Little, Big (79 page)

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' shells, 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 conceivable—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 buttons and their associates, what words were said, what deaths came to pass, 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.

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 Wingéd 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 passages and discomfitures of his old drunkenness. And yet the skills he had learned in that long binge—how to yield up control, how to ignore shame and make a spectacle of himself, how not to question circumstances or at least not be surprised when no answers to questions could be found—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, God 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 damn 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 passage snatched 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 circumstances 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 pricked up their ears, and looked around them into the complex darkness.

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."

"Oh yeah?" Auberon said. They stood together in the bow. Fred, sitting astern, legs crossed, made remarks to the aged aged ferryman, who said nothing in response.

"Well, not
been
here," George said. "But sort of." Whose adventures here, in this boat, in those woods, had he known about, and how had he come to know about them? God, his memory had turned to a dry sponge lately. "I dunno," he said, and looked curiously at Auberon. "I dunno. Only—" He looked back at the shore they had come from, and at the one they slid toward, holding his hat against the river breezes. "Only it seems—aren't we going the wrong way?"

"I can't imagine that," Auberon said.

"No," George said, "can't be . . ." Yet the feeling persisted, that they travelled back-toward and not away-from. It must be, he thought, that same disorientation he sometimes experienced emerging from the subway into an unfamiliar neighborhood, where he got uptown and downtown reversed, and could not make the island turn around in his mind and lie right, not the street-signs nor even the sun's position could dissuade him, as though he were caught in a mirror. "Well," he said, and shrugged.

But he had jogged Auberon's memory. He knew this ferry too: or at any rate he had heard of it. They were approaching the bank, and the ferryman laid up his long pole and came forward to tie up. Auberon looked down on his bald head and gray beard, but the ferryman didn't look up. "Did you," Auberon said, "did you once," now how was he to put this, "was there a girl, a dark girl once, who, a time some time ago, well worked for you?"

The ferryman with long, strong arms hauled on the ferry's line. He looked up at Auberon with eyes as blue and opaque as sky.

"Named Sylvie?" Auberon asked.

"Sylvie?" said the ferryman.

The boat, groaning against its stub of dock, came to rest. The ferryman held out his hand, and George put into it the shiny coin he had brought to pay him with.

"Sylvie," George said by the fire. His arms were around his drawn-up knees. "Did you think," he went on, "I mean I sort of thought, didn't you, that this was sort of a family thing?"

"Family thing?"

"All this, I mean," George said vaguely. "I thought it might only be the family that got into this, you know, from Violet."

"I did think that," Auberon said. "But then, Sylvie."

"Yeah," George said. "That's what I mean."

"But," Auberon said, "it still might, I mean all that about Sylvie might be a lie. They'll
say
anything. Anything."

George stared into the fire a time, and then said: "Mm. Well, I think I have a confession to make. Sort of."

"What do you mean?"

"Sylvie," George said. "Maybe it
is
family."

"I mean," he went on, "that maybe she's family. I'm not sure, but . . . Well, way back when, twenty-five years ago, oh more, there was this woman I knew. Puerto Rican. A real charmer. Bats, completely. But beautiful." He laughed. "A spitfire, in fact. The only word. She was renting at the place, this was before the Farm, she was renting this little apartment. Well, to tell the truth she was renting the Folding Bedroom."

"Oh. Oh," Auberon said.

"Man, she was something. I came up once and she was doing the dishes, in a pair of high heels. Doing the dishes in red high heels. I dunno, something clicked."

"Hm," Auberon said.

"And, well." George sighed. "She had a couple of kids somewhere. I got the idea that whenever she got pregnant she'd go nuts. In a quiet way, you know. So, hey, I was careful. But."

"Jeez, George."

"And she did sort of go off the deep end. I
don't
know why, I mean she never told me. She just went—and went back to P.R. Never saw her again."

"So," Auberon said.

"So." He cleared his throat. "So Sylvie did look a lot like her. And she did find the Farm. I mean she just showed up. And never told me how."

"Good grief," Auberon said, as the implications of this sank in. "Good grief, is this true?"

George held up an honest palm.

"But did she . . ."

"No. Said nothing. Name wasn't the same, but then it wouldn't have been. And her mother was off, she said, gone, I never met her."

"But surely you, didn't you . . ."

"To tell you the truth, man," George said, "I never really inquired into it too closely."

Auberon was silent a time, marveling. She
had
been plotted, then; if all their lives were, and she was one of them. He said: "I wonder what she . . . I mean I wonder what she thought."

"Yeah." George nodded. "Yeah, well, that's a good question all around, isn't it. A damn good question."

"She used to say," Auberon said, "that you were like a . . ."

"I know what she used to say."

"God, George, then how could you have . . ."

"I wasn't
sure
. How could I be sure? They all look sort of alike, that type."

"Boy, you're really given to that, aren't you?" Auberon said in awe. "You really . . ."

"Gimme a break," George said. "I wasn't sure. I thought, hell, probably not."