Little, Big (60 page)

The patrons of the Seventh Saint had grown quiet, respectful or resentful.

"The last best hope," the sad man in the straw fedora said. "The goddam last best goddam hope."

"All over," said another, and drank deeply. "All over but the shouting." The cars passed away, the crowds falling in behind them, filling up their wake; the drum was like a dying heartbeat. Then, as uptown the band rang out again, there was a terrific crash of thunder, and everyone in the bar ducked at once, and then looked at one another and laughed, embarrassed to have been startled. Auberon finished his fifth gin in a gulp, and, pleased with himself for no reason but that, said "Let it fall, let it rain." He thrust his empty glass toward Siegfried, more commandingly than he usually did. "Another."

The rain began all at once, big drops spattering audibly on the tall window and then falling in great volumes, hissing furiously as though the city it fell on were red-hot. Rain coursing down the tinted glass obscured the parade's events. It looked now like ranks of people wearing hoods, holes cut out for eyes, or paper masks like welder's masks, carrying clubs or batons, were coming behind the limos and meeting some resistance; whether they were part of the parade or another show in opposition to it was hard to tell. The Seventh Saint filled rapidly with clamoring folk fleeing the rain. One of the mimes or clowns, his white face running, came in bowing, but certain shouts of greeting seemed to him hostile; he bowed out again.

Thunder, rain, sunset swallowed up in stormy darkness; crowds pouring through the pouring streets in the glare of streetlights. Breaking of glass, shouts, tumult, sirens, a war on. Those in the bar rushed out, to see or join in, and were replaced by others fleeing, who had seen enough. Auberon held his stool, calm, happy, lifting his drink with a suggestion of extended pinkie. He smiled beatifically at the troubled man in the straw fedora, who stood next to him. "Drunk as a lord," he said. "Quite literally. I mean lunk as a drord is when a lord is drunk. If you follow me." The man sighed and turned away.

"No, no," Siegfried shouted, waving his hands before him like shutters: for barging in were a bunch of Eigenblick adherents, their colored shirts plastered to their bodies with rain, supporting one among them who had been hurt: a spiderweb of blood over his face. They ignored Siegfried; the crowd, murmuring, let them in. The man next to Auberon stared openly and truculently at them, speaking in his mind to them in unguessable words. Someone vacated a table, upsetting a drink, and the wounded one was lowered into a chair.

They left him there to recuperate, and pushed to the bar. The man in the fedora was displaced elsewhere. A brief mood seemed to pass over Siegfried's face that he wouldn't serve them, but he thought better of it. One mounted the stool next to Auberon, a small person over whose shivering back was draped someone else's colored shirt. Another rose on tiptoe, glass raised high, and gave a toast: "To the Revelation!" Many cheered, for or against. Auberon leaned toward the person next to him and said, "What revelation?"

Excited, shivering, brushing rain from her face, she turned to Auberon. She'd got her hair cut, very short, like a boy's. "The Revelation," she said, and handed him a slip of paper. Not wanting to look away from her now that she was next to him, afraid if he looked away she would not be there when he looked back, he held the paper up to his near-blinded eyes. It said:
No fault of your own
.

In fact there were two Sylvies beside him, one for each eye. He clapped a hand over one eye and said, "Long time no see."

"Yah." She looked around at her companions, smiling, still shivering, but caught up in their excitement and glory.

"So where did you get to anyway?" Auberon said. "Where've you been? By the way." He knew he was drunk, and must speak carefully and mildly so that Sylvie wouldn't see and be ashamed of him.

"Around," she said.

"I don't suppose," he said, and would have gone on to say
I don't suppose if you weren't really Sylvie here now that you'd tell me so
, but this was drowned out by further toasts and comings and goings, and all he said was, "I mean if you were a figment."

"What?" Sylvie said.

"I mean how've you been!" He felt his head wobbling on his neck, and stopped it. "Can I buy you a drink?" She laughed at that: drinks for Eigenblick's people were not to be bought tonight. One of her companions caught her up and kissed her. "Fall of the City!" he cried hoarsely, been shouting all day no doubt. "Fall of the City!"

"Heeeey!" she answered, a kind of agreement with his enthusiasm rather than exactly with his sentiment. She turned back to Auberon then; she lowered her eyes, she moved her hand toward him, she was about to explain everything; but no, she only picked up his drink, sipped from it (raising her eyes to him over its rim) and put it down again with a grimace of disgust.

"Gin," he said.

"Tastes like
alcolado
," she said.

"Well, it's not supposed to be good," he said, "only good for you," and heard in his own voice a joking Auberon-and-Sylvie tone that had been so long absent from it that it was like hearing old music, or tasting a long-untasted food. Good for you, yes, for a further thought about her figmentary nature was trying to crack his consciousness like an oyster-knife, so he drank again, beaming at her as she beamed at the merry madness that boiled around them. "How's Mr. Rich?" he said.

"He's okay." Mum, not looking at him. He wasn't to pursue such subjects. But he was desperate to know her heart.

"You've been happy, though?"

She shrugged. "Busy." A small smile. "A busy little girl."

"Well, I mean . . ." He stopped. The last dim bulb of reason in his brain showed him Silence and Circumspection, and then went out. "It doesn't matter," he said. "I've been thinking about this a lot, lately, you know, well, you could've guessed, about us and all, I mean you and me; and what I figured out is that really it's basically okay, and all right, really." She had cupped her cheek in her hand, and was looking up at him rapt yet inattentive, as she had always been at his disquisitions. "You moved on, is all, right? I mean things change, life changes; how could I complain about that? I couldn't have any argument with that." It was suddenly sweetly clear: "It's as though I were with you like in one stage of your development—like a pupa stage, or a nymph stage. But you outgrew that. Became a different person. Like a butterfly does." Yes: she had broken from the transparent shell which was the girl he had known and touched; and (as he had the empty isinglass sculptures of locusts when he was a kid) he had preserved the shell, all he had of her, all the more precious for its terrible fragility and the perfect abandonment it embodied. She meanwhile (though out of his sight and ken, imaginable only by induction) had grown wings and flown: was not only elsewhere but something else as well.

She wrinkled her nose and opened her mouth in a
huh?
"What stage?" she said.

"Some early stage," he said.

"What was the word, though?"

"Nymph," he said. Thunder crashed; the eye of the storm had passed; rain wept again. And was this before him then nothing but the old transparency? Or her in the flesh? It was important to get these things straight right off the bat. And how anyway could it be that her flesh was what he was most intensely left with, and was it the flesh of her soul or the soul of her flesh? "It doesn't matter, doesn't matter," he said, his voice thick with happiness and his heart awash in the gin of human kindness; he forgave her everything, in exchange for this presence, whatever it was. "Dozen madder."

"Listen, it really doesn't," she said, and raised his own glass to him before sipping it gingerly again. "Go with the flow, y'know."

"Trooty is booth, booth trooty," he said "that is all ye know on earth, and all . . ."

"I need to go," she said. "To the john."

That was the last thing he clearly remembered, that she returned from the john, though he hadn't expected her to; when he saw her returning, his heart rose as it had when she had turned to face him on the stool next to him; he forgot that he had denied her thrice, had decided to decide she had never existed; that was absurd anyway, when here she was, when in the pelting rain outside (this glimpse only he had) he could kiss her: her rain-wet flesh was as cold as any ghost's, her nipples as hard as unripe fruit, but he imagined that she warmed.

There are charms that last, keeping the world long suspended in their power, and charms that do not last, that drain quickly away and leave the world as it was. Liquor is well known for not lasting.

Auberon was wrenched awake just after dawn, after a few hour of deathlike unconsciousness. He knew instantly that he should be dead, that death was his only appropriate condition, and that he was not dead. He cried out softly and hoarsely,, "No, oh God no," but oblivion was far away and even sleep had fled utterly. No: he was alive and the wretched world was around him; his staring eyeballs showed him the Folding Bedroom's crazed map of a ceiling, so many Devil's Islands in plaster. He didn't need to investigate to find that Sylvie wasn't next to him.

There was, however, someone next to him, bound up in the damp sheet (it was hot as hell already, chill sweat circled Auberon's neck and brow). And someone else was speaking to him; speaking from a corner of the Folding Bedroom, soothingly, confidentially: "Oh for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green . . ."

The voice came from a small red plastic radio, an antique with the word Silvertone across it in bas-relief script. Auberon had never known it to work before. The voice was black, a silky DJ's voice, black but cultured. God, they're everywhere, Auberon thought, overwhelmed with horrid strangeness, as a traveler sometimes is to find so many foreigners in other lands. "Away! Away! For I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy . . ."

Auberon climed slowly like a cripple from the bed. Who the hell was this beside him anyway. A brown shoulder big with muscle could be seen; the sheet breathed softly. Snored. Christ what have I done. He was about to draw down the sheet when it moved of its own accord, snuffling, and a shapely leg, flat-shinned, with curly dark hair, came out like a further clue; yes it was a man, that was certain. He carefully opened the door of the toilet, and took out his overcoat. He put it on over his nakedness, feeling with loathing the clammy touch of its lining against his skin. In the kitchen he opened cupboards with trembling skeleton's hands. The dusty vacuity within the cupboards was for some reason ghastly. In the last he opened there was a bottle of Doña Mariposa rum with an inch or two of amber fluid in it. His stomach turned; but he took it out. He went to the door, with a glance at the bed—his new friend still slept— and then out.

He sat on the stairs in the hallway, staring into the stairwell, the bottle in both hands. He missed Sylvie and comfort so dreadfully, with such a parched thirst, that his mouth hung open and he leaned forward as though to scream or vomit. But his eyes wouldn't yield tears. The vivifying fluids had all been drawn from him; he was a husk; the world was a husk too. And this man in the bed. He unscrewed (it took some application) the cap of the rum bottle, and, turning its accusatory label away from him, he poured fire on his sands. Darkling I listen. Keats, in smoothie blackface, slid out under the door and insinuatingly into his ear. Now more than ever seems it rich to die. Rich: he drank the last of the rum and rose, gasping and swallowing bitter spittle. To thy high requiem become a sot.

He recapped the empty bottle and left it on the stair. In the mirror hung over the pretty table at the hall's end he caught a glimpse of someone forlorn. The very word is like a bell. He looked away. He went into the Folding Bedroom, a golem, his dry clay animated briefly by rum. He could speak now. He went to the bed. The person there had thrown off his sheet. It
was
Sylvie, only modeled in male flesh, and no charm: this goatish boy was real. Auberon shook his shoulder. Sylvie's head rolled on the pillow. Dark eyes opened momentarily, saw Auberon, and closed again.

Auberon bent over the bed and spoke into his ear. "Who are you?" He spoke carefully and slowly. Might not understand our lingo. "What is you
name
?" The boy rolled over, woke, brushed his hand over his face from forehead to chin as though to magic away the resemblance to Sylvie (but it stayed) and said in a morningroughened voice, "Hey. What's happening?"

"What is your name?"

"Hey, hi. Jesus Christ." He lay back on the pillow, smacking his lips. He rubbed his knuckles in his eyes like a child. He scratched and stroked himself shamelessly, as though pleased to find himself to hand. He smiled at Auberon and said, "Bruno."

"Oh."

"You membah."

"Oh."

"We got frone outta dap bah."

"Oh. Oh."

"Boy you was drunk."

"Oh."

"Membah? You coont even . . ."

"Oh. No. No." Bruno was looking at him with easy affection, still stroking himself.

"You said Jus wait," Bruno said, and laughed. "That was you lass words, man."

"Oh yes?" He didn't remember; but he felt a weird regret, and almost laughed, and almost wept, that he had failed Sylvie when she was Sylvie. "Sorry," he said.

"Hey listen," Bruno said generously.

He wanted to move away, he knew he ought; he wanted to close his coat, which hung open. But he couldn't. If he did so, if he let this cup pass away from him, then the last dry dregs of last night's charm within it would not be licked up, and they might be all he had forever. He stared at Bruno's open face, simpler and sweeter than Sylvie's, unmarked by his passions, strong though Sylvie had always said they were. Friendly: tears, double-distilled because there was so little water within to draw on, burned the orbits of his eyes: friendly was the word to describe Bruno. "Do you," he said, "have a sister?"