Little, Big

family owned in the City might be combined and sealed up to make an enormous, impenetrable curtain-wall—like the hollow wall of a castle—around the center of the block, where the gardens were. The outbuildings and stuff inside the block could be torn down then and all the garden-space transformed into a single pasture or farm. They could grow things there, and keep cows. No, goats. Goats were smaller and less fussy about their food. They gave milk and there would be the odd kid to eat. George had never killed anything larger than a cockroach, but he had eaten kid in a ’Rican diner and his mouth watered. He hadn’t heard what Smoky said, though he had heard Smoky talking. He said, “But what’s the story? What’s the real story?”

“Well, we’re Protected, you know,” Smoky said vaguely, digging the black ground with his stick. “But there’s always something that’s got to be given in return fur protection, isn’t there?” He hadn’t understood any of that in the beginning; he didn’t suppose he understood it any better now. Though he knew some payment had to be made, he wasn’t sure whether it had been made, or was to be made, or had been deferred; whether the vague sense he had in winter of something being wrung from him, of being dunned and desiccated and having sacrificed much (he couldn’t say what exactly) meant that the Creditors had been satisfied, or that the goblins he sensed peeking in the windows and calling down the chimneys, clustering under the eaves and scrabbling through the disused upper rooms were reminding him and all of them of a debt unpaid, tribute unexacted, goblin principal earning some horrid interest he couldn’t calculate.

But George had been thinking of a plan to represent the basic notions of Act Theory (that he had read of in a popular magazine and which seemed to him just then to make sense, a lot of sense) by means of a display of fireworks: how the various parts of an Act as the theory explained them could be expressed in the initiation, rising whistle, culminating starburst and crackling expiration of a colored bomb; and how in combination fireworks could represent “entrained” Acts, multiple Acts of all kinds, the grand Act that is Life’s rhythm and Time’s. The notion faded in sparks. He shook Smoky’s shoulder and said, “But how goes it? How are you getting on?”

“Jesus, George,” Smoky said standing. “I’ve told you all I can. I’m freezing. I bet it freezes over tonight. There might be snow for Christmas.” He knew in fact there would be; it had been promised. “Let’s go get some cocoa.”

Cocoa and a Bun

It was brown and hot, with chocolate bubbles winking at the brim. A marshmallow Cloud had plopped in it turned and bubbled as though dissolving in joy. Daily Alice instructed Tacey and Lily in the arts of blowing gently on it, picking it up by the handle, and laughing at the brown moustaches it made. The way Cloud watched over it it grew no skin, though George didn’t mind a skin; his mother’s had always had a skin, and so had that they served from urns in the basement of the Church of All Streets, a nondenominational church she had used to take him and Franz to, always, it seemed, on days like this.

“Have another bun,” Cloud said to Alice. “Eating for two,” she said to George.

“You don’t mean it,” George said.

“I think so,” Alice said. She bit the bun. “I’m a good bearer.”

“Wow. A boy this time.”

“No,” she said confidently. “Another girl. So Cloud says.

“Not I,” Cloud said. “The cards.”

“We’ll name her Lucy,” Tacey said. “Lucy Ann and Anndy Ann de Barn Barn Barnable. George has two moustaches.”

“Who’ll take this up to Sophie?” Cloud said, setting a cup and a bun on a black japanned tray of great age that showed a silver-haired, star-spangled sprite drinking Coke.

“Let me,” George said. “Hey, Aunt Cloud. Can you do the cards for me?”

“Sure, George. I think you’re included.”

“Now if I can find her room,” he said giggling. He took up the tray carefully, noting that his hands had begun to shake.

Sophie was asleep when he came into her room by pushing the door open with his knee. He stood unmoving in the room, feeling the steam rise from the cocoa and hoping she would never wake. So strange to feel again those adolescent peeping-tom emotions—mostly a trembling weakness at the knees and a dry thickness in the throat— caused now by conjunction of the mad capsule and Sophie deshabille on the messy bed. One long leg was uncovered and the toes pointed toward the floor, as though indicating the appropriate one of two Chinese slippers that peeped from beneath a discarded kimono; her breasts soft with sleeping had come out of her ruffled ’jammies and rose and fell slightly with her breathing, flushed (he thought tenderly) with fever. Even as he devoured her though she seemed to feel his gaze, and without waking she pulled her clothes together and rolled over so her cheek lay on her closed fist. It made him want to laugh, or cry, so prettily she did it, but he restrained himself and did neither, only set down the tray on her table cluttered with pill bottles and crushed tissues. He moved onto the bed a big album or scrapbook to do it, and at that she woke.

“George,” she said calmly, stretching, not surprised, thinking perhaps she was still asleep. He laid his swarthy hand to her brow gently. “Hi, cutie,” he said. She lay back amid the pillows; her eyes closed, and for a moment she wandered back to dreamland. Then she said Oh arid struggled up to kneel on the bed and come full awake. “George!”

“Feeling better?”

“I don’t know. I was dreaming. Cocoa for me?”

“For you. What were you dreaming?”

“Mm. Good. Sleeping makes me hungry. Does it you?” She wiped away her moustache with a pink tissue she plucked from a box of them; another took its place pertly. “Oh, dreams about years ago. I guess because of that album. No you can’t.” She took his hand from it. “Dirty pictures.”

“Dirty.”

“Pictures of me, years ago.” She smiled, ducking her head Drinkwater-style, and peeked at him over her cocoa cup with eyes still crinkled with sleep. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you,” George said; once he had seen her, he knew it to be true. She didn’t respond to his gallantry; she seemed to have forgotten him, or remembered suddenly something else entirely; the cocoa cup stopped halfway to her lips. She put it down slowly, her eyes looking at something he couldn’t see, something within. Then she seemed to wrest herself from it, laughed a quick, frightened laugh and took George’s wrist in a sudden grip as though to stay herself. “Some dreams,” she said, searching his face. “It’s the fever.”

The Orphan Nymphs

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl’s wings and talons and became other than conscious.

Starting from the simple pleasure of it, she had become practiced in all its nameless arts. The first thing was to learn to hear the small voice: that fragment of conscious self which like a guardian angel walks with the eidolons of self with which we replace ourselves in Dreamland, the voice that whispers you are dreaming. The trick was to hear it, but not attend to it, or else you wake. She learned to hear it; and it told her that she could not be hurt by dream wounds, no matter how terrible; she woke from them always whole and safe—most safe because warm in bed. Since then she had feared no bad dreams; the dream Dante of her leaned on the dreaming Virgil and passed through horrors delightful and instructive.

Next she found she was one of those who can awake, leap the gap of consciousness, and arrive back in the same dream she had awakened from. She could build also many-storied houses of dream; she could dream that she woke, and then dream that she woke from that dream, each time dreaming that she said Oh! It was all