Daemonomania

  “So is he living there now? Mike? In Conurbana?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess.” He had no idea where they hid during the day, Ray and Pitt and Mike, he had thought of them as vanishing, hadn’t tried to imagine them at their breakfast or bath.

  “If he is,” Rosie said. “If he moved there and didn’t tell me. Then that was illegal. Strictly speaking.” She pressed her fist against her lips in thought. Then she reached out to touch his hand. “Oh man,” she said. “Where’s this going to end.”

  “A little angel was last,” said Sam, standing in the doorway. “Inside the baby.”

  “Right,” said Pierce. “Nothing inside her.”

  “Nothing,” said Sam.

  What Rosie needed to talk to Allan about was the submission of her quarterly report to the board of the Rasmussen Foundation in New York, a simple enough document that Rosie worried long over, she had typed several drafts on Boney’s huge Remington and now Allan said his own secretary would take it and do it right. They had delicately skirted the issue of Rosie’s hearing next week, but talked of the Powerhouse and its plans to buy the bankrupt Woods.

  “Listen,” Allan said. “If a community doesn’t want something like this to happen, they have resources. You understand me? There are very many perfectly legal and acceptable ways of countering an unwanted buyer. It doesn’t even need to be public.”

  “Like what ways.”

  “If you didn’t want them to buy it you could buy it yourself. I mean the Foundation could. It might take some doing to convince the board, but I think the asking price is about a million. Suppose you offered a million and a half.”

  “What are you talking about. The whole Foundation’s hardly worth that much.”

  “You don’t pay that much. You take an option to buy for a million and a half. It costs you, say, fifty thousand. The option’s good for three years. Eventually the other prospects get bored or their resources dry up. They go away.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “You think of something else. A lot can happen in three years.”

  “The horse could learn to talk,” Rosie said, not quite aloud.

  “The Foundation could even inspire a joint community action to raise the option money,” Allan said. He gazed thoughtfully out the window, hands linked behind his head, enjoying this, she thought. “Some people are already nervous about this bunch. To say nothing of the fact that having it bought by a nonprofit takes it off the tax rolls.”

  “Well gee,” Rosie said. “I’d help with that. Where do I sign.”

  “Well let’s think this through,” Allan said, swivelling toward her. “The Foundation yes could have a lot of influence in keeping these people out. But it could also help make a case for them in the community. It could offer to try to swing opinion in their favor.”

  “But why would I. Oh. Oh yes.” She perceived Allan’s train of thought just as it went out of sight. Yes. Then she thought of herself going to them, to Mike; sitting with them around some table somewhere, and making these deals. The Foundation’s help in swinging the Woods deal—in exchange for permanent custody of Sam. The nerve it would take, the lies she would have to tell. Maybe she wouldn’t have to do it herself; Allan might do it, he might be able to make it sound reasonable and proper, the way some people can offer bribes or tips for favors and make it sound just like business as usual. “But I don’t want them here,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “Well then,” Allan said. “You go and try your best on their behalf. And you don’t succeed.”

  Rosie shuddered profoundly, not knowing why. “It’s just too weird to think about,” she said. “I can’t.”

  Allan shrugged, somewhat theatrically.

  “He’s not a bad guy,” Rosie said. “I do know him. He isn’t, really.”

  Meanwhile Sam showed Pierce how to lie back on a bed and hang your head down almost to the floor, so that you could see the house upside down, the floor as the ceiling, the dusty empty rooms where lamps sprouted, the furniture stuck up above you, all the same but different.

  “See?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Pierce. “Wow.”

  When lunchtime came he gave her tomato soup with chunks of cheese in it, food he had come to know in Kentucky and still sometimes ate when he needed comfort; after a first hesitant bite she ate it willingly.

  “My daddy has a new house,” she said as she ate.

  “I heard that,” he said.

  “I have my same ode house.”

  “Yes. Lucky.” He wanted to say that when his parents separated he lost his old house, and all Brooklyn too. “Are you going to his new house today?”

  She shrugged, eating. Pierce tried to remember what it had been like to be suddenly parted from his father, but what he mostly remembered about it was the one thing that was most unlike now: that it couldn’t be spoken of.

  He put Oreo cookies before her, and she marvelled, reaching out for them in slow awe as though for spilled treasure; Pierce suddenly thought maybe he was flouting a family food rule.

  “Do you love God?” she said, after scraping the white innards from one with her teeth.

  “Um sure,” Pierce said.

  “I love God. He can cure everything. Like epsa lepsy.”

  “Ah,” Pierce said. “Tell me something. Is it after lunch you take your nap?”

  “You sually,” she said. “But. First I have a story.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Do you have any stories?”

  “Well I know some.”

  “I’d rather have a real story,” she said. “From a book.”

  “Oh. Well see I don’t have kids, so my books are. Well you know the kind.”

  “Yets see,” she said. She slipped from her tall chair (why don’t we remember living in a world where everything was absurdly outsize, tables and chairs and spoons, doorknobs too high to reach, too fat to grasp?) and went to look.

  Maybe because it happened to be one she could both reach and take hold of: she drew out a ragged paperback, saw that at least it had pictures, and held it out to Pierce.

  “This one?” Pierce said. It was the bound edition of the once well-known comic strip Little Enosh: Lost Among the Worlds, for the year 1952. Pierce used to receive these every year on his birthday, sent to Kentucky from his father in Brooklyn, at least so he thought at the time; it was actually his mother who had bought and wrapped them. In Brooklyn at the beginning of his life Axel used to read Enosh to him nightly, in the New York World. He accepted this one from Sam, remembering immediately its contents and the times too when he had read it and the others (he saved them all, spine-broken and held together with rubber bands) for comfort and delight from that year down to this.

  “You’ll like it,” he said; but she would make no such assumption, only waited till they sat side by side and he had opened the book to the middle.

  “Start at the beginning,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter where you start,” he said. “It’s been going on so long.”

  So here’s Little Enosh in his lenticular starship, as usual hurtling over a planet’s pocked surface; behind him the planet’s sleepy sun goes down. Dok dok nite says Enosh, a little fearish (his eyes rolled up and leftwards, what danger might come from there, the Uthras maybe in their own starships bristling with weapons). He lands. Wherein have I been thrown? he wonders, though this desolate surface, these random stars, this crescent moon just climbing over the horizon with knowing hooded eyes, and the hints of mushroom-shaped cities or villages far away that Enosh never reaches—these are always there wherever Enosh lands, and he is always surprised; above his round head and round clear helmet floats the eternal Enosh question mark, which sometimes sets off on adventures of its own.

  He showed her how you could follow a different thing every time you read an Enosh adventure. The small creatures who (unnoticed by anybody, least of all Enosh) clamber out of the ground or evolve from the eternal stones, grow faces
and characters, change and disperse or are absorbed into other parts of the drawing, the stars, the planets. Or the moon, whose commentary on things below is mostly contained in his bored yawns and sly sleepy smiles, who at dawn disappears over the horizon with his towel and toothbrush (Boyo boy) leaving Enosh in his predicaments. Or how words and notions—shadows, reflections, predicaments, thoughts (or tots in Enosh’s strange baby talk)—take on independent life as soon as they are named or pictured.

  “See,” said Pierce to Sam, as Axel had once to him, “see, here’s Enosh trying to rescue Snoopie Sophie from the Inn of the Worlds where she’s caught. He calls her the Kurious Kid. Ha ha.”

  “Ha ha.”

  Sophie keeps opening doors and climbing to windows to see within rooms that contain great blobby people, fat-fingered men and women in voluminous skirts just barely able to fit inside, shocked or amused at Sophie’s peeking. Only years and years later did Pierce come to see that the Inn of the Worlds is a whorehouse, and that Sophie’s curiosity is about sex, or is sex. Sophie forever on the point of losing her shoes, Mary Janes hanging by a toe, their neatly drawn straps a-dangle.

  “Who’s they?”

  “Uthras,” Pierce said in a sinister bass. Sam laughed. “Bad guys.” The wicked Uthras have got Enosh drunk, foisting on him a foaming cup of something whose bubbles hover from then on over his own head, sometimes becoming tiny faces. He is falling asleep, again, again. Wen U come to the N of a perfiday, he muses, cheek on hand and elbow in liquor-spill, + UR left alone wit your Tot. In the next panel his Tot, a mirror-image Enosh, is beside him, also asleep.

  “He has to wake up.”

  “Yep. He’s going to get a letter from his mother. The letter will wake him up.”

  “It will?”

  “It’ll say Wake up,” Pierce said, and Sam laughed again.

  “Does he?”

  “Well, see?”

  Pierce had forgotten how much of the story was always left out, intentions and announcements often standing for deeds, which in the next day’s panels have already been done, or forgotten. Here was Enosh awake, going down the circular stair of the Inn of the Worlds toward the deepmost Lockup for panel after panel (his little bun feet never quite touching them though, their shadows are clearly visible upon the treads; the most moving thing about Enosh is that he can suffer and be brave and at the same time never actually be touched at all; Pierce beside Sam thought this thought for the first time).

  “Why is he sad?”

  “Well see, he’s looking into the cell where Sophie is. See, she’s in jail.”

  Relentless Rutha, Queen of the Uthras, has shackled Snoopie Sophie in the dark well of the Inn of the Worlds; one tiny star only visible through the high thick-barred window, a star like the tear on Sophie’s cheek. Rutha’s glad to have Sophie there because she knows that will bring Enosh, and after Enosh his mother and protector Amanda de Haye, setting out from the Realms of Light to find and rescue him (4 the 102 time admits Enosh). And with the three of them bound up and immobilized (the brutal Uthras laugh and toast one another) then the stars will go out at last and Rutha’s awful Boss (who’s never ever seen) will never have to hear the word Light again. And the plot will work, too; it always does.

  “She looks like her,” Sam said, pointing to Snoopie Sophie and then to Amanda de Haye. The same flyaway ringlets and mobile nose, the same puppetlike articulation.

  “Yup,” Pierce says. “See, Enosh thinks so too. What he doesn’t know, and never does figure out, is that Sophie’s his sister. Long-lost.”

  “Why doesn’t his mother tell him?”

  “She’s sort of forgotten,” Pierce said. “And besides, if she told him, the story would be over.”

  Sam raised her eyes from the book.

  “Are you sad?” she asked.

  “No,” said Pierce, “No, oh no,” as though surprised by her question. “No no. Listen. Is it time for you to lie down?”

  She shrugged, it was up to him, she was not yet a clock person. Pierce showed her the bedroom, how it was reached through the bathroom, which didn’t amuse her as much as he thought it would; she resisted this place, a little chilly and weird, and Pierce too after a moment decided no, and instead showed her the daybed by the stove, oh yes sure, she liked this one. She lay down and let him cover her and her rag doll with a blanket, watching him with interest and perhaps caution.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said. “I am a little scared.”

  “Yes,” said Pierce. “I can understand. Without mom or dad. Your first nap here and all. I,” he said, “am going to take my nap too.”

  She looked at him. “You could take Brownie,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Oh no,” said Pierce. “I will be happy alone wit my Tot.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  In his own bed his thought was of her, Sam; and of Rosie, and Rosie’s life. To act every day as though you believed your child was safe and okay, while knowing she wasn’t; to live knowing you could lose her, or see her hurt. How could you bear that. Well he would never have such a being, so valuable and so vulnerable, in his own life, they inhabited a sphere that he (he thought) did not. The only child of his person there would ever be he had constructed by himself in his own workshop, like Geppetto; had prayed then to the smiling powers that he might be made into a real little boy. And—like that lonely old puppeteer—he had got a sort of conditional yes. Real to you: as real as unreal can be: as real as the gods’ gifts ever are.

  And what had he done with his new son then? What had he imagined he had done with him then?

  His heart struck loudly within him like a door slamming shut upon him.

  Did he really know of no other way to love except that, was it so?

  He heard Sam stir, and speak a word, but then no more. Pierce had never seen her asleep, yet he saw her now with clarity, the curve of her open mouth, the curve too of her closed blond-lashed lids.

  Could he be sure he knew the difference between a real child and one who could not suffer, one he could pretend even took delight in what he imagined they did together? He had told himself that his son, his phantasm, could not be hurt; whom then had he hurt, in what realm, by what he had pretended to do? It seemed suddenly certain to him that he had caused harm to someone somewhere: that it mattered what he had done in the hollow of his heart and hand.

  Just a game. He thought of his cousin Hildy, one night home from the novitiate: they had stayed up late over coffee talking about Last Things, and about that dread moment (Michelangelo in his Judgment in the Sistine Chapel had pictured a damned soul experiencing it) when you realize that you knew this all along, knew what you were doing and what it meant, but pretended you didn’t know. That’s Damnation, Hildy had said: that moment, lasting forever.

  “I’m just afraid for her,” Mike Mucho said. “She’s only a little kid. It breaks my heart. I’ve tried to talk to her mother about how I feel, but she won’t even talk to me anymore about it. She’s just—‘here, give her this medicine.’”

  Ray Honeybeare pondered this, or did not.

  “Well,” he said at last. “The medical condition isn’t what I’m afraid of. If God doesn’t want that child to suffer those fits she won’t. And if it’s not just ordinary seizures that’s bothering her, then the medicine isn’t helping anyway.”

  Mike and he were on the road, going up to the Faraways to meet Rosie Rasmussen to pick up Sam from Rosie. Mike’s weekend to have her would begin at sundown on Friday, like a Sabbath. The talk was of her, Sam, though Mike (who was driving) wasn’t always clear where Ray’s thought was running.

  “Let me ask you this,” Ray said. “Does your little girl watch television?”

  “Well she did. I mean, not the cartoons and, like the violence. She watched the educational channel.”

  Ray nodded as though this was what he feared he would hear. “And did she attend a little school there?”

  “The Sun School,” M
ike said.

  “The one most of the progressive parents send their kids to.”

  “Well I guess.”

  “Yes. And what was the one thing that they both taught? That they both put the emphasis on?”

  Nothing Mike could think of seemed to be what Ray was thinking of (letters and numbers? Colors and shapes?).

  “They teach them to imagine,” Ray said. “They teach them that it’s a wonderful thing to imagine. You pretend to be something, anything, and you are that thing. Pretend to be anywhere and you are there. Just imagine.”

  He regarded Mike with a smile of complicity, or irony, and Mike nodded, though he didn’t feel included exactly.

  “We want them to open their minds wide, don’t we?” Ray said. “And believe that in imagination all power is theirs. But do you see what word is there at the root of imagine? It’s magic, isn’t it? We’re teaching children to imagine they can have whatever they want, we make them practice doing it all day long, and what we’re teaching them is the first principle of magic.”

  Mike began to say something, ask at least for elucidation, thinking of all those children, thinking how he had believed (and thought Ray and all of them also surely believed) in that sense of possibility, in that childlike, that that, but before he could say so much Ray spoke his name.

  “Mike. I’ll tell you what I’m concerned about, and it’s not a small thing. What happens to the imaginer who trusts in his own power? I want you to think about this. Right into that wide-open mind can step a being much more powerful than any human person. Right into that mind. And we can call that insanity, if we want, or dysfunction, or seizures, there’s a lot of medical names for it. But we recognize it. Don’t we.”

  This was a question or a demand to which Mike was to respond, and he understood that. Don’t we. If he couldn’t see it in his own daughter he could see it in no one, and had been lying to himself and to Ray and to God when he had said that he could. It was a lie to say he believed that Ray could help anyone and not to believe he could help Sam.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “We’ve been fighting magic for two thousand years, Mike. Remember Simon Magus, a magus is a magician, that Peter contended with. He thought the Word of God was some kind of magic, and he tried to buy the power off Peter. Peter said it wasn’t for sale. Well in history we can read that this Simon believed himself to be the Power of God Incarnate, and he paraded around a whore he’d picked up in a brothel somewhere, who he called the Lost Wisdom of God. He got people to believe that.” Ray chuckled, deeply, and his belly shook with it. “Sure. Here she is, ain’t she beautiful. Just use your imaginations, folks.”