I
VITA
ONE
If ever some power with three wishes to grant were to appear before Pierce Moffett, he or she or it (djinn, fairy godmother, ring curiously inscribed) would find him not entirely unprepared, but not entirely ready either.
Once upon a time there had seemed to him no difficulty: you simply used the third of your three wishes to gain three more, and so on ad infinitum. And once upon a time too he had had no compunctions about making wishes that would result in horrendous distortions of his own and others’ universes: that he could change heads with someone else for a day; that the British could have won the War of Independence (he had been profoundly Anglophile as a child); that the ocean could dry up, so that he could see from its shore the fabulous mountains and valleys, higher and deeper than any on land, which he had read lay in its depths.
With an endless chain of wishes, of course, he could theoretically repair the damage he inflicted; but as he grew older he became less sure of his wisdom and power to make all things come out right. And as the lessons of the dozens of cautionary tales he read sank in, tales of wishes horribly misused, wishes trickily turned against their wishers, misspoken or carelessly framed wishes tumbling the greedy, the thoughtless, the stupid into self-made abysses, he began to consider the question at more length. The monkey’s paw: bring back my dead son: and the dreadful thing come knocking at the door. All right, make me a martini. And Midas, first and most terrible exemplar of all. It was not, Pierce decided, that those powers which grant wishes intend our destruction, or even our moral instruction: they are only compelled, by whatever circumstances, to do what we ask of them, no more, no less. Midas was not being taught a lesson about false and true values; the dæmon who granted his wish knew nothing of such values, did not know why Midas would wish his own destruction, and didn’t care. The wish was granted, Midas embraced his wife—perhaps the dæmon was puzzled for a moment by Midas’s despair, but, not being human himself, being power only, gave it little thought, and went away to other wishers, wise or foolish.
Literal-minded, deeply stupid from man’s point of view, strong children able thoughtlessly to break the ordinary courses of things like toys, and break human hearts too that were unwise enough not to know how much they loved and needed the ordinary courses of things, such powers had to be dealt with carefully. Pierce Moffett, discovering in himself as he grew older a streak of caution, even fearfulness, coloring a mostly impulsive and greedy nature, saw that he would have to lay plans if he were to escape harmless with what he desired.
There turned out to be so many angles to consider—his changing desires even aside—that, a grown man now, professor, historian, he still hadn’t completed his formulations. In the useless, vacant spaces of time that litter every life, in waiting rooms or holding patterns or—as on this particular August morning—when he sat staring out the tinted windows of long-distance buses, he often found himself mulling over possibilities, negotiating tricky turns of phrase, sharpening his clauses.
There were few things Pierce liked less than long rides on buses. He disliked being in motion at all, and when forced to travel tried to choose the briefest though most grinding means (the plane) or the most leisurely, with the greatest number of respites and amenities (the train). The bus was a poor third, tedious, protracted, and without any amenities at all. (The car, most people’s choice, he couldn’t take: Pierce had never learned to drive.) And his disdain and loathing for the bus was usually repaid in how it treated him: if he was not forced to wait for hours in squalid terminals for connections, he would be thrust in among colicky infants or seated next to liars with pungent breath who bent his ear and then slept on his shoulder; it was inevitable. This time, though, he had tried to meet the awful necessity halfway: having an appointment today in the city of Conurbana, a job offer at Peter Ramus College there, he had decided to take the slow uncrowded local, to travel in a leisurely way through the Faraway Hills, have a glimpse of places long known to him by name but still more or less imaginary; at least to get out into the country for a day, for sure he needed a break. And it did seem to him, as the bus left the expressways and carried him into summer lands, that he had chosen rightly; he felt suddenly able to shed by sheer motion a state of himself that had become binding and flavorless, and enter into another, or many others, like these scenes now being shown to him one by one, each seeming to be a threshold of happy possibilities.
He rose from his seat, taking from his canvas bag the book he had brought to beguile the time (it was the Soledades of Luis de Góngora in a new translation; he was to review it for a small quarterly), and made his way to the back of the bus, where smoking was permitted. He opened the book, but didn’t look at it; he looked out at opulent August, shaded lawns where householders watered their grass, children dabbled in bright plastic pools, dogs panted on cool porches. At the outskirts of town the bus paused at a juncture, considering the possibilities offered by a tall green sign: New York City, but that’s where they had come from; Conurbana, which Pierce did not yet want to contemplate; the Faraways. With a thoughtful shifting of gears, they chose the Faraway Hills, and when the bus after a series of smooth ascensions gained a height, Pierce supposed that those hills, green then blue, then so faint as to meld into the pale horizon and disappear, were they.
He rolled a cigarette and lit it.
The first two of his three wishes (and of course there would be three, Pierce had studied the triads that cluster everywhere in Northern mythology—whence it seemed most likely his fortune would come—and had his own ideas as to why it had to be three and not more or fewer) had for some time been in their present form. They seemed airtight, clinker-built, foolproof to him, he had even recommended them to others, like standard legal forms.
He wished, first of all, for the lifelong and long-lived mental and physical health and safety of himself and those he loved, nothing asked for in a subsequent wish to abrogate this. Something of a portmanteau wish, but an absolutely necessary piece of caution, considering.
Next he wished for an income, not burdensomely immense but sufficient, safe from the fluctuations of economic life, requiring next to no attention on his part and not distorting his natural career: a winning lottery ticket, along with some careful investment advice, being more the idea than, say, having some book he might write thrust magically onto the best-seller list with all the attendant talk-show and interview business, awful, whatever pleasure he might have in such fame and fortune spoiled by his knowledge that it was fake—that would be selling his soul to the devil, which by definition works out badly; no, he wanted something much more neutral.
Which left one more, the third wish, the odd one, the rogue wish. Pierce shuddered to think what would have become of him if one or another of his adolescent versions of this wish had been granted; at later times in his life he would have wasted it getting himself out of jams and troubles that he had got out of anyway without a wish’s help. And even if, now, he could decide what he wanted, which he had never finally done, wisdom would be needed, and courage, and wits; here was danger, and the chance for strange bliss. The third wish was the world-changing one of the triad, and it was hedged around in his mind with strictures, taboos, imperatives moral and categorical: because, for Pierce Moffett anyway, the game was no fun unless all the consequences of any tentative third wish could be taken into account; unless he could imagine, with great and true vividness, what it would really be like to have it come true.
World peace and suchlike enormous altruisms he had long dismissed as unworkable or worse, at bottom solipsistic delusions of the Midas kind, only unselfish instead of selfish: obverse of the same counterfeit coin. No one could be wise enough to gauge the results of imposing such abstractions on the world, there was no way of knowing what alterations in human nature and life might be required to bring about such an end, and as the BVD Brothers had taught him at St. Guinefort’s, if you will the end you must axiomatically will the means. Any power stro
ng enough to remold the whole great world nearer to the heart’s desire Pierce had in any case no desire to match wits with. No: whatever destiny a man’s three wishes compelled him to, hilarious or tragic or sweet, it was his destiny, as they were his wishes: he should leave the world alone to wish its own.
Power: there was a sense in which, of course, all wishing was wishing for power, power over the ordinary circumstances of life one is subject to; but that was a different matter from actually wishing for power in the narrower sense, strength, subjection of others to your will, your enemies your footstool. This whole huge field of human desire was in some way alien to Pierce, power had never figured in his daydreams, he could somehow never manage to imagine power very vividly in his own hands, but only as it might be used against him; freedom from power was his only true wish in this line, and negative wishes had always seemed to him mean.
It had occurred to him (as it occurred to the Fisherman’s Wife in the story) that it might be nice to be Pope. He happened to have a number of ideas about natural law, liturgy, and hermeneutics, and he thought a lot of good, in small ways, might be able to be done by a man of large historical sensibilities in such a job, able to enunciate God’s will and impose it by fiat, no long-drawn-out contest of wills interposed between Sanctissimus and the carrying out of His pronouncements. But those gratifications could never make up for the awful tedium of official position; and in any case the hierarchy was probably not so responsive now to bulls and encyclicals as they ought to be, or had once been. Who the hell knew.
Love. Pierce Moffett had been both lucky and unlucky in love, his luck good and bad was among the causes of his being on this bus now through the Faraway Hills, love took up the greater part of his daydreaming one way or another; and no more than any man was he able not to toy with thoughts of hypnotic powers, unrefusable charms, the world his harem—or, conversely, of a single perfect being shaped exactly to his wants, of the kind that lonely academics described at such self-revealing length in the Personals columns of certain journals Pierce subscribed to. But no: it was no good using his third wish to compel the heart. It was wrong. Worse, it wouldn’t work. There was no joy Pierce knew like the joy of finding himself freely chosen by the object of his desire, no joy even remotely like it. The astonished gratification of it, the sudden certainty, as though a hawk had chosen to fall out of the sky and settle on his wrist, still wild, still free, but his. Who would, who could compel that? The closed hearts of call-girls, the glum faces of last-chance pickups: Pierce drunk or coked enough could pretend for an hour or a night, as they could. But.
And if hawks flew then, choosing to fly as they had chosen to alight, and if he failed to understand why—well, he hadn’t understood why they alighted in the first place, had he? And that was, that must be, all right, if one were going to love hawks in the first place. Gentle hawks, kind-unkind.
Chalkokrotos.
I wish, he thought, I wish, I wish …
Chalkokrotos, “bronze-rustling,” where had he come up with that epithet, some goddess’s: chalkokrotos for her bronze-colored hair and the rustle of her bangles on a certain night; chalkokrotos for her weapons and her wings.
Good lord, he thought, and fumbled with his book, crossing his legs. He tossed his cigarette to the floor amid the sordid litter there of other butts, and counseled himself that perhaps daydreaming was not a thing he should indulge himself in just now, this week, this summer. He looked out the window, but the day had ceased to flow in toward him, or rather he outward toward it. For the first time since he had decided on this jaunt, he felt that he was fleeing and not journeying, and what he fled took up all his attention.
When he was a boy, traveling from the fastness of his Kentucky home east and northward to New York City where his father lived, he had seen signs directing people to these very Faraway Hills he now rode through, though the immense Nash crowded with his kinfolk never followed the arrows that pointed that way.
It was Uncle Sam at the wheel (Uncle Sam looked a lot like the Uncle Sam who wears red white and blue, except for the goat’s beard, and his suit, which was brown or gray, or wrinkled seersucker on these summer trips) and Pierce’s mother beside him with the map, to navigate; and next to her, in strict rotation, one or another of the kids: Pierce, or one of Sam’s four. The rest contested for space along the wide sofa of the back seat.
The Nash held them all, though just barely, the swollen sides and fat rear end of its prehistoric-monster shape bellied out (it seemed) with their numbers and their luggage. Sam called his car the Pregnant Sow. It was the first car Pierce knew well; the remembered smell of its gray upholstery and the plump feel of its passenger clutch-straps still meant Car to him. There was something penitential about those long trips in it that he would not forget, and though he held nothing against the Nash, “pleasure driving” would remain an oxymoron for Pierce the rest of his life.
Leaving the eroded and somehow unfinished-looking woods and hills of Kentucky, they would descend through country not much different though with now and then a further prospect of folded hills in sunlight that meant Pennsylvania; and then, by ritual passage through wide gates and the acquisition of a long ticket, they would enter onto the brand-new Pennsylvania Turnpike, and on its broad back be carried into country both new and old, country that was at once History and the gleaming clean Present as well. History and the blue-green distances of a free land, a new-found-land uncircumscribed and fruited, which Kentucky did not seem to him to be but that America was described as being in his school texts, was contained for him not only in the rolling hills they rolled through but in the roll of Pennsylvania names on his tongue and around his inward ear—Allegheny and Susquehanna, Schuylkill and Valley Forge, Brandywine and Tuscarora. They were never to see anything of Brandywine and such places, nothing except the turnpike restaurants located near them, clean, identical, sunlit places with identical menus and identical lollipops and waitresses—that were, however, not really identical at all, because each bore on its fieldstone front one of these lovely names. Pierce would ponder the difference between Downingtown and Crystal Spring as they sat around a long table breakfasting on exotic foods not found at home, tomato juice (orange only and always at home) or sausages in patty form, or Danish, and even oatmeal for Sam, who alone of them relished it.
And then on, through land forested and farmed and seeming underpopulated and yet to be explored (this illusion of turnpike travel, that the land is empty, even primeval, was more strong in those days when cars first left the old billboarded and well-trodden ways for the new-made cuts) and—best of all—into the series of tunnels whose beautifully masoned entrances would loom up suddenly and thrillingly: all the children would call out the name, for each tunnel had one, the name of the intransigent geographical feature it breached and left behind so neatly, so curtly—there was Blue Mountain and Laurel Hill, there was (once Pierce could say them all, like a poem, he no longer could) Allegheny and Tuscarora … One other?
“Tuscarora,” Pierce said aloud, on his bus. O Pennsylvania of the names. Scranton and Harrisburg and Allentown were hard and dark with toil; but Tuscarora. Shenandoah. Kittatinny. (That was the last tunnel: Kittatinny Mountain! They plunged into darkness, but Pierce’s heart had been lifted as though by music into a height of summer air.) Never once had the Nash left the turnpike, never followed signs inviting it to Lancaster or Lebanon, though the Amish lived there, or to Philadelphia, built long ago by the man on the Quaker Oats box; they went right on, up the Jersey Turnpike, a pale shadow of Pennsylvania’s it seemed to Pierce, though just why he didn’t know: perhaps it was only that they drew closer to New York and his old reality, passing out of History and the splendid Present into his own personal past, pressing on toward the Brooklyn streets that he would take up and put on like an old suit of clothes, too well known and growing smaller each time he came back to them.
There had always been other choices, up to the last minute, up to the Pulaski Skyway anyway and the hellish fla
ts it crossed, after which the Holland Tunnel like an endless dark bathroom was inevitable. They could turn away (Pierce found the places on the map his mother held) to these strange Dutch-named places north, or south toward the Jersey Shore—the very word shore was for him full of the plash of salt surf, gull’s cries, bleached boardwalks. On the way there they could visit unimaginable Cheesequake. Or they could turn toward the Faraway Hills, which did not seem so far, they could leave the turnpike just here, and in not too long a time they would find themselves passing the Jenny Jump Mountains and entering the Land of Make-Believe. It said so on the map.
He couldn’t urge Sam to turn aside, really, the journey had too strong a logic, the Nash a juggernaut compelled by the turnpike habit. And he didn’t really not want to see his father in Brooklyn. Yet he would wish silently: I wish we could go now to this place, his finger touching it, covering it: even—closing his eyes and throwing all caution to the winds—I wish I were here right now: not actually expecting the car’s roar and his cousins’ hubbub to be replaced by silence and birdsong, or the smell of the sun-hot upholstery by meadow odors: and a moment later opening his eyes again to the turnpike still shimmering ahead with false pools of silver water, and the billboards advertising the attractions to be found in the city fast approaching.
And a good thing too, on the whole, Pierce thought now, looking out at the meadows, ponds, and townlets of the place. It was all nice enough, surely, more than nice, desirable, and yet not really that otherwhere, that place where the grass is always greener. He couldn’t have known it as a boy—he didn’t always know it as a man—but wishing is different from yearning. Yearning, a motion of the soul toward peace, resolution, restitution, or rest; a yen for happiness, which momentarily is figured in that duck pond overhung with maples, that fine stone house whose lace curtains beckon to cool rooms where the coverlet is turned down on the tall bed—a hard-won wisdom distinguished between such motions, which had fleeting objects, and true wishing, which carpentered an object of desire with such care that it could not disappoint.