Little, Big

IV.

You talk like a Rosicrucian, who

will love nothing but a syiph, who does

not believe in the existence of a

sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole

universe for not containing a sylph.

—Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

No, I understand now," Auberon said, calm in the woods—it was so simple, really. "I didn't, for a long time, but I do now. You just can't hold people, you can't own them. I mean it's only natural, a natural process really. Meet. Love. Part. Life goes on. There was never any reason to expect her to stay always the same—I mean 'in love,' you know." There were those doubt-quotes of Smoky's, heavily indicated. "I don't hold a grudge. I can't."

"You do," Grandfather Trout said. "And you don't understand."


Nothing for Something

He had gone out at dawn, awakened by that abrasive thing like thirst or need that always awoke him at dawn since he'd become a drunkard. Unable to recapture sleep, unwilling to stare at the room, his room, which in the untender dawn looked alien and un- familiar, he d dressed. Put on his overcoat and hat against the misty chill. And climbed up through the woods, past the lake island where the white gazebo stood up to its knees in mist, up to where a falls fell melodiously into a deep dark pool. There, he'd done as his mother had instructed him, though believing none of it or trying to believe none of it. But, believe it or not, he was after all a Barnable, Drinkwater on his mother's side; his great-grandfather didn't refuse his summons. He couldn't have if he'd wanted to.

"Well, though, but I'd like to explain to her," Auberon said. "Tell her . . . Tell her, anyhow. That I don't mind. That she has my respect for making the decision she did. So I thought if you knew where she was, even approximately where . . ."

"I don't," said Grandfather Trout.

Auberon sat back from the pool's edge. What was he doing here? If the one piece of information he had wanted—the one piece which of all pieces he should not any longer care to seek—was to be still withheld from him? How could he anyway have asked for it? "What I don't understand," he said at last, "is why I have to go on making such a big deal out of it. I mean there are lots of fish in the sea. She's gone, I can't find her; so why do I cling to it? Why do I keep making her up? These ghosts, these phantoms . . ."

"Oh, well," said the fish. "Not your fault. Those phantoms. Those are their work."

"Their work?"

"Don't want you to know it," said Grandfather Trout, "but yes, their work; just to keep you sharp set; lures; no worry there."

"No worry?"

"Just let 'em pass by. There'll be more. Just let 'em pass by. Don't tell them I told you so."

"Their work," Auberon said. "Why?"

"Oh, well," Grandfather Trout said guardedly. "Why; well, why . . ."

"Okay," Auberon said. "Okay, see? See what I mean?" An innocent victim, tears sprang to his eyes. "Well, hell with them anyway," he said. "Figments. I don't care. It'll pass. Phantoms or no phantoms. Let 'em do their worst. It won't last forever." That was saddest of all; sad but true. A trembling sigh covered him and passed. "It's only natural," he said. "It won't last forever. It can't."

"It can," Grandfather Trout said. "It will."

"No," Auberon said. "No, you think it will sometimes. But it passes. You think—Love. It's such a whole, such a permanent thing. So big, so—separate from you. With a weight of its own. Do you know what I mean?"

"I do."

"But that's not so. It's just a figment too. I don't have to do its bidding. It just withers away on its own. When its over after all you don't even remember what it was like." That's what he had learned in his little park: that it was possible, reasonable even, to discard his broken heart like a broken cup; who needed it? "Love: It's all personal. I mean my love doesn't have anything to do with her—not the real her. It's just something I feel. I think it connects me to her. But it doesn't. That's a myth, a myth I make up; a myth about her and me. Love is a myth."

"Love is a myth," Grandfather Trout said. "Like summer."

"What?"

"In winter," Grandfather Trout said, "summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer."

Auberon raised his eyes to the crook-fingered trees that rose above the sounding pool. Leaves were uncurling from ten thousand tips, What he was being told, he saw, was that he had accomplished nothing in the little park by Art of Memory, nothing at all; that he was as burdened as ever, unrelievably. That couldn't be so. Could he really love her forever, live in the house of her forever, inescapably?

"In summer," he said, "winter is a myth. . . ."

"Yes," said the trout.

"A report, a rumor, not to be believed."

"Yes."

He had loved her and she had left him, without reason, without farewell. If he loved her always, if there was no death of love, then she would always leave him, always without reason, always without farewell. Between those eternal stones bright and dark he would be ground small forever. It couldn't be so.

"Forever," he said. "No."

"Forever," said his great-grandfather. "Yes."

It was so. He knew, eyes blind with tears and heart black with terror, that he had exorcised nothing, not one moment, not one glance, no, he had by his Art only refined and burnished every moment of Sylvie that he had been given, not one of them was returnable now forever. Summer had come, and all serene autumns and all winters peaceful as any grave were myth and no help.

"No fault of your own," Grandfather Trout said.

"I must say," Auberon said, wiping tears and snot from his face with the sleeve of his coat, "you're not a lot of comfort."

The trout answered nothing. He hadn't expected thanks.

"You don't know where she is. Or why I should be done by this way. Or what I should do. And then you tell me it won't pass." He sniffed. "No fault of my own. Big help that is."

There was a long silence. The fish's wavering white form regarded him and his grief unblinking. "Well," he said at last. "There is a gift in it for you."

"Gift. What gift."

"Well, I don't know. Exactly. But I'm sure there's a gift. You don't get nothing for something."

"Oh;" Auberon could sense the fish's effort to be kind. "Well. Thanks. Whatever it is."

"Nothing to do with me," Grandfather Trout said. Auberon stared into the water's silky folded surface. If he had a net. Grandfather Trout sank slightly and said, "Well, listen." But after that he said nothing more; and by slow degrees sank out of sight.

Auberon rose. The morning mist had burned away, the sun was hot, and the birds were ecstatic—it was all that they had hoped it would be. He made his way down the stream through all this gladness, and out along the path to the pasture. The house, beyond whispering trees, was pastel in the morning, and seemed to be just opening its eyes. A dark smudge in the spring, he stumbled through the pasture, wet to his knees with dew. It can last forever: it will. There would be a bus he could catch at evening, a bus that by a roundabout path met another bus that went south along the gray highways, through thickening suburbs, to the broad bridge or to the tiled tunnel, and then out onto the horrid streets that led by old geometries smoked and full of wretchedness to Old Law Farm and the Folding Bedroom in the City where Sylvie was or was not. He stopped walking. He felt himself to be a dry stick, that dry stick that the Pope in the story gave to the sinful knight who had loved Venus, and who would not be redeemed until it blossomed. And there was no blossoming in him.

Grandfather Trout, within whose pool spring was also unfolding, fringing his private holes with tender weed and bringing bugs to term, wondered if there really would be a gift for the boy. Probably not. They didn't give out such things when they didn't have to. But the boy had been so sad. What harm in telling him? Give him heart. Grandfather Trout's was not an affectionate soul, not now, not after all these years; but this was after all spring, and the boy was after all flesh of his flesh, or so they said. He hoped anyway that if there was a gift in it, it wouldn't be one that would cause the boy any great suffering.


Quite Long-Sighted

"Of course I'd always known about them," Ariel Hawksquill said to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. "In the practical, or experimental, stage of my studies, they were always a nuisance. Elementals. The experiments seemed to draw them, like a bowl of peaches drawing a cloud of fruit flies from nowhere, or a walk in the woods drawing chickadees. There were times I couldn't go up and down the stairs to my sanctum—where I worked with the glasses and mirrors and so on, you know—without a crowd of them at my heels and head, Annoying. You couldn't ever be sure they weren't affecting your results."

She sipped at the sherry the Emperor had ordered for her. He was pacing the parlor of his suite, not paying close attention. The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club had departed in some confusion, not sure whether any conclusion had been come to, and feeling vaguely fleeced. "What," Barbarossa said, "do we do now? That's the question. I think the time is ripe to strike. The sword's unsheathed. The Revelation should come soon."

"Hm." The difficulty was that she had never thought of them as having wills. Like angels, they were forces only, emanations, condensations of occult energy, natural objects really and no more wilful than stones or sunlight. That they had shapes which seemed to be able to contain wills, had voices and faces with changeful expressions and flitted about with apparent purpose, she had ascribed to that quiddity of human perception that sees faces in the blotches of plaster walls, hostility or friendliness in landscapes, creatures in clouds. Once see a Force, and you will see it with a face, and a character; no help for it. But the Architecture of Country Houses saw the matter very differently: it seemed to state that if there were creatures who were merely expressions of natural forces, the will-less emanations of shaping wills, the medium of spirits who knew what they were doing, then those creatures were men and not fairies. Hawksquill was unwilling to go so far, but she was forced to think that yes, they did have wills as well as powers, and desires as well as duties, and weren't blind, no, quite long-sighted in fact; and where did that leave her?

She really didn't feature being a mere link in a chain woven by other powers, and having nothing to say in the matter, as her upstate cousins apparently thought of themselves. For sure she had no intention of being a subaltern in their army, which is how she supposed they thought of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whatever he thought of the matter. No: with no side was she ready to throw in her lot that completely. The mage is by definition he who manipulates and rules those forces at whose direction the common run blindly live.

She was on thin ice, in fact. The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club could never have been an opponent worthy of her powers. And by as much as she outclassed those gentlemen, by just as much, perhaps, was she outclassed by those who operated Russell Eigenblick. Well: it was anyway to be a contest worthy of her, at last; at last she and what she knew, now when her powers were at their height and her senses sharpest, would be tested as far as they could be tested; and if found wanting, there would at least be no dishonor in the losing.

"Well? Well?" said the Emperor, sitting down heavily.

"No Revelation," she said, and rose. "Not now, if ever."

He started, and his eyebrows shot up.

"My mind is changed," Hawksquill said. "It might be just the thing to be a President for a while."

"But you said . . ."

"As far as I know," Hawksquill said, "that office's powers are legally intact; only disused. Once installed, you could turn them on the Club. They'd be surprised. Throw them . . ."

"Into prison. Have them done secretly to death."

"No; but perhaps into the toils of the Legal System at least; from which, if recent history is any guide, they will not emerge for a long time, and then considerably weakened, and much poorer—nickeled and dimed to death, as we used to say."

He grinned at her from his chair, a long, wolfish, conspirator's grin which almost made her laugh. He crossed his large blunt fingers over his stomach and nodded, pleased. Hawksquill turned to the window, thinking Why him? Why him of all people? And thought: if the mice in a household were suddenly given some vote or say in its management, whom would they elect housekeeper?

"And I suppose," she said, "in many ways, being President of this country, just now, wouldn't be altogether different from being Emperor of your old Empire." She smiled at him over her shoulder, and he looked up at her from under his red brows to see if he were being mocked. "The same splendors, I mean," Hawksquill said mildly, raising her glass to the window light. "The same joys. The same sorrows . . . How long, in any case, did you expect to reign now?"

"Oh, I don't know," he said. He yawned hugely, complacently. "From now on, I suppose. Ever after."

"That's what I thought," Hawksquill said. "In that case, there's no need to be hasty, is there?"

From the east, across the ocean, evening was gathering; a complex, lurid sunset was spilled in the west as from a broken vessel. From this window's height, out of its orgulous expanse of glass, the struggle between them could be observed, a show laid on for the rich and mighty who lived in high places. Ever after . . . It seemed to Hawksquill, watching the battle, that the whole world was just at that moment lapsing into a long dream, or perhaps awaking from one; it was impossible to tell which. But when she turned from the window to remark on this, she saw that the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was asleep in his chair, snoring softly, his faint breath blowing out the hairs of his red moustache and his face as peaceful as any sleeping child's: as if, Hawksquill thought, he had never really awakened at all.


Ever After

"Oho," George Mouse said when at last he opened the door of Old Law Farm to find Auberon on the stoop. Auberon had been long pounding and calling (somewhere in his wanderings he had lost all his keys) and now faced George ashamed, the prodigal cousin.

"Hi," he said.

"Hey," George said. "Long time no hear from."

"Yeh."

"You had me worried, man. What the hell was that about, running off? Hell of a thing."

"Looking for Sylvie."

"Oh, yeah, hey, you left her brother in the Folding Bedroom. A sweet guy, really. So you find her?"

"No."

"Oh."

They stood facing each other. Auberon, still bemused by his own sudden reappearance in these streets, could not think of a way to ask George to take him back, though it seemed that it was for that that he stood before him. George only smiled and nodded, his black eyes alert to something not present: stoned again, Auberon supposed. Though May was just unfolding in Edgewood, the City's single week of spring had come and passed, and summer was full there already, putting forth its richest odors, like a lover in heat. Auberon had forgotten.

"So," George said.

"So," Auberon said.

"Back in Bigtown, huh?" George said. "Were you thinking . . ."

"Can I come back?" Auberon said. "I'm sorry."

"Hey, no. Swell. Lot's to do just now. The Folding Bedroom's empty . . . How long were you thinking? . . ."

"Oh, I don't know," Auberon said. "From now on, I guess. Ever after."

He was a flung ball, that's all, he saw that clearly now; flung outward from Edgewood at first, leaping high, bounding to the City, then ricocheting madly within that maze, the walls and objects he struck the determiners of his way, until (not by his choice) he had been flung back Edgewoodwards again to carom there, angles of incidence equaling angles of reflection; and then back again to these streets, to this Farm. And even the most tensile of balls must have a stop, must bounce more lowly, then more lowly, and at last roll only, parting the grass; then, resisted even by the grass, must slow, and with a little rocking motion come to rest.


Three Lilacs

George seemed then to realize that they stood there in an open door, and, darting his head out for a quick look down the fearful street to see who might be approaching, drew Auberon within and locked the door behind them, as he had once before on a winter night in another world.

"You got some mail and stuff," he said as he led Auberon down the hall and down the stairs to the kitchen; and then said something more, about goats and tomatoes, but Auberon heard nothing more because of a sudden roaring of blood in his ears and a fearful thought about a gift, which filled up his head; a roaring and a thought which continued to fill up his head while George aimlessly searched amid the treasures of the kitchen for the letters, stopping to put questions and make remarks. Only when he saw that Auberon neither heard nor answered did he apply himself and come up with two long envelopes, which had been put in a toast-rack along with some ancient dunning letters and souvenir menus.

A glance told Auberon that neither was from Sylvie. His fingers trembled, though pointlessly now, as he opened them. Petty, Smilodon & Ruth were pleased to inform him that Doctor Drinkwater's will had at last been settled. They included an accounting which showed that, less advances and costs, his share of the settlement was $34.17. If he would come in and sign some papers he would receive this amount in full. The other envelope, a heavy wove paper with an expensive-looking logo, yielded up a letter from the producers of "A World Elsewhere." They had gone very carefully over his scripts. The story ideas were terrific and vivid but the dialogue was somewhat unconvincing. Still, if he cared to work over these scripts or try another, they thought a place could be found for him soon among the show's junior writers; they hoped to hear from him, or were anyway hoping last year. Auberon laughed. At least he'd have, perhaps, a job; perhaps he would continue Doc's endless chronicle of the Green Meadow and the Wild Wood, though not in the way Doc would have.

"Good news?" George said, making coffee.

"You know," Auberon said, "There's some very strange things going on in the world lately. Very strange."

"Tell me about it," George said, meaning the opposite.

Auberon realized that coming out of his long drunk he was just now noticing things that everyone else had already learned to live with. As though he were suddenly to turn to his fellow man and announce that, hey, the sky is blue, or point out that the aged trees along the street were in leaf. "Were there always big trees along this street?" he asked George.

"That ain't the worst of it," George said. "The roots are breaking up my basements. And just try to get through to the Parks Department. Hopeless." He put coffee before Auberon. "Milk? Sugar?"

"Black."

"Curiouser and curiouser," George said, stirring his coffee with a tiny souvenir coffee-spoon though he had put nothing in it. "Sometimes I think I'll blow this burg. Go back into fireworks. There's going to be big bucks in fireworks now, I bet, with all the celebrations."

"Hm?"

"Eigenblick and all that. Parades, shows. He's very into that stuff. And fireworks."

"Oh." Since his night and morning with Bruno, it had been a policy of Auberon's not to think or ask questions about Russell Eigenblick. Love was strange: it could color whole passages of the world, and ever after they retained the color of love, whether that color was bright or dark. He thought of Latin music, souvenir T-shirts, certain City streets and places, the nightingale. "You were in fireworks?"

"Sure. You didn't know that? Hey. The biggest. Name in the papers, man. It was a lot of laughs."

"It wasn't ever mentioned at home," Auberon said, feeling the familiar exclusion. "Not to me."

"No?" George looked at him strangely. "Well, it all came to a kind of sudden end. Just about the time you were born."

"Oh yeah? How come?"

"Circumstances, man, circumstances." He stared into his coffee, a pensiveness odd for George having fallen on him. Then, seeming to come to a decision, he said, "You know you had a sister, named Lilac."

"Sister?" This was a new idea. "Sister?"

"Well, yeah, sister."

"No. Sophie had a baby, named Lilac, that went away. I had an imaginary friend, named Lilac. But no sister." He pondered. "I always kind of thought there were three, though. I don't know why."

"Sophie's baby's the one I'm talking about. I always thought the story up there was . . . Well, never mind."

But Auberon had had enough. "No, uh-uh, wait a minute. No 'never mind.' " George looked up startled and guilty at Auberon's tone. "If there's a story, I want to hear it."

"It's a long one."

"All the better."

George pondered. He got up, put on his old cardigan and sat down again. "Okay. You asked for it." He thought for a time how to begin. Decades of odd drugs made him a vivid but not always a coherent story-teller. "Fireworks. Three Lilacs, did you say?"

"One was imaginary."

"Shit. I wonder what makes the other two. Anyway, there was one in there that was false: like a false nose. I mean exactly like. That's the fireworks story: that one.

"See, a long time ago, one day, Sophie and I. . . Well, it was one winter day when I went up to Edgewood, and she and I . . . But I didn't think anything came of it, you know? Sort of a crazy fling. I wrote it off. I mean she had me fooled. Meanwhile, I knew there was a thing between her and Smoky." He looked at Auberon. "Common knowledge, right?"

"Wrong."

"You didn't . . . They didn't . . ."

"They never told me anything. I knew there'd been a baby, Lilac, of Sophie's. Then she was gone. That's all I knew."

"Well, listen. As far as I know, Smoky still thinks he's Lilac's father. So, you know, mum is definitely the word on this story. Wazza matter?"

Auberon was laughing. "No, nothing," he said. "Yeah, sure, mum's the word."

"Anyway. This is—what?—twenty-five years ago maybe. I'd gotten heavily into fireworks, because of Act Theory. Remember Act Theory? No? Jesus, things don't last long in that line these days, do they. Act Theory, dig—God, I don't know if I remember now how it worked myself, but it was this idea about how life works—how life is acts, and not thoughts or things: an act is a thought and a thing both at once, only it has this shape, see, so it can be analyzed. Every act, no matter what kind, pick up a cup, or a whole life, or like all of evolution, every act has the same shape; two acts together are another act with the same shape; all life is only one big act, made up of a million smaller ones, follow?"

"Not really."

"Don't matter. It was the reason I got into fireworks though, because a rocket has the same form as an act: initiation, burning, explosion, burning out. Only sometimes that rocket, that act, sets off another initiation, burning, explosion, and soon, get the picture? And so you can set up a display that has the same form as life. Acts, acts, all acts. Shells: inside one shell you can pack a bunch of others, which go off after the big one, packed in like a chicken is packed inside an egg, and inside that chicken more eggs with more chickens, and so on odd infinooty. Gerbs: a gerb has the same form as the feeling of being alive: a bunch of little explosions and burnings going on all the time, burning out, initiating, burning out, that all together make a picture, like thought makes pictures in the middle of the air."

"What's a gerb?"

"A gerb, man. Chinese fire. You know, that makes a picture of two battleships shooting at each other, and that turns into Old Glory."

"Oh, yeah."

"Yeah. Lancework we call those. Just like thinking. A few people got that, too. Some critics." He said nothing for a time, remembering vividly the river barge where he'd set off The Act Entrained and other shows. Darkness, and the slap of oily water; the smell of punk. And then the sky filled up with fire, which is like life, which is light that ignites and consumes and goes out and for a moment traces a figure in the air that can't be forgotten but vihich, in a sense, was never there. And he racing around like a madman, shouting at his assistants, firing shells from the mortar, his hair singed, throat burning, coat motheaten from cinders, while his thought took shape above.

"About Lilac," Auberon said.

"Yeah? Oh, yeah. Well, I'd been working for weeks for a new show. I had some new ideas about garnitures, and it was—well, it was my life, man, night and day. So one night . . ."

"Garnitures?"

"Garnitures are the part of the rocket that goes blooey at the end, like a flower. Y'see, you got your rocket, and here's your case with your composition that burns and gets it aloft; and up here you got your, what you call your cap, and that's where your garniture goes—stars, pinched stars, pumped stars—"

"Okay. Go on."

"So I'm up on the third floor in this workshop I had fitted out up there—top floor, in case anything went, you know, the whole building wouldn't go—it's late, and I hear the bell ring. Bells still worked in those days. So I put down the case and stuff—you can't just walk away from a roomful of fireworks, you know—and all the time the bell's going, and I go down, who is this wise guy leaning on the bell. It was Sophie.

"It was a cold night, raining, I remember, and she had this shawl on, and that face in the shawl. She looked about dead, like she hadn't slept for days. Big eyes like saucers, and tears, or maybe it was the rain on her face. She had this big bundle in her arms in another shawl, and I said what's up and so on, and she said, 'I've brought Lilac,' and she pulled the shawl away from this thing she had."

George shuddered, deeply, the shudder seeming to start at his loins and work upward till it flew off the top of his head, making his hair rise—the shudder of one whose future grave, they say, is somewhere stepped on. "Remember, man, I never knew about any of this. I didn't know I was a daddy. I hadn't heard from up that way in a year. And suddenly there's Sophie, standing on the stoop like a bad dream saying Here's your daughter, man, and showing me this baby, if that's what it was.

"Man, this baby was in trouble.

"It looked old. I guess it was supposed to be about two now, but it looked about forty-five, a little withered bald guy, with this sly little face like some middle-aged furrier with troubles." George laughed, a strange laugh. "It was supposed to be a girl, remember. God, it gave me a start. So we're standing there, and the kid puts out its hand like this"—palm up, flat—"and checks the rain, and pulls the scarf over its head. Hey. What could I say? The kid made itself clear. I brought them in.

"We came in here. She set the kid up in that high chair. I couldn't look at it, but I like couldn't look away. And Sophie told me the story: her and me, that afternoon, strange as it may seem, she's figured the dates blahblahblah, Lilac is my kid. But—dig this—not this one. She's figured it out: the true Lilac got changed, one night, for this one. This one isn't real at all. Not the real Lilac, not even a real baby. I'm stunned. I'm reeling around saying What! What! And all the time"—he started laughing again, helplessly—"this kid is sitting there with this attitude—I can't describe it—this sneer on its face like okay, okay, I've heard this tripe a million times—like it was bored—and all I could think was that it needed a cigar in its mouth, just to complete the picture.

"Sophie was like in shock. Shivering. Trying to tell me all this stuff at once. Then she stopped, couldn't go on. It seems the kid was all right at first, she never knew the difference; she couldn't even tell what night it was when it happened, 'cause she seemed so normal. And beautiful. Only quiet. Real quiet. Like passive. Then—a few months before—it started to change. Very slowly. Then faster. It started to sort of wither. But it wasn't sick. Doc checked it at first, all okay, big appetite, smiling—but getting old, like. Oh God. I put an afghan around her and started making tea and I'm saying Calm down! Calm down! And she's telling me how it dawned on her what must have happened—I just wasn't convinced yet, man, I thought this kid should see a specialist—and then how she started hiding it from everybody, and they started asking hey, how's Lilac, how come we never see her around anymore." Another fit of unwilled laughter. George was on his feet now, acting out the parts of the story, especially his own bewilderment, and suddenly he turned wide-eyed to the empty high chair. "Then we look. The kid is gone.

"Not in the chair. Not underfoot.

"The door's open. Sophie's dazed, she lets out a little cry—Ah!—and looks at me. See, I was its daddy. I was supposed to do something. That's why she'd come and all. God. Just the thought of this thing running around loose in my house gave me the willies. I went out in the hall. Nobody. Then I saw it climbing up the stairs. Stair by stair. It looked—what's the word—purposeful: like it knew where it was going. So I said, 'Hey, wait a second, buster—' I couldn't think of it as a girl—and I reached for its arm. It felt weird, cold and dry, like leather. It looked back at me with this look of hate—who the f*ck are you—and it gave a pull away, and I pulled back, and—" George sat again, overcome. "It tore. I tore a hole in the god damn thing. Rrrrip. A hole opened up near its shoulder, and you could look in, like into a doll—empty. I let go fast. It didn't seem to be hurt, it just flapped the arm, like damn now it's busted, and crawled on; and its blanket was coming off, and I could see there were some other cracks and splits here and there—at the knees, you know, and the ankles. This kid was falling apart.

"Okay. Okay. What could I think then? I came back in here. Sophie's bundled up, with these big eyes. 'You're right,' I said. 'It ain't Lilac. And it ain't mine, either.'

"She broke down. Like dissolved. That was the last straw. She just melted, man it was the saddest thing I've ever seen—'You've got to help me, you've got to'—you know. Okay, Okay, I'll help; but what in hell am I supposed to do? She didn't know. Up to me. 'Where is she?' Sophie asked me.

"'Went upstairs,' I said. 'Maybe it's cold. There's a fire up there.' And she suddenly gave me this look—horrified, but just too tired to do anything or even really feel anything—I can't describe it. She grabbed my hand and said, 'Don't let her go near the fire, please, please!'

"Now what's that about? I said, 'Look, you just sit here and get warm and I'll see.' What the hell I was going to see I didn't know. I picked up the baseball bat—be prepared, you know—and I went out, and she was still pleading: 'Don't let her get near the fire.'

George mimed creeping up the stairs, and entering the second-floor drawing-room. "I go in, and there it was. By the fire. Sitting on the whatchacallit, the hearth there. And I can not believe my eyes: because as it sits there it's reaching into the fire—yes!— reaching into the fire and picking out, you know, glowing embers: picking them out, and popping them into its mouth."

He came close to Auberon, this could not be believed unless he gripped Auberon's wrist in pledge of his truthfulness. "And crunching them." George made the gesture: like eating a walnut. "Ca-runch. Ca-runch. And smiling at me—smiling. You could see the coals glowing inside its head. Like a jack o'lantern. Then they'd go out, and it'd pick out another. And boy, it was getting a lot livelier behind this, Chipper, you know, a little refreshment; it jumps up, does a little dance. Naked now, too, Like a little broken evil plaster cherub. I swear-to-god nothing: nothing has ever scared me like that. I was so scared I couldn't think, I just moved. You know? Too scared to be scared.

"I went over to the fire. I picked up the shovel. I dug up a whole lotta hot stuff from deep inside the fire. I showed it: mmm mmm good. Follow me, follow me. Okay, it wants to play this game, hot chestnuts, very hot chestnuts, come on, come on, we went out and up the stairs, it keeps reaching for the shovel; uh-uh, no no, I keep leading it on.

"Now listen, man. I don't know if I was crazy or what. All I knew was that this thing was evil: I mean not evil evil, because I don't think it was anything, I mean it was like a doll or a puppet or a machine, but moving on its own, like awful things in dreams that you know aren't alive, piles of old clothes or mounds of grease that suddenly get up and start threatening you, okay? Dead, but moving. Animated. But evil, I mean an awful evil thing to have in the world. All I could think of was: get rid of it. Lilac or no Lilac. Just. Get. Rid of it.

"So anyway it's following me. And up on the third floor across from the library is my, you know, my studio. Okay? Get the picture? The door is closed, of course; I closed it when I came down, always did, can't be too careful. So I'm fumbling with it, and the thing is looking at me with these eyes that weren't eyes, and oh shit any minute now it's going to figure out the scam. I shove the shovel under it's nose. The damn door won't open, won't open, then it does—and—"

With a mighty imaginary gesture, George heaved the shovelful of live coals into the studio filled with charged fireworks. Auberon held his breath.

"And then for the kid—"

With a swift, careful kick, side of the foot, George propelled the false Lilac into the studio also.

"And then the door!" He flung shut the door, staring at Auberon with the same wild horror and hurry that must have been in his eyes that night. "So done! Done! I flew down the stairs. 'Sophie! Sophie! Run!' She's still sitting in that chair—right there—paralyzed. So I picked her up—not exactly carried her, but like a bum's rush, because I can already hear the noises upstairs—and get her out into the hall. Bang! Blooey! Out the front door.

"And we stood out there in the rain, man, just looking up. Or anyway I looked up, she just sort of hid her head. And out the studio windows comes my whole show. Stars. Rockets. Magnesium, phosphorus, sulfur. Light for days. Noise. Stuff is falling all around us, hissing in the puddles. Then blowey! Some big cache goes up, and puts a hole right through the roof. Smoke and stars, boy we lit up the neighborhood. But the rain had got a lot worse; and pretty soon it was out, about the time the cops and the fire-trucks got there.

"Well, I had the studio pretty well reinforced, you know, steel door and asbestos and stuff, so the building didn't go. But by God if there was anything left of that kid, or whatever it was . . ." .

"And Sophie?" Auberon said.

"Sophie," George said. "I told her: 'Listen, it's all right. I got it.'

"'What?' she says. 'What?'

"'I got it,' I said. 'I blew it up,' I said. 'Nothing left of it.'

"And hey: do you know what she said to me?"

Auberon could not say.

"She looked up at me—and man I don't think anything I saw that night was as bad as her face just then—and she said: 'You killed her.'

"That's what she said. 'You killed her.' That's all."

George sat down, weary, depleted, at the kitchen table. "Killed her," he said. "That's what Sophie thought, that I'd killed her only child. Maybe that's what she still thinks, I don't know. That old George killed her only child, and his too. Blew her up, in stars and stripes forever." He looked down. "Man, I don't want to see somebody look at me the way she did that night, not ever again."

"What a story," Auberon said, when he could find his voice again.

"See, if," George said. "If it was Lilac, but just transformed in some weird way . . ."

"But she knew," Auberon said. "She knew it wasn't really Lilac."

"Did she?" George said. "Who knows what the hell she knew." A dark silence rose. "Women. How do you figure 'em."

"But," Auberon said, "what I don't understand is, why they would have brought her that thing in the first place. I mean if it was such a fake."

George eyed him suspiciously. "What 'they' is this?" he asked.

Auberon looked away from his cousin's inquiry. "Well, they," he said, surprised and oddly embarrassed that this explanation was coming out of his mouth. "The ones who stole the real one."

"Hm," George said.

Auberon said nothing further, having nothing further to say on that head, and seeing quite plainly and for the first time in his life just why silence had been kept so well among those whom he had used to spy on. Having them for explanation felt in fact like having none at all, and he found himself now, willy-nilly, sworn to the same silence; and yet he thought he would not ever again be able to explain a single thing in the world without recourse to that collective pronoun: they. Them.

"Well, anyway," he said at last. "That accounts for two."

George raised his eyebrow in question.

"Two Lilacs," Auberon said. He counted them off: "Of the three I thought there were, one was imaginary, mine, and I know where she is." In fact he felt her, deep within, take notice of his mention of her. "One was false. That's the one you blew up."

"But if," George said, "if that was the real one, only Somehow changed . . . Naaah."

"No," said Auberon. "That's the one that's left, the one that's unaccounted for: the true one." He looked out the casement at the gloaming which was stealing now over Old Law Farm as well as over the high towers of the City. "I wonder," he said.

"I wonder . . ." George said. "I'd give a lot to know."

"Where," Auberon said. "Where, where."


Thinking of Waking

Far, far, and dreaming: turning in her sleep, restless, and thinking of waking, though she would not wake yet for many a year; an itch in her nose, and a yawn in her throat. She even blinked, but saw nothing through sleeping eyes but dream: a dream, amid the spring she slept in, of autumn: of the gray vale where, on the day of her tour, the stork that bore her and Mrs. Underhill had at last put its feet on terra firma or something like it, and how Mrs. Underhill had sighed and dismounted, and how she, Lilac, had reached out to put her arms around Mrs. Underhill's neck and be helped down. . . . She yawned; having learned how to do it, she was now apparently unable to stop, and couldn't decide whether she liked the sensation or not.

"Sleepy," Mrs. Underhill said.

"Where is this?" Lilac said when she had been set on her feet.

"Oh, a place," Mrs. Underhill said softly. "Come along."

A broken arch, roughly carved, or finely carved and roughly weathered, stood before them; no walls extended from it, it stood alone astride the leaf-littered path showing the only way into the sere November wood beyond. Lilac, apprehensive yet resigned now, put her young small hand in Mrs. Underhill's old huge one, and like any granny and child in a chill park from which summer and fun have fled, they went on to the gate; the stork stood alone on one red leg, preening her rumpled and disordered leathers.

They passed under the arch. Old birds' nests and moss filled its coffers and reliefs. The carving was obscure, creatures inchoate or returning to chaos. Lilac passed her hand over it as they passed: the stuff it was made of was not stone. Glass? Lilac wondered. Bone?

"Horn," said Mrs. Underhill. She took off one of her many cloaks, and dressed Lilac's nakedness in it. Lilac kicked the brown leaves of the vale, thinking it might be nice to lie down in them, for a long time.

"Well, a long day," said Mrs. Underhill, as though sensing this thought.

"It went too fast," Lilac said.

Mrs. Underhill put her arm around Lilac's shoulder. Lilac stumbled against her, her feet seeming to have lost contact with her will. She yawned again. "Aw," said Mrs. Underhill tenderly, and she picked up Lilac with a single swift motion of her strong arms. She drew the cloak more tightly around her as Lilac nestled against her. "And was it fun?" she asked.

"It was fun," Lilac said.

They had stopped before a great oak at whose foot a whole summer's worth of leaves was piled. From a hollow in it an owl, just awakened, boomed softly to itself. Mrs. Underhill bent to lay her burden in the rustling leaves.

"Dream of it," she said.

Lilac said something that made no sense, about clouds and houses, and then no more, for she was asleep. Asleep, never having noticed the moment when she began, dreaming of it already as she would go on dreaming of it from now on; dreaming of all that she had seen, and all that would come of it; dreaming of the spring when she would dream of the autumn when she fell asleep, and dreaming of the winter when she would wake; in the involution of her dream, turning and altering those things she dreamed even as she dreamed them and as elsewhere they came to pass. She drew up, though unaware she did so, her knees; she drew her hands close to her chin, which drew down, till she took the same S-shape she had taken when she had lived within Sophie. Lilac was asleep.

Mrs. Underhill tucked the cloak once more carefully around her, and then straightened up. With both hands she pressed the small of her back and bent backwards, as weary as she had ever been. She pointed to the owl, whose soft-blooming eyes were looking out from its house, and said, "You. Take care, watch well," which those eyes could do as well as anypair she knew. She looked upward. Twilight, even the endless twilight of this November day, had nearly ended, and she with all her tasks left undone: the last of the year still unburied, and the rains that were to bury it (and a million insect larvae, a million bulbs and seeds) yet unpoured; the floor of heaven unswept of dirty cloud and its winter lamps still to be lit. Brother North-wind, she was sure, champed at his bit to be unleashed. It was a wonder, she thought, that day followed night, that the very earth turned at all, she had given it so little thought of late. She sighed, turned away, and (growing huger and older and more puissant than Lilac had ever supposed, or could imagine or even dream her to be) she expanded upward and outward toward these tasks without a backward look at her adopted grand-daughter asleep among the leaves.