Little, Big

his nose had felt it yet. “Greyhound, huh,” he said. He recrossed his legs and said, “I can raise the price.” He asked Sylvie: “You want to go?”

“Sure I do,” Sylvie said.

“Sure I do,” said Fred.

“I was speaking to, I wasn’t speaking to you just then,” Auberon said.

Fred put his arm gently around Auberon’s shoulder. What ghosts plagued his friends he was always careful to be kind to. “Well, sure she do,” he said, his yellow eyes opening enough to gaze on Auberon in a way Auberon had never decided was predatory or kindly. “And bes’ of all,” he said, smiling, “she don’t need a ticket.”

Door into Nowhere

Of all the lapses and losses of his sodden memory, the one that troubled Auberon most later on was that he couldn’t remember whether or not he had gone to Florida. The Art of Memory showed him a few ragged palms, some stucco or concrete-block buildings painted pink or turquoise, the smell of eucalyptus; but if that was all, solid and unremovable though it seemed, it might well be imagination only, or only remembered pictures. Just as vivid were his memories of Old Man Hawk on avenues as wide as wind, perched on the gloved wrists of doormen along the Park, his beard of feathers rimy and his talons sharp to grip the entrails. But he had, Somehow, not frozen to death; and surely even more than palms and jalousies, a City winter survived on the street would, he thought, stick in the memory. Well: he hadn’t been paying close attention: the only thing that really engaged him were those islands where red neon signs beckoned to the wanderer (they were always red, he learned) and the endless replication of those flat bottles clear as water, in some of which, as in a box of children’s cereal, there would be a prize. And the only thing he vividly recalled was how, at the end of winter, there were no more prizes. His drunkenness was empty. There were only the lees left to drink; and he drank them.

Why had he been in the bowels of the old Terminus? Had he just returned by train from the Sunshine State? Or was it chance? Seeing three of most things, a damp leg where he had pissed himself some time before, in the small hours he strode purposefully (though going nowhere; if he didn’t stride purposefully he would take a header; this walking business was more complicated than most people supposed) down ramps and through catacombs. A fake nun, wimple filthy and eyes alert (Auberon had long ago realized this figure was a man) shook a begging cup at him, more in irony than expectation. He passed on. The Terminus, never silent, was as silent now as it ever was; the few travelers and the lost gave him a wide berth, though he glowered at them only to make them singular, three of each was too many. One of the virtues of drink was how it reduced life to these simple matters, which engaged all the attention; seeing, walking, raising a bottle accurately to the hole in your face. As though you were two years old again. No thoughts but simple ones. And an imaginary friend to talk to. He stopped walking; he had come up against a more-or-less solid wall; he rested and thought Lost.

A simple thought. One simple singular thought, and the rest of life and time a great flat featureless gray plain extending in all directions; consciousness a vast ball of dirty fuzz filling it to its limits, with only the hooded fire of that one thought alive within it.

“What?” he said, starting away from the wall, but no one had spoken to him. He looked around at the place where he stood: a vaulted intersection where four corridors met in a cross. He stood in a corner. The ribbed vaulting, where it joined in descending to the floor, made what seemed to be a slot or narrow opening, but which was only joined bricks; a sort of slot, which, it seemed, if you faced into it you might peer through.

“Hello?” he whispered to the darkness.

“Hello?” Nothing.

“Hello.” Louder this time.

“Softer,” she said.

“What?”

“Speak real soft,” Sylvie said. “Don’t turn around now.”

“Hello. Hello.”

“Hi there. Isn’t this great?”

“Sylvie,” he whispered.

“Just like you were right next to me.”

“Yes,” he said; “yes,” he whispered. He pressed his consciousness forward into the darkness. It folded up closed for a moment, then opened again. “What?” he said.

“Well,” she said, in a small voice, and after a darkling pause, “I think I’m going.”

No, he said. No, I bet not, I bet not; why?

“Well, I lost my job, see,” she whispered.

“Job?”

“With a ferry. A real old guy. He was nice. But boring. Back and forth all day…” He felt her withdraw somewhat. “So I guess I’ll go. Destiny calls,” she said; she said it self-mockingly, making light of it to cheer him.

“Why?” he said.

“Whisper,” she whispered.

“Why do you want to do this to me?”

“Do what, baby?”

“Well why don’t you just God damn go then? Why don’t you just go and leave me alone? Go go go.” He stopped, and listened. Silence and vacuity. A deep horror flew over him. “Sylvie?” he said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Where? Where are you going?”

“Well, further in,” she said.

“Further in where?”

“Here.”

He gripped the cold bricks to steady himself. His knees were falling back and forth from locked to loose. “Here?”

“The further in you go,” she said, “the bigger it gets.”

“God damn it,” he said. “God damn it, Sylvie.”

“It’s weird here,” she said. “Not what I expected. I’ve learned a lot, though. I guess I’ll get used to it.” She paused, and the silence filled the darkness. “I miss you, though.”

“Oh god,” he said.

“So I’ll go,” she said, her whisper already fainter.

“No,” he said, “no no no.”

“But you just said…”

“Oh god Sylvie,” he said, and his knees gave way; he knelt heavily, still facing into the darkness. “Oh god,” and he thrust his face into the nonexistent place he spoke into, and said other things, apologizing, begging abjectly, though for what he no longer knew.

“No, listen,” she whispered, embarrassed. “I think you’re great, really, I always did. Don’t say that stuff.” He was weeping now, uncomprehending, incomprehensible. “Anyway I have to,” she said. Her voice was already faint and distant, and her attention turning elsewhere. “Okay. Hey, you should see all the stuff they gave me… Listen, papo. Bendicion. Be good. G’bye.”

Early train-takers and men come to open tawdry shops passed him later, still there, long unconscious, on his knees in the corner like a bad boy, face wedged into the door into nowhere. With the ancient courtesy or indifference of the City, no one disturbed him, though some shook their heads sadly or in disgust at him as they passed: an object-lesson.

Ahead and Behind