Home. No light but the gray spill of the television, on without sound, small figures in antic distress, swiftly changed for others. By it she saw the sagging couch, and the straightback chair her great-grandfather had made, the Bible laid on it.
She went past it toward the door of the only bedroom, open too. Beneath her feet as she approached the door the linoleum crackled. And the wind like to lift the little place right into the air, up into the treetops.
He was there.
He lay on his back on the mattress, shirtless, his great horny feet apart and one long arm fallen toward the floor. At first she thought he was not asleep, that his eyes saw; but when she came closer (in revulsion and awe but no fear) she could tell that he was absent. The wind wrenched the curtain at the open screenless window.
She did not, or she could not, hesitate, but went to him where he lay; lifted the slack arm up and placed it by his side; put her red-nailed hands beneath his back (cold as a corpse, she thought) and pushed. As heavy as a corpse too. She set her feet again, unsteady in heels, and with a tiny bat-cry she rolled the man-doll over on its face. It didn’t awaken. It could not.
Now his walking spirit, when at dawn he came back again, could not enter at the mouth from which he had gone out. He was caught outside.
And she turned and left, leaving the door open (he could not now return by it), past the devil’s stone and back across the little bridge, this time twisting a heel in a crack. She bent to take off her shoes almost without stopping, then went more swiftly to the white car left waiting by the water’s side; and she spurred it away in a spurt of earth and pebbles as the wind called after her aghast.
Oh don’t you remember, don’t you remember: there will be no record of it except as you remember it. One of the big pines on the knoll at Arcady blew down, shattering right at the hollow in its heart, in which a great beehive had been built; the bees rose in their numbers to meet the enemy, and were scattered. It blew shingles from the stable roof and turned the pages of National Geographics piled in the stable’s attic; it rattled but could not open the locked door before which Boney Rasmussen had been standing stony and inert since his death in July.
Rosie Rasmussen sat up in bed, awakened by the wind too; or by a sound beyond her room, like an approaching footfall. Something the wind had done, doubtless. Alert and staring at the black oblong of the doorway, Rosie willed whatever it was to go away.
Go away.
But then, just as Rosie grew certain that some presence really was near her, another soft footfall came, and a small figure in white went past her door without looking in.
Oh lord Sam.
“Hon? Do you have to go?”
No she wasn’t going toward the bathroom. Rosie got out of bed and went out into the hall, just in time to see Sam turn purposefully and go down the stairs.
Was it true you weren’t supposed to wake them, that something awful happened if you did? No that was a myth, it sounded when she told it to herself just exactly like something made up, because of the strangeness, because of the fear of, of what.
“Sam,” she whispered, not loud enough.
Man listen to the wind.
Sam went down the stairs, holding the thick banister rail, unhesitating, down to the hall. What did she think, where did she think she went. Rosie after her, her neck and shoulders thrilling the way they did when she heard someone’s eerie dream told. She watched Sam’s white nightshirt float down the hall toward the door out. When she reached it she stood on tiptoe and took hold of the knob, meaning to let herself out or the night in.
“No! Sam don’t!” Rosie called, unable not to, following fast. “Don’t!”
Sam turned from the door. Her body shook violently to see her mother, and the great front hall, and herself there; her eyes were huge.
“What’s that?” she said, staring.
Then she shook again, and didn’t stop. She fell to the floor before Rosie could reach her. Rosie tried to gather her up, but Sam was twisted rigid, her pupils were rolled away and her teeth clenched, a sort of wild roar coming from her throat.
A storm in her brain, Dr. Bock had called it. Like an electrical storm.
“Oh Christ,” Rosie said, trying to hold her. “Oh Jesus.” It was just past midnight on the twenty-first of September. The seizure went on for nearly a minute. Forever. “Oh Jesus,” Rosie pleaded or whispered. “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ.”
NINE
The heart,” Frank Walker Barr said to Pierce Moffett. “It has a history.” And he tapped his sternum, behind which his own heart presumably lay.
“Yes?” Pierce said.
“Today the heart is just a pump. A muscle. Liable to failure and needing care. But for centuries it was, really was, the seat of the feelings, interpreter of the world, source of emotional life.”
The two walked together along an avenue of attenuated palms, whose high heads indicated an eastward breeze. At the avenue’s end a little pyramid stood, guarded by sphinxes painted with cat’s eyes and rosebud mouths.
“Once upon a time, of course,” Barr said, “the human person was composed differently from the way in which it’s composed now. Once, it was made of distinct and incommensurable parts. Soul and body. Body and soul.”
“Yes,” Pierce said.
“The soul was not material; it had no size, shape, density, weight, none of that. It did have parts, but never mind that for now. The body was all material, made out of the four elements, air fire earth and water, in subtly variable combinations.”
Pierce nodded. He took from his pocket and donned a pair of brown sunglasses he had bought on his first trip to the Faraway Hills, in the former age of the world, before the passage time. The sand and sea darkened.
“Now the problem then was,” Barr said, “the relation between the two parts. The soul was wholly non-material, and the body was the opposite; therefore how can the soul apprehend the body and the material world? How can the body respond to the commands or aspirations of the soul? What could possibly connect them?”
He lifted a hand to indicate the pyramid ahead, that they should approach it rather than going around. He was a short man who gave the impression of being large, as though he were made of some heavy and powerful matter; yet his step was hesitant, and his arms in their drip-dry shirt were crooked a little at the elbow. He had been old even when Pierce had been his student.
“But of course you don’t have to have this problem,” Pierce said, who was feeling the onset of familiar anxieties. “You set it for yourself, by dividing up the person.”
“Right,” Barr said. “The Greeks did that. Setting the problem then to be solved by whoever thought that the Greeks were the last word on everything. Here’s what they did eventually: they posited a third thing, spirit, pneuma in Greek, a word which had a lot of ambiguous meanings, including breath.”
Soul, spirit: Pierce said he had been reading those words in old authors and hearing them in church since he was a kid and had never actually understood the difference, if there was one.
“Well,” Barr said. “There came to be. You’ve read Ficino, of course. De vita coelitus comparanda.”
“Well, I’ve read in it,” Pierce said, blushing hotly, if not in his sun-red face in his heart.
“You know his distinctions, which were perhaps largely his own, but widely influential. The difference between soul and spirit was that spirit was matter, soul wasn’t; spirit was an extremely fine, refined, superfine matter, a liquid airy fiery sort of stuff. It flowed all through the body, it was very quick, it was hot and it was somehow shiny or silvery or reflective, so that whatever the body’s senses perceived was reflected in it.”
Barr indicated the world, the vegetation, a pair of spiraling butterflies, the people around them who walked barefoot to and fro or gazed out over the sands shading their eyes.
“A sound comes in at the ear,” he said. “Or a sight comes in through the eye. It hits the shiny spirit, which is stirred by it, heats up with emotion (which is not ma
terial). And the soul, which can’t perceive matter at all, having no organs to sense it with, can perceive reflections, which are immaterial, like light. And so the soul perceives what the body perceives, because it is incised or impressed or reflected in the spirit.”
“So I’m not sure what this has to do with the heart,” Pierce said. The conversation had begun with Barr’s mention of his own, not in good shape he said.
“The heart,” Barr said. “Right. You see spirit flowed all through the body. It comprised a sort of second body closely bound up with the physical one, this one.”
“The astral body,” Pierce said, thinking of Beau Brachman.
“Yes,” Barr said. “Exactly. But it was in the heart that the spirit was generated, and from which it circulated; and that’s where the material coming in through the senses was received and felt.”
“Ah,” Pierce said. He had begun to perceive the shapes of certain old philosophical difficulties, brought to light by this idea; why people had once said what they had said, done what they had done. Bruno. Dee. “I see,” he said, though he didn’t, quite.
“Spirit flowed out from the heart and returned to it; partly it was under the soul’s control, partly it was subject to the body whose senses it served. The material senses received the data, the data heated up the spirit, the heart synthesized the image from all the senses and the soul perceived in it the immaterial reflection of the object, and considered: is this thing good? Bad? The will (which is part of the soul) could then choose it or reject it.”
“Uh huh,” Pierce said.
“Take sex,” Barr said. “Love rather.”
“Uh huh,” Pierce said, as though he had known this was coming, which darkly he had.
“You see a person. That person’s physical qualities enter your senses. They are reflected in your spirit, which heats up as your feelings awake. The soul looks into this mirror, the spirit, and sees the reflection, and becomes entranced, or doesn’t. Love.”
They joined a dozen others who had also approached the pyramid and now waited there, some of them old and brown, some of them holding children by the hand, patient in the mild sun.
“She comes in through the eyes,” Barr said. “Not her physical person, but the image of her, projected somehow by her own eyes, source of her power to cause love.”
“Beatrice and Dante,” Pierce said. Sweat had begun to form in a cool band over his forehead. “Petrarch and Laura.”
“Remember, the soul, which is the only part of you that can love, can never perceive the body of the other person; it can only see, and love, the reflection of the other person in your heart, in your spirit.”
“So you don’t really fall in love with another person,” Pierce said lamely. “Just an idea.”
“Not so silly, after all, is it?” Barr said smiling. He took off his straw hat, and wiped the band with his handkerchief. “The Renaissance Platonists pictured the whole personal mechanism differently, but they were no stupider about life than we are.”
Now their turn had come. They went up to the wide window and the white counter where oranges were piled in cannonball fashion, small pyramids too; a black youth in a white cap at a rakish angle smiled at them. Arched over his window was painted the word FRESH in bold and convincing letters.
“Large or small?” Barr inquired of Pierce.
“Oh. Small,” Pierce said; and Barr held up two fingers to the counterman.
“They use Valencias,” Barr said. “I determined that. The best for juice.” He gave Pierce a cup of foamy juice and steaming ice that did not seem small at all.
“Another thing this picture could explain or account for,” Barr said as they turned away, “was what could go wrong with love, which seems to have gone wrong very frequently then.”
“Amor hereos,” Pierce said. “Burton talks about it.”
“Yes. It was a part of melancholy. Well its etiology was part of this spirit theory. Now watch what happens. Suppose your spirit is a particularly hot, shiny, labile, fluid one. And you see or meet somebody who for all sorts of reasons—the stars mostly—matches perfectly your own spirit’s ability to reflect. What can happen is that the image of the beloved can run rampant through the body, carried on the spirit; it can actually become an infection.”
“Love-sick,” Pierce said. His own heart had begun the steady rapid beat, little hard fist knocking at a cell-door, that had come to be nearly constant, had alarmed him enough to send him to a doctor, a real modern one, who listened and told him to relax.
“The soul ceases to be able to think of anything else, because the spirit can’t reflect anything else. The phantasmal reflection of the other person, let loose in your spirit, takes on a sort of phony autonomy. It’s not a person, remember—it’s a creation of your own—but it can establish itself as a person. Since the poor soul can think of nothing else, the phantasm can actually come to supplant your own subjectivity, so that the phantasm of the beloved is there where you should be. You have lost your heart to her.”
“What happens to you?” Pierce said.
“Gone.” Barr finished his drink. “If you don’t get yourself back, you die. Can’t feed yourself or dress yourself or.”
For a moment Pierce felt his knees weaken, and the bright day darken, and thought he might be about to shame himself and embarrass his old teacher by fainting there on the boardwalk.
He would have said that this was not the first case of infection he had suffered; he would have said that he had rarely in his postpubertal life not been suffering it, or recovering from it, or seeking restlessly to contract it again. But oh this was different, this case. The man who walked beside Barr sucking the straw of his juice, who resembled an old student of Barr’s met by strange chance at an out-of-the-way Florida resort, was in fact a golem no longer operated by himself, a shell hollowed by something certainly very much like a fatal disease; and the empty spaces within him filled with awful imaginary things, black matter the sun could not penetrate to. “So is there,” he tried to say calmly, “a cure?” He tried smiling down at Barr brightly, just curious. “I mean if they thought it was a disease, maybe they had a cure. I’ve never heard of one.”
“They tried,” Barr said. “They might put you to bed. Try to get you to figure it out. Prayer. A vacation amid unexciting surroundings. And in some cases there was spontaneous remission, of course.”
Certainly there was. Had Pierce not survived the process himself, and not once only, but more than once? Weaker but not dead, not yet.
This time, though.
“I,” he said, and Barr waited. “I.”
He stopped then, and turned as though to look out over the miniature beach (man-made) and the vanishing cloudscape. But it was really to turn his still-smiling but (he could feel it) alarmingly unwell face away from his old teacher. He experienced the madman’s awful bind: having to ask for help, from people who cannot conceive the spiritual difficulty you’re in; and realizing that they can therefore give you no help; and so sinking deeper into darkness before their kind puzzled faces. Beau and Rosie Mucho and Spofford, when he had tried to explain, a child in the grip of night terrors, comforted by big safe grownups, a child who knows that grownups are beyond all such fears, which makes him even more afraid and alone. Of course they found it hard to believe, or to sympathize. Pierce himself found it hard to believe, dreadfully, wholly unlikely; his self, from whatever gray cold noplace it had been remanded to, looked back on Pierce in helpless and amazed dismay.
He walked with Barr up the beach road past the souvenir stands and food stalls, back to the iron grille of Barr’s hotel. They both remarked again on the coincidence, coming upon one another here of all places, each as far from home as the other, and Barr said Small world; but Pierce had actually ceased to be surprised by these vatic encounters, any more than the errant knight is surprised to encounter the hermit in the wide forsaken forest, just the hermit he needs to meet. It seemed to him that from now on he must probably encounter his old
mentor and guide at every hopeless juncture of his journey, or if not him someone just like him; and yet still he did not know to ask the question that would free him, or even that there was a question that could be asked.
Christ let him not die of it, he thought as he walked back to his mother’s place: that would be so futile, so shaming, he would never be able to hold his head up among the dead.
“She was working at a psychotherapy center,” Pierce told his mother. “And that’s where she fell in with this. Group.”
They sat together again at evening on the marina deck of the little motel that Winnie owned a share in. The winter air was mild.
“It’s called the Powerhouse International,” Pierce said, and gave a strangled chuckle. “The Powerhouse, yes. A quasi-Christian sort of Bible cult. They specialize in healing, at least the elite does. They claim a big success with mental patients.”
Winnie shook her head, dismayed.
“I think an old lover of hers got her into it,” Pierce said. He could see them, the operatives of her newfound faith, the night-birds roosting open-eyed in his inward darkness: Mucho the tool, Ray Honeybeare the torpid sorcerer; and farther behind them, somewhere in the Midwest where the cult had its home and temple, the cult’s founder and head, the prophet-dragon, who appeared Oz-like in videotapes to instruct his followers and inductees. Rose had described the sessions; she said she thought Pierce would find them really interesting.
“A lot of people in cults get over it,” Winnie said. “You think they get swallowed up and never come out. But a lot do.”
Cults were everywhere then, or seemed to be, gingerbread houses appearing on the path into which the young especially were tempted by the thousands. Cults were passage-time creatures, perhaps, compound monsters amazed at their own sudden new powers; or they were hopeless refuges to rush to in the upheaval of time, as passengers on a sinking liner rush to the uptipped stern, to cling together there; or they were symptoms of social or psychic distress that had always been there, and had only come to be noticed, or re-noticed. Or they were none of these things. Anyway Pierce had had fatidic dreams about them often in recent years, dreams of being in the power of one or another, as had many other sleepers; but till now he had always been able to tell he was dreaming.