Little, Big

Why did he find himself staring down into water? What was going on here anyway? He put his hands into his pockets hoping to find something that would give him a clue. He took out an old pocket watch, which meant nothing to him, and a blackened, small-bowled pipe.

He turned the pipe in his hands. A pipe: yes. “I remember,” he said vaguely. The pipe, the pipe. Yes. His basement. Down in the basement of a building on his block he had discovered an ancient cache, an amazing, a hilarious find. Amazing stuff! He had smoked some, in this pipe, that must be it: there in that blackened bowl. He could see bits of cindery consumed resin, it was all in him now, and this—this!—was the effect. Never, never had he known a rush so total, so involving! He had been swept away; he was no longer standing where he had been standing when he had put match to the pipe’s contents—on a bridge, yes, a stone bridge up in the Park, where he had gone to share a pipe with Sylvie—but in some weird woods, so real he could smell them, so swept away that he seemed to have been clambering forgetful of who he was in this woods for hours, forever, when in fact (he remembered, he remembered clearly) he had only at this moment lowered the pipe from his lips—here it still was in his hands, before his eyes. Yes: it had reappeared first, first sign of his alighting from a no doubt quite short but utterly ravishing rush; Sylvie’s face, in an old peau-de-soie black hat, would come next. He was even now about to turn to her (the hash-created woods discreating themselves and the littered brownish winter Park assembling itself around him) and say: “Hm, ha, strong stuff, watch it, STRONG stuff;” and she, laughing at his swept-away expression, would make some Sylvie remark as she took the pipe from him:

“I see, I remember,” he said, like a charm, but he had already a terrible percipience that this was not the first time he had remembered, no indeed, once before he had remembered it all but remembered it all differently. Once before? No, oh no, perhaps many times, oh no oh no: he stood frozen as the possibility of an endless series of remembrances, each one different but all made out of a small moment in the woods, occurred to him: an infinite series endlessly repeated, oh I remember, I remember, each one extending a lifetimewards out from one small, one very small moment (a turn of the head only, a step of the foot) in an absolutely inexplicable woods. George, seeing it so, felt he had been suddenly —but not suddenly, for a long, an immemorial time—condemned to hell.

“Help,” he said, or breathed. “Help, oh help.”

He took steps across the rickety bridge beneath which the forest stream foamed. There was a glassless picture framed in an old gilt frame on his kitchen wall (though George had forgotten just now that it was there) which showed just such a dangerous bridge as this, and two children, innocent, unafraid or perhaps unaware of their danger, crossing it hand in hand, a blond girl, a dark, brave boy, while above them, watching, ready to stretch out a hand to them if a loose crosspiece broke or a foot was placed wrong, was an angel: a white angel, crowned with a gold fillet, vapid-faced in gauzy draperies but strong, strong to save the children. Just such a power George felt behind him then (though he didn’t dare turn to see it) and, taking Lilac’s hand, or was it Sylvie’s, he stepped bravely across the creaking slats to reach the other side.

Then came a long, an endless because unremembered time; but at last George gained the top of the ravine, knees torn and hands weary. He came out between two rocks like upraised knees, and found himself—yes!—in a small glade spangled with flowers; and in the near distance, the row of guardian trees. Beyond them, it was clear now, was a fence of wattles, and a building or two, and a curl of smoke from a chimney. “Oh, yes,” George said, panting, “oh, yes.” Near him in the glade, a lamb stood; the noise George heard was not his own lost heart but its crying voice. It had got caught in some wicked trailfng briar, and was hurting itself to free its leg.

“There, there,” George said. “There, there.”

“Baa, baa,” said the lamb.

George freed its, fragile black leg; the lamb stumbled forward, still crying—it was just newborn, how had it strayed from its mother? George went to it, and picked it up by its legs, he had seen this done but he forgot where, and slung it over his neck, holding it by its feebly kicking feet. And with it turning its silly sad face to try and look into his, he went on up to the gate in the fence of wattles beyond the row of guardian trees. The gate stood open.

“Oh, yes,” George said, standing before it. “Oh, yes; I see. I see.”

For this was clear enough; there was the small ramshackle house with horn windows, there the byre, there the goat shed; there was the plot of new-planted vegetables, in which someone was digging, a small brown man who when he saw George approach threw down his tool and hurried away muttering. There was the wellhouse and the root cellar, there the woodpile, with its axe upright in the block. And there, the hungry sheep shouldered at their fences, looking up to be fed. And all around the little clearing, there was the Wild Wood looking down, indifferent and dark.

How he had come here he didn’t know, any more than he knew now where he had started from; but it was plain now where he was. He was home.

He set down the lamb within the fold, and it skipped to where its mother scolded it. George wished that he could remember, just a little; but what the hell, he’d spent a lifetime in one enchantment or another, or one enchantment in another, in another; he was too old now to worry when it changed. This was real enough.

“What the hell,” he said. “What the hell, it’s a living.” He turned to close his gate of palings, barring it and tying it closely in good husbandry against the dark Wild Wood and what lived there, and, brushing his hands together, went to his door.

Middle of Nowhere

A heaven, Ariel Hawksquill thought, deep within, a heaven no larger than the ball of one’s thumb. The island-garden of the Immortals, the valley where we are all kings forever. The rocking, clacking rhythm of the train drove the thought again and again around the track of her mind.

Hawksquill was not one of those who find the motion of trains soothing. Rather it prodded and grated on her hideously, and though a dull rainy dawn looked to be near breaking in the flat landscape beyond the window, she had not slept, though she had given out, on boarding, that she would—that was only to keep the President, for a time, away from her door. When the aged, kindly porter had come to make up her bed, she had sent him away, and then called him back, and asked that a bottle of brandy be brought her, and that no one disturb her.

“Sure you don’t want that bed made up, miz?”

“No. That’s all.” Where had the President’s staff found these gentle, bowed black men, who had been old and slow and few even in her own youth? Come to that, where did he find these grand old cars, and where tracks that could still be traveled on?

She poured brandy, grinding her teeth in nervous exhaustion, feeling that even her sturdiest memory mansions were being shaken to earth by this motion. Yet she needed, more than she had ever needed, to think clearly, fully, and not in circles. On the luggage rack above and opposite her was the alligator purse containing the cards.

A heaven deep within, the island-garden of the Immortals. Yes: if it were so, and if it were in fact heaven or someplace like it, then the one thing that could be said with certainty about it was that, whatever other delightful qualities it might have, it must be more spacious than the common world we leave to reach it.

More spacious: skies less limited, mountain peaks less reachable, seas deeper and less plumbable.

But there, the Immortals themselves must dream and ponder too, and take their spiritual exercises, and search for an even smaller heaven within that heaven. And that heaven, if it exist, must be yet more wide, less limited, higher, broader, deeper than the first. And so on… “And the vastest point, the center, the infinity—Faery, where the gigantic heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea upon sea and there is no end to possibility— that circle is so tihy it has no doors at all.”

Yes, old Bramble might be right, only too simple—or rather too complex, with his fundibular other-worlds with doors attached. No, not two worlds; with Occam’s old razor she could slit the throat of that idea. One world only, but with different modes; what anyway was a “world?” The one she saw on television, “A World Elsewhere,” could fit without multiplication of entities into this one, it was molecule-thin but whole: it was only another mode, it was fiction.

And in a mode like fiction, like make-believe, existed the land to which her cousins said she was invited to —no, told she must!—joumey. Yes, journey; for if it was a land, the only way to get there was to travel.