Little, Big

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.

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.

Doesn’t Matter

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