AEgypt (12 page)

But the music was loud in the streets of his slum. The city had gathered up its filthy skirts and arisen griping and rheumaticky, and begun altogether to move: the building opposite Pierce's, whose gray face he knew almost as well as he knew his own, had come, while he was gone, to be painted in stars, sunbursts, polka dots; the old stone heads that had hidden like dark dryads under the eaves had had their eyes opened with bright paint and looked out surprised. There were transients everywhere, pilgrims in strange clothes, but Pierce's part of the city in particular resembled a medieval city on a fair day or high holy day, there were
pénitentes
in orange robes and shaven heads chanting and whirling in St. Vitus's dance, there were Gypsies come to town camped in the littered squares, furred feathered and earringed, shaking tambourines and stealing things. There were hawkers and jugglers and smokesellers, there were women in long homespun dresses and brass bangles who squatted on the stoop of his building, suckling their babes; there were madmen and friars of orders gray and ragged beggars asking alms.

Pierce read on. Printing had been invented, and the bookstores were suddenly full of odd wares. There were new newssheets in lurid, smudgy colors, there were almanacs and books of prophecy, there were strange scriptures, ballads, broadsides. Deeply surprised, Pierce began to find among them bright-clad reissues of books that had meant much to him in childhood, a childhood that had been largely spent between the covers of books, one way and another, a childhood he found he was able to taste again by cracking the same books, unseen since antiquity, since his own Age of Gold.

Here for example were Frank Walker Barr's ten- and twenty-year-old books, being reverently brought out in a uniform new paper edition, including the ones Pierce knew, like
Time's Body
and
Mythos and Tyrannos
; someone had had the brilliant idea of covering them all with a single titanic Baroque painting crowded with figures, each volume's cover only a detail, so that when they were all in print and assembled, they would form the whole picture. And here also was Sidney Lanier's
Boy's King Arthur
, with all the original illustrations, as bright as Christmas morning and as cold to his touch; a shabby edgeworn copy had stood long on his boyhood bookshelf, a present from his father. And a book he didn't at first recognize in its new soft covers, only to find inside a book he knew immediately, like a childhood friend unmasked, because it was simply a photo reproduction of the old one he had read. It was
Bruno's Journey
, a biography of sorts, by the historical novelist Fellowes Kraft, and he remembered nothing of it but that he had once been deeply affected by it; what he would think of it now he had no idea. The page he had opened to was this:

The immense laughter of Bruno when he understood that Copernicus had inverted the universe—what was it but joy in the confirmation of his knowledge that Mind, in the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of? If the Earth, the old center, now was seen truly to revolve somewhere halfway between the center and the outside; and the Sun, which before had revolved on a path halfway to the outside, were now the center, then a half-turn like that in a Mobius strip was thrown into the belt of the stars: and what then became of the old circumference? It was, strictly, unimaginable: the Universe exploded into infinitude, a circle of which Mind, the center, was everywhere and the circumference nowhere. The trick mirror of finitude was smashed, Bruno laughed, the starry realms were a jewelled bracelet in the hand.

Copyright 1931. Who was publishing these things newly? How did they know he needed them? Why did he see their spines under the arms and in the tasseled satchels of the effendi, woodsmen, Injuns of the gong-tormented streets? He had the funny feeling that doors long bolted within him were being forced, that in the general amnesty of carnival something jailed in him since puberty was being let out—somewhat by mistake—into the open air, to be welcomed by the cheering mob.

Something: what?

When the weather turned cold the jingling throngs sought shelter, huddling wrapped in aged furs on stoops or in heated public places; Pierce took in the odd stray for a night or a week. Boys with head colds, far from home, boiled brown rice on his stove, girls practiced simple native crafts cross-legged on the floor, shared the bed, moved on. In their endless talk, periodless, a slurry of outlandish possibilities as real to them as the dangerous city and the workaday world around them were unreal, Pierce with elation and trepidation heard the end—not of the world, no, but of the world he had grown up in, the world that everyone, growing up, imagines will never change. Climacterics would one day suggest to him that the world forever grows up and explodes into possibility, revolts against the past, evolves the future, and settles down to grow staid and old, all at exactly the same rate as each person experiencing it does; but Pierce didn't know Climacterics then; he let his hair grow long, and looked out his window at the parade, and thought:
Nothing now will ever be the same again.

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Barnabas College, like a fast little yacht, had quickly tacked with the new winds that were blowing, even while old galleons like Noate were wallowing in the breakers. Courses in the history, chemistry, and languages of the old everyday world were semester by semester cut to a minimum (Pierce's History 101 course would, eventually, very nearly reach the present day from time-out-of-mind, even as the 200-level courses, out of his provenance, came to deal chiefly not with the past at all but in possibilities, in the utopias and armageddons all adolescents love). The old standard textbooks were chucked, replaced by decks of slim paperbacks, often the students’ own choices, they are after all (said Doctor Sacrobosco) paying the bills. Veteran teachers faced with this fell tongue-tied or turned coats garishly; young ones like Pierce, his students’ coeval almost, still had trouble facing children who seemed to have come to Barnabas chiefly to be instructed in a world of their own imagining.

Earl Sacrobosco tried to help him out. “You're not plastic enough,” he told Pierce, molding something invisible in his hands. “The kids want to play with these ideas that are new to them. So play with them. Entertain them."

"Entertaining students is not my idea of..."

"The notions, Pierce. Entertain the notions."

Sacrobosco himself taught an astronomy course which was, at his students’ insistence, coming to include practical training in judicial astrology, so he knew whereof he spoke. Earl was as plastic as they come. Pierce did his best, he could entertain notions, he could and did, but he continued to think of his course as a
history
course, on the model of those he had taken under Frank Walker Barr at Noate: a history course, however commodious and full of digression. His students apparently wanted something else. They liked the stories he was gleaning from his newly wide reading, and made round sounds of wonder at the notions he put forth, which they entertained indiscriminately, mixing them with their other mental guests in a bash that Pierce found hard to crash. They had come to college not, as Pierce's generation seemed to Pierce to have gone to college, to be disabused of their superstitions, but to find new and different ones to adopt; they seemed not to understand the nature of evidence, and were vague about whether the Middle Ages came before or after the Renaissance; they were resentful of Pierce's careful distinctions, and insulted when he showed himself to be appalled at their ignorance. “But this is a
history
course,” he would plead before their truculent faces. “It is about
past time
and what has in fact occurred. Stories told about that past time are no good unless they can account for events that really happened, which we therefore have to learn, which is why we study history in the first place. Now about this other stuff, maybe in Dr. Sacrobosco's course or Mrs. Black's course on the Witch Cult as a Women's Movement...” But after class they would crowd around his desk, uncowed, bringing him news of Atlantis, the secrets of the pyramids, the Age of Aquarius.

"What,” he asked Earl Sacrobosco, “is the Age of Aquarius?"

Pierce and another young teacher, a woman named Julie who had just come to the school to teach New Age journalism, were at a small dinner party at the Sacroboscos. Earl had acquired a little pot, ho ho, for him and the youngsters to try out after Mrs. Sacrobosco had gone to bed.

"The Age of Aquarius?” Earl said, his eyebrows wrinkling up and down rapidly (his toupee remained motionless though, always a giveaway). “Well, it's an effect of the precession of the equinoxes. Very simple really. See, the earth turning on its axis"—he pointed his forefingers at each other and revolved them—"doesn't have a regular motion, it has a little bobble in it, it moves sort of like a top when it's running down.” The fingers described this eccentricity. “One whole movement, though, takes a long time, about twenty-six thousand years to complete. Now one effect of this is that the direction the axis points in the sky—true north—changes slowly over time; the star pointed to, the North Star, is a different star at the beginning of the cycle and halfway through."

"Hm,” said Pierce, visualizing.

"Another effect,” Earl went on, “is that the star background shifts vis-à-vis the sun. Just as the relative positions of things in this room change if you waggle your head slowly around.” They all did that, and fell to giggling for a while. “So, so,” Earl said, “the star background shifts. You can measure this by noting, at a specific day every year, what sign of the zodiac the sun is rising with; and the days you choose are the equinoxes, the days that are the same length as the nights, if you see what I mean. And if you do that over a very long time, centuries, you can see that the sun is very gradually falling back. It's rising, on the equinox, slightly later every century, that is, in a slightly more easterly part of the sign. And you can suppose, well, it will keep on doing that till it has fallen all the way back around. And so it does.” He lapsed into thought, brow rising, rug remaining fixed. “So it does."

"Yes?” Pierce said. “And so?"

"So every once in a while, a long while, the sun rises one morning in a new sign. It has slipped right out of one and back into the previous one. Right now it rises on the spring equinox in some early degree of the sign Pisces. But it's always on the move—relative to us, that is, it's really us who are on the move; and pretty soon—well, astronomically speaking pretty soon, a couple hundred years or so—the sun will begin to rise in the sign of Aquarius. Thus the end of the Piscean Age, that started two-thousand-odd years ago, and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius."

Two thousand years ago, the Piscean age, the world shifts from B.C. to A.D. Jesus. And Jesus was a fish.

Oh. “Oh,” said Pierce.

"Always precedes, you see,” Earl said dreamily. “Precedes. Before Pisces was Aries the ram, and before that Taurus the bull, and so on."

Moses had ram's horns, who overthrew the golden bull-calf. And then comes Jesus the fish, two thousand years on, new heaven and new earth, and shepherd Pan flees from the mountainsides. And now the world watched and waited for the man with the water jug.

"The kids,” Pierce said, “claim it's starting now."

"Yes, well,” Earl said indulgently.

Pierce felt again, intensely, that sensation of a series of magic-lantern slides projected within him, all at once, all overlapping, all the same slide. Had he heard about this before too, and only forgotten it?
Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna
: yes, sure, the Virgin returns, because if, when Virgil was writing that line two thousand years ago, the sun was entering Pisces, then on the
autumnal
equinox it would rise in one two three four five six yes in Virgo. So Virgil it seems knew about this stuff too. And he, Pierce, had read him and studied him at St. Guinefort's, and hadn't understood. He felt as though if this kept up he would find himself sitting once again before his earliest ABC books, his first catechism, saying Oh I get it, this was the story encoded in these stories, this is the secret that was kept from me.

Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead: the great god Pan is dead.

"I thought,” Julie said, “that the equinox is March 21st."

"So it is, about,” said Earl.

"But that's Aries."

"So it was, once. Maybe when the whole system was codified, it was."

"But then all these sun signs and birth signs are wrong.” She sounded affronted. Pierce knew she set great store by her own sign and what it implied for her. Around her neck hung an enameled copper scorpion. “They're way off."

"It's adjusted for, in the system,” Earl said vaguely. He moved his hand as though tuning a TV. “Adjustments are made."

Pierce shook his head, buffaloed. Some kind of collision seemed to be taking place within him, a collision of just unprecedented magnitude, two vast sedans, both of them his, coming together in slow, slow motion, their noses crumpling, their drivers aghast. “But it's just this little bobble,” he said.

"Imagine the effect, though,” Earl said, raising the smoldering joint to his lip, “if the earth were stationary. The whole heavens would be shifting. Very important-seeming stuff."

"But they aren't,” Pierce said.

Earl grinned. “Well, all that stuff is coming back,” he squeaked with held breath. “It's a new age."

Redeunt Saturnia regna
: the old gold age that once was is come again. Walking home through the illuminated streets, in bed with Julie, at breakfast, on the toilet, standing abstracted before his students, Pierce came to feel often, like a clutch in his throat or a hum in his ears, that sense of collision he had first felt at Earl's: as though he had come upon some kind of crossroads, no, as though he were himself a crossroads, a place where caravans met, freighted with heavy goods, come from far places, colliding there with others come from different far places, headed elsewhere: pack-trains, merchants carrying jewels sewn in their clothing, dark nomads from nowhere carrying nothing, imperial couriers, spies, lost children. The history he thought he knew, the path called History which he walked every working day, the path that led backward through a maze of battles, migrations, conquests, bankruptcies, revolutions, one damn thing after another, men and women doing and saying, dreaming and playing, till it coiled finally and unknowably upon itself at the side of a cold campfire on some vast and silent veldt—from that path, it seemed, there forked another, just as long and just as mazy, only long since lost; and for some reason now, just now, it had suddenly become visible again, to him as to others, dawn winds rising as night turned pale. It seemed to spring out from the very foot of the napless velveteen armchair (recently rescued from the street) in which late at night Pierce sat thinking.