But hurt, hurt, how hurt anyway: he clapped his brow and laughed, near tears again: how hurt, when it had been Robbie who had made the invitation, who had gently mocked Pierce’s inhibitions, who at morning, elbow on the pillow next to Pierce’s, had looked down on him with a smile of selfless pleased godlike sweetness probably no child of thirteen had ever truly smiled. Pierce had only accepted: though he had, admittedly, elaborated and gone on elaborating the consequences of his acceptance all by himself, all that blue-and-white morning, astonished at his own ceaselessness, as though he were thirteen again himself.
For all of that had been present too in his wish from the beginning; and from the beginning he had known it, but had kept from himself the secret.
He wondered if Robbie had known it too, if it had been part of his plan, imagined as he dozed on the bus or crossed the mountain on foot. What was it in Robbie, a natural bent, an overplus of generous feeling, what? There had been a boy at St. Guinefort’s, Pierce’s old school, a charmer to whom a copulation was among the necessary first offerings of a friendship, it was like a warm handshake, a hug, a swap of cherished belongings.
Well: Pierce would learn in time.
“Because he’s going to stay with me now, ever after,” Pierce wrote defiantly. “One of his grandparents recently died; the other is a little gaga; so it shouldn’t be hard, with my new fairy wealth, to make it all legal. He’ll love it around here, I think, away from the city, and raising him will take all my resources, maybe some I don’t yet know I have, all right, all right. I didn’t have anything else anyway to do.”
He lay down the pencil then, and attended only to the rising spring that had come forth in him, a burble of possibilities, some of them contradictory, succeeding one another rapidly and without his conscious participation. Robbie would grow, he would change. Of course he would. Certainly he would love others; girls too, Pierce thought it likely. Dates. In fact it might be that the two of them would rarely again, would not even once more.
And yet they would not cease to be lovers, never ever, no matter how Robbie grew or how often or for how long life parted them, never ever.
He showered and shaved, a whole working morning having vanished away, and dressed. He stood on the steps of his building rolling a cigarette and remembering small details of the night and morning that had passed: thinking he knew, now, what those nuns felt who in the night or at Mass were embraced by smiling Christ or His Angel, made to cry aloud as they were pierced with arrows or made to take fiery swords upon their tongues: he knew just how hard it might be for them to make a distinction between such experiences and ones which other fleshly people might share with them.
He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am His own. Pierce could not have imagined this solution to his difficulties in advance, but a solution it seemed to be. Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. He stepped off purposefully down Maple Street toward Hill Street, though he had no purpose, and needed none.
His mailbox at the Post Office was empty, except for an extremely small package from New York City, whose handwriting and address he didn’t at first recognize. Wrapped in brown paper that had before wrapped something else. He turned it in his fingers, teasing himself with its oddness for a minute.
As he opened it the problem of who had sent it was unwrapped too in his mind, the address, her changeable hand. Oh sure.
The Sphinx in New York had sent him, inside the brown paper, a matchbox from a City restaurant; and inside that, folded absurdly small, three hundred-dollar bills. And something else: a button to pin on his shirt, gathered on a junktique hunt presumably. It bore a wreath of tiny greeting-card roses, and in churchy script the words Be of good cheer.
He held the little button, feeling his soul topped up with luck and love. Maybe he had been wrong, about three wishes. What if, in coming upon Robbie and making him manifest, he had not completed a triad but instead had discovered an unsuspected malleability in the whole wide world? Maybe after wishing all his life for this and that, carefully framing his wishes or moaning them out in the desperate midnight, he had somehow hit on the trick of it; just as after he had blown fruitlessly through puckered lips for weeks and months he had found himself suddenly, though doing nothing apparently different, able to whistle.
Was there, in that case, anything else he would care for? He felt beside him the smiling cosmic waiter, the long menu, not able yet to be read, but coming maybe clearer.
On River Street, he glanced sidewise at the boys on their bikes, sunstreaked moptops, golden-tanned and lithe. It might be that a nice square wrist, a frank smile, borrowed from one or another of these kids could help clothe Robbie in flesh, who remained discouragingly not quite but almost discarnate. But these real physical boys, the idea of, of. No. The approach was unthinkable, and the imagined sensation repellent, or at least weirdly unlikely, like eating locusts or bathing in milk.
“Hi.”
“Hi there,” Pierce said. “How was the game.”
“Okay.”
“Hey, good.” Turning away from them, seeing them try to place this tall shambling guy (teacher? parent?); laughing inwardly and blushing. No he had not somehow contracted a new sex perversion overnight. He didn’t want a new class of bodies to handle or a new sort of thrill to stir his jaded heart: he wanted a person, just one, this person alive to him and with him even now.
He would walk out of town, he thought. At the end of River Street there would be two ways he could go: up the road leftward, which traveled past the better residences and out to tidy farms and thence upward, spiraling around Mount Randa; or rightward across the bridge to the Shadow River road, a poorer part of town, a steeper way upward. He thought he would choose when he got to the crossroads. Which way, son? You pick.
But when he came to the steps of the Blackbury Jambs Library, which faces on River Street, he saw Rose Ryder just coming down them, her bookbag over her shoulder and papers in her arms. The two of them drifted to a halt together, at the bottom of the steps. The moon, almost too pale to see in the sky above the library, slipped undetectably into a new sign.
“I said I’d see you here,” she said. “Eventually.”
“Yes,” Pierce said.
She had indeed said so, not long ago, even as she rose away from Pierce and from the earth in the basket of a hot-air balloon. That was at a festival up on Skytop, marking summer’s beginning. The basket contained not only her, Rose Ryder, but Mike Mucho and his little girl as well. The balloon was a Raven, vast and black. Pierce could almost hear its burner sound on River Street.
THIRTEEN
The Blackbury Jambs Free Library was completed in 1898, a sort of Shingle Style building with a central dome and wings, paid for by the Carnegie Foundation and opened on July Fourth, wrapped in bunting. In the entranceway is a mounted slab of mud with a dinosaur’s footprint embedded in it; in the children’s room a frieze of North American mammals, faded now almost to ghosts and surprising the unwary child who looks up to find them there. All of Fellowes Kraft’s novels are there, of course, and a couple of his other books as well; he used to look into them, surreptitiously, to see if anyone was taking them out. He used the Blackbury Jambs Library a lot, despite having so many books of his own, and Pierce was eventually to come upon several of the Library’s books among his, years overdue.
Rose Ryder worked there two or three mornings a week, in the big wing to the left of the entrance. She arrived early and made her place at a long table, by a green-shaded light; she took out from her bag a big pad of graph paper, a steel ruler, a fine-pointed draftsman’s pen, and a pocket calculator for the math, which otherwise defeated her. Then she got up, went to the low shelves on the north wall (beneath a portrait of George Washington) and drew out a volume of the Dictionary of American Biography, and carried it back to her place. There she opened it, and as though practicing a sortilege, she riffled the pages, let them fall open randomly, and with her eyes closed put her finger on a name. If the entry or the life
proved too short, she took the one before or after it.
She would pick up her ruler then, and score a line across the pad’s width in peacock ink (her choice). Then, carefully counting squares, she would draw sharp parabolas, up and over the line and down under it again, a sine wave. She usually did this work the night before, but not last night, too crowded with crazy incident. At the top of the first parabola she wrote the number seven; and at the tops of the others, multiples of seven: fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight up to the last year of the life she was charting. It looked like this:
These weren’t arbitrary divisions but were, according to Mike Mucho, who was the system’s inventor, life’s actual component units; for it was Mike’s discovery that life, human life, comes in seven-year cycles of rise, climax, decline and re-arising. Rose arrayed the life she had chosen on the chart she had drawn, setting it out in seven-year parts. Early successes, breakdowns, breakthroughs, breakups; marriage, victory in battle or boardroom, illness, recovery; sudden bursts of illumination, or power, or despair: each noted in her tiniest hand on the mountains and valleys of life’s journey.
When she had done this, she could begin the more subjective or judgmental part of her work, the creative part as she thought of it, the part she was good at: seeing how the life thus charted met or did not meet the predictions of the system (or of its inventor rather) about the nature and common course of life, the shaping force of its seven-year cycles. When she was all finished, and the particular life had yielded up its shape, then its accidents and incidents would be used to refine further the system’s generalizations. She would have time, in the course of a morning’s work, to thus dismantle and reassemble four or five lives.
Not this morning, though.
“Closed,” she said to Pierce on the library steps. “All day.”
“Oh yes?”
“Fourth of July,” she said, and somewhere nearby a string of crackers went off. Ladyfingers. “I just forgot.”
“Well hell,” he said. “Then come have a coffee with me.” She looked back up at the building, at its flags flying, as though it might relent and open; then back to Pierce.
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s a long-term project that I’m assisting someone on,” she said to Pierce in the Donut Hole, settling on this formula not quite comfortably he thought. “A someone,” she immediately added, “who has recently sort of lost interest.”
“Oh?”
She picked up and tore in two a fragment of her pastry, looking out the front window of the little shop toward the river. She pondered what appeared from her face to be a grievance, and he waited to see if she would air it.
“It seems to me unfair,” she said.
“Hm.”
“When a project has gotten to a certain state, and people have worked hard to help.”
“Yes.”
“To just lose interest.” She looked directly into Pierce’s eyes. “I know how to do what I need to do. But I need some guidance.”
“Sure,” he said. “And this person …”
“A psychotherapist. The Woods Center.” She sipped her coffee thirstily and brushed back the thick hair that fell forward when she drank.
“So,” Pierce said. He thought he knew anyway what name she would not say. “What exactly does your part consist of?”
“Research,” she said. “Compiling data, sort of, for a statistical model.”
“Research on …”
She looked out the window, a curious twist to her mouth.
“I mean if you don’t want to say,” Pierce said; he well knew how fraught research can be, non-scholars would be surprised. She considered a moment, and then took from her bag a clutch of duplicated sheets, graph paper, annotated in peacock ink.
“Lives,” she said, and showed him.
Lives, beginning at zero, mount up a steady curve of learning and experience, meeting challenges, facing obstacles. At seven years children have achieved a sort of mastery; they stand on a plateau; they know what the world is and they know that they are within it, like it or not.
“Then comes a turn,” said Rose, her explaining pencil taking the top of the curve.
Then comes a turn, not down so much as out (undrawable on graph paper) and new experience begins to threaten the early synthesis. Confusions and difficulties. “The Down Passage Year, here, where you cross the midline heading downward. A dangerous time.” The wave overwhelms the little boat; the young life is tossed out to flounder. A nadir is reached. Rose’s pencil tapped the bottom of the curve.
“Then you start up again,” she said. “Slowly at first. You find out you’ve bottomed out.”
“No place to go but up.”
“Up,” she said, and her pencil went up the next hill or wave. “Right here you cross the midline, and for the next year you are putting together this new hard stuff, working toward a new synthesis. An Up Passage Year. Kind of exciting. Until you reach a new Plateau Period, and now you know what’s what again, you know who you are and what the rules are for being in the world.”
“And then.”
Her finger traced the way down again. “Down Passage Year.” Then up to twenty-one. “Plateau Period.” She looked up at him then, satisfied.
“That,” Pierce said, “is absolutely remarkable.”
“Now it’s really just a beginning, but.”
“No but I can see.”
“And there is a certain, I mean. This is all supposed to be very …”
“My lips are sealed,” Pierce said. “Absolutely. Not my field anyway,” he added, looking down on her charts, which would not have puzzled any seventeenth-century doctor, though he might have envied them. “And this method is called …”
“Climacterics.”
He laughed aloud, threw back his head and laughed. Whenever, in his ashen midnight wakings, he thought that the world really had no use any longer for the sort of practices he had promised his agent Julie Rosengarten that he could retail by the dozen, whenever he felt embarrassment or shame at his enterprise of magic, soon enough somebody would unfold to him a system for finding hidden treasure, or invite him to have his aura balanced, or define his life in mystic numbers. Climacterics!
“The Grand Climacteric ” she said.
“Is sixty-three. Seven years later …”
“You could go farther.”
“You could,” he said, still laughing.
She took no umbrage at his laughter, in fact she smiled too, and returned to her coffee. He looked at her, she at him. She put away her papers, and shook her long hair free of some tug somewhere.
“So,” she said. “What is it that you do there?”
“Oh. Ah. Research too.”
“Oh?”
“Well,” he said. “Shouldn’t I be circumspect? No, fair’s fair; you told me. Actually my project is a little hard to describe. A little shocking.”
“Oh come on.”
“Intimate. Of course you’re a professional. In a sort of allied field. So.”
“So?”
“I’m doing work on magic,” he said.
She lowered her cup to its saucer. “Magic,” she said. “Not like, card tricks and stuff. Houdini.”
“No. Not like.” He said nothing more, smiling and open but not accommodating, allowing her to regard him in puzzlement. A kind of wonderful calm was in him, and an access to power in speech that he only rarely felt; he knew it was because Robbie was near, only a spiritual block away.
“Actually,” he said, “‘magic’ is sort of a hard word to say out loud, I think.”
“Yes?”
“It is if you mean it. A little shaming to say. Like ‘sex.’”
“Like sex?” She laughed.
“I mean it’s a thing you want to keep at a distance. Even though it means a great deal to you, even because it does. It’s just agreed on, under the rules of politeness. It won’t be seriously discussed.”
“You sound like you think it works,” she said.
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He leaned toward her and began to speak a little more urgently. “Magic comes in more than one kind,” he said. “There’s illusion, like you said; Houdini. And wonder-working, wave a wand, get what you want—that kind is restricted to stories. But there are other kinds, that were really practiced. For centuries. It doesn’t seem likely that people would have gone to so much trouble for so long if what they did didn’t work at all.”
“Like pacts with the devil? Witchcraft?”
“No,” Pierce said. “That kind wouldn’t work unless there really is a devil, or was, who could help. You believe that?”
“I just got here,” she said, and laughed again. “Spells?”
“Ah,” Pierce said. “Ah.” He brought out tobacco, and papers, and began making a cigarette. Magic was a hard word to say, he had always thought so, shaming by its power, its power among other things to make us look ridiculous when we take it seriously. Like sex. “Spells at least only require people. One to cast, one to receive. What’s called intersubjective magic.”
“You can resist,” she said.
“Right. There are lots more effective ways than magic to make you do something you don’t want to do. You can refuse to be entranced; you can resist, you can deny the magician’s claim to power. And if you do resist, everybody agrees the magician can’t do a thing. What he can do is—knowing the secret springs of your nature, by means of his powers—he can make it very hard for you to resist.”
“Yes?”
“He’d have to know first what kind of spirit yours was, and whether it was subject to magic at all. Not everyone’s is.”
“How would he know?”
“He’d know. He’d see,” Pierce said. “In fact”—vamping now, he had never thought of these things before—“a danger for the great magician would have been that he was so sensitive himself to the projections of others. Which made his control even more heroic.”