Little, Big

IV.

Me thinks there be not impossibilities

enough in Religion for an active faith.

—Sir Thomas Browne

In the tiny offices of Wingéd Messenger Service were: a counter or partition, behind which the dispatcher sat, chewing always an unlit cigar and plugging and unplugging the cords of the oldest PBX in the world and bellowing "Wingéd" into his headset; a line of gray metal folding chairs on which those messengers not at the moment carrying messages sat, some as still and lifeless as unplugged machines, some (like Fred Savage and Sylvie) engaged in conversation; a huge and ancient television on a chain-flown platform out of reach, forever on (Sylvie, if she wasn't running, caught episodes of "A World Elsewhere"); some urns full of sand and cigarette butts; a crackle-finish brown time clock; a back office, containing a boss, his secretary, and at odd hours a hearty but ill-looking salesman; a metal door with a bar; no windows.


More Would Happen

It wasn't a place Sylvie liked to stay in much. In its bare, fluorescent, hard-finish shabbiness she recognized too many places where she had spent too much of her childhood: the waiting rooms of public hospitals and asylums, welfare offices, police stations, places where a congress of faces and bodies in poor clothes gathered, dispersed, were replaced always by others. She didn't, fortunately, have to spend much time there: Wingéd Messenger Service was as busy as it had ever been, and out on the cold spring streets, bound in work-boots and hooded sweatshirt (looking, she told Auberon, like a teenage dyke, but cute), she made time, glorying in the crowds, the posh offices, and the oddly-assorted secretaries (snooty, harsh, and mannered; slovenly; kind) whom she gave to and took away from. "Wingéd Messenger!" she shouted at them, no time to waste. "Sign here please." And away, in elevators crowded with soft-voiced, fine-suited men on their way to lunch, or loud-voiced back-slappers returning. Though she never learned midtown as Fred Savage knew it—every underground access, every passageway, every building which, facing on one avenue, evacuated onto another, saving half a block for a walker—she did grasp the general, and find shortcuts; and she made her lefts and rights, ups and downs, with an accuracy she was proud of.

On a day early in May that had begun rainy (Fred Savage beside her wore a vast fedora swaddled in plastic) she sat restless on the edge of her chair, crossing her legs right over left and then left over right, watching "A World Elsewhere" and waiting for her name to be called.

"That guy," she explained to Fred, "was the one who pretended to be the father of the kid whose real father was the other guy, who divorced the wife who fell for the girl who crashed the car that crippled the kid that lived in the house that this guy built."

"Mm," Fred said. Sylvie's eyes hadn't left the screen nor her ear the story, but Fred looked only at Sylvie.

"That's him," she said as the scene changed to a smoothhaired man sipping coffee and studying, silently, for a very long time, a letter addressed to someone else, trying apparently to decide whether he dared open it. He had been, Sylvie told Fred, wrestling with this temptation since April ended.

"If I was writing it," she said, "more would happen."

"I just bet it would," Fred said, and the dispatcher said Sylvie.

She leapt up, though her eyes didn't leave the screen; she took the dispatcher's slip and started out.

"See ya," she said to Fred and to an unresponsive overcoat and hat at the end of the row of chairs.

"More would happen, mm-mm," said Fred, who still looked only at Sylvie. "I bet now it would at that."


Something Going

The pickup was from a suite in a tall hotel of glass and steel, chill, sinister even, despite the factitious gaiety of its tropical lounges and English chophouse and hustle and bustle. She rode upward alone in a silent, thickly carpeted elevator in which nameless music played. At the thirteenth floor, the doors slid open, and Sylvie said "A! A!", startled, because facing her was a vast blowup in color of Russell Eigenblick's face, bushy eyebrows over limpid eyes, red red beard sprouting from his cheeks almost up to his eyes, mouth knowing, stem and kindly. The nameless elevator music became a radio, loud: a merengue.

She looked down the long plush corridor of the suite. Instead of a secretary of any sort, four or five young guys, black and P.R., made dance steps and drank Cokes around a vast rosewood desk. Those not in a sort of military undress wore bright loose shirts or jackets of many colors, Eigenblick's troops' insignia. "Hi," she said, at ease now. "Wingéd Messenger Service."

"Hey. Check the messenger."

"Saayy . . ."

One of the dancers strutted toward her as the others laughed, and Sylvie did a step or two with him; another, with an expert air, manipulated the intercom. "A messenger's here. We got something going?"

"So listen," Sylvie said. "What about this guy—" thumb toward the vast portrait. "What's with him?"

Some laughed; one looked solemn; the dancer fell back in astonishment at Sylvie's ignorance. "Oh wow man," he said, "oh man . . ."

He had just begun to put right forefinger into left palm to begin an explanation (cute, Sylvie thought him, well-muscled, real neighborhood) when double doors behind them were flung open. Sylvie caught a glimpse of huge rooms glossily furnished. A tall white guy with blond hair cut severely came out. With a quick gesture he ordered the radio silent. The young men drew together protectively, taking stances tough but wary. The blond man raised his chin and eyebrows at Sylvie inquiringly, too busy to say actual words.

"Wingéd Messenger."

He considered her for a long moment, almost insolently. He had a good five inches on everybody else present, more than that on Sylvie. She crossed her arms, placed her booted feet in a "So?" attitude, and returned his look. He turned back into the rooms he had come from.

"What's his problem?" she asked the others, but they seemed subdued. He was back anyway in a moment, with a parcel, oddly shaped, tied with an old-fashioned red-and-white twine Sylvie hadn't seen in years, and addressed in a hand so fine and antique as to be almost illegible. Altogether it was one of the odder things she had been asked to carry.

"Don't delay," the man said, with what Sylvie thought might be the trace of an accent.

"I'm not gonna delay." Turkey. "Sign here please." The blond man drew back from her book as though it were repellent; he gestured to one of the boys, and backed through the doors, closing them after him.

"Wow," she said as the good-looking one signed her book with a flourish and a final dot. "You work for him?"

Big gestures all around indicating resentment, defiance, resignation. The black one essayed a quick imitation, and the others fell out in exaggerated hut silent laughter. "Okay," Sylvie said, seeing that the address was far uptown, a good long time away from the office, "see ya."

The dancer accompanied her to the elevator, bringing out a quick line, listen I could use a message if you got one, no message for me, hey, listen, I wanna ask you sumpm, no this is serious; and after further chaff (she would have liked to stay, but the package under her arm seemed Somehow needful and exigent) he struck a comic pose as the elevator doors extinguished him to her. She did a few steps alone in the elevator, hearing other music than was playing there. Long time since she'd been dancing.


Uncle Daddy

Riding uptown, hands thrust in her sweatshirt's front pockets and the weird'package beside her.

She should have asked those guys if they knew Bruno. She had heard nothing of her brother in some time; he wasn't living with his wife and her mother, she knew that. Hustling somebody somewhere . . . But those guys weren't together. Just something to do. Instead of hanging around the block. She thought of little Bruno: pobricito. She had vowed that, once a week at least, she would make the long journey out to Jamaica and visit him, take him away from them for a day. She hadn't, not as often as she'd intended to: not at all in the last busy month. She renewed her vow, sensing at her back, pressing on her, a history of such neglects and their cumulative damage—the ones she had been subjected to, and her mother before her; and Bruno; her other nieces and nephews. Smothered with love, and left to sink or swim: what a system. Kids. And why did she think she could do it any differently? And yet she thought she could. With Auberon she might have kids. Sometimes her ghost children implored her to be born; she could almost see and hear them; she couldn't resist forever. Auberon's. She couldn't do better, such a sweetie, good good man at heart, and for sure a hot number too: and yet. Often enough he treated her like a child herself. Not that she sometimes wasn't one. But a child a mother . . . Uncle Daddy they both called him when he was in that mode or mood. He'd wiped her tears, though. He'd wipe her ass if she asked him to. . . . What a mean thing to think.

What if they grew old together? How would that be? Two little old people, apple-cheeked and crinkly-eyed and white haired, full of years and affection. Nice . . . She'd like to see that big house and all that it contained. But his family. His mother was almost six feet tall, coño. She imagined the vast race of them towering over her, looking down. Sport model. George said they were a sweet bunch. He'd got lost more than once in that house. George: Lilac's father, though Auberon didn't know it, and George had sworn her to secrecy. Lost. What was that about? George knew more, but what he wouldn't say. What if Auberon lost one of her kids? White people. She'd have to keep a sharp eye out, running around at knee level to them, holding on to her babies.

But if all that weren't her Destiny: or if she really had escaped Destiny, refused it, turned it down . . . If she had, then, oddly, she seemed to have more future, rather than less. Anything could happen if she were free of the cramp of Destiny. Not Auberon, not Edgewood, not this town. Visionary men and pursuits, visionary places, visionary selves crowded up on the borders of her train-lulled consciousness. Anything . . . And a long table in the woods, dressed in a white cloth, set for a banquet; and everybody waiting; and an empty place in the middle . . .

Her head, falling suddenly breastwards, dipped her in vertigo, and she snapped awake.

Destiny, destiny. She yawned, covering her mouth, and then looked at her hand, and the silver ring on it. She'd worn it for years and years. Would it come off? She turned it. She tugged. She put her finger in her mouth to wet it. She pulled harder. Nope: stuck on good. But gently: yes, if she pushed gently from below . . . the silver circle slid upwards, over the big knuckle, and off. A strange lightness glowed around the naked finger, spreading outward from it to the rest of her; the world,, the train, seemed to grow pale and insubstantial. She looked slowly around herself.

The package that had been beside her on the seat was gone.

She leapt up, filled with horror, jamming the ring back on her finger. "Hey! Hey!" she said out loud, to alarm the thief if he was still nearby; she charged out into the middle of the car, sweeping the other riders with her glance, they looked up at her curious and guiltless. She looked again at where she had been sitting.

The package was right there where it had been.

She sat again slowly, wondering. She put her ringed hand on the smooth white paper of the package, just to make sure it was really there. It was: though it seemed, unaccountably, to have grown larger as it traveled uptown.

Definitely larger. Out on the street, where breezes had blown away the rain and clouds and brought in a real spring day, first one of the few the City was ever allowed, she chased down the address written on the package, which no longer quite fit beneath her arm. "What is with this thing," she said aloud as she walked briskly through a neighborhood she hadn't ever visited much, a neighborhood of great, dark-stained apartment-hotels and aged brownstones. She tried holding the package this way, then that; never had she been given anything so clumsy to carry. But the spring was vivifying; she couldn't have wished for a better day on which to carry messages through the streets; winged was just what she felt. And summer would come soon, hot as hell, she couldn't wait; she unzipped, tentatively, then boldly, the front of her sweatshirt, felt the breeze lick at her throat and breast, and found the feeling good. And there, ahead, must be the building she had been sent to.


Lost for Sure

It was a tall, white building, or a building that had once been white; it was covered with gloomy cast figures of every description. Two wings of it stuck out, forming a dank dark courtyard between them. Far above, at the top of the building, a course of masonry joined these two wings, making an arch absurdly high, an arch for a giant to pass under.

Sylvie glanced up at this monstrous fancy, and then quickly away. Tall buildings gave her the willies, she didn't like looking up at them. She stepped into the courtyard, where puddles from the recent rain showed lurid rainbows of oil, but then had no idea how to find Room 001 as she must. An ancient porter's lodge there by the entrance seemed to have been shuttered up tight for years and years, but she went to it anyway and pressed a rusted bell, if this thing works I'll . . .

She didn't get to complete her condition, for even as she pressed down the bell's black nipple a small shutter flew open in the little lodge, and showed her the top half of a head, long nose, small eyes, bald dome. "Hi, can you tell me . . ." she began, but before she could ask further, the eyes crinkled up in a smile or a grimace, and a hand arose; with a long index finger, the hand indicated Left, then Down, and the shutter banged shut.

She laughed. What the hell do they pay him for? That? She followed his instructions, and found herself going in, not the central entrance with its steps and glass doors, but a wrought-iron grille or gate that led to stairs, which went down into an open areaway. Sun didn't reach that narrow place, a sort of slot made by the rising towers. She went down, down, down to the echo-y, cavern-smelling bottom, where there was a small door, let into the wall. A very small door; but there was no other exit. "This can't be right," she said, shifting the impossible package (it seemed to be changing shape, and had grown very heavy too). "I'm lost for sure." But she pushed open the door.

It opened on a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor. Down at the far small end, someone was standing before a door, doing something: painting the door? He had a brush, and a paint-pot. Super, or super's helper. Sylvie thought she'd ask further instructions from him, but when she called "Hi," he looked back at her in alarm, and vanished through the door he'd been working on. She marched up to it anyway, reaching it with surprising suddenness, the corridor was shorter than it seemed, or seemed longer than it was, whichever; and the door at its end was even smaller than the one she'd come in by. If this keeps up, she thought, I'll be crawling next. . . . On the door, in fresh white paint in an antique style, the number 001 was painted.

Laughing a little, a little nervously, uncertain now and not at all sure that an elaborate joke wasn't being played on her, Sylvie knocked at the little door. "Wingéd Messenger," she called.

The door opened a crack. A strange, outdoor, summergold light seemed to come through it from beyond. A very long, very knuckly hand was put around the door to open it further, and then a very widely grinning face looked out.

"Wingéd Messenger?" Sylvie said,

"Yes? What is it? What can we do for you?" He was the man she'd seen painting the number on the door, or someone just like him; or he was the man who'd directed her here. Or someone just like him.

"Package for you," she said.

"Aha," the little man said. His grin unabated, he opened the door wider so she could stoop to enter. "Do come in, then,"

"Are you sure," she said, looking within, "that this is where I'm spose to be?"

"Oh, it certainly is."

"Boy. It's real little in here."

"Oh, yes it is. Won't you please step right on in."


The Wild Wood

Out on the same May streets at evening, Auberon dawdling Farmwards through the brand-new spring thought of fame, and fortune, and love. He was returning from the offices of the production company that created and sustained "A World Elsewhere" and several other less successful ventures. He had there given into the manicured hands of a remarkably friendly but somewhat absent man of not much more than his own age two scripts for imaginary episodes of their famous soap. Coffee had been pressed on him, and the young man (who didn't seem to have a lot of business on hand) had talked ramblingly about television, and writing, and production; huge figures of money were mentioned, and arcana of the business touched on—Auberon tried hard not to be astonished at the first and nodded sagely at the latter though he understood little enough of it; and then he'd been shown out, with invitations to drop around any time, by a secretary and a receptionist of near-legendary beauty.

Amazing and wonderful. Large vistas opened before Auberon on the crowded street. The scripts, his and Sylvie's collaboration through long, hilarious and excited evenings, were shapely and thrilling, he thought, though not exquisite to look at, typed as they were on George's old machine; no matter, no matter, his future was filled with expensive office equipment, and with long lunches, prize secretaries, hard work for great rewards. He would seize, from between the claws of the dragon who was denned in the heart of the Wild Wood, the golden treasure it guarded.

The Wild Wood: yes. There had been a time, he knew, say when Frederick Barbarossa was emperor of the West, a time when it had been beyond the log walls of tiny towns, beyond the edges of the harrowed land, that the forest began: the forest, where there lived wolves, and bears, witches in vanishing cottages, dragons, giants. Inside the town, all was reasonable and ordinary; there were safety, fellows, fire and food and all comforts. Dull, maybe, more sensible than thrilling, but safe. It was beyond, in the Wild Wood, that anything could happen, any adventure could be had; out there you took your life in your hands.

No more though. It was all upside down now. At Edgewood, upstate, night held no terrors; the woods there were tame, smiling, comfortable. He didn't know if there were any locks that still worked on the many doors of Edgewood; certainly he'd never seen any of them locked. On hot nights, he'd often slept out on open porches, or in the woods themselves, listening to the sounds and the silence. No, it was on these streets that you saw wolves, real and imagined; here you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing might be Out There, as once the doors of woodsmen's huts were barred; horrid stories were told of what could happen here after the sun has set; here you had the adventures, won the prizes, lost your way and were swallowed up without a trace, learned to live with the fear in your throat and snatch the treasure: this, this was the Wild Wood now, and Auberon was a woodsman.

Yes! Greed for treasure bred daring in him, and daring made him strong; errant, armed, he strode through the crowd. Let the weak be gobbled up, he would not be. He thought of Sylvie, clever as a fox, woods-bred though born in the complacent safety of a jungle island. She knew this place; her greed was as great as his, greater, and her cunning matched it. What a team! And to think that not many weeks ago they two had seemed stuck in a deadfall, to have lost each other in trackless undergrowth, to be on the point of surrendering to it all, and parting. Parting. God, what chances she took! How narrow the odds were!

But he could believe, just now, this evening, that they would grow old together. The joy they took in each other, in abeyance all that cold bitter March, had flowered again bright and tough as clustered dandelions—that very morning, in fact, she had been late for work for a reason, a new reason; late, because a certain elaborate process had had to be successfully brought to conclusion—oh, God, the fabulous exertions they required of one another, and the rests those exertions required, a life could be spent in the one and then the other, he felt that his nearly had been so spent all in that morning. And yet unending: he felt it could be, saw no reason why it should not be. He drifted to a halt in the middle of an intersection, grinning, blind; his heartbeats seemed to be minted in gold as moment upon moment of that morning was relived within his breast. A truck blared at him, a truck desperate not to miss the light, its light, which Auberon was flouting. Auberon leapt from its path and the driver yelled something pointed but unintelligible at him. Struck down blinded by love, Auberon thought (laughing and safe on the far sidewalk), that's how I'll die, struck by a truck when I'm whelmed with lust and love and forget where I am.

He took up a quick City stride, still grinning but trying to be alert. Keep your wits about you. After all, he thought, but got no further in the thought, for there came at that moment, crashing down the avenue or swarming up the side-streets or descending from the balmy sky like a ton of shrieking laughter, a thing that was like a sound but wasn't one: the bomb that had fallen once on him and Sylvie, but double that or greater. It rolled over him, it might have been the truck that had missed him, yet it seemed to burst from his own person. Coursing away from him up the avenue, leaving him sundered, the thing seemed to make a vacuum behind it or within it that tugged at his clothes and ruffled his hair. Still his feet fell in good order—the thing had no power to hurt him physically at least—but the smile was quite wiped from his face.

Oh boy, they really mean business now; that was his thought. But he didn't know why he thought it, or what business he thought they meant, or for that matter who he thought they were.


This Is War

At that moment, far to the west in a state whose name begins with I, Russell Eigenblick, the Lecturer, was on the point of rising from his folding chair to address another immense gathering. He had a small deck of index cards in his hands, a pimento-flavored belch in his throat (chicken a la king again) and a throbbing pain in his left leg, just below the buttock. He wasn't feeling particularly justified. That morning, in the stables of his wealthy hosts, he had mounted a horse and trotted sedately around a small enclosure. Posing for photographers thus, he had looked confident (as always) and somewhat too small (as always, nowadays; upon a time, he had been well above average height). Then he had been induced to take a gallop over fields and meadows as barbered and neat as any chase he had ever ridden. A mistake, that. He hadn't explained that it had been centuries since he'd last been on a horse; he seemed lately to have lost the strength for such provocative remarks. Now he wondered if an ungainly limp would mar his approach to the dais.

How long, how long, he thought. It wasn't that he shunned the work, or resented the trials that were part of it. His paladins strove to ease the process for him, and he was grateful, but the squalid intimacies of this age, the backsiapping and arm-taking, didn't really bother him. He had never stood on ceremony. He was a practical man (or thought himself to be so), and if this was what his people—as he already thought of them—wanted of him, he could give it. A man who without complaint had slept amid the wolves of Thuringia and the scorpions of Palestine could suffer motels, could service aging hostesses, could catnap on planes. Only there were times (as now) when the strangeness of his long journey, too impossible to seize, bored him; and the great sleep with which he had grown so familiar tugged at him, and he longed to lay his heavy head once again on his comrades' shoulders, and close his eyes.

His eyes were drifting closed even at the thought.

Then there came, bowling outward in all directions from its starting place, the thing Auberon in the City had felt or heard: a thing that turned the world for a moment to shot silk, or changed in a wink the changeable taffeta of its stuff. A bomb, Auberon had thought it to be; Russell Eigenblick knew it wasn't a bomb but a bombardment.

Like a sharp restorative it shot throught his veins. His weariness vanished, He heard the end of the encomium which introduced him, and he sprang from his chair, eyes alight, mouth grim. He let flutter away, dramatically, the handful of notes for this Lecture as he mounted the dais; the vast audience, seeing this, gasped and cheered. Eigenblick gripped the edges of the lectern with both hands, leaned forward, and bellowed into the microphones that gaped before him to receive his words: "You must change your lives!"

A wave of astonishment, the wave of his own amplified voice washing the crowd, lifted them up, struck the back wall, and returned to break over him. "You must. Change. Your lives!" The wave curled back on them, a tsunami. Eigenblick gloried, sweeping the crowd and seeming to look deeply into every eye, into every heart: they knew it, too. Words crowded into his brain, formed sentences, platoons, regiments against whom resistance was hopeless. He unleashed them.

"The preparations are finished, the votes are in, the die is cast, the chips are down! Everything you most dreaded has already occurred. Your ancientest enemies have the whip hand now. To whom will you turn? Your fortress is all chinks, your armor is paper, your old laughter is a reproach in your throat. Nothing—nothing is as you supposed it to be. You have been deeply fooled. You have been staring into a mirror and supposing it to be the old road's long continuation, but the road has run out, dead end, no through traffic. You must change your lives!"

He drew upright. Such winds were blowing in Time that he had difficulty hearing himself speak. In those winds rode the armed heroes, mounted at last, sylphs in battle-dress, hosts in the middle of the air. Eigenblick, as he harangued the open-mouthed mass before him, lashed them, threshed them, felt himself bursting restraints and coming forth whole at last. As though in a moment he had grown too large for an old worn carapace, with delicious itchy relief he felt it split and crack. He paused, until he knew it had all been shed. The crowd held its breath. Eigenblick's new voice coming forth, loud, low, insinuating, made them shiver as one: "Well. You didn't know. Oh, no. How were yoouu to know? You never thought. You for got. You hadn't heard." He leaned forward, looking out over them like a terrible parent, speaking rapidly, as though he spoke a curse: "Well, there will be no forgiveness this time. This time is once too often. Surely you see that, surely you knew it all along. You might, in your secretest heart, if you ever allowed yourself to suspect that this would happen, and you did suspect it, you did, you might have hoped that once again, once again there would be mercy, however undeserved; another chance, however badly bungled every other chance had been; that at the very last you would be ignored, you, only you would be missed out, overlooked, not counted, lost blameless in the cracks of the catastrophe that 'must engulf all else. No! Not this time!"

"No! No!" They cried out to him, afraid; he was moved, deep love for their helplessness, deep pity for their state filled him and made him powerful and strong.

"No," he said softly, cooing to them, rocking them in the arms of his bottomless wrath and pity, "no, no; Arthur sleeps in Avalon; you have no champion, no white hope; nothing is left to you but surrender, don't you see that, you do, don't you? Surrender; that's your only chance; show your rusted sword, useless as a toy; show yourselves, helpless, innocent of any of the causes or conclusions of this, aged, confused, weak as babes. And still. And still. Helpless and pitiable as you are"—he held out commiserating arms to them with great slowness, he could hold them all and comfort them— "eager to please as you are, full of love, asking only with softest tears in your big babe's eyes for mercy, pity peace; still, still." The arms descended, the big hands again gripped the lectern as though it were a weapon, a huge fire burst within Russell Eigenblick's bosom, horrid gratitude engulfed him that he could lean down upon these microphones at last and say this: "Still it will not draw their pity, none of it, for they have none; or stay their awful weapons, for they have already been loosed; or change anything at all: for this is war." Lower he bent his' head, closer his satyr's lips came to the aghast microphones, and his whisper boomed: "Ladies and gentleMEN, THIS IS WAR."


Unexpected Seam

Ariel Hawksquill, in the City, had felt it too: a change, like a flash of menopause, but not happening to herself but to the world at large. A Change, then; not a change but a Change, a Change glimpsed bowling along the course of space and time, or the world stumbling over a thick and unexpected seam in the seamless fabric.

"Did you feel that?" she said.

"Feel what, my dear?" said Fred Savage, still chuckling over the ferocious headlines of yesterday's paper.

"Forget it," Hawksquill said softly, thoughtful. "Well. About cards, now. Anything at all about cards? Think hard."

"The ace of spades reversed," Fred Savage said. "Queen of spades in your bedroom window, fierce as any bitch. Jack of diamonds, on the road again. King of hearts, that's me, baby," and he began to sing-hum through his ivory teeth, his buttocks moving slightly but snappily on the long, buttock-polished bench of the waiting room.

Hawksquill had come to the great Terminus to question this old oracle of hers, knowing that most evenings after work he could be found here, confiding strange truths to strangers; pointing out with an index finger brown, gnarled, and dirt-clogged as a root, certain items in yesterday's paper which the train-takers around him might have missed, or discoursing on how a woman who wears a fur takes on the propensities of the animal—Hawksquill thought of timid suburban girls wearing rabbit-furs dyed to look like lynx, and laughed. Sometimes she brought a sandwich to share with him, if he were eating. Usually she went away wiser than she had come.

"Cards," she said. "Cards and Russell Eigenblick."

"That fella," he said. He was lost awhile in thought. He shook out his paper as though shaking a troublesome notion from it. But it wouldn't go.

"What is it?" she said.

"Now damn if there wasn't a change just now," he said, looking upward. "Sumpm . . . What was it, did you say?"

"I didn't say."

"You said a name."

"Russell Eigenblick. In the cards."

"In the cards," he said. He folded his paper carefully. "That's enough," he said. "That'll do."

"Tell me," she said, "what you think."

But she had pressed him too hard, always a danger, ask the great virtuosi for one more encore and they will turn petulant and surly. Fred rose—as far as he ever rose, remaining bent like a quizzical letter—and felt for something nonexistent in his pockets. "Gotta go see m'uncle," he said. "You wouldn't have a buck for the bus? Some kinda buck or change?"


From East to West

She walked back through the vast arching hall of the Terminus no wiser this time than when she had come, and more troubled. The hundreds who hurried there, eddying around the shrinelike clock in the center and washing up in waves against the ticket booths, seemed distracted, hard-pressed, uncertain of their fates: but whether more so than on any other day she wasn't sure. She looked up: grown faint with age and long watching, the Zodiac painted in gold marched biaswise across the night-blue dome, pricked out with tiny lights, many of them extinguished. Her steps slowed, her mouth fell open; she turned, staring, unable to believe what she saw.

The Zodiac ran the proper way across the dome from east to west.

Impossible. It had always been one of her favorite jokes about this mad City that its grand center was watched over by a Zodiac that was backwards, the mistake of a star-ignorant muralist, or some sly pun on his star-crossed City. She had wondered what reversals might happen if—with proper preparation—one were to walk backwards through the Terminus beneath this backwards cosmos, but propriety had always kept her from trying it.

But look now. Here was the rain in his right place, and the hindquarterless bull, the twins and the crab, King Lion and the virgin and the double-panned scales. The poised scorpion next, with red Antares in his sting; the centaur with his bow, the fish-tailed goat, the man with the water-jug. And the two fishes bow-tied at the tails. The crowds flowed around her where she stood gawking, flowed without pause as they did around any fixed object in their path. Her looking upward was infectious, as in the hoary trick; others looked upward too, searching briefly, but, unable to see the impossible thing she saw, hurried on.

The ram, the bull, the twins . . . She struggled to retain her memory that they had been otherwise, had not always had this order, for they looked as old and immutable as the stars they pictured. She grew afraid. A Change: and what other changes would she find, out on the streets; what others lay in the to-come, yet to be manifested? What anyway was Russell Eigenblick doing to the world; and why on earth was she sure that it was Russell Eigenblick who was Somehow at fault? A sweet baritone bell struck, and echoed around her as she stared, not loud but clear, calm as though possessed of the secret: the Terminus clock, ringing the small time of the hour.


Sylvie?

The same hour was being rung in the pyramidal steeple of a building which Alexander Mouse had built downtown, the only steeple in the City that rang the hours for the public enlightenment. One of the four notes of its four-note tune was silenced, and the others fell irregularly into the channel of streets below, blown away by wind or muffled by traffic, so it was no help usually, but Auberon (unbarring and unbolting a door into Old Law Farm) didn't care what time it was anyway. He gave a glance around himself to see that he wasn't followed by thieves. (He'd already been robbed once, by two kids who, since he'd had no money, had taken the bottle of gin he was carrying, and then took and flung his hat to the ground and stepped on it with long sneakered feet as they went away.) He slipped in, and bolted and barred the door behind him.

Down the hall, through a brick-toothed rent George had made in the wall to give access to the next building, up that hall, up the stairs, gripping the banister iced thickly with generations of paint. Out a hall window onto a fire escape, a wave to the happy farmers at work with shoots and trowels down below, and back into another building, another hall, absurdly narrow and close, familiar in its gloom and joyful, for it led home. He glimpsed himself in the pretty mirror Sylvie had hung on the wall at the end of the hall, with a tiny table below it and a bowl of dried flowers, bien nice. The doorknob didn't open the door. "Sylvie?" Not home. Not back from work, or out farming; or just out, the reborn sun caused the blue island lagoon in her blood to rise. He hunted out his three keys and peered at them in the dark, growing impatient. Ovoid-ended for the top lock, keystone-ended for the middle, oh hell! He dropped one, and had to get down on hands and knees, furious, and feel for it amid the irremediable antique filth of all City nooks and crannies. Here it was: huge, round-ended one for the police lock, which kept the police out, ha ha.

"Sylvie?"

The Folding Bedroom seemed oddly large, and, though sunlight poured in through all its little windows, Somehow not cheerful. What was it? The place seemed swept, but not tidy; cleaned, but not clean. There was a lot of stuff missing, he gradually realized; a lot of stuff. Had they been robbed? He went gingerly into the kitchen. Sylvie's collection of unguents and such that clustered above the sink was gone. Her shampoos and hairbrushes, gone. It was all gone. All but his own old Gillette.

In the bedroom likewise. Her totems and pretty things, gone. Her china señorita, with a dead-white face and black spitcurls, whose top half separated from her flaring skirt which was really a jewel box, gone. Her hats hung on the back of the door, gone. Her crazy envelope of important papers and assorted snapshots, gone.

He tore open the closet door. Empty coat-hangers clanged, and his own overcoat hung on the door flung out startled sleeves, but there was nothing at all of hers there.

Nothing at all.

He looked around him, and then looked around him again. And then stood still in the middle of the empty floor.

"Gone," he said.