Little, Big

III.

Come, let me see thee sink into a dream

Of quiet thoughts, protracted till thine eye

Be calm as water when the winds are gone

And no one can tell whither.

—Wordsworth

It's George Mouse," Smoky said. Lily clinging to his pants-leg looked out the front way where her father pointed. Above the fist stuck in her face, her longlashed eyes made no judgment on George coming up through the mist, his boots spraying puddles. He wore his great black cloak, his Svengali's hat limp with rain; he waved a hand at them as he came up. "Hey," he said, squishily mounting the stairs. "Heeeeeey." He embraced Smoky; beneath his hat-brim his teeth shone and his dark-rimmed eyes were coals. "This is what's-her-name, Tacey?"

"Lily," Smoky said. Lily retreated behind the curtain of her father's pants. "Tacey's a big girl now. Six years old."

"Oh my God."

"Yes."

"Time flies."

"Well, come in. What's up? You should have written."

"Didn't decide till this morning."

"Any reason?"


Time Flies

"Wild hair up my ass." He chose not to tell Smoky of the five hundred milligrams of Pellucidar he had taken and which were now coldly ventilating his nervous system like the first day of winter, which this was, seventh winter solstice of Smoky's married life. The great capsule of Pellucidar had put him on the gad; he had got out the Mercedes, one of the last tangibles of the old Mouse affluence, and driven north till all the gas stations he passed were bankrupt ones; he parked it then in the garage of a deserted house, and, breathing deeply of the dense and moldy air, set off on foot.

The front door closed behind them with a solid sound of brass fittings and a rattle of the oval glass. George Mouse decaped grandly, a gesture that made Lily laugh and that halted Tacey in her headlong rush down the hail to see who had come. Behind her came Daily Alice in a long cardigan, her fists making bulges in the pockets. She ran to kiss George, and he pressing her felt a dizzying and inappropriate rush of chemical lust that made him laugh.

They all turned toward the parlor where yellow lamplight already shone, and saw themselves in the tall hall pier-glass. George stopped them by it, holding a shoulder of each, and studied the images: himself, his cousin, Smoky—and Lily who just then appeared between her mother's legs. Changed? Well, Smoky had regrown the beard he had started and then amputated when George first knew him. His face looked gaunter, more what George could only call (since the word was just then rushed to him by importunate messenger) more spiritual. SPIRITUAL. Watch out. He got a grip on himself. Alice: a mother twice over, amazing! It occurred to him that seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story. And himself? He could see the grizzle in his moustache, the lean stoop of his stringbean torso, but that was nothing; it was the same face that had always looked out from mirrors at him since he had first looked in.

"Time flies," he said.


A Definite Hazard

In the parlor, they were all preparing a long shopping list. "Peanut butter," Mother said, "stamps, iodine, soda-water—lots of it, soap pads, raisins, tooth powder; chutney, chewing gum, candles, George!" She embraced him; Doctor Drinkwater looked up from the list he was making.

"Hello, George," said Cloud from her corner by the fire. "Don't forget cigarettes."

"Paper diapers, the cheap ones," Daily Alice said. "Matches—Tampax—3-in-One Oil."

"Oatmeal," Mother said. "How are your people, George?"

"No oatmeal!" Tacey said.

"Good, good. Mom's, you know, hanging on." Mother shook her head. "I haven't seen Franz for, oh, a year?" He put bills on the drum-table where Doc wrote. "A bottle of gin," he said.

Doc wrote "gin," but pushed aside the bills. "Aspirin," he remembered. "Camphorated oil. Antihistamine."

"Somebody sick?" George asked.

"Sophie's got this strange fever," Daily Alice said. "It comes and goes."

"Last call," Doc said, looking up at his wife. She stroked her chin and clucked in an agony of doubt, and at last decided she would have to go too. In the hall, pursued by all of their last-minute needs, he tugged a cap over his head (his hair had gone almost white, like dirty cotton-wool) and put on a pair of pink-framed glasses his license said he had to wear. He picked up a brown envelope of papers he must deal with, announced himself ready, and they all went out onto the porch to see them off.

"I hope they'll be careful," Cloud said. "It's very wet."

From within the coach-house, they heard a hesitant grinding. Then an expectant silence, followed by a firmer start, and the station wagon backed warily out into the drive, making two soft and delible marks in the wet leaves. George Mouse marveled. Here they all were intently watching nothing more than an old guy very gingerly handling a car. The gears ground and an awed silence fell. George knew of course that it wasn't every day they got the car out, that it was an occasion, that doubtless Doc had spent the morning wiping cobwebs from the old wood sides and chasing chipmunks away who were thinking of nesting under the apparently immobile seats, and that he now put on the old machine like a suit of armor to go out and do battle in the Great World. Had to hand it to his country cousins. Everybody he knew in the City hitched endlessly about the Car and its depredations; his cousins had never handled this twenty-year-old woodie anyhow but infrequently and with the greatest respect. He laughed, waving goodbye with the rest, imagining Doc out on the road, nervous at first, shushing his wife, changing gears with care; then turning onto the great highway, beginning to enjoy the smooth slipping-by of brown landscape and the sureness of his control, until some monster truck roars by and nearly blows him off the road. The guy's a definite hazard.


Up on the Hill

He certainly didn't want, George said, to stay indoors; he'd come up for fresh air and stuff, even if he hadn't picked the best day for it; so Smoky put on a hat and galoshes, took a stick, and went with him to walk up the Hill.

Drinkwater had tamed the Hill with a footpath, and stone steps where it was steepest, and rustic seats at lookout places, and a stone table at the top where views and lunch could be taken together. "No lunch," George said. The fine rain had stopped—had halted, it seemed, in mid-fall, and hung, stationary, in the air. They went up the path which circled the tops of trees that grew in the ravines below, George admiring the pattern of silver drops on leaf and twig and Smoky pointing out the odd bird (he had learned the names of many, particularly odd ones).

"No but really," George said. "How's it going?"

"Slate junco," Smoky said. "Good. Good." He sighed. "It's just hard when winter comes."

"God, yes."

"No, but harder here. I don't know. I wouldn't have it any different. . . . You just can't bear the melancholy, some evenings." Indeed it seemed to George that Smoky's eyes might brim with tears. George breathed deeply, glorying in the wetness and the wood. "Yes, it's bad," he said happily.

"You're indoors so much," Smoky said. "You draw together. And there's so many people there. You seem to get wound around each other more."

"In that house? You could lose yourself for days in there. For days." He remembered an afternoon like this one when he was a kid, when he had come up here for Christmas with the family. While searching for the stash he knew must be somewhere awaiting the great morning, he got lost on the third floor. He went down a strange staircase narrow as a chute, found himself Elsewhere amid strange rooms; draughts made a dusty tapestry in a sitting room breathe with spooky life, his own feet sounded like other's feet coming toward him. He began to shout after a while, having lost the staircase; found another; lost all restraint when he heard far off Mom Drinkwater calling to him, and ran around shouting and throwing open doors until at last he opened the arched door of what looked like a church, where his two cousins were taking a bath.

They sat on one of Drinkwater's seats of bent and knobby wood. Through the screen of naked trees they could see across the land a great gray distance. They could just make out the gray back of the Interstate lying coiled and smooth in the next county; they could even hear, at moments, carried on the thick air, the far hum of trucks: the monster breathed. Smoky pointed out a finger or Hydra's head of it which reached out tentatively through the hills this way, then stopped abruptly. Those bits of yellow, sole brightness on the scene, were sleeping caterpillars—the man-made kind, earth-movers and -shakers. They wouldn't come any closer; the surveyors and purveyors, contractors and engineers were stalled there, mired, bogged in indecision, and that vestigial limb would never grow bone and muscle to punch through the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood. Smoky knew it. "Don't ask me how," he said.

But George Mouse had been thinking of a scheme whereby all the buildings, mostly empty, on the block his family owned in the City might be combined and sealed up to make an enormous, impenetrable curtain-wall—like the hollow wall of a castle—around the center of the block, where the gardens were. The outbuildings and stuff inside the block could be torn down then and all the garden-space transformed into a single pasture or farm. They could grow things there, and keep cows. No, goats. Goats were smaller and less fussy about their food. They gave milk and there would be the odd kid to eat. George had never killed anything larger than a cockroach, but he had eaten kid in a 'Rican diner and his mouth watered. He hadn't heard what Smoky said, though he had heard Smoky talking. He said, "But what's the story? What's the real story?"

"Well, we're Protected, you know," Smoky said vaguely, digging the black ground with his stick. "But there's always something that's got to be given in return fur protection, isn't there?" He hadn't understood any of that in the beginning; he didn't suppose he understood it any better now. Though he knew some payment had to be made, he wasn't sure whether it had been made, or was to be made, or had been deferred; whether the vague sense he had in winter of something being wrung from him, of being dunned and desiccated and having sacrificed much (he couldn't say what exactly) meant that the Creditors had been satisfied, or that the goblins he sensed peeking in the windows and calling down the chimneys, clustering under the eaves and scrabbling through the disused upper rooms were reminding him and all of them of a debt unpaid, tribute unexacted, goblin principal earning some horrid interest he couldn't calculate.

But George had been thinking of a plan to represent the basic notions of Act Theory (that he had read of in a popular magazine and which seemed to him just then to make sense, a lot of sense) by means of a display of fireworks: how the various parts of an Act as the theory explained them could be expressed in the initiation, rising whistle, culminating starburst and crackling expiration of a colored bomb; and how in combination fireworks could represent "entrained" Acts, multiple Acts of all kinds, the grand Act that is Life's rhythm and Time's. The notion faded in sparks. He shook Smoky's shoulder and said, "But how goes it? How are you getting on?"

"Jesus, George," Smoky said standing. "I've told you all I can. I'm freezing. I bet it freezes over tonight. There might be snow for Christmas." He knew in fact there would be; it had been promised. "Let's go get some cocoa."


Cocoa and a Bun

It was brown and hot, with chocolate bubbles winking at the brim. A marshmallow Cloud had plopped in it turned and bubbled as though dissolving in joy. Daily Alice instructed Tacey and Lily in the arts of blowing gently on it, picking it up by the handle, and laughing at the brown moustaches it made. The way Cloud watched over it it grew no skin, though George didn't mind a skin; his mother's had always had a skin, and so had that they served from urns in the basement of the Church of All Streets, a nondenominational church she had used to take him and Franz to, always, it seemed, on days like this.

"Have another bun," Cloud said to Alice. "Eating for two," she said to George.

"You don't mean it," George said.

"I think so," Alice said. She bit the bun. "I'm a good bearer."

"Wow. A boy this time."

"No," she said confidently. "Another girl. So Cloud says.

"Not I," Cloud said. "The cards."

"We'll name her Lucy," Tacey said. "Lucy Ann and Anndy Ann de Barn Barn Barnable. George has two moustaches."

"Who'll take this up to Sophie?" Cloud said, setting a cup and a bun on a black japanned tray of great age that showed a silver-haired, star-spangled sprite drinking Coke.

"Let me," George said. "Hey, Aunt Cloud. Can you do the cards for me?"

"Sure, George. I think you're included."

"Now if I can find her room," he said giggling. He took up the tray carefully, noting that his hands had begun to shake.

Sophie was asleep when he came into her room by pushing the door open with his knee. He stood unmoving in the room, feeling the steam rise from the cocoa and hoping she would never wake. So strange to feel again those adolescent peeping-tom emotions—mostly a trembling weakness at the knees and a dry thickness in the throat—caused now by conjunction of the mad capsule and Sophie deshabille on the messy bed. One long leg was uncovered and the toes pointed toward the floor, as though indicating the appropriate one of two Chinese slippers that peeped from beneath a discarded kimono; her breasts soft with sleeping had come out of her ruffled 'jammies and rose and fell slightly with her breathing, flushed (he thought tenderly) with fever. Even as he devoured her though she seemed to feel his gaze, and without waking she pulled her clothes together and rolled over so her cheek lay on her closed fist. It made him want to laugh, or cry, so prettily she did it, but he restrained himself and did neither, only set down the tray on her table cluttered with pill bottles and crushed tissues. He moved onto the bed a big album or scrapbook to do it, and at that she woke.

"George," she said calmly, stretching, not surprised, thinking perhaps she was still asleep. He laid his swarthy hand to her brow gently. "Hi, cutie," he said. She lay back amid the pillows; her eyes closed, and for a moment she wandered back to dreamland. Then she said Oh arid struggled up to kneel on the bed and come full awake. "George!"

"Feeling better?"

"I don't know. I was dreaming. Cocoa for me?"

"For you. What were you dreaming?'

"Mm. Good. Sleeping makes me hungry. Does it you?" She wiped away her moustache with a pink tissue she plucked from a box of them; another took its place pertly. "Oh, dreams about years ago. I guess because of that album. No you can't." She took his hand from it. "Dirty pictures."

"Dirty."

"Pictures of me, years ago." She smiled, ducking her head Drinkwater-style, and peeked at him over her cocoa cup with eyes still crinkled with sleep. "What are you doing here?"

"Came to see you," George said; once he had seen her, he knew it to be true. She didn't respond to his gallantry; she seemed to have forgotten him, or remembered suddenly something else entirely; the cocoa cup stopped halfway to her lips. She put it down slowly, her eyes looking at something he couldn't see, something within. Then she seemed to wrest herself from it, laughed a quick, frightened laugh and took George's wrist in a sudden grip as though to stay herself. "Some dreams," she said, searching his face. "It's the fever."


The Orphan Nymphs

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.

Starting from the simple pleasure of it, she had become practiced in all its nameless arts. The first thing was to learn to hear the small voice: that fragment of conscious self which like a guardian angel walks with the eidolons of self with which we replace ourselves in Dreamland, the voice that whispers you are dreaming. The trick was to hear it, but not attend to it, or else you wake. She learned to hear it; and it told her that she could not be hurt by dream wounds, no matter how terrible; she woke from them always whole and safe—most safe because warm in bed. Since then she had feared no bad dreams; the dream Dante of her leaned on the dreaming Virgil and passed through horrors delightful and instructive.

Next she found she was one of those who can awake, leap the gap of consciousness, and arrive back in the same dream she had awakened from. She could build also many-storied houses of dream; she could dream that she woke, and then dream that she woke from that dream, each time dreaming that she said Oh! It was all a dream! until at last and most wonderful she woke to wakefulness, home from her journey, and breakfast cooking downstairs.

But soon she began to linger on her journeys, go farther, return later and more reluctantly. She worried, at first, that if she spent half the day as well as all the night in Dreamland, she would eventually run out of matter to transmute into dreams, that her dreams would grow thin, unconvincing, repetitious. The opposite happened. The deeper she journeyed—the farther the waking world fell behind—the grander and more inventive became the fictive landscapes, the more complete and epical the adventures. How could that be? Where if not from waking life, books and pictures, loves and longings, real roads and rocks and real toes stubbed on them, could she manufacture dreams? And where then did these fabulous isles, gloomy vast sheds, intricate cities, cruel governments, insoluble problems, comical supporting players with convincing manners, come from? She didn't know; gradually she came not to care.

She knew that the real ones, loved ones, in her life worried about her. Their concern followed her into dreams, but became transformed into exquisite persecutions and triumphal reunions, so that was how she chose to deal with them and their concern.

And now she had learned the last art, which squared the power of her secret life and at the same time hushed the real ones' questions. She had Somehow learned to raise at will a fever, and with it the lurid, compelling, white-hot dreams a fever brings. Flushed with the victory of it, she hadn't at first seen the danger of this double dose, as it were; too hastily she tossed away most of her waking life—it had lately grown complex and promiseiess any- how—and retired to her sickbed secretly, guiltily exulting.

Only on waking was she sometimes—as now when George Mouse saw her look within—seized by the terrible understanding of the addict: the understanding that she was doomed, had lost her way in this realm, had, not meaning to, gone too far in to find a way out—that the only way out was to go in, give in, fly further in—that the only way to ameliorate the horror of her addiction was to indulge it.

She grasped George's wrist as though his real flesh could wake her truly. "Some dreams," she said. "It's the fever."

"Sure," George said. "Fever dreams."

"I ache," she said, hugging herself. "Too much sleep. Too long in one position. Something."

"You need a massage." Did his voice betray him?

She bent her long torso side to side. "Would you?"

"You bet."

She turned her back to him, pointing out on the figured bed-jacket where it hurt. "No no no honey," he said as though to a child. "Look. Lie down here. Put the pillow under your chin—right. Now I sit here—just move a little—let me take my shoes off. Comfy?" He began, feeling her fever-heat through the thin jacket. "That album," he said, not having for a moment forgotten it.

"Oh," she said, her voice low and gruff as he pressed the bellows of her lungs. "Auberon's pictures." Her hand reached out and rested on the cover. "When we were kids. Art pictures."

"Art pictures like what?" George said, working the bones where her wings would he if she had wings.

As though she couldn't help it she raised the cover, put it down again. "He didn't know," she said. "He didn't think they were dirty. Oh, they're not." She opened the book. "Lower. There. Lower more."

"Oho," George said. George had once known these naked, pearl-gray children, abstracted here and more carnal for not being flesh at all. "Let's take this shirtie off," he said. "That's better. . . ."

She turned the album's pages with abstracted slowness, touching certain of the pictures as though she wished to feel the texture of the day, the past, the flesh.

Here were Alice and she on the stippled stones by a waterfall which plunged madly out-of-focus behind them. In the hazy foreground leaves, some law of optics inflated droplets of sunlight into dozens of white disembodied eyes round with wonder. The naked children (Sophie's dark aureoles were puckered like unblown flowers, like tiny closed lips) looked down into a black, silken pool. What did they see there that kept their lashy eyes lowered, that made them smile? Below the image, in a neat hand, was the picture's title: August. Sophie's fingers traced the ray of lines where Alice's thigh creased at the pelvis, lines tender and finely-drawn as though her skin were thinner then than it would become. Her silver calves lay together, and her long-toed feet, as though they were beginning to be changed into a mermaid's tail.

Small pictures clipped to the pages with black corners. Sophie wide-eyed, open-mouthed, feet wide apart and arms high, all open, a Gnostic's X of microcosmic child-woman-kind, her yet-uncut hair wide too and white—thus golden in fact—against an obscure cave of summer-dark trees. Alice undressing, stepping one-footed from her white cotton panties, her plump purse already beginning to be clothed with crisp fair hair. The two girls opening through time like the magic flowers of nature films as George hungrily looked through Auberon's eyes, double-peeping at the past. Stop here a minute. . . .

She held the page open there, while he went on, shifting his position and his hands; her legs opening across the sheets made a certain sound. She showed him the Orphan Nymphs. Flowers twined in their hair, they lay full length entwined on the grassy sward. They had their hands to each other's cheeks, and their eyes were heavy and they were on the point of kissing open-mouthed: acting out lonely consolation, it might be, for an art-picture of innocence at once orphaned and faëry, but not acting; Sophie remembered. Her nerveless hand slipped from the page and her eyes too lost their grasp of it; it didn't matter.

"Do you know what I'm going to do," George asked, unable not to.

"Uh-huh."

"Do you?"

"Yes." An exhalation only. "Yes."

But she didn't, not really; she had leapt across that gap Consciousness again, had saved herself from falling there, had landed safely (able to fly) on the far side, within that pearl-toned afternoon that had no night.


The Least Trumps

"As in any deck," Cloud said, taking their velvet bag from the tooled case and then the cards themselves from the bag, "there are fifty-two cards for the fifty-two weeks of the year, four suits for the four seasons, twelve court cards for the twelve months and, if you count them right, three hundred and sixty-four pips for the days of the year."

"A year's got three-sixty-five," George said.

"This is the old year, before they knew better. Throw another log on the fire, will you, George?"

She began to lay out his future as he fooled with the fire. The secret he had within him—or above him asleep actually— warmed his center and made him grin, but left his extremities deathly cold. He unrolled the cuffs of his sweater and drew his hands within. They felt like a skeleton's.

"Also," said Cloud, "there are twenty-one trumps, numbered from zero to twenty. There are Persons, and Places, and Things, and Notions." The big cards fell, with their pretty emblems of sticks and cups and swords. "There's another set of trumps," Cloud said. "The ones I have here are not as great as those; those have oh the sun and the moon and large notions. Mine are called—my mother called them—the Least Trumps." She smiled at George. "Here is a Person. The Cousin." She placed that in the circle and thought a moment.

"Tell me the worst," George said. "I can take it."

"The worst," said Daily Alice from the deep armchair where she sat reading, "is just what she can't tell you."

"Or the best either," said Cloud. "Just a bit of what might be. But in the next day, or the next year, or the next hour, that I can't tell either. Now hush while I think." The cards had grown into interlocking circles like trains of thought, and Cloud spoke to George of events that would befall him; a small legacy, she said, from someone he never knew, but not money, and left him by accident. "You see, here's the Gift; here the Stranger in this place."

Watching her, chuckling at the process and also helplessly at what had occurred to him that afternoon (and which he intended to repeat, creeping quiet as a mouse when all were asleep), George didn't notice Cloud fall silent before the completing pattern; didn't see her lips purse or her hand hesitate as she placed the last card in the center. It was a Place: the Vista.

"Well?" George said.

"George," she said, "I don't know."

"Don't know what?"

"Exactly." She reached for her box of cigarettes, shook it and found it empty. She had seen so many displays, so many possible falls had grown into her consciousness that sometimes they overlapped; with a sense like déjà vu, she felt she was looking not at a single arrangement but at one of a series, as though some old display she had made were to be labeled "Continued," and here, without warning, was the continuation. Yet it was all George's fall too,

"If," she said, "the Cousin card is you." No. That wouldn't do. There was something, some fact she didn't know.

George of course knew what it was, and felt a sudden strangulation, a fear of discovery absurd on the face of it but intense anyway, as though he had walked into a trap. "Well," he said, finding voice. "That's enough anyway. I'm not sure I want to know my every future move." He saw Cloud touch the Cousin card; then the Thing called Seed. Oh Christ, he thought; and just then the station wagon's hoarse horn was heard in the drive.

"They'll need help unloading," Daily Alice said, struggling to rise from the grasp of her armchair. George jumped up. "No no, honey, oh no, not in your condition. You sit tight." He went from the room, cold hands thrust in his sleeves like a monk.

Alice laughed and picked up her book again. "Did you scare him, Cloud? What did you see?"

Cloud only looked down at the pattern she had made.

For some time now she had begun to think she had been wrong about the Least Trumps, that they were not telling her of the small events of lives close to her-or rather that those small events were parts of chains, and the chains were great events; very great indeed.

The Vista card in the center of her pattern showed a meeting of corridors or aisles. Down each corridor was an endless vista of doorways, each one different, an arch then a lintel then pillars and so on till the artist's invention ran out and the fineness of his woodcutting (which was very fine) could no longer make distinctions. You could see, down those aisles, other doors which led off in other directions, perhaps each showing vistas as endless and various as this one.

A juncture, doorways, turnings, a moment only when all the ways could be seen at once. This was George—all this. He was that vista, though he didn't know it and she couldn't think how to tell him. The vista wasn't his: he was the vista. It was she who looked down it at the possibilities. And could not express them. She only knew—for sure now—that all the patterns she had ever cast were parts of one pattern, and that George had done or would do—or was at that moment doing—something that made an element in that pattern. And in any pattern, the elements do not stand alone; they are repeated, they are linked. What could it be?

Around her in the house the sounds of her family came, calling and hauling and treading the stairs. But it was into this place that she stared, into the prospect of endless branchings, corners, corridors. She felt that perhaps she was in that place; that there was a door just behind her, that she sat here between it and the first of the doors pictured on the card; that if she turned her head she might see an endless prospect of arch and lintel behind her too.


Only Fair

All night especially in cold weather the house was accustomed to speak softly to itself, perhaps because of its hundreds of joints and its half-floors and its stone parts piled on wooden. It tocked and groaned, grunted and squeaked; something gave way in an attic and fell, which caused something to come loose in a cellar and drop. The squirrels in the airspaces scratched and the mice explored the walls and halls. One mouse late at night went on tiptoe, a bottle of gin under his arm and a finger on his lips, trying to remember where Sophie's room might be. He nearly tripped on an unexpected step; all steps in this house were unexpected.

Within his head it was still noon. The Pellucidar had not worn off, but it had turned evil, as it will do, not prodding flesh and consciousness any the less, but now with a cruel malice and not in fun. His flesh was contracted and defensive and he doubted that it would uncoil even for Sophie supposing he could find her. Ah: the lamp over a painting had been left on, and by it he saw the doorknob he wanted, he was sure of it. He was about to step quickly to it when it turned, spookily; he stepped back into the shadows, and the door opened. Smoky came out, an old dressing gown over his shoulders (the kind, George noticed, that has a braided edge of dark and light hues around the collar and pocket) and shut the door carefully and silently. He stood for a moment then, and seemed to sigh; then he went off around the corner.

Wrong damn door, George thought; imagine if I'd gone into their room, or is it the kids' room? He went away, utterly confused now, searching hopelessly through the coiled nautilus of the second floor, tempted once to go down a floor; maybe in his madness he had gotten onto a matching upper floor and forgotten he had done so. Then Somehow he found himself in front of a door that Reason told him must be hers, though other senses disputed it. He opened it in some fear and stepped inside.

Tacey and Lily lay sweetly asleep beneath the sloping ceiling of a dormer room. By the nightlight he could see spectral toys, the glittering eye of a bear. The two girls, one still in a jailhouse crib, didn't stir, and he was about to shut the door on them when he knew there was someone else in the room, near Tacey's bed. Someone . . . He peered around the edge of the door.

Someone had just drawn from within the fine folds of his night-gray cloak a night-gray bag. George couldn't see his face for the wide Spanish night-gray hat he wore. He stepped to the crib where Lily lay, and with fingers clothed in night-gray gloves took from his bag a pinch of something, which delicately he dispensed from between thumb and finger above her sleeping face. Sand descended in a dull-gold trickle to her eyes. He turned away then and was putting away his bag when he seemed to sense George turned to stone at the doorway. He glanced at him over the tall collar of his cloak, and George looked into his placid, heavy-lidded, night-gray eyes. Those eyes regarded him for a moment with something like pity, and he shook his heavy head, as who should say Nothing for you, son; not tonight. Which was after all only fair. And then he turned around, the tassel swinging on his hat, and went away with a low snap of his cloak to elsewhere and others more deserving.

So when George at last found his own cheerless bed (in the imaginary bedroom as it happened) he lay sleepless for hours, his withered eyeballs starting from his head. He cradled the gin bottle in his arms, tugging now and again at its cold and acid comfort, the night and day growing confused and raggedy on the still-burning Catherine-wheel of his consciousness. Only he did come to understand that the first room he had tried to enter, the one he saw Smoky come out of, was indeed Sophie's, had to be. The shudder-starting rest of it dissolved as the sparkling synapses one by one mercifully began to bum out.

Toward dawn he watched it begin to snow.