Little, Big

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.

Sylvie & Bruno Concluded

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 Dona 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?”

“Shichess.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know,” Auberon said, “where she is?”

“Nah.” He dismissed her with an easy gesture, her own gesture translated. “Ain’t seen her in munce. She gets around.”

“Yes.” If he could just put his hands in Bruno’s hair. Just for a moment; that would be enough. And close his burning eyes. The thought made him faint, and he leaned against the headboard.