Little, Big (59 page)

Not Old Law Farm but that old marten-house on a pole, and its battling noisy occupants coming and going and building nests.

Not the Seventh Saint Bar & Grill but Bacchus in basrelief, or Silenus or whoever that was supported by goat-footed satyrs nearly as drunk as their god.

Not the weird pursuing pressure of his madness, inherited and inescapable, only that plaque fixed to the gate where he had entered: Mouse Drinkwater Stone.

Not the false Sylvies that had afflicted him when he was drunk and defenseless but the little girls, skipping rope and playing jacks and whispering together as they eyed him suspiciously, who were always the same yet always different, perhaps only in different outfits.

Not his season on the street but the seasons of this pavilion.

Not her but this park.

Press on, press on.

The cold compassion of bartenders, he came to see, was like that of priests universal rather than personal, with charity for all and malice toward almost none. Firmly situated (smiling and making ritual and comforting gestures with glass and cloth) between sacrament and communicant, they commanded rather than earned love, trust, dependence. Best always to placate them. A big hello, and the tips subtle but sufficient.

"A gin, please, Victor, I mean Siegfried."

Oh God that solvent! A season's worth of summer afternoons dissolved in it as his father once, in a rare burst of enthusiasm for the sciences, had in school dissolved something blue-green (copper?) in a beaker of clear acid till it did not exist at all, didn't stain its solvent with even the faintest veridical residue; what had become of it? What had become of that July?

The Seventh Saint was a cool cavern, cool and dark as any burrow. Through the windows the white heat showed the more blank and violent to his eyes when they were accustomed to the dark; he looked out at a parade of blinking, harrowed faces, bodies as nearly unclothed as decency and contrivance allowed them to be. Negroes turned gray and oily and white people red; only the Spanish bloomed, and even they sometimes looked a little blown and wilted. The heat was an affront, like winter's cold; all seasons were errors here, two days only excepted in spring and a week in autumn full of huge possibilities, great glamor and sweetness.

"Hot enough for you?" said Siegfried. This was he who had replaced Auberon's first friend Victor behind the Seventh Saint bar. Auberon had never enjoyed any rapport with this thick, stupid one, named Siegfried. He sensed an unpastoral cruelty in him, an enjoyment almost in others' weaknesses, a
Schadenfreude
shadowing his ministry.

"Yes," Auberon said. "Yes, it is." Somewhere, far off, guns were fired. The way to avoid being disturbed by these, Auberon had decided, was to regard them as fireworks. You never anyway saw the slain in the streets, or as rarely as you saw the dead bodies of rabbits or birds in the woods. Somehow they were disposed of. "Cool in here, though," he said with a smile.

Sirens wailed, going elsewhere. "Trouble someplace," Siegfried said. "This parade."

"Parade?"

"Russell Eigenblick. Big show on. You didn't know?"

Auberon made gestures.

"Jeez, where you been? Did you know about the arrests?"

"No."

"Some guys with guns and bombs and literature. Found them in the basement of some church. They were a church group. Planning some assassination or something."

"They were going to assassinate Eigenblick?"

"Who the hell knows? Maybe they were his guys. I forget exactly. But he's in hiding, only there's this big march on today."

"For him or against him?"

"Who the hell knows?" Siegfried moved off. If Auberon wanted details, let him get a paper. The bartender had just been making conversation; he had better things to do than be grilled. Auberon drank, abashed. Outside, people were hurrying by, in groups of two and three, looking behind them. Some were shouting, others laughing.

Auberon turned from the window. Surreptitiously, he counted his money, contemplating the evening and the night ahead. Soon he would have to move downward in the drinker's scale, from this pleasant—more than pleasant, necessary, imperative—retreat to less pleasant places, brightly-lit, naked, with sticky plastic bars surmounted by the waxy faces of aged patrons, their eyes fixed on the absurdly cheap prices posted on the mirror before them. Dram shops, as old books had it. And then? He could drink alone, of course, and wholesale so to speak: but not in Old Law Farm, not in the Folding Bedroom. "Another of these," he said mildly, "when you get a chance."

He had that morning decided, not for the first time, that his search was over. He wouldn't sally forth today to follow illusory clues. She couldn't be found who wanted not to be found. His heart had cried out, But what if she does? What if she is only lost, and searching for you even as you search for her, what if only yesterday you came within a block of one another, what if at this moment she sits somewhere nearby, on a park bench, a stoop, Somehow unable to find her way back to you, what if she is even now thinking
He'll never believe this crazy story
(whatever it would be)
if only I find him, if only
; and the tears of loneliness on her brown cheeks . . . But that was all old. It was the Crazy Story Idea, and he knew it well; it had once been a bright hope, but it had over time condensed to this burning point, not a hope but a reproach, not even (no! No more!) a spur; and that was why it could be snuffed.

He'd snuffed it, brutally, and come to the Seventh Saint. A day off.

There was only one further decision then to make, and he would (with the help of this gin, and more of the same) make that today. She hadn't ever existed at all! She was a figment. It would be hard, at first, to convince himself of how sensible a solution this was to his difficulty; but it would grow easier.

"Never existed," he muttered. "Never never never."

"Wazzat?" said Siegfried, who usually couldn't hear the plainest request for replenishment.

"Storm," Auberon said, for just then there was a sound which if it wasn't cannon was thunder.

"Cool things off," said Siegfried. What the hell could he care, Auberon thought, aestivating in this cave.

Out of the roll of thunder came the more rhythmic beats of a big bass drum far downtown. More people were in the streets, driven forward by or perhaps heralding the oncoming of something big which they looked now and again over their shoulders at. Police cruisers shot into the intersections of street and avenue, blue lights revolving. Among those coming up the street—they were walking heedlessly in the middle of the roadway, that looked exhilarating to Auberon—were several wearing the blousy shirts of many colors worn by Eigenblick's adherents; these, and others in dark glasses and narrow suits, with what could have been hearing aids stuck into their ears but probably were not, discussed things with the sweating policemen, making gestures. A portable conga band, contrapuntal to the far-off beating bass drum, proceeded northward, surrounded by laughing brown and black people and by photographers. Their rhythms hurried the negotiators. The suited men seemed to command the police, who were helmeted and armed but apparently will-less. The thunder, more distinct, rolled again.

It seemed to Auberon that he had discovered, since coming to the City, or at least since he had spent a lot of time staring at crowds, that humanity, City humanity anyway, fell into only a few distinct types—not physical or social or racial, exactly, though the qualities that could be called physical or social or racial helped qualify people. He couldn't say just how many of these types there were, or describe any of them at all precisely, or even keep any of them in his mind when he didn't have an actual example before him; but he found himself continually saying to himself, "Ah, there's one of
that
sort of person." It certainly hadn't helped in his search for Sylvie that, however distinct she was, however utterly individual, the vague type she belonged to could throw up cognates of her everywhere to torment him. A lot of them didn't even look like her. They were her sisters, though; and they harrowed hini, far more than the
jovens
and
lindas
that superficially resembled her, like those that, on the lean muscled arms of their boyfriends or honorary husbands, now followed the conga band up the street, dancing. A larger group, of some status, was coming into view behind them.

These were decently dressed matrons and men, walking abreast, black women with broad bosoms and pearls and glasses, men in humble pork-pie hats, many skinny and stooped. He had often wondered how it is that great fat black women can grow faces, as they get older, that are hard, chiseled, granitic, tough and leathery, all that is associated with the lean. These people supported a street-wide banner on poles, with half-moon holes cut in it to keep it from being filled like a sail and carrying them off, whose letters, picked out in sequins, spelled out CHURCH OF ALL STREETS.

"That's the church," Siegfried said—he had moved his glass-wiping activities nearer the window in order to watch. "The church where they found those guys."

"With the bombs?"

"They got a lot of nerve."

Since Auberon still didn't know whether the bombers found in the Church of All Streets were for or against whoever this parade was for or against, he supposed this could be true.

The Church of All Streets contingent, the decent poor mostly as far as Auberon could see but with one or two Eigenblick blousons marching beside them, and one of the hearing-aides watching them too, was escorted by the many-eyed press on foot and in vans, and by armed horsemen, and by the curious. As though the Seventh Saint were a tidepool, and the tide were rising, two or three of these spilled through its doors, bringing in the hot breath of day and the odor of their marching. They complained loudly of the heat, more in high-pitched whistles and low groans than in words, and ordered beers. "Here you are, take this," said one, and held out something to Auberon on his yellow palm.

It was a narrow strip of paper, like a Chinese cookie fortune. Part of a sentence was crudely printed on it, but the sweat of the man's hand had obscured part of that, and all Auberon could make out was the word "message". Two of the others were comparing similar strips of paper, laughing and wiping beer-foam from their lips.

"What's it mean?"

"That's for
you
to figure out," the man said gaily. Siegfried put a drink in front of Auberon. "Maybe if you make a match, you win a prize. A lottery. Huh? They're handing 'em out all over town."

And indeed now outside Auberon saw a line of whitefaced mimes or clowns cakewalking along in the wake of the Church of All Streets, doing simple acrobatics, firing cap pistols, tipping battered hats, and distributing among the jostling crowd that thronged around them these small strips of paper. People took them, children begged for more, they were studied and compared. If no one took them, the clowns let them flutter away into a breeze that was beginning to rise. One of the clowns turned the handle of a siren he had hung around his neck, and an eerie wail could be faintly heard.

"What on earth," Auberon said.

"Who the hell knows," Siegfried said.

With a crash of brass instruments, a marching band began, and the street was suddenly filled with bright silken flags, barred, starred, snapping and furling in the thunder-wind. Great cheers rose. Double eagles screamed from some banners, double eagles with double hearts aflame in their bosoms, some clutching roses in their beaks, myrtle, swords, arrows, bolts of lightning in their talons; surmounted with crosses, crescents, or both, bleeding, effulgent or aflame. They seemed to stream and flutter on the terrific wave of military sound rising from the band, which was not uniformed but dressed in top hats, tails, and paper bat-wing collars. A royal-blue gold-fringed gonfalon was born before them, but was gone before Auberon could read it.

The bar patrons went to the window. "What's going on? What's going on?" The mimes or clowns worked the borders of the march, handing out slips, avoiding grabbing hands dexterously as they somersaulted or rode each other's shoulders. Auberon, well oiled by now, was exhilarated, as they all were, but he as much because he had no idea for what all this crazy energy was being expended as for the quick-stepping, flag-waving thing itself. More refugees barged through the doors of the Seventh Saint. For a moment the music grew loud. They weren't a good band, cacaphonous in fact; but the big drum kept the time.

"Good God," said a haggard man in a wrinkled Suit and a nearly brimless straw fedora. "Good God, those people."

"Check it out," said a black man. More entered, black, white, other. Siegfried looked startled, at bay. He'd expected a quiet afternoon. A sudden chattering roar drowned out their orders, and outside, descending right into the valley of the street, a sharpstuttering helicopter hove, hovered, reascended, scanning, raising winds in the streets; people clutched their hats, running in circles like farmyard fowl beneath a hawk. Commands issued from the copter in meaningless shouts of gravelly static, repeated over and over just as meaninglessly but more insistently. In the street, people shouted back defiance, and the helicopter rose away, turning carefully. Cheers and raspberries for the dragon's going.

"Whaddy say whaddy say?" the partrons asked each other.

"Maybe," Auberon said to no one, "warning them it's about to rain."

It was. They didn't care. More conga artists were passing, nearly swamped by throngs, all chanting to their beat: "Let it fall, let it rain; let it fall, let it rain." Fights were breaking out, shoving contests mostly, girl-friends shrieked, bystanders pulled apart contestants. The parade seemed to be turning into a swarming culture, and growing a riot. But car horns honked, insistently, and the millers were parted by several black limousines with fast-fluttering pennants on their fenders. Hurrying beside the cars were many of the suited, dark-spectacled men, looking everywhere and nowhere, faces grim, not having fun. The scene had darkened, quickly, ominously, the harsh dusty orange light of late afternoon snuffed like a klieg-light. Black clouds must have extinguished the sun. And even the neat haircuts of the suited aides were ruffled by the rising wind. The band had ceased, only the drum went on, sounding threnodic and solemn. Crowds pressed closely around the cars, curious, perhaps angry. They were warned away. Wreaths of dark flowers dressed some of the cars. A funeral? Nothing could be seen within their tinted windows.