DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (43 page)

“The only thing that could make a difference,” she said then, “would be if I didn’t get what I wanted.
That
would make a difference.”

“If your wishes didn’t come true.”

“Well. And then anyway maybe when I was an old woman I would look back and say I
did
get what I wanted even if I didn’t know it at the time.”

“That’s what we were told by the nuns. You get what you want. Always.”

She put out her cigarette, and her last exhalation took momentary form in the streetlight, a little ghost. “I know I’ll slip
up again,” she said. “Get drunk, fornicate, whatever—the dog returning to his vomit, you ever read that part? But it doesn’t
matter, because what I’ve been given can’t be taken from me. I’ve got it for good. I can look down, and see how far up I’ve
come. But I can’t fall. Ever again.”

The unsleeping pedant within Pierce recognized the Carpocratian heresy: there is no sin for those who are saved. He saw himself
too in
her scheme, fornicating, not excluded, if he could put up with it, which he couldn’t.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Rose.”

“Yes.”

“Is this. Is this the big payback? Is that really what all this is?” He knew it was not, but the monstrous possibility seized
him, why not, why not anything.

“Payback?”

“For. All that was done. All that I.”

“You mean the Invisible Bedroom?”

He made no reply, wondering if she was smiling.

“Aw Pierce,” she said. “That wasn’t
you
doing those things. That was made up. That was just a game.”

Later on, when in a kind of awed pity he would look back upon himself in these days and hours (as we do when remembering an
unspeakable dream of self-mutilation or confinement, how could I do that to myself, for what reason), it would be this moment
that he would feel with the sharpest pangs. He had already been judged, condemned, dragged by grinning torturers down dungeon
stairs, but it was now that the oubliette opened beneath him and he went down. Entirely unable to see (though it would strike
him later as obvious, the punch line of a long joke) the reassurance she of course intended by what she said. Not
you
: not you that made me feel those things, suffer those things. Don’t worry.

What
she
would remember was his demonic restlessness, like a speed freak, unable to be reached or comforted.
Sweet sleep
she said to his head on the pillow (as Ray had said to her one bad night, whereupon her whole body had filled with, yes,
sleepy sweetness, she’d barely made it to her bed before it overcame her), but it didn’t work on him, maybe she was too distraught
herself to put the power into it. He got up, then lay down again; tossed this side and that. She slept; she dreamed, she would
not remember of what, and woke, and only an hour had passed; he claimed she had talked in her sleep, about the Spirit or the
Powerhouse. He got up again, and sat in a chair; she slept. As soon as it was light he woke her again, dressed now, and made
her give him her house keys. He was going out, he said. Unshaven, great-eyed, mad. Like a student up all night cramming for
a test he couldn’t possibly pass. She let him go.

He could not shake the sensation of being still on the bus. The hum of its engine in his breast, the sense of being propelled
unwillingly, the bitter flavor in his throat and his mind. He stood at a wide blank intersection, a store on each corner closed
tight and no help anyway (children’s
sad clothing, drugs, treacherous-eyed cameras, and one whose business he couldn’t discern). He walked a block in each direction,
finding nothing more. Then he forgot where he was, what city, why; and when he remembered, could not remember how to go back
to where he’d started from, which turns he had taken. Follow the right-hand wall. He was about to turn and try to retrace
his steps when he recognized the store he stood before: it was the drugstore he had first seen. Full circle. It had opened
meantime, it had a fountain; he entered warily.

Coffee put before him. The counterman looked long and meaningfully at him, toothpick rolling left to right in his mouth;
one of them
maybe, Pierce thought, one of Ray’s or God’s people, planted around her neighborhood in places where Pierce was bound to
come, or just one of many, the world filling up with them, from now on he was going to find them everywhere, and they would
know him too. Then he understood it was only his own appearance that had made the man size him up, his stricken face and frowsy
hair, and it occurred to him that maybe the mad feel that they are observed and judged constantly because they really are.

This is not my fault
, he thought. No it was not he or anything he had done or wanted that had brought this about. This became suddenly clear to
him, though it brought no relief. No it was because of some disaster or calamity that had just occurred somewhere, one that
he was not aware of, and why should he be? Doubtless there were others like himself trapped or cast away by it, many maybe,
many many. He realized he could see, from the stool where he sat, the building she lived in, thought he could tell which window
was hers. She too. No, not she: this was her land, wasn’t it, her city. Happy here, happy. Yet surely she was not the
source
of the disaster. She could not be: unless she wasn’t she at all.

He saw her then, just as though he stood by her bed: saw her vacated body asleep in her bed, within her dawnlit apartment.
And as though thrust through by a sword he understood what had happened.

She’d got off the bus.

Somewhere far away, wherever she was, she had got off the bus; weeping maybe, in her old raincoat, at some rest stop in some
shabby city or some diner on a windswept hillcrest, she’d got off. And at that her eidolon, the one they had replaced her
with in this black city of theirs, the one now occupying her bed and her life, had set about doing what it had been made to
do.

For
it wasn’t he but she
with whom the wizards had made their horrid bargain; not his love but hers that was to be tested. Well, she hadn’t lasted
long, had she. No surprise; no blame either, as there would not have been if it had been he, he who had been set the test
and failed
it finally. It was okay: if he ever saw her, the real her, again (but of course he could not, ever again, except in dreams)
he would want to tell her it was okay. He had suffered, yes—as they had intended he should, as they had told her he would
suffer if she got off the bus—but he was not to suffer the worst consequences. No. For he knew their plan, he had in fact
himself conceived it in advance of their making and carrying it out: on his way home from school, long ago, on the bus.

She was not she. Clear, strong, and beautiful, more beautiful than she had been before, she was not she, and he knew it. He
should have known it sooner. The simulacrum they had made was amazing but he would not any longer be fooled. He knew who they
were, of course, though not how they had gained the power that they had, or why he and she should be subject to it. But knowing
what he knew, he would fight them; he would not surrender, he could not, though he supposed he would not win. He had no weapons
but poor Reason, and his memory of what the world had once been like, and he did not think they would be enough.

He let himself into her apartment; it was as he had seen it from the street.

The gray light; the cat-familiar in its place, watchful. Her bare arm over the pillow and her mouth ajar. He sat again in
the chair where he had sat so long. At length his dry wracking sobs awoke her; he had begun to sob because he wanted so much
to touch her, to tell her it was okay, that he understood. She didn’t open her eyes or stir; she only listened to the noises
he made and, to her shame, pretended to be still asleep.

G
iordano Bruno left thankless Prague for Frankfurt in Novem ber. He carried two long Latin poems he wanted printed there,
De minimo
(on the Little) and
De immenso
(on the Big). He met a man called Hainzell or Haincelius who carried him off to a castle near Zurich called Elgg (how was
it they recognized him, men and women like this, by what sign, he had long ceased to be surprised by it) and sat him down
to write a book on composing signs and seals. How is it done? How can they be made, in the soul, in the mind? How are they
to be used; what can they do? Well:

Very well; and then:

These things were surely known to everyone; indeed they can’t be learned, they can only be forgotten. One more of the first
triad, before the world begins:

Next, her daughter Amphitrite, or Fullness; then Zeus or Order, out of whose brow proceeds Athene or Sophia or Wisdom; then
in quickening
crowds all the others, one at least for everything there is, and one also for every representation of those things, no number
that could be made could ever comprise the whole.

Yes of course. And then:

Yes. But then:

Where did they come from, where do they go; how did he draw them into his mind on their journey; how was it they would stop
for him, regard him with their august eyes, agree to stay? He could not command them but he could modify them: make the sad
ones glad, the savage ones mild. What he knew was that the oppositions invoked in creating these differing emblems could not
be simple ones, or the thing would die; the oppositions must run in two or four or twenty directions at once, high and low,
male and female, dark and light, one and other, many and one, near and far. What was it the English said:
the more the merrier
.

This seemed to him clear enough, clear enough to speak truths; but perhaps he was wrong, and it needed Explication.

Bruno knew that Mercury in his strength was anciently pictured as no other thing than a male part, obscenely large and aroused.
But the qualities passed the other way as well, from Positive to Negative: what the Ass is, Mercury is not; but what Mercury
is, the Ass his steed may also be: quick, witty, unscrupulous.

—You may use such figures as these to summon help, he told the puzzled lord of Elgg, showing him his descriptions of Amphitrite
and the rest. Use them rightly, and an army of helpers will come to your aid, riding out from your own heart, or from the
sky. For a time they can do that; then they no longer can.

—These? said Herr Hainzell.

—No not these, Bruno said, taking them back. These are mine. You must make your own.

He went back down to Frankfurt to cut with his own hands the geometrical illustrations for this book (
De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione
, the last book Bruno would write); and it was while he was at work there that he received an invitation from a young Venetian
nobleman, who had come to know his work (but how? Bruno had once lived in kindly Venice, but that was long ago) and who now
invited him to come teach him the arts he knew: Memory, Mathesis, Magic. This last word however the young man did not write.
Bruno began to wrap up his business. He had conceived a plan, a plan which involved the Images, the Pope, the Church, the
statues, the palaces of his memory, the new King of France, and the end of the world as it is. He was still growing.

Late in the year 1588 there came to Prague from Milan Signor Arcimboldo Arcimboldi, bringing with him the head of the Emperor.
That is, we know from certain documents that the head was there in 1591; surely it
could
have come in that year, 1588, when so much was for a moment possible.

Arcimboldo had been many years in the Emperor’s service, and been ennobled for his pains (for his pleasures too, it seemed
to him that his life and his work were so intensely pleasing as to be almost a crime, or a sin). He had made astonishing pageants
and plays for the Emperor, built automata that worked by water and fire and wind. He had designed
triumphal arches that told the story of the Emperor’s victories against the Turks (
tell me more, tell me more
, he would ask the victorious generals as he sketched and lettered and colored, and they would look on each other somewhat
guiltily: there had really been no great victory, but Arcimboldo didn’t care, there would be when he was done). To pass beneath
one such arch, he made a gigantic armored Emperor on a snorting armored horse, so real that a bystander had been cured of
the King’s Evil just by touching its skirts. Arcimboldo hadn’t known whether to laugh or weep.

Then he had begged leave of the Emperor to return to Milan, to live quietly and care for his soul after the years of patient
labor, and was allowed to go; reluctantly, for the Emperor hated losing anything he had acquired. Now he had returned. The
Emperor was there in the
neue Saal
for the placing of his head, the last head he would make, Arcimboldo said, the one missing from among the heads that hung
there where the Elements made the Seasons.

A single attendant carried it; it wasn’t large. It was placed upon an ebony easel, and the Emperor stood before it, and Arcimboldo
himself (plump, all in black like his master but smiling hugely) removed the wrappings.

There is no Stone: no medicine for melancholy. But when the Emperor saw the new portrait aflame in the afternoon sunlight
a deep peace and richness filled his bosom that he recognized immediately even while knowing he had never felt it before:
happiness.

—It pictures Vertumnus, said Arcimboldo. Your Majesty will of course be aware. There is a poem to accompany it, to explicate
it.

—It is myself, said the Emperor, looking. Arcimboldo bowed deeply.

It was himself, his heavy lip and big jaw, unmistakable. Like the other heads by Arcimboldo that watched over his collections,
it was what it was, very exactly, and it was also an emblem; its eyes were eyes, and saw, and they were also not eyes but
other things.

Vertumnus is God of the turning year, he who changes the seasons one into the next. So the Emperor’s face and breast, his
hair, beard, ringed ear, cap and chain, were all fruits and vegetables, the riches of every season gathered into a heap, May’s
and September’s, summer’s and spring’s, undistinguished but distinguishable.

Almost in awe the Emperor came close.

The figure’s toga, of spring and summer flowers and sweet lettuces, revealed the bosom, a great autumn gourd; warty winter
roots were the tendons of his neck, and a bristling chestnut the beard beneath his lip. In his lip, June raspberries; peas
in their pods his eyebrows; sheaves of wheat and grapes, blushing apples his apple cheeks, the Emperor
laughed aloud in gratitude and glee. How many portraits of himself had his artists made over the years, endowed with his chains
of office, his Roman armor and bays, with the sacred Cross; surrounded by Fame, Victory, Justice, Orthodoxy. No: here he was
of the earth only, a man composed of Earth’s multiple and constant production in time; himself, and yet not himself but all
things, beyond all the powers of kings and states, popes and principalities, changeless in constant change. He was the last
element not pictured here in this chamber, the fifth, which is Time.

—Time, said the Poem of Explication read aloud by the lector whom Arcimboldo had brought. Ruler over all states, god of the
elements. Eternal because cyclical, ever-returning, always the same in change.

—It shall be mounted at once, the Emperor said. He looked around himself; Strada was instantly at his side; workmen were summoned.
The Emperor, finger to his lips, studied with Arcimboldo where in the quadrature of the gallery it would hang, in what corner
of the earth, or what center. The place they at length settled on meant that the Elements must be shifted in their places
(as the workmen with their ladder and plumb bob noted) somewhat north by northwest into the region of the summer constellations;
Arcimboldo thought that would be acceptable. The cabinets would have to be shifted and reassembled to the same degree, but
that could wait, the Emperor was opening and clutching his hands impatiently behind his back; Strada clapped his own hands
to hurry the workmen.

Arcimboldo and his assistant took hold of
Fire
and lifted it from the wall. Just then in the
Judenstadt
far off, a certain housewife, hurrying to finish her Sabbath cooking before sunset came and the fire needed to be banked,
spilled her fat and in horror watched it catch. Doing what she knew very well never to do, she flung a pot of water on it,
which spattered the burning fat everywhere. In a moment she was calling for her children, first to help, then to flee.

—
Air
, said the Emperor, and that picture was the next to be shifted, his plumage rustling and the birds that composed him calling
like terns crowding a sea-rock. Down the ladder it came, to go up elsewhere.

A sudden wind springing up tossed the black-beaked gulls of the river and the flights of city pigeons out over the rooftops.
It played over the burning house in the Jewish quarter, and those gathering in the narrow street watched it tease and prod
the fire, twisting it into vortices, imps that poked their heads out the windows grinning at the crowd before withdrawing
again to redouble their efforts. And now the crowd saw a remarkable thing: out from the house were coming all the small inhabitants,
the mice and cats, a shuffling old dog and even (scorched
and bawling, having pulled its rope loose at the last moment) a little goat that Father had bought at Passover for two zuzim.

During that time the workmen in the
neue Saal
shifted the beastman
Earth
with his bull’s neck and fox’s eye.

Then they climbed to the fish-woman
Water
. By the time they had loosened and lowered it, the house in Farbrent Street belonged to the fire, which was making a quick
meal of it and looking around hungrily. But the Jews of the ghetto, so crowded and huddled, were of course great firefighters,
and already from the nearest fountain the leathern buckets were being passed hand over hand with rhythmic cries to be flung
(half-empty by then) at the fire’s feet. It wasn’t enough. But by the goodness of the Eternal, blessed be He, the house next
door happened to be an illegal tannery, which had with its stink always disgusted its neighbors but which had flourished because
it was situated above a small and ancient but reliable well, and every day the tanner’s men pumped water to fill a tall wooden
cistern on the roof. So now men with axes climbed to the tanner’s roof and began hacking at the planks of the cistern, their
eyes stinging from the swirl of smoke, and at length the cistern split and, like a glutton vomiting, shot a great volume of
water over the little house that was pressed up next to it. Water and fire, ancient enemies, grappled and fought, and men
and women hurried to help, and soon the fire was out. The people wept and cheered. Only one small house lost, not whole streetsful
as in other times. The peace of Shabbas came.

Peace: Perpetual Peace. The Emperor in his palace ordered torches and many-armed candelabra lit so that he could go on standing
before his new portrait.

—I am not a god, he said.

Arcimboldo, still smiling, bowed again: as you say.

—Nothing I have wanted for the people have I been able to create for them.

—Your Majesty is beloved for the mercy you have shown.

—You mean, the Emperor said, for the evil I have not done.

Arcimboldo bowed again.

Wrong, wrong, he had been wrong about everything. He had believed that by shutting himself within his palace to study the
making of gold, by learning to hasten the birth of gold from what was not gold, he could thereby hasten also the return of
the Age of Gold. What gratitude for him then! But the one thing the Age of Gold had not contained was gold. It contained peace,
not justice; liberty, not might; plenty, not lucre. The golden wheat; the golden cherry, golden marrow, golden grape: not
gold.