Little, Big

dangers or difficulties they would meet, this had been haphazard; George found and tossed out sweaters, flaccid knapsacks, knitted caps, galoshes.

“Say,” Fred said, tugging a cap over his wild hair. “Long time since I wore one of these here.”

“What good is all this, though?” Auberon said, standing aside, hands in his pockets.

“Well, listen,” George said. Better safe than sorry. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“You’d about need to be four-armed,” said Fred, holding up an immense poncho, “for thisere to do you much good.”

“This is stupid,” Auberon said. “I mean…”

“Okay, okay,” George said angrily, flourishing a large pistol he had just then found in the trunk, “okay, you decide, Mr. Know-it-all. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He thrust the gun in his belt, then changed his mind and tossed it back. “Hey, how about this?” It was a twenty-bladed jackknife with a thousand uses. “God, I haven’t seen this in years.”

“Nice,” Fred said, levering out the corkscrew with a yellow thumbnail. “Ver’ nice. And handy.”

Auberon went on watching, hands in pockets, but made no further objection; after a moment he no longer watched. Ever since Lilac’s appearance at Old Law Farm he had had immense difficulty in remaining for any length of time in the world; he seemed only to enter and leave particular scenes, which had no connection with each other, like the rooms of a house whose plan he couldn’t fathom, or didn’t care to try to fathom. He supposed, sometimes, that he was going mad, but though the thought seemed reasonable enough and an explanation of sorts, it left him oddly unmoved. For sure an enormous difference had suddenly come over the nature of things, but just what that difference was he couldn’t put his finger on: or rather, any individual thing he did put his finger on (a street, an apple, any thought, any memory) seemed no different, seemed to be now just what it had always been, and yet the difference remained. “Same difference,” George often said, about two things that were more or less alike; but for Auberon the phrase had come to designate his sense of one thing, one thing that had Somehow become—and was probably now for good—more or less different.

Same difference.

Probably, though (he didn’t know, but it seemed likely) this difference hadn’t come about suddenly at all, it was only that he had suddenly come to notice it, to inhabit it. It had dawned on him, is all; it had grown clear to him, like breaking weather. And he foresaw a time (with only a faint shudder of apprehension) when he would no longer notice the difference, or remember that things had ever been, or rather not been, different; and after that a time when storms of difference would succeed one another as they liked, and he would never notice.

Already he found himself forgetting that something like an occluded front seemed to have swept over his memories of Sylvie, which he had thought as hard and changeless as anything he owned, but which when he touched them now seemed to have turned to autumn leaves like fairy gold, turned to wet earth, staghorn, snails’ shells, fauns’ feet.

“What?” he said.

“Put this on,” George said, and gave him a sheath knife on whose sheath, dimly printed in gold, were the words “Ausable Chasm,” which meant nothing to Auberon; but he looped it through his belt, not able to think just then why he might rather not.

Certainly this drifting in and out of what seemed to be chapters of fiction with blank pages in between had helped out with a hard task he had had to do: wrapping up (as he had thought he would never need to) the tale told on “A World Elsewhere.” To wrap up a tale whose wrapping-up was in the very nature of it not conceivable—hard! And yet he had only had to sit before the nearlyshot typewriter (so much had it suffered) for concluding chapters to begin to unfold as clearly, as cleverly, as impossibly as an endless chain of colored scarves from the empty fist of a magician. How does a tale end that was only a promise of no ending? In the same way as a difference comes to inhabit a world that is otherwise the same in all respects; in the same way that a picture which shows a complex urn alters, as you stare at it, to two faces contemplating each other.

He fulfilled the promise, that it wouldn’t end: and that was the end. That’s all.

Just how he had done it, just what scenes he stabbed out on the twenty-six alphabetical buttons and their associates, what words were said, what deaths came to pass, what births, he couldn’t remember afterwards; they were the dreams of a man who dreams he dreams, imaginary imagination, insubstantialities set up in a world itself gone insubstantial. Whether they would be produced at all, and what effect they would have Out There if they were, what spell they might cast or break, he couldn’t imagine. He only sent Fred off with the once-unimaginable last pages, and thought, laughing, of that schoolboy device he had once used, that last line that every schoolboy had once used to complete some wild self-indulgent fantasy otherwise uncompletable: then he woke up.

Then he woke up.

The phrases of his fugue with the world touched each other. The three of them, he, George, and Fred, stood booted and armed before the maw of a subway entrance: a cold spring day like a messy bed where the world still slept.

“Uptown? Downtown?” George asked.

Watch Your Step

Auberon had suggested other doors, or what had seemed to him might be doors: a pavilion in a locked park to which he had the key; an uptown building that had been Sylvie’s last destination as a Winged messenger; a barrel vault deep beneath the Terminus, nexus of four corridors. But Fred was leading this expedition.

“A ferry,” he said. “Now if we’s to take a ferry, we surely will cross a river. So now not countin’ the Bronx and the Harlem, not countin’ no Kills and no Spuyten Duyvil which is really th’ocean, not goan so far north as the Saw Mill, and settin’ aside the East and the Hudson which got bridges, you still got a mess more of rivers to consider, yunnastan, only, here’s the thang, they runnin’ underground now all unseen; covered up with streets and folks’ houses and plays-a-business; shootin’ through ser-pipes and pressed down to trickles and rivulets and like that; stopped up, drove down deep into the rock where they turn into seep and what you call your groundwater; stillthere though, y’see, y’see, so we gots to first find the river to cross, and then we gots to cross it next; and if the mose of ’em is underground, underground is where we gots to go.”

“Okay,” George said.

“Okay,” Auberon said.

“Watch your step,” Fred said.

They went down, stepping carefully as though in an unfamiliar place, though all of them were familiar with it, it was only The Train with its caves and dens, its mad signs pointing in contradictory directions, no help for the lost, and its seep of inky water and far-off borborygmic rumbles.

Auberon stopped, half-way down the stairs.

“Wait a sec,” he said. “Wait.”

“Wazza matter?” George said, looking quickly around.

“This is crazy,” Auberon said. “This can’t be right.” Fred had gone ahead, had rounded the corner, waving them on. George stood between, looking after Fred and up at Auberon.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” George said.

This would be hard, very hard, Auberon thought, following reluctantly; far harder to yield to than to the blank passages and discomfitures of his old drunkenness. And yet the skills he had learned in that long binge—how to yield up control, how to ignore shame and make a spectacle of himself, how not to question circumstances or at least not be surprised when no answers to questions could be found—those skills were all he had now, all the gear he could bring to this expedition. Even with them he doubted he would get to the end; without them, he thought, he would not have been able to start off.

“Okay, wait,” he said, turning after the others into deeper places. “Hold on.”

And what if he had been put through that awful time, basic training, only so that now (snow-blind, sun- struck) he could live through this storm of difference, make his way through this dark wood?