Daemonomania

  Pierce had not spoken, Rosie became aware, in some time.

  “So whatcha think of that? Dumb idea?”

  “I,” said Pierce. The work of pulling his cored and splintered self together enough to ponder such a notion and answer was overwhelming. Nothing he had ever known was turning out to be so, why not this notion of Rosie’s? Maybe tomorrow or the next day his thing too would be over, as suddenly as it came on; maybe it was over already, and he just didn’t yet realize it.

  “Yeah well,” Rosie said, and laughed, what do I know.

  “No no,” said Pierce. “It’s. An idea.”

  Rosie picked up the bottle, and between filling her glass and his she lifted her hooded laughing eyes to him. “I’ve got an even dumber one,” she said. “You want to hear it?”

  The disease or melancholia called amor hereos was formerly believed to have a treatment; not a very certain or reliable one, not a cure really but an ameliorative, or rather a list of them, which if applied judiciously over a long time might save the sufferer. Exercise and travel and a plain diet of bland and light-colored foods; prayer of course; if these fail, whipping and fasting; then coitus with a willing and openhearted woman or women, cheerful reminders of the flesh, which paradoxically the sufferer has forgotten in the awful infection of his spirit.

  Pierce in Rosie’s bed (she led him to it like a child, by the hand) was awed, unmanned almost, by the strangeness, wholly other, of her person and her body when they were disclosed to him, her body actually strange and not strange, as though once familiar but long forgotten, oh I remember; he realized then that all he really remembered was this disclosure, itself always the same, the freckles of her breastbone and the taste of her breath actually altogether new.

  “What about,” he said.

  “Pill,” she said.

  Still he nearly failed when he embraced her, no longer knowing what would be enough either for her or for him, afraid that his own thermostat was now set so high that no common acts or words could start his fires, and for a moment he turned his face away from hers and wept because he thought now all ordinary tenderness had been taken away from him for good, sold to buy what he was hooked on.

  “What,” she asked, and smiling made him turn to face her. He wouldn’t answer and tried to rise, offering some broken apology, but she pressed him back against the pillows and made him suffer her attentions. Though he covered his face she did to him what everyone knows or says all men like to have done, to be dandled and handled and suckled, and though he went on weeping or shaking with odd sobs he began laughing too, and so did she at his absurdity.

  “This the first time you ever did this?” she said when he squirmed. “No no,” he said. “No no. No no.”

  Just afterward she too wept a little, or only panted maybe, victorious or defeated athlete, wet and wrung. A while after that she spoke: “I thought that went really well,” she said. “Actually.”

  “Should we,” Pierce said, “talk about Spofford?”

  “No,” she said. She was near sleep. “Spofford got eaten by wolves.”

  “He’s tough.” Pierce felt the shock of guilt he’d felt when he thought he’d been tempted to betray Spofford with Rosie once before, though that hadn’t been her.

  “He’s had her too,” Rosie said. “Rose I mean. You knew that, right?” “No.”

  “Oh.”

  She did sleep then, what she had looked forward to as much as any of it, in the cave of his curled body, anybody’s body as far as her own sleeping one knew or cared. Pierce even slept, though not for long. He was one of that quadrant of humanity that can’t sleep when touched by a fellow human, no matter how familiar or beloved, and Rosie pressed close and warm and grateful; but mostly he awoke because his eyes were still unsatisfied. In its terminal stages amor hereos withers all the body, except the eyes, which of course grow stronger, but cease to shut: the sufferer sleeps no more, or too little to heal. He guessed he should have long ago noticed this symptom, and the hectic creativity or false afflatus that had accompanied it, for what they were, but he hadn’t.

  Un Dieu en ciel, he repeated, a little charm, a hypnotic; un Dieu en ciel, en terre une Déesse. Quixote, befuddled by stories, wrong about everything except the one thing that matters most; not knowing who he was, wherein he had been thrown, who his enemies were, but setting his lance, kicking up his horse in the name of his lady, the wrong lady. What if that really were Pierce’s own madness, one sick puppy. His would be just the reverse though of course: deluded by a brain-drying melancholy into thinking he was not a knight, that there were no giants, that there was nothing that mattered.

  Rosie woke again when he turned away from her. She touched him, knowing he was awake. “You know something?” she said.

  “What.”

  “You should get married. Have kids.” She heard him make a small sound, the smallest possible sound of the purest possible grief; maybe actually no sound at all. “Get out of your head. Get down in the shit and the blood.”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh I don’t know. Good night, you dope.”

  “Good night, Rosie.”

  8

  At dawn Beau Brachman, driving away from the City and down the interstate, having gone past the exits that would have led him back to the Faraway Hills and those who waited for him on Maple Street in Blackbury Jambs and every night set a place for him at dinner, turned off onto other roads, the older roads whose numbers in their white badges had once been codes for escape or pursuit. The Python was going backwards, along the ways that longtime past his Olds 88 had borne him forward—his once and future car, that was, the Double Worm, the black ouroboros in which he had crossed and recrossed the country twice in a long loop, a loop that still connected a network or union of souls, the finding or creating of which was Beau’s only surety now of where he had come from. It was they of whom Julie had spoken, those whom Beau could call, or call on, to say Are you seeing this too? I think I see this, I don’t know, I’m asking; do you see it? If he could have brought them all together in one room (he never would or could, it would amount to a category error, it would be a zoo almost literally) they wouldn’t know one another, would look around themselves in dismay even to find who they were included among. But without them, or the thought of their existence, Beau felt that his overextended soul would collapse like a circus tent whose poles and guys were let fall. Gassing up the Python when evening came, though, at a neon station somewhere on the rim of the Great Central Basin, he almost asked if this cup might not pass from him: it was a long way around, and he wondered if he really had to do it all.

  Outside Harrisburg, pressing the Wonder Bar in search of human voices, Beau caught what he thought was the far tall transmitter of WIAO, wherever exactly it was, he had never known, hadn’t heard the unmistakable sound of it since the last time he had crossed these flatlands; the distant dashed line of a freight train then too, going across the way he went, under a low winter sky.

  Up, there it was again. And gone again. Country music swamping it as though in Karo syrup with warm sweet bitterness. Then again back.

  Radio WIAO! Comn at you through the ozone, it’s IAO, yow! The cry of the peacock is the name-a God! Where have you been that you couldn’t hear, where have you lain asleep? We can reach you throughout these lands, Egyptland where we are imprisoned. Let every ear be open and every heart awaken. Now the news.

  Whatever unimaginable news the great lost station was prepared to retail Beau couldn’t pick up. He tuned delicately, a safecracker, as back then he had tuned and sought, when he had roamed these secondary roads with the placid herd of great American cars, feeding with them at places whose ruined shells he was maybe now passing, these spaceship or amœba shapes whose lights were out and broad windows boarded.

  The beautiful immortal Wisdoma God! The last and youngest child of the perfect infinite immobile ones! They were the All, and they searched for Him from Whom they had come forth, He Whom they were within. And She the last and
youngest, She leapt the farthest! And and and

  Gone.

  That was Her again, though, Her being spoken of: as it had been Her on the paper handed him on the streets of New York. So he was on the right way still. He remembered the days he had first begun hearing or collecting this story, learning that it had always been known and told, alongside or underneath the other American stories: an American story too but not American in being so sad.

  And she said Father! I want to know You! I want to love You! Father I want to come closer to You, and do a work like the works You have done! And leaving her Consort she moved, in a motion toward the Father. And oh my what troubles there was then. For this Movement of love and seeking of hers threatened the All with its passion. And so that passion of Hers was thrust outside the Awful Fullnessa God! Put out and set to wander! Oh grief! Oh happy fault!

  In the story as Beau knew it and told it, there was nothing and nowhere then for the fallen Passion of Sophia to fall into: nothing existed except the Pleroma, the Fullness of God’s expression of himself. What happened was that her exile itself, the catastrophe or disaster of it, made a place into which she could be exiled: a world of darkness for her to wander in, a place made by her wandering. Not a place outside God or abandoned by him, for there could be no such place, no, but deepmost inside him, a hollow in his heart from which he at that time withdrew. At the sight of this Abyss, and at the thought of what she had done and what she had lost, she felt grief, and her grief became the first element, Water; and she felt fear, that she might cease to be, and bewilderment, and ignorance, and these became elements too; but when she thought of the Light that she had left, it cheered her and caused her laughter, which is the stars and the Sun.

  It was this world: the one we know, which hadn’t existed till then; this world in its infinitudes, and in its brief lives and hopes as well, made of Her suffering, made of Her hope. This one Beau crossed now and had crossed then, this story that had become the world: he had heard different chapters or versions of it in bars and diner booths and nighttime drugstores as well as in the cloud castles and tent cities and jingling caravans he had also passed through in those years, finding and losing it again like the rays of WIAO. He was this story too, it was his both to be and to tell. Beau remembered where he had come to along it better than where he had come from to get there.

  He remembered following the No Name River up into the mountains of eastern Kentucky in search of the last of the more perfect gospel bearers, but did not remember what he had heard, on what coast or among what believers, that had set him off to find them. Remembered arriving at dawn or evening in towns named for the coal companies that had once created them, Carbon Glow, Neon, High Hat, Good Luck, each with its railhead, its tall breakers and washers and the water tower marked with the company’s sign, some abandoned and rusting; each with its slagheap, accumulated defecation of the long consumption of the land and people; each with its half-dozen churches alight at dawn and evening when folks could come, the hand-lettered sign put up outside an ill-made shed no finer than the houses they lived in. Inside they sang:

  Where the Godhead dwelleth

  Temple there is none

  Naught that country needeth

  Of those aisles of stone.

  All the saints that ever

  In such courts have stood

  Are but babes and feeding

  On children’s food.

  It was the Old Holiness people who had at last told him how to reach the more perfect gospel bearers. For a long time after he had come to the Old Holiness church they pretended not to know or even to hear when he asked, but he was patient; he knew they knew. And if they did not, then the story that Beau had been following, faint as a mountain track, was really not true, or no longer true.

  Old Holiness handled snakes, but not as Holiness or New Holiness did: not as a victory over evil. In their board-and-batten church when the snake was brought out, shook from its sack, the gathered sang in clanging shape-note harmony:

  In Paradise did Adam sleep

  The Serpent woke him, he did weep

  Awakened Man he wept full sore

  And begged that he might sleep once more.

  After Beau served beside them for a summer, toting and picking corn and minding children and sitting to watch by the side of sick old ones, they began to speak to him of what they knew, usually attributing it to someone else or to dream or rumor: that there were ones who know a truth beyond preaching, a surprise even to the holiest heart. Up in the pineclads, far off the gullied roads, he would need somebody to take him there, and the reason they were hid so fast was that the more perfect gospel bearers know what the law does not want them to know, or to pass on, or certainly to practice: a practice more forbidden than the handling of snakes, which often enough they had the sheriff or the state police on them about.

  At last they set him guides (a boy of twelve and his older brother) and they drove and then walked a trail following the river. A fastness such as Beau hadn’t climbed up into since he had followed his Hmong guides into the clouds to cross from the nation, imaginary to them, of Vietnam into the also imaginary nation of Cambodia. His Kentucky guides barefoot as the Hmong had been. At evening they brought him to a string of cabins and tents along the stream, trucks too turned into dwellings with a cap and a fly and a couple of aluminum chairs. And a small trailer, somehow occupying the center of the encampment, an aqua and cream Voyager dotted with rust at the joints and with fiberglass awnings over the miniature windows. It had been dragged up here with awful effort to be the place where Plato Goodenough the more perfect gospel bearer could lie in his last days. In there now Plato Goodenough was starving himself to death. Once before he had been rescued by the social worker, and taken to doctors; here he wouldn’t be found.

  In the trailer an ancient smell of mildewed linoleum. On the sheetless mattress Plato lay motionless, propped on pillows, cadaverous already except for the flush of his cheeks and the bright tip of his nose. A clean white shirt buttoned to the neck, where his Adam’s apple bobbed, sprouting gray hairs; his body slack and thin as a dropped puppet’s. Beau hat in hand came in among the few gathered in the minuscule bedroom and its doorway. Plato Goodenough was talking. He had strength only for a few words each day, and spoke almost too low to be heard.

  What Plato Goodenough had done was to refuse the Devil’s domination; he had chosen not to put into this body any more of the nourishment it needed to stave off its dissolution. He had begun years before by refusing butcher’s meat, though he ate fish for it had no blood. Then he ate no fish; then no food produced through sex congress, milk and eggs and cheese. Now nothing. All the sustenance he had now was branch water and the Last Supper, printed on a black-velvet cloth hung opposite him on the wall; to the apostles gathered at that table he sometimes spoke as familiarly as to those around his bed.

  “You see the stars and the planets, the sun and moon,” Beau heard him say, only his jaw moving. “Well I tell you all them was angels once, and for their sins was put in bodies, and those are them. And if you think it’s a fine thing to have for a body a bright star, well I tell you that to the angels the bodies they have are as burdensome and as hateful as this one of mine is to me, and as much as I do they long to escape them, when as it says, the stars will cease to shine, and fall upon the earth.”

  Beau wanted to speak, to ask, but could not; and was answered anyway. As evening came on, he withdrew from Plato’s side with the others, though one or two were allowed to watch through the night. In the morning in their cabins along the track the people stirred up their fires and made beaten biscuits and red gravy, and at noon they heated cans of tomato soup with Pet milk or chunks of Well Far cheese and ate it with crumbled saltines and boiled coffee. No meat though, no ham fried in lard or Swanson’s chicken slid whole and greasy from the can to cook with dumplings, they wouldn’t want to be eating flesh through which the souls of their parents and ancestors and dead children had cycled. They ate their food
as silently and ravenously as if they had stolen it, their heads bent together and their spoons and jaws going, and were hungry again soon after, ever hungrier as Plato waned. Beau among them knew that their suffering was perhaps greater even than Plato’s, and as exemplary, and as necessary. From then on, Beau watching people eat would sometimes see not the familiar humans nourishing themselves and their loved ones but instead, in revulsion and pity, would perceive strange unconscious machines laboring at some automatic work, steam robots grinding and processing, the caught spirit sometimes looking out the hungry eyes. That would be his to bear.

  At each dawn some of them went up to the trailer to sit by Plato Goodenough’s side, to listen to him, to watch him dissolve for their sakes, because he could do it and they couldn’t; then perhaps in their next journey they too could refuse the Devil’s domination, his false gifts, and so not have to sweat and toil and suffer here below any longer.

  Are you at peace, Plato? they would ask him. Are you satisfied?

  I’m at peace, he would answer. But I ain’t satisfied. I never will be satisfied here below.

  When he ceased to speak, they didn’t cease to put their questions; they dribbled water between his lips and watched his chin tremble. They thought he might tell of what he saw, just as he set out, that shore; but he said nothing at the last.

  When he was finally altogether shet of it, they burned Plato Goodenough’s body. He had asked them to leave it on the stony mountaintop for the buzzards to pick at (Beau thought of Parsi towers he had seen, the desiccated dead atop them and the black birds) but they were afraid for the law. They sang the hymn called “White” while the oily smoke arose: