But soon she began to linger on her journeys, go farther, return later and more reluctantly. She worried, at first, that if she spent half the day as well as all the night in Dreamland, she would eventually run out of matter to transmute into dreams, that her dreams would grow thin, unconvincing, repetitious. The opposite happened. The deeper she journeyed—the farther the waking world fell behind—the grander and more inventive became the fictive landscapes, the more complete and epical the adventures. How could that be? Where if not from waking life, books and pictures, loves and longings, real roads and rocks and real toes stubbed on them, could she manufacture dreams? And where then did these fabulous isles, gloomy vast sheds, intricate cities, cruel governments, insoluble problems, comical supporting players with convincing manners, come from? She didn’t know; gradually she came not to care.
She knew that the real ones, loved ones, in her life worried about her. Their concern followed her into dreams, but became transformed into exquisite persecutions and triumphal reunions, so that was how she chose to deal with them and their concern.
And now she had learned the last art, which squared the power of her secret life and at the same time hushed the real ones’ questions. She had Somehow learned to raise at will a fever, and with it the lurid, compelling, white-hot dreams a fever brings. Flushed with the victory of it, she hadn’t at first seen the danger of this double dose, as it were; too hastily she tossed away most of her waking life—it had lately grown complex and promiseiess any- how—and retired to her sickbed secretly, guiltily exulting.
Only on waking was she sometimes—as now when George Mouse saw her look within—seized by the terrible understanding of the addict: the understanding that she was doomed, had lost her way in this realm, had, not meaning to, gone too far in to find a way out—that the only way out was to go in, give in, fly further in—that the only way to ameliorate the horror of her addiction was to indulge it.
She grasped George’s wrist as though his real flesh could wake her truly. “Some dreams,” she said. “It’s the fever.”
“Sure,” George said. “Fever dreams.”
“I ache,” she said, hugging herself. “Too much sleep. Too long in one position. Something.”
“You need a massage.” Did his voice betray him?
She bent her long torso side to side. “Would you?”
“You bet.”
She turned her back to him, pointing out on the figured bed-jacket where it hurt. “No no no honey,” he said as though to a child. “Look. Lie down here. Put the pillow under your chin—right. Now I sit here—just move a little —let me take my shoes off. Comfy?” He began, feeling her fever-heat through the thin jacket. “That album,” he said, not having for a moment forgotten it.
“Oh,” she said, her voice low and gruff as he pressed the bellows of her lungs. “Auberon’s pictures.” Her hand reached out and rested on the cover. “When we were kids. Art pictures.”
“Art pictures like what?” George said, working the bones where her wings would he if she had wings.
As though she couldn’t help it she raised the cover, put it down again. “
“Oho,” George said. George had once known these naked, pearl-gray children, abstracted here and more carnal for not being flesh at all. “Let’s take this shirtie off,” he said. “That’s better…”
She turned the album’s pages with abstracted slowness, touching certain of the pictures as though she wished to feel the texture of the day, the past, the flesh.
Here were Alice and she on the stippled stones by a waterfall which plunged madly out-of-focus behind them. In the hazy foreground leaves, some law of optics inflated droplets of sunlight into dozens of white disembodied eyes round with wonder. The naked children (Sophie’s dark aureoles were puckered like unblown flowers, like tiny closed lips) looked down into a black, silken pool. What did they see there that kept their lashy eyes lowered, that made them smile? Below the image, in a neat hand, was the picture’s title:
Small pictures clipped to the pages with black corners. Sophie wide-eyed, open-mouthed, feet wide apart and arms high, all open, a Gnostic’s X of microcosmic child-woman-kind, her yet-uncut hair wide too and white— thus golden in fact—against an obscure cave of summer-dark trees. Alice undressing, stepping one-footed from her white cotton panties, her plump purse already beginning to be clothed with crisp fair hair. The two girls opening through time like the magic flowers of nature films as George hungrily looked through Auberon’s eyes, double- peeping at the past. Stop here a minute…
She held the page open there, while he went on, shifting his position and his hands; her legs opening across the sheets made a certain sound. She showed him the Orphan Nymphs. Flowers twined in their hair, they lay full length entwined on the grassy sward. They had their hands to each other’s cheeks, and their eyes were heavy and they were on the point of kissing open-mouthed: acting out lonely consolation, it might be, for an art-picture of innocence at once orphaned and faery, but not acting; Sophie remembered. Her nerveless hand slipped from the page and her eyes too lost their grasp of it; it didn’t matter.
“Do you know what I’m going to do,” George asked, unable not to.
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” An exhalation only. “Yes.”
But she didn’t, not really; she had leapt across that gap Consciousness again, had saved herself from falling there, had landed safely (able to fly) on the far side, within that pearl-toned afternoon that had no night.
The Least Trumps
“As in any deck,” Cloud said, taking their velvet bag from the tooled case and then the cards themselves from the bag, “there are fifty-two cards for the fifty-two weeks of the year, four suits for the four seasons, twelve court cards for the twelve months and, if you count them right, three hundred and sixty-four pips for the days of the year.”
“A year’s got three-sixty-five,” George said.
“This is the old year, before they knew better. Throw another log on the fire, will you, George?”
She began to lay out his future as he fooled with the fire. The secret he had within him—or above him asleep actually— warmed his center and made him grin, but left his extremities deathly cold. He unrolled the cuffs of his sweater and drew his hands within. They felt like a skeleton’s.
“Also,” said Cloud, “there are twenty-one trumps, numbered from zero to twenty. There are Persons, and Places, and Things, and Notions.” The big cards fell, with their pretty emblems of sticks and cups and swords. “There’s another set of trumps,” Cloud said. “The ones I have here are not as great as those; those have oh the sun and the moon and large notions. Mine are called—my mother called them—the Least Trumps.” She smiled at George. “Here is a Person. The Cousin.” She placed that in the circle and thought a moment.
“Tell me the worst,” George said. “I can take it.”
“The worst,” said Daily Alice from the deep armchair where she sat reading, “is just what she can’t tell you.”
“Or the best either,” said Cloud. “Just a bit of what might be. But in the next day, or the next year, or the next hour, that I can’t tell either. Now hush while I think.” The cards had grown into interlocking circles like trains of thought, and Cloud spoke to George of events that would befall him; a small legacy, she said, from someone he never knew, but not money, and left him by accident. “You see, here’s the Gift; here the Stranger in this place.”
Watching her, chuckling at the process and also helplessly at what had occurred to him that afternoon (and which he intended to repeat, creeping quiet as a mouse when all were asleep), George didn’t notice Cloud fall silent
