And had it been because his hand was open and his heart too that on those streets he had, just about then, acquired one of the legendary passes that circulated on certain days and times in what was assumed to be random fashion (though you were never exactly surprised at having one pressed into your hand or slipped to you across a bar or left for you in the pigeonhole of the downtown hotel where no one knew you slept): a white cardboard oblong with only a number and the letters MM on it? If you did not know what the letters signified you tossed the thing away with a sense maybe of having avoided being tricked or cheated, but if you did know you experienced a hot rush of blessing, having been given, for nothing, by fate, what others sought to pay fabulous sums for.
MM. It was underneath Park Avenue somewhere, reached by way of the tunnels that fed people into the subways and trains from the American Metal Climax building, the Cyanamid building, the Metatron building, towers whose weight you could feel above you and that you imagined might go down as far as they went up, mirror Babels or Babylons. (It was believed that you could also reach the place by heading down along the New York Central tracks from the old private station under the Waldorf-Astoria where FDR used to pull in, to exit in his chair out of sight of the newsreel cameras and then appear later erect and grinning at a ball or banquet; more than one party was lost going that way, hope and Evereadys giving out amid the drip of seep and the chitter of rats.) The door when you found it was white, unremarkable, marked with the same MM in black sans serif, no Day-Glo or art-nouveau exfoliation; once past it, and another like it, you took further passageways all tending downward and filled with progressively less light and more sound, music, insistent mechanized yearning and throbbing; then after a last and smallest door the place opened up like the great chamber a spelunker comes upon after wriggling through cold narrow caves for unmeasured time: a space apparently unending because so dark, crossed overhead with ductwork and pipes hugely coupled and ramifying, moist and hissing. Wide is the gate and easy is the way: people occupy the floors and bars and fill the vast transparent beds and turquoise pools and the music actually shakes the smoke that fills the air, Beau had marvelled to see that, the wisps and fumes of it standing trembling in the thunder like souls: the rich smell of it, and of the cheapest and strongest incenses from most of the countries he had dwelt in or passed through. And the universal smell as well, nostril-widening, shocking, unmistakable. Suspended overhead in glass was the famous silkscreen of the titular goddess of the place, not one copy but ten or twenty, it being of no consequence which were originals and which knockoffs, they all had the same mouth, and the lidded eyes at once hurt and dangerous, at once having and wanting. Lost and found. Child and whore. Savior never saved.
All protest against the Powers starts with the flouting of their command be fruitful and multiply: Beau knew that. Make no more bodies in which the lost light is caught and suffers. Which, with the Pill and all, had just in that time and place become possible, even common. “Copulation Without Generation is Salvation,” the famed orgiast Mal Cichy said or shouted once into Beau’s ear in the “Venusberg Room” at MM. “Fuck your way to freedom.” The Phibionites for instance (Tertullian saith) aimed to consume the seed produced in 365 sexual couplings with 365 different partners, one for each Æon that separates us from God. “Not a big number,” said Mal, prolific producer and consumer of seed, at once lithe and porcine, his every maxim an offer too.
Escapism was what this was called by concerned commentators in the papers then, this and so much else that so many people were thinking up then to do, and Beau supposed that was exact, especially the ism part, implying a program, a commitment, even a hope. Except that the headshakers seemed to think escape was easy when just the opposite is the case, as usual the valuation had got reversed and the escapists who were held up as examples—the maddened addicts and the pleasure suicides and the soiled bodies uncollected at MM when the lights came on past dawn—were precisely those who had not escaped, those who even after fabulous exertions hadn’t made it, crashing shattered and aflame like flop experiments in aviation, ærialists falling prey to hateful gravity, escape artists who had been unable to wriggle out of the last wrapping of chains, the last padlocked carette. Beau encountering them in that underground didn’t know (but he could tell now, looking backwards) that his vocation had revealed itself to him there: that once he had failed often enough himself he would then spend years finding and caring for others who had failed: offer himself for them to love, a path by which they could maybe really get out of themselves: out of there where, despite all their efforts, they were stuck more firmly than ever.
The place was gone now, of course, MM: Beau walking downtown was sure of that. It had become for good the fiction that most people always thought it was. The Powers were changing their masks, and so the stories they issue, that we enact, must change as well. Beau kept on, down past Madison Square, arriving at length at a genteel and shabby brownstone on East Twenty-fifth Street off Lexington (the one neighborhood in Manhattan that has no name) where were housed the offices of the Astra Literary Agency: that is, the apartment and book-crowded bedroom of Julie Rosengarten, who was Pierce Moffett’s agent and—once upon a time, the time when Beau himself lived in these streets—Pierce’s lover too. Beau knew her at first from MM, to which she had come after her time with Pierce: among the first of those Beau’s opened eyes saw truly.
“Something has happened in Hell,” Julie Rosengarten was just then writing on a long yellow pad at her desk. “An ancient evil has burst its bounds”—she pondered this, then struck out “bounds” and wrote “bonds” instead—“and threatens to engulf the world.” She liked “engulf,” a word she wasn’t sure she had ever written down before. “What dark destiny from another time connects an autistic boy in a small Maine town to the CEO of a giant munitions corporation, a faded movie queen, and the keeper of the poisonous snakes in the Central Park Zoo?” She was aware of footsteps on the stair outside, and wondered a little, for she was almost always entirely alone here weekdays; some departing tenant had probably once again left the street door open. An ancient evil. A nameless ancient evil. “Alone and unregarded they battle for their own souls and the soul of the world.”
A sweetly deferential and yet definite knock on her own door. She saw she had used the word “world” twice. And what was the soul of the world? Something that Beau Brachman would be able to tell her maybe.
She opened the door to him.
“Oh my God. I just this second thought of you.”
“Hi, Julie.”
“What is it?” Beau had never visited her here before.
“Can I come in, Julie? I won’t stay long.”
“Oh God, of course come in.” She stood aside for him, seeing as though through his eyes as he entered her chaotic place, the piles of bound galleys, the lurid covers of romances and fantasies, the typescript of the nameless-ancient-evil book she had been blurbing, a book she knew was going to make her some money; she didn’t know which made her more uneasy as Beau came in, the book or the money.
He let her make him tea, and ate the bread she gave him slowly and with what appeared to be delight; Beau’s abstemiousness always looked like a kind of shy delight, Julie didn’t think he really meant it that way and maybe the delight was only hers, just to be in his company again. It’s been so long, she said, though it wasn’t like they hadn’t been in touch: she had called him in some alarm and fear the night of the big wind in September (she had called a few people that night, shocked at her phone bill the following month).
“Where are you going, Beau? How far?”
“I don’t know. Not far, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Are you going out to the Coast? Will you meet the guys?”
“I can’t say, Julie. I don’t know.”
That he had been set in motion was news enough for Julie Rosen-garten.
Once, she had been sure she would see the inception of a world entirely different from the one she had been born
into, had sat one summer on the bluffs above the sea at Montauk waiting for the Old City to arise from the blue water, feeling delight not only in the huge possibility but in her own aptitude in imagining it, which seemed to be power. It was Beau who had told her no, it’s not a possibility, it’s a certainty: but it won’t be a city from the sea, it will be some small and unnoticed thing, apparently one of a million identical things but not identical, you will very likely miss it even if it’s in your own backyard; which doesn’t mean you don’t keep looking and waiting.
“What should I do, Beau? If I can help I’ll do what I can.”
“Tell stories, Julie.”
“Oh boy,” she said helplessly. “Well gee.”
Beau always talked as though she had chosen the work that she did because of the help she could be to the world, which was shaming, sort of; he told her she had a big responsibility, because after all the world is made out of stories.
“There are different kinds of stories,” Beau said, as though Julie knew this very well. “There are stories that are like—like wallpaper, or chocolate. And there are stories that are like food and shelter. And in certain times people hunger for that kind, and in those times there have to be tellers of them. Not to have them is dangerous.”
“Who could tell that kind now,” Julie said or asked. “Who could.”
“They aren’t only told. I think that when they are needed, they’re found too, in lives and in the world. The newspapers and TV tell them as though they were really happening, and they are.”
“Which ones are they?”
“Not many. I’m thinking that right now there’s only one.”
“Just one?”
“It’s told in so many ways though,” Beau said. He closed his eyes and began to speak as though counting or recounting. “Someone or something is lost and needs to be rescued or awakened or saved,” he said. “It’s a woman or a man, or it’s a child. Or it’s not a person, it’s an animal or a stone or something of your own or your family’s, something valuable or just magnetic, something you need to have. Sometimes you find it. Sometimes you find out that whatever it is that has to be found isn’t the thing or person you thought, but another one, one you knew about all along but didn’t recognize.”
“Right in your own backyard.”
“Or you are the one that’s lost, waiting to be found, or searching for a way back or a clue or.”
“Do you always find it?”
“No. Sometimes you fail, and what you have to tell is the story of how you failed. Maybe you took dangerous journeys, journeys that other people don’t perceive to be dangerous, or even to be journeys; maybe you gave up, and turned back. Or maybe you didn’t even dare to go. Maybe you refused, and the refusal might cause you some kind of awful shame and guilt, so you’re seeking always ever after for relief, and in your seeking you find what was lost anyway.”
“So okay,” said Julie.
“Worse sometimes is when you do find it. Like the people you see on the street in this city, every city, who push their carts and busted baby carriages full of junk. These terrible burdens. Every day they find the thing that was lost, the all-important thing, they save it, and they go on, and then they find it again a little while later. And again.”
“Oh God.”
“It might be that it’s to those people the story comes first; that the burden is theirs first. It might be that there has to always be one or some of them.”
“It would be hard to do that,” Julie said, and lifted her eyes to the solid walls around her.
“Hard,” Beau said. “How about if your task was to find some one, not something, but someone who is also a seeker, so someone who’s always faced the other way, who you can’t get to turn and face you.”
“How do you think these up.”
Beau laughed. “If it was me thinking them up,” he said, “I might know how I did it. But it’s not.”
As usual it was impossible to know if Beau meant exactly what he said, or if what he said applied to the world she lived in most of the time or to another one that was a lot like it but different. She thought of all the books she had sold or tried to sell, many of those that were around her now whose covers and titles Beau’s eyes passed over, and she thought well what the heck, most of them are just the kind Beau described; she didn’t think they had been food or shelter for anyone, or there would not need to be so many of them; and so what was she in business for?
“Maybe the thing that has to be found, now, is just the right story of what was lost.”
That was Julie who spoke. All of those who had lived around Beau for long had this experience now and then of saying things that they hadn’t known they were going to say, and didn’t know what they meant, or if they meant. Julie knew this. She knew the sadness too that came with his company and didn’t pass away when he left, along with the joy of having had him nearby; the sadness that was maybe Beau’s sadness though felt as her own, the sadness for which lost was the word. And for which found was the word as well.
3
Pierce that night dreamed that Rose told him how she had escaped, and been rescued.
“I ran away,” she told him. “I could see them all, the others, going the wrong way away over the hills, so many of them. I don’t know if they were looking for me. I walked a long time alone. Then a band of other people saw me, and pointed, and started calling to me; and I was afraid. But when they came close I could see that they were kind. They talked to me a long time, days maybe, and everything made sense. The weather was so clear and dry. They asked if I wanted to come with them. They told me I would be safe with them, and I knew I would be.”
Pierce in his dream both listened to her talk and saw her among her rescuers, not as though he were one of them but still as though he looked on her too. When they had all rested they moved on, with her among them, climbing steadily upward into the clear air. With them she gathered food and firewood, and sometimes helped to carry the children, great-eyed placid kids who would grip her waist with their knees and lay their cheeks on hers. We’ll go up along that ridge under the shade of those trees, they said; and all of them, the old people and the kids and the friends she had found, went up under great red-barked trees so calmly tall, and after a time came out into sight of the sea far below.
He awoke in his bed in Littleville, and it was way before dawn, black and cold; he lay in the warmth of the sun he had dreamed of, unmoving for fear of losing what he had found. For he knew how to make this right. He had awakened knowing how to make it and everything wrong come out right from the present backwards. It was a question: a simple question he had to ask her, the question he had not asked.
The morning after the outreach in Conurbana Rose Ryder had driven him back from the city to the Faraways, though back did not seem to be where he came to. He parted from her in his yard; she wanted to come in no more than he wanted her to, she had clearly had it with him by then. He watched her back out and turn to go, working her wheel with knitted brows. He went into his house as though swallowed by it, and sat down in his overcoat on the daybed in his office, feeling the place around him as though it expected something from him. Into the Invisible Bedroom he would not go. Though he had not slept, still he stayed all that day and well into the night awake, the dark waters lapping at his feet.
Once he leapt up, telling himself aloud that after all he wasn’t friendless, he had counsellors. Beau Brachman would know what to do, what to think; he should go out, drive there now; but the darkness and the image in his mind of the rising road defeated him. Well then he’d call. Beau’s phone number was not listed, of course, but Pierce thought he had it somewhere, written down on a matchbook or an envelope from last May, when Beau and he were making plans to go up to Skytop Farm for the balloon festival.
Green May morning, the great balloons arising from the pasture. Rose Ryder departing in a black one with Mike Mucho, and Sam in Mike’s arms. In the womb of that time had lain already the dark fœtus that had grow
n into this time, and yet he and all of them had smiled in the sun and kidded and felt delight and hope.
Here was the number.
He dialed, and waited a long time while it rang. The woman who answered told him Oh no Beau wasn’t there, he was away (she seemed to think Pierce would know this, as though everybody must) and she didn’t know when he would be back. I hope soon she said.
He sat again. He would get up now and then to put a log into his little black stove or go to the bathroom or check the flow of water as the temperature dropped after dark; then return to sit. Which didn’t mean he was not in motion much of the time, across the wastes to which he had come: he trod on league upon league, in time to the beating of his heart, not knowing the right way back but quite sure this wasn’t it; he watched the beauty and interest drain from things, leaving mocking or sullen husks which still had to be dealt with, his shoes, his clothes, his beard, his food; clustering stuff to be pushed aside so he could Think.
By nightfall he felt as heavy as though cast in bronze, and at the same time evanescent, nothing but one burning eyeball and a clockwork heart. He came to believe that he might die; he thought that if he did not get help, if he were not somehow shaken awake, then by dawn he would certainly have gone too far, and not be able ever to return. But who could help him now? Who would be on his side, who had the strength? Who would not simply dismiss his fears, or, worse, share them? He knew of no such person or being.
Well maybe there was one. Her face and name appeared in his consciousness like the ambiguous answers swimming up out of the dark well within the Magic Eight Ball when it was questioned. After a long hour of saying her name to himself like a charm he got to his feet and went to find the telephone book.
As soon as he had finished dialing and heard her phone begin to ring, Pierce realized in horror that it was after midnight; he knew he should hang up, but he knew also that he had already awakened her or her house, the damage done, and before he could muster the cowardice to put down the phone a low voice answered. Male, he thought.