Little, Big

“All the better.”

George pondered. He got up, put on his old cardigan and sat down again. “Okay. You asked for it.” He thought for a time how to begin. Decades of odd drugs made him a vivid but not always a coherent story-teller. “Fireworks. Three Lilacs, did you say?”

“One was imaginary.”

“Shit. I wonder what makes the other two. Anyway, there was one in there that was false: like a false nose. I mean exactly like. That’s the fireworks story: that one.

“See, a long time ago, one day, Sophie and I… Well, it was one winter day when I went up to Edgewood, and she and I… But I didn’t think anything came of it, you know? Sort of a crazy fling. I wrote it off. I mean she had me fooled. Meanwhile, I knew there was a thing between her and Smoky.” He looked at Auberon. “Common knowledge, right?”

“Wrong.”

“You didn’t… They didn’t…”

“They never told me anything. I knew there’d been a baby, Lilac, of Sophie’s. Then she was gone. That’s all I knew.”

“Well, listen. As far as I know, Smoky still thinks he’s Lilac’s father. So, you know, mum is definitely the word on this story. Wazza matter?”

Auberon was laughing. “No, nothing,” he said. “Yeah, sure, mum’s the word.”

“Anyway. This is—what?—twenty-five years ago maybe. I’d gotten heavily into fireworks, because of Act Theory. Remember Act Theory? No? Jesus, things don’t last long in that line these days, do they. Act Theory, dig —God, I don’t know if I remember now how it worked myself, but it was this idea about how life works—how life is acts, and not thoughts or things: an act is a thought and a thing both at once, only it has this shape, see, so it can be analyzed. Every act, no matter what kind, pick up a cup, or a whole life, or like all of evolution, every act has the same shape; two acts together are another act with the same shape; all life is only one big act, made up of a million smaller ones, follow?”

“Not really.”

“Don’t matter. It was the reason I got into fireworks though, because a rocket has the same form as an act: initiation, burning, explosion, burning out. Only sometimes that rocket, that act, sets off another initiation, burning, explosion, and soon, get the picture? And so you can set up a display that has the same form as life. Acts, acts, all acts. Shells: inside one shell you can pack a bunch of others, which go off after the big one, packed in like a chicken is packed inside an egg, and inside that chicken more eggs with more chickens, and so on odd infinooty. Gerbs: a gerb has the same form as the feeling of being alive: a bunch of little explosions and burnings going on all the time, burning out, initiating, burning out, that all together make a picture, like thought makes pictures in the middle of the air.”

“What’s a gerb?”

“A gerb, man. Chinese fire. You know, that makes a picture of two battleships shooting at each other, and that turns into Old Glory.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Yeah. Lancework we call those. Just like thinking. A few people got that, too. Some critics.” He said nothing for a time, remembering vividly the river barge where he’d set off The Act Entrained and other shows. Darkness, and the slap of oily water; the smell of punk. And then the sky filled up with fire, which is like life, which is light that ignites and consumes and goes out and for a moment traces a figure in the air that can’t be forgotten but vihich, in a sense, was never there. And he racing around like a madman, shouting at his assistants, firing shells from the mortar, his hair singed, throat burning, coat motheaten from cinders, while his thought took shape above.

“About Lilac,” Auberon said.

“Yeah? Oh, yeah. Well, I’d been working for weeks for a new show. I had some new ideas about garnitures, and it was—well, it was my life, man, night and day. So one night…”

“Garnitures?”

“Garnitures are the part of the rocket that goes blooey at the end, like a flower. Y’see, you got your rocket, and here’s your case with your composition that burns and gets it aloft; and up here you got your, what you call your cap, and that’s where your garniture goes—stars, pinched stars, pumped stars—”

“Okay. Go on.”

“So I’m up on the third floor in this workshop I had fitted out up there—top floor, in case anything went, you know, the whole building wouldn’t go—it’s late, and I hear the bell ring. Bells still worked in those days. So I put down the case and stuff—you can’t just walk away from a roomful of fireworks, you know—and all the time the bell’s going, and I go down, who is this wise guy leaning on the bell. It was Sophie.

“It was a cold night, raining, I remember, and she had this shawl on, and that face in the shawl. She looked about dead, like she hadn’t slept for days. Big eyes like saucers, and tears, or maybe it was the rain on her face. She had this big bundle in her arms in another shawl, and I said what’s up and so on, and she said, ‘I’ve brought Lilac,’ and she pulled the shawl away from this thing she had.”

George shuddered, deeply, the shudder seeming to start at his loins and work upward till it flew off the top of his head, making his hair rise—the shudder of one whose future grave, they say, is somewhere stepped on. “Remember, man, I never knew about any of this. I didn’t know I was a daddy. I hadn’t heard from up that way in a year. And suddenly there’s Sophie, standing on the stoop like a bad dream saying Here’s your daughter, man, and showing me this baby, if that’s what it was.

“Man, this baby was in trouble.

“It looked old. I guess it was supposed to be about two now, but it looked about forty-five, a little withered bald guy, with this sly little face like some middle-aged furrier with troubles.” George laughed, a strange laugh. “It was supposed to be a girl, remember. God, it gave me a start. So we’re standing there, and the kid puts out its hand like this”—palm up, flat—“and checks the rain, and pulls the scarf over its head. Hey. What could I say? The kid made itself clear. I brought them in.

“We came in here. She set the kid up in that high chair. I couldn’t look at it, but I like couldn’t look away. And Sophie told me the story: her and me, that afternoon, strange as it may seem, she’s figured the dates blahblahblah, Lilac is my kid. But—dig this—not this one. She’s figured it out: the true Lilac got changed, one night, for this one. This one isn’t real at all. Not the real Lilac, not even a real baby. I’m stunned. I’m reeling around saying What! What! And all the time”—he started laughing again, helplessly—“this kid is sitting there with this attitude—I can’t describe it—this sneer on its face like okay, okay, I’ve heard this tripe a million times—like it was bored—and all I could think was that it needed a cigar in its mouth, just to complete the picture.

“Sophie was like in shock. Shivering. Trying to tell me all this stuff at once. Then she stopped, couldn’t go on. It seems the kid was all right at first, she never knew the difference; she couldn’t even tell what night it was when it happened, ’cause she seemed so normal. And beautiful. Only quiet. Real quiet. Like passive. Then—a few months before—it started to change. Very slowly. Then faster. It started to sort of wither. But it wasn’t sick. Doc checked it at first, all okay, big appetite, smiling—but getting old, like. Oh God. I put an afghan around her and started making tea and I’m saying Calm down! Calm down! And she’s telling me how it dawned on her what must have happened—I just wasn’t convinced yet, man, I thought this kid should see a specialist—and then how she started hiding it from everybody, and they started asking hey, how’s Lilac, how come we never see her around anymore.” Another fit of unwilled laughter. George was on his feet now, acting out the parts of the story, especially his own bewilderment, and suddenly he turned wide-eyed to the empty high chair. “Then we look. The kid is gone.

“Not in the chair. Not underfoot.

“The door’s open. Sophie’s dazed, she lets out a little cry—Ah!—and looks at me. See, I was its daddy. I was supposed to do something. That’s why she’d come and all. God. Just the thought of this thing running around loose in my house gave me the willies. I went out in the hall. Nobody. Then I saw it climbing up the stairs. Stair by stair. It looked—what’s the word—purposeful: like it knew where it was going. So I said, ‘Hey, wait a second, buster—’ I couldn’t think of it as a girl—and I reached for its arm. It felt weird, cold and dry, like leather. It looked back at me with this look of