, will happen here. In fact we are inside out, but
we don’t know this. We wait. And there, at length, one day—how does it come to be, does it come in at the ear, or out and
upward from within, or does it gather in the air around our heated heads, become the air, is it breathed in with a gasp—we
see. We say I
see
. Some do.

What Pierce knew about mazes, what he had gleaned from his researches but had not yet had to test, was that the way to exit
from a maze (at least one of those built in the great age of mazes) is simply to
follow the right-hand wall
. Just put out your right hand and keep to that wall. If there had not been such a simple key or trick then the makers themselves
would not have been able to get out.

But Pierce had never been able to tell left from right. It was a comical trait that many who knew him, Rose among them, had
laughed at. If asked a direction he always pointed, for if he named it the word that popped out of his mouth might be either,
a penny flipped; given the name of a direction in which to turn, he was as likely to turn the opposite way. He could not name
the hands of his body without a moment’s deliberation, every time, every single time.

I
t was dark at Arcady, its cupola and tower just visible against the moon, one yellow window lit, like the cover of a Gothic
novel; the window was Rosie’s room, and she lay in bed, a flannel shirt over her nightgown and her knees up to hold the big
old book. A week till Halloween, and Sam’s appointment at Little Ones. Sam slept beside her, a little bear, facedown but knees
drawn under her, her blond curls alone visible, as still as though dead. She’d wanted to sleep in her own bed tonight but
Rosie had asked her to stay. Aw cmon Sam please. From far, far below (just the basement,
but another country to Rosie) she heard the furnace awake, and go to work. Getting colder. How was it doing down there, anyway,
did it need seeing to, by whom? Never done, she thought.

Ars Auto-amatoria; or; Every Man His Own Wife. A Very Heroick Epyllion in Four Fits
. There was a jokey Preface full of wretched puns, some she guessed were there but didn’t get, and a few epigraphs from sources
she doubted really existed; there was a list of Persons in the Drama though the thing wasn’t a play at all (
The Brothers
Ballock,
a Pair of Hangers-on
; Scrotum,
a wrinkled old Retainer
) and then the first Fit started. Rosie turned the thick sheets, wondering why it was printed in such large type; maybe old
Anon was just terrifically pleased with himself, proud of what he had produced, and all by himself too.

She remembered that idea from college philosophy—she would have guessed Aristotle though—that we were all really once beings
of both sexes, and round (why round? Because the circle was supposed to be the most perfect shape, whatever that meant; Pierce
would know). Then somehow divided, like eggs cut in half with a thread; and ever after restless, unsatisfied, looking for
our lost halves. Bedeviled eggs. Lucky if you found him, or her; lucky, probably.

Cold. She thought of what Pierce had said, the triumph of hope over experience: all those young wives, dead in childbirth,
dead from a cat scratch, dead from the plague or the flu. There could be reasons why the prospect was scary, or unsettling.
Maybe the writer was not, as she had been imagining, someone old, crabbed and saturnine, but someone young. Maybe very young.

There was a time just after she was married herself (not a short time either, it had seemed endless to live through) when
she had been half-certain she had made a very big mistake. The conviction had appeared
first at the altar—not really an altar, a bureau with her mother’s lace tablecloths over it and flowers heaped on it, she
and Mike had refused every church and minister proposed to them. Just as the retired judge, her mother’s friend, had bound
her to him, she felt an overwhelming awful rush like a hit of bad acid coming on, a nightmare sense of having done something
so wrong, so stupid and irrevocable she might have been jumping off a cliff. And it persisted, came and went through the week
they spent biking in Vermont and their first weeks in a barracks-like graduate-student housing complex—a barracks in fact,
having been thrown up twenty years before for returning vets and their families; Rosie could sense, and envy, their plain
hopes and hard work and troubles, which had soaked into the Celotex and the linoleum. She lay awake nearly all night every
night memorizing the pine branch that hung in the bedroom window, saying almost but not quite aloud
I can’t do this I can’t do this I can’t
. Until one night came when she lay wishing with all her might that she could know the future, the next ten years, know if
she was to see this through and be happy, or if not what: and had realized with sudden force that if she really were allowed
to glimpse herself ten years down the road there might be nothing to see: the future—her future—might have come to a stop
some time before that moment. Blank. Nothing.

And she had thought: But at least you’d know
that
. You’d know you had no more than ten years to get through. Not so long. You’d know that.

An astonishing peace had stolen over her in her sagging marriage bed in Vetville.
Not so long
. She had felt certain that if she could know for sure she would be dead in five years or ten, she could easily be brave and
cheerful, happy even. She could love Mike as he needed to be loved, as he deserved to be loved (warm and unaware beside her,
his presence suddenly sweet too for the first time in weeks, how strange). She had even been able for the first time to imagine
having a child with him: like a smile all through her she could imagine it, which had seemed so terrifying, an abyss. It would
be easy, easy, to love them both and be glad, sure. Because. Because why? Why could she face what needed to be done with equanimity,
joy even, if it wasn’t going to last forever? It wouldn’t last forever anyway. Why this peace?

She hadn’t known why. She had only lain and tasted it, watching that faintly beckoning pine branch, wishing for death, death
and certainty, and good cheer. It didn’t matter why. Soon she’d slept.

Oh strange, she thought at Arcady, remembering. And Sam beside her now.

She lifted the book again:

No she was wrong, he was a tight, mean, sneering smug old bastard, Rosie thought, must have been. She flipped the pages, not
quite as delicately maybe as Pierce might have wished, feeling a kind of annoyance, at the thing and at its supposed great
worth, thinking of the men she saw at the newsstand going so intently through the skin magazines, one woman after another,
their eyes sucking them in, why did they need so many.

Well go on then, she said or thought; go go, smartie.

Must be permanent, she thought, or at least real old, the way men regard their p’s (as Sam had somewhere learned to call them):
you had to be careful about it, not hurt its feelings, the little man who accompanies your man (oops, “little,” see right
there); the man your man waits on and looks on fondly and indulges, or tries to. Rosie laughed, visited by another scene from
her own married life, seen through this antique writing as though from a great distance, and felt a twinge of unreasoning
grief, and at that laughed again.

“Greetings from the big city,” Rose Ryder’s letter to Pierce Moffett began, the first he had received from her. She had warned
him he
should not expect much in what she called the “initial period,” by which he supposed she meant the period of her training
by the Powerhouse in whatever exactly they were going to train her in, “brainwashing” was the term that came to his mind.
“I’m amazed how good I’m doing in the test-prep course. Pierce I was always terrified of tests, I had testophobia bad, and
now—now not. I just do it.” Something crossed out here that looked like
I wish you could
, wish withdrawn or left unsaid. “My little apartment is so cute, on an OK street in a safe neighborhood, it’s amazing I got
it. The class is interesting and Mike has been so supportive about everything here, a lot of hard things—Oh there are things
I just can’t write to you, Pierce, or even say.”

Things she couldn’t write or even say: well he had stood before shut doors of that kind before, and what was behind them often
enough, as behind the doors of bedroom closets in a thousand dirty jokes, was actually quite easily named.

Old Mike. Still in the picture. Okay, all right.

“Here the great drought continues,” Pierce wrote back, his yellow pad, the same he used for his work, balanced on his raised
knees where he reclined in bed. “It’s unusual, says the paper, but not unheard of. No rain now in a month almost. It has its
beauties, it’s sort of Edenic in its way, so changeless, but of course changing fast: suspended in the moment of change, how’s
that? There’s a (Chinese?) proverb, I’m told, about how women fall in love with men in the spring and men with women in the
autumn. Seems right to me, I mean experience can be said to confirm. There’s the other proverb too, about absence and the
heart. I think about hearts lately, how they do seem like repositories or containers, they feel like it, and I wonder why
they do, what the reason is in physiology, that they can be heavy or light. When all they contain is blood, on the move. Hydraulics.
Anyway. This is a love letter, if that has not become apparent yet.”

Cross that out, burn it, crush it, feed it to the fire. Instead he turned the yellow sheet, which, like all its kind and no
others, had its head at the bottom of the verso side; and continued.

“Rose,” he wrote. “I now have some instructions for you. I’ll want you to follow these
very exactly
and when you call me next I’ll want to know just how it went; you’ll be asked to describe it all in detail, in detail.”

He lifted his eyes. “First of all,” he wrote. “If you are in a public place while reading this, I want you to continue reading
all the way to the end. Those around you will observe you reading, and certainly some of them will even study you, my dear,
men will, because they do, don’t they? And think about you, so absorbed in your reading; maybe, maybe
they’ll notice something about you, something about your absorption, but they won’t know what it is, what it is that draws
their eyes to you; but of course you’ll know, won’t you?

“And if you are out and about, Rose, you can think about these things through the day, until you’re alone, and you can begin
to do what I will tell you, and say aloud what I will tell you to say.”

He pondered. There had already come to be a fullness in his breast. What he had planned for her had taken some thought; but
actually writing it down, even the prospect of actually writing it down, of her actually reading it, had an unexpected force.
A topic not covered in the
Ars Auto-amatoria
: the sequential or chain-letter form of the art. Universal and ancient, though, Pierce bet. He moved, on the bed, to a less
constricting position.

Rosie Palm and her five daughters was how they used to say it in Kentucky, Pierce wondered how the joke had travelled, carried
with lonely huntsmen into the Cumberlands with Boone, or reinvented every generation, obvious enough after all.
Without a Purse spend freely here
. Clever of old Anon or Onan, he’d told Rosie Rasmussen, “purse” being common slang at that time for. And “spend” for come.

The unfinished letter, and some change fallen from his pocket, crept to the edge of the bed and slid to the floor; the emblem
on the wall grew larger, passing directly into his heart through the windows of the imagination, for of course it was in him
and not in wary Rose that those windows were open, open wide. As though his right hand worked the
handle of a pump, Imagination now began to draw up from the dark well a nice steady stream. He had Rose describe to him what
he had said she should do and how she did it, and other things he and she had done or would have or might have done; he described
to her what he might have once done, but had hot done, with a former lover he invented, or to the lovers he had really had
but had not thought of in weeks or months; he even, at a turning, glimpsed Robbie, just arriving at his front door, shy golden
kid, his mandrake, his fruit.
Do you see what powers, what speed you have?
(That’s Hermes Thrice-great, egging on the straining adept to wonder-working by Thought alone.)
Make yourself huge, beyond measuring; climb higher than the highest height; sink lower than the lowest depth. Imagine that
you are everywhere, on earth, at sea, in the deep dens of beasts, that you aren’t yet born, are in your mother’s womb, adolescent,
old, dead, past death
.