No something real, something simple and undeniable, not even rare; a surprise, but something you actually knew all along. As though, in the next age of the world, a cooler and a duller age than this one, somebody were to come upon a lump of radium, glowing eerily in darkness, shedding particles, decaying, showing just those properties that once upon a time, in Einstein’s day or Fermi’s, people actually believed it to have.
How could he have set himself such an insoluble problem?
He had worked on it and thought about it all through one thundery stifling day, when toward evening the problem was wholly supplanted in his thinking; for an event he had been waiting for almost all his conscious life took place as he sat on the front step of Fellowes Kraft’s house waiting for Rosie Rasmussen’s car to pick him up. The power that had in its keeping Pierce’s three wishes had showed up, ready to grant them to him if he asked, and Pierce was unable afterwards to think of anything else.
If we believe, or pretend, that the world is capable of being other than it is, alterable by our desires (as perhaps more people did then than do now), then it is likely we will spend a certain amount of our aimless mental time in imagining just how we might alter it. Pierce Moffett had never built model railroads, hadn’t spent energy imagining himself into that small world, boarding the little cars at little stations, oiling the engine and driving it through the hills and over the bridges. He had never had a teddy bear who went on imaginary travels with him, or an imaginary friend, or even a dog he pretended could talk to him, not because he was refused a dog but because he seemed so unmoved by them.
But he had always, always imagined that wishes could come true; and if wishes could come true, the wisher had better be ready to make them, the right ones, the ones he most wants, at a moment’s notice, when the chance is offered him. In the days when he had sat on the steps of the dogtrot in Kentucky, looking out over the shaggy hills and twisting a lock of hair in his fingers, this was what he was often about: examining his heart, testing against its unfathomable depths of need first this wish and then that, and gauging the response.
He had never completely quelled the habit. Though he had prepared himself with a couple of practical wishes for Health and Money, it was only that day, sitting on the steps of Fellowes Kraft’s house as he had once sat on the steps in Kentucky, twirling as he had then a long lock of hair, that he had discovered his deepest need and conflated it with desire, and just in time too. And having made the wish, his true last wish, he needed only to wait with patience and some tears (he was on the verge of happy tears all afternoon) for Robbie.
“Robbie,” Pierce explained the next morning to a tall gray ledger that he had bought on his arrival in the Faraways in the spring, bought to record very different matters in, “is my son.”
He looked at this brief sentence on the page and felt a sweetness (already familiar) rise in his throat.
“I engendered him on a thoughtless and contraceptiveless night in 1965, an early summer night that I remember very little of. I saw the girl one other time, and noted a secret smile about her, but she was a strange one, and if she knew she didn’t tell me; she figured someone else, maybe—who can tell now.” He could see, could smell in fact, the night streets of that neighborhood in that year, his first year down from college. “Anyway Robbie was the result. I never knew. He was raised by his grandparents (his mother was a wanderer, long gone off now to, well the coast, someplace, who knows now, vanished utterly, no surprise to me). But she told him, somehow, about me, and now he’s managed to find me.”
Standing on the WELCOME mat that lay before the front door of Pierce’s building, having got off the bus in the wrong town and walked the rest of the way, footsore and intensely proud of himself, with nothing but a cardboard valise and his flute in its case.
“Well I was amazed of course, unbelieving,” Pierce wrote, his pencil now twirling happily and more or less automatically down along the blue lines, “but he does look a lot like me, only far more beautiful than I ever was or could be, or if not beautiful so winning, so winning it doesn’t matter. Apparently he just supposed that once he found me I’d just take him in. And I did.”
There was a daybed on Pierce’s sun-porch which he could have, the sun-porch where Pierce now sat, writing in the journal amid the complex and soothing geometries of window frame and sash, the shadows of the mullions on sills and floorboards, the golden ingots of sunlight. A narrow bed, an airy room, just right for him. Who in the sunny beams did glide.
The nature of his wish had come to Pierce as a complete surprise, not distilled out of any previous inclinations or needs that he knew of; it had simply and suddenly occurred within him whole and ready to be wished. No doubt but it was his wish, though; he had immediately recognized it as his, the wish he had so long waited to know, the one good thing he really wanted. Recognizing it was not only a necessary precondition to its coming true: the recognizing was the coming true. And he knew that too. He had sat in a bright fog of happiness, tasting continuously a strange sweetness in the back of his throat, admitting for the first time, yes for the first time, how much he wanted just to love and be loved, without any other conditions attached; and was possessed with dæmonic laughter to know that even if Robbie were in some trivial sense not real, Pierce could, just now, easily make him real (it would only mean going mad): and the laughter felt like the sobs that had riven him in his dream.
And so and then: he had returned home and at evening the doorbell rang; he heard it in is heart’s core.
“So these are the fruits of renunciation,” he wrote in his journal in the morning sun. For it came to that, it seemed: in exchange for the vow he had taken, that foolish vow, he was owed a return. As soon as he ceased to scan the horizon, as soon as he turned back in at his own gate and shut it behind him, then there was Robbie, he who had been waiting all along within.
Something for his life to be about; someone to be clean and solvent for; a reason to go on living the life he had chosen, a reason for the abnegations he had made. There hadn’t been a reason, not a good reason, and now there was.
Robbie, why that name. He had not had an imaginary friend as a child, but it must feel like this to have one; he felt visited, as people had once been visited by gods or godlets, sudden strong sweet friends out of the blue, dangerous too maybe, who walked with you a ways before vanishing: and he would soon, he supposed, feel the beat of departing wings. But oh not yet, not yet.
He’d remained all that evening, and showed no signs of evanescing; in fact he grew, if not exactly more actual, more distinct. Now, the following morning, when he moght have been expected to be gone, he was still there, the tiny stove still glowing merrily beneath Pierce’s sternum—the same sensation (Pierce noticed) as is occasioned by finding, the day after your birthday and the day after that, that the new bike is still in the garage, its paintwork still bright, still yours.
He closed his journal. Becalmed with weird happiness, he found it hard to get to work. Boney Rasmussen had sent to him, via Rosie, a set of questions, and Pierce had not yet sent his answers back; he was not at all sure that the answers he had were the ones the old man was looking for. Pierce felt so lucky in the Rasmussens and their Foundation that he did not dare to put too many hard queries to them; he didn’t want to find himself outside again, left to his own resources: not yet.
The answers he had completed, or at least assayed, were already rolled in the typewriter, a great powder-blue electric. This machine had been accepted long ago by the Sphinx in exchange for drugs, and given for nothing, so to speak, to Pierce. He read what he had written:
1. No.
2. Not as far as I can tell.
3. The literature on Rudolf II in English is very slight. I can read German just a little, but only a university library would have the things. I don’t imagine Kraft used any very exotic sources; there aren’t many books at all in his library in languages other than English and Italian (and Latin, a few). So I conclude he made this up.
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4. It might be a powder. It might be a liquid or a stone or a jewel or almost anything. No one is going to be very specific, naturally.
Okay. He rubbed his hands together and took up the next of Boney’s questions. He typed with two fingers, index of one hand, medicus of the other, he always had, but why.
5. Yes. In the early summer of 1588 Dee sent to Walsingham in London the news that he had in fact transmuted ordinary iron into gold, using a “powder of projection” that Kelley had long possessed. They sent Walsingham an iron pot lid, with a piece broken out of it, and they sent the matching piece, now made entirely of gold. These two items are supposedly somewhere in the British Museum.
6. The stuff to be drunk, “taken internally” as the docs say now, wasn’t exactly gold, it was “potable gold” (aurum potabile) which was I don’t know what; like “philosophical mercury,” it wasn’t probably just what it seems.
While Pierce went on with his responses, Robbie practiced his flute, playing over and over a slow movement from the Water Music which Pierce would never after be able to hear without thinking of him, and of summer, the big maple outside the windows of the sunporch full at last, opulent, million-handed. The kid was actually a sort of musical prodigy, so it seemed to Pierce’s untrained ears—to Pierce music was an arcanum as great and fast as any that he studied. A flute, for Pan’s sake. Were those buds of faun-horn in the soft curls of his hair? What color hair, anyway? Gold, and the curly down of his arms and legs gold too. Pierce whistled the Water Music as he tidied the house, and then broke out the mop and pail, no more geezerish squalor, bad example for the boy and not healthy; then lunch to make and lay on the kitchen table, sandwiches, a tall glass of milk.
One last question of Boney’s to address. A quote from a bad old magic book that Pierce had once repeated in Boney’s hearing, only to have Boney turn on him and ask with interest, with too-intense interest, if Pierce could say that again, and write it down for him, and find the source. Pierce couldn’t recall where he had read the quote. In a book about Bruno, maybe. He spent the afternoon findiing the book where he had read the quote.
7. I think you mean this: “O Arctic Manes! O Antarctics propelled by divinity! Why do natures so great and noble seem to be enclosed in mineral species?” This was said or written by King Solomon, supposedly, in a book called On the Shadows of Ideas, a magic book which has since disappeared.
Bruno’s greatest book of memory magic was also called De umbris idearum, on the shadows of ideas. He thought of telling Boney this, though Bruno’s book was certainly not translated from the Latin, and to tell him that might mean revealing to Boney that his own Latin wasn’t up to extracting a précis from it.
Why was he afraid of Boney? He had no reason not to want to go see him and sit with him in the pleasant study of his beautiful house, share research with him, drink his liquor. Did he not know on which side his bread was buttered? Sickly and slow as the old man was. Was it that? Pierce didn’t think so; he had never been embarrassed or repelled by age, he had an odd willingness usually to indulge garrulous oldsters and maintain pretend conversations with them; he never minded listening to stories he hadn’t heard before, and Boney’s were of that kind for sure.
A valetudinarian, Pierce had called him once, talking with Rosie, who thought he meant the complement of salutatorian: the other one, the one who makes the farewell speech. No that is the valedictorian, there is a dim linguistic connection but no real one. Valetudinarians are the sickly oldsters who will not get well. Valetudo is health; in Latin it could be good or bad, like luck. Good health is what valetudinarians don’t have. It is the name of the sixth house of the Zodiac, which is the house of Health and Sickness and also for some reason of Servants, one of Boney’s being Pierce himself.
Was it because he was afraid Boney really wanted Pierce to find a way for him to live longer? Skin for skin, yea all that a man has he will give for his life. That’s what it was. Though Boney would never say such a thing out loud. Unless Pierce were to confess a similar desire, which he wouldn’t, never yet having been conscious of fearing death: dying, maybe, but not being dead, not yet at any rate.
That was perhaps because he hadn’t yet had to think very long or very hard about it. He had no troubling stars in that house, not in either of his possible natal charts. Melancholy was his only sickness; and melancholy might be fatal but was not mortal, not his kind. His was the fiery kind that yearned and went unsatisfied. He was no suicide. Nor would he die of boredom.
Not now, not any longer.
He had found his own medicine for melancholy, his aurum potabile, he had made it out of the stuff of his heart, the base matter of his need, but it would do his patron no good. Let Boney find a virgin to sleep with; every man to his own cure.
Later there came a violent thunderstorm, and he stood with Robbie at the window to watch the slew of rain across the window and the metal roof of the porch below, Robbie’s head on his shoulder and Pierce’s arm around his son, hand hooked in his belt. Found by the lost.
The night following that day. Pierce awoke after a few hours of restless sleep, erect and too hot. What had he dreamed of?
Walking, he remembered; walking night city streets (why do we walk so much in dreams, pressing on aimlessly, the walls and streets mutating around us? Why is it so often night, as though we were producing our dream-movies on the cheap, saving on scenery? Or is it only the real night in which we dream pouring softly in?); then meeting his father, who was walking too, as he actually did walk compulsively in the city, his eyes quartering the ground continually before him as he went, searching or rather only seeming to search, and now and then stooping to pick up some oddment, a scrap of paper, only to discard it again. In the dream his father was strangely young, with glossy brown hair, and he wore a uniform (though he had never been a soldier), a Sam Browne belt, polished shoes. He was going, he told Pierce or Pierce somehow guessed, to meet Winnie, and the two of them were going to go down to the Staten Island ferry, to take a ride. World’s cheapest sea cruise. Pierce saw the ferry station, and the harbor, vast antiquated works; gulls, and the machinery of the slips and docks; moon-light, wind. He wanted to pat Axel, urge him gently on to his rendezvous. He knew Axel was intending to propose marriage, hopefully, bravely, unsuited as he was for it, and thus to engender Pierce; and Pierce was grateful, knowing himself to be Axel’s reason more than any other. Axel shyly admitting as much as they walked together to the subway.
Why do we awake with boners from dreams of night cities, our fathers, hope.
It was as warm as day. Pierce pushed aside the sheet that covered him, and looked up into the mirror that he had hung cantilevered over the bed, in which he was accustomed now and then to see pictures of the bed’s former life in the city, pictures that, like old hand-colored photographs, grew more not less remote and unreal as he applied his tints to them. I will take it down, he thought.
The muslin curtains he had hung in the sun-porch window stirred. He noticed that, the stir of breeze. And then Robbie was beside his bed. Standing slim tall wandlike in his white undershorts over Pierce.
What is it?
I don’t want to sleep out there.
What do you mean?
I don’t want to sleep out there. I’d rather sleep here.
Well but, Pierce said; Robbie allowed him to stare and murmur, only smiling and possessing himself, arms wrapping his long torso; and then he placed his forefinger gently against his lips, and pulled away Pierce’s sheet.
Shine of his thigh in moon- and street-light as he climbed up, still smiling, nearly laughing. When he pressed against Pierce for the first time (for they had not yet truly embraced, not wholly, shy maybe in the day), Pierce could feel the heat still emanating from him, the sun he had walked in all day to find his father.
Morning again and the cicadas’ whine, and a light of unearthly clarity (so it seemed to Pierce, Day One in a world new-hatched) filling his apartment. He sat on the daybed with the gray le
dger in his hands, wherein Robbie was chiefly kept (so far, so far).
How light but not fragile he had felt, satin-skinned and not soft: somehow like holding a bird and not a beast. The crown of his head, that one of Pierce’s hands could compass; the strong vulnerable tendons of his neck. “Well I will forget a lot of things,” Pierce wrote, heart a hot lump in his throat, “but I will not forget that. I wept, after, a little; and he wanted to know why, wasn’t it fun? And I said it was fun, and I said I didn’t know why. But I did.”
He put down his pencil, vividly conscious suddenly of what he had done, what acts; startled and shamed to see himself at them.
So. He had not, it seemed, escaped harmless from his own father’s sexual tortuosities, only he had not had evidence of them till now. Robbie was doubtless nothing more than a cryptic gateway through which his inheritance had come. Maybe this was how such tendencies commonly first emerge, issuing as harmless fantasy, a Young Friend, a Chum, whose love is offered with magical swiftness and complaisance. Only then come the stalkings, the sordid crimes. Though actually (Pierce thought) Axel wasn’t bent that way; he’d often professed a horror of child molestation, had despised those he knew who confessed to or rejoiced in such tastes, and been puzzled by them too, where’s the fun.
Not Axel’s genes then even to blame probably. And yet even Axel might understand the love.
But how could he have, how. When the last thing he would want to do was to hurt his own son. Pierce chewed his pen’s end. Can a phantasm be hurt? He would have to consult his experts. If one were, it would of course be only the creator or possessor of the phantasm who would suffer (and suffer the more as the phantasm were more present to him). That seemed obvious, and also seemed not to matter; he could not evade what he had done merely by denying the reality of his victim.