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Drip-drip.
Although George had actually dressed him (almost literally) and never undressed him (neither literally nor figuratively though one sometimes did have to wonder just what his eyes were doing) there was something about his presence that made Smoky feel more and more exposed.
It was the way that George caught strangers' eyes and held them. Oh, he didn't mean to, he was a City Mouse through and through, but...well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say eyes tried to catch and hold him. And Smoky lost some camouflage of anonymity just by virtue of being next to him. Somewhere for the other eye to land. Another presence in the frame.
Drip.
"It's the ritual of it that's the point, really," said George.
"What?"
"What I mean is, if you want your mind cracked open, there are a lot more efficient ways. But it's the elegance of it."
"You mean those little silver slotted spoons, the glass?"
The slow death of the sugar cube.
"The whole thing. Puts you in the frame of mind before you even start."
Smoky nodded. The ritual had been inadequate in this case, he supposed. A bit too much bitter wormwood. Still, he saw what George meant, more or less.
"There she is, the Green Fairy," George said, as though he thought he was supposed to and found it a little embarrassing. Or perhaps it was Smoky who found it embarrassing. Ritual was, wasn't it? It was meant for proud Romans with a Destiny riding on a battle, perhaps, or some bearded Druid who needed to understand something important, something unfathomable, in the stars.
Not for aimless young men in City apartments with cars outside and a sky purplish-orange with electric lights. For Ritual to make sense, you had to want something, to need something, and it had to be something for which you had to petition unseen forces, spirits and gods, and even if Smoky could imagine himself believing in such things he had trouble coming up with anything to ask them for.
"So my cousins are coming," George said suddenly, twitching his nose. "It won't be long now."
His voice was distant and velvety. "Your country cousins?"
George chuckled. They hadn't known each other that long, really, but already the joke was ancient between them. "Father and mother and two big sisters."
"No little sister?"
"No, they're both big."
He fell silent again, or nearly so, only giggling a little. Smoky's place in the old rectory was as quiet as George's family's block was loud, the long snowy sleep of the ancient Dutch perturbed only by the tiny sound of stone crackling slowly under winter, under years.
Smoky tried to contemplate country. He thought about it so hard he started speaking aloud under the influence of the absinthe, trying to turn some scattered years full of states that began with I into memories concrete enough to apply: he spoke of cracking pickup tires and grass that turned yellow in the harsh light, and lines of trees and hedges cutting green across orange fields, a sun-bleached child waving at him with a dusty dog beside while a summer storm blinked its huge bright rages in a darkening sky...
George stopped him with a hand on his wrist, dark eyes closed but still laughing behind the lids, Smoky imagined. "The lightning - was it in colors?"
"I think so," Smoky said, and tried to recall it in his mind, not sure if he were remembering or creating. "I think it looked blue sometimes and sometimes white. The sky's really big, you know. No tall buildings."
"And it takes it all up," George said. "I can see it."
"It was dangerous," Smoky said.
"Ah, I'm sure," George said, smiling harder. "Wouldn't you like to do that, though?"
"What?"
"Be up there in the sky with it! Wouldn't that be great?"
"Hm?"
"Sometimes I think...well, I think I could. I've seen it from so many different angles, you know."
Smoky didn't, but sometimes when he just lay back like this and let George talk, it was almost as though he did. For oftentimes in the ways of young people who pursue a little gentle debauchery, there are one or two among them who tell the stories, and the others who listen-perhaps with an ooh or an aah, perhaps an interjection of 'bullshit!' Not that Smoky would do either to George, whose voice after a while became like a sax player in a coffee house, riffing around out there before coming back to the "head" of whatever initial image had germinated his original journey.
In the little hash dens, in the smoky bars, Girls drifted in and out of this litany the way shadows moved with the sun and moon, counter to it in some predictable fashion Smoky couldn't predict.
There were none here tonight, though, and there was nowhere for Smoky to drift but through George's words, through his story about having turned down his little alley the wrong way once and being so high he'd forgotten which paving stone must be tapped three times, and when he turned around again, he was staring down into the same street but different. Where the street ended, the denuded masts of tall ships pierced the sky. Where the bridge should have been, it wasn't.
"And I stared at it too long, because they hit me over the head and they took me," he said. "They did that in those days if you weren't careful. You might come to in China. I wasn't that lucky, I got a whaler, and it was cold, really fucking cold, rain water and sea water slopping all over me through this crappy thin coat, and let me tell you about lightning." From the way George's hands flashed, Smoky could almost see it in the placid winter window.
"Got cut loose at last," he said. "One-eyed whore from Singapore, stuck her knife right in my hand. It should've hurt. It didn't, not so bad, so that's when I woke up!"
"It was a dream?"
"I suppose so - I had to wake up twice. I was lying on a pier, though. Got up and went home - I never looked back. You don't, you know, that's important. Never found that pier again either."
"Umm-hmmm," Smoky nodded.
"Wrong kind of adventure for me," George said not too unhappily. "Not a sailor. They threw me back like a fish that's too small."
Smoky could smell seawater on his breath, nearly: sawdust and ale; George's leather vest creaked like creosoted wood. No, that wasn't right. He was right. Wrong kind of adventure. George was supposed to smell like a forest, like a magic sword giving off a mossy scent before its metal when pulled from the ancient oak's heart. Someone trapped inside the cloven trunk, was that how it went?
It was a most un-Smoky-like thought, Smoky thought, and was surprised that he had something solid enough to contrast against at once. But it wasn't the first time George Mouse had given him that.
Sometimes he wasn't sure George didn't take him for one of these vivid egregores sometimes, except that Smoky knew perfectly well he was no such thing, and that he was mundane enough that if he ever appeared in such a fancy it would be as a blank-faced stand-in for the dreamer, shuffling along in his pajamas and able to walk through walls and on water simply by virtue of not seeing that either were supposed to be there. That's how he'd survived all sorts of embarrassments, ranging from simple drunken staggering to the night of the mushroom church, where hairy and earnest young men conducted incomprehensible chants to glow-painted spirits of psylocibin on the walls. Smoky felt he'd found reconstructionists bent on reconsecrating the cave painting in that windowless storefront. He'd reached out for flowers that weren't there, felt stigmata of vines blooming in his palms, felt a terrible urgency in his loins to touch giggling earth-faces in the floor.
He'd thought for once, from George's knowing smile, that the two of them might be seeing the same things, sitting side by side in a theater in the round, both players and play. Smoky in a thrift-shop fedora because he wanted to challenge George's hat. A cluster of yellow silk at George's throat since he'd been reading Decadents all day.
One shirt button of his, that George's shaking fingers did something with, and then twitched away. The bristle of a man's face, not at all like a girl's. The shrooms go down best with honey, kills the bitter taste. Sticky fingertips, missed, got in his mouth somehow and there were shivers aplenty long before anything else could take hold; they were tripping already on something that hadn't been there before.
A man can get things in his head, George said. Well, indeed. He wasn't about to get any more specific. The warped stamped-tin ceiling was fascinating, and Smoky had a fingernail in an anciently graffiti'd tabletop. He could have sworn the wood was nibbling him, coquettishly.
George was, specifically, the man who could get things in his head, and when Smoky suddenly turned around and found that grinning face very close to him, too close, it was almost as if he could look into those wide-open eyes, so terribly dark and so blindingly white, and see some of the things that were there: autumn leaves and black earth, a storm-tossed sea, flickers in the sky, and himself, reduced to a character in a story not of his own writing. There was something flattering about that, for if some other force were to take a hand in shaping his, Smoky's destiny, it would have to notice him, to pay attention to him, to make a decision about his importance. It was exciting and frightening.
George petted him like a stray puppy he was going to find a way to keep.
***
Much, much later, in the Eigenblick years
***
Deep within him Smoky was sure of this: that in some way it was true that once he had turned within the gates of Edgewood on that long-ago summer day made perfect by memory, he had never truly left it again, and indeed, most likely, would never. But another part of him knew, or at least was on the edge of beginning to know, just how immense those boundaries might possibly be.
Mist surrounded him where he retraced that lane slowly, past the patronizingly kind gaze of the sentinel trees shedding their unreliable gold and copper on his head. With the unerring certainty that sometimes dreamers have (when they are not hopelessly bewildered; states of mind in between the two are rare), he knew when the world had changed around him.
He found the relative lack of car horns disorienting, and he hadn't realized until that moment how much he relied upon sound as well as sight. There was no mistaking it: the line of ancient maples was the same, but what they guarded was different, and the place where he was felt like itself, but sounded all wrong.
Smoky never questioned for a moment which direction he should be walking in, which leaning, weatherbeaten door in the tenement block would open for him, which hallway with its untrustworthy floors and peeling, age-spotted wallpaper would lead him where he was meant to be. He liked to think he had learned at least a little something about dreaming over the years, from Sophie at least, and it was elementary that to pause, to question, to show doubt, can be fatal. That which you knew before can evaporate and leave you helpless and mapless in a world stripped of its markers, and he couldn't allow that. He wasn't even sure he should be acknowledging even that much, but once a thought has been thought, one can't unthink it, and he would simply have to make do.
The cry of a rooster, obviously sorely misled on the matter of time, didn't wake him. It only made him question whether he was in fact dreaming at all.
The door shouldn't have opened, but it did, and because Smoky was still trying to hang on to his solid sense of dreaming, he wasn't surprised that George had heard him.
But if this was a dream, shouldn't George look the same? It was the same hat, but Smoky had long ago given up wondering if it had been same one all these decades or if George had owned several. Though his long hair was no longer solid black and his face crinkled, his glittering dark eyes were much the same. Dilated as ever.
George shook his head sadly. "I knew you were coming, but I didn't know long enough. I could have found something better to eat if you'd given more notice."
"I was going to say...I didn't give any notice at all, did I?" Smoky hardly could have, considering he'd had none himself.
George just shrugged and clapped him companionably on the shoulder. "No matter. Aub'll be glad to see you."
"Er..." Smoky wasn't so sure about that at all.
A goat laughed uncannily from the courtyard.
Smoky blinked and shook his bleary head. He was standing in the hallway where he'd been mere moments before...and all along, really. There was no sign of anyone else. The door still stood before him.
He suspected this was the very door he had once opened, when he was young and so the City seemed young as well though he knew better, to meet behind it a very tall girl and her tall sister. There were probably still molecules of her perfume among the spores of mildew.
Auberon's letters had been nicely descriptive-he got that from his grandfather--and yet still Smoky supposed he had imagined Old Law Farm to be a little more Farm and a little less Old Law. Still, this was absurd. He pushed on the door, for that's what doors are for, and behind it was George, truly, sprawled upon a mouse-eaten (did that joke ever get old) couch, staring into the dusky window with eyes so fixed that Smoky might have thought for a horrid moment he was actually dead. But the eyes sparkled to life. And there were two cups of viscous coffee on the table, one untouched and awaiting him. There was also an old copy of one of Doc Drinkwater's books, anachronistically pastoral. Or perhaps not so.
"It's a good thing you didn't take that road," George said. "You'd have gotten rained on at Throgs Neck."
"I don't think...well, I don't remember passing it," Smoky said helplessly.
"Of course not," George said. "You came by the trees. I had been wondering what was meant by those."
Smoky shrugged. That was the thing about George Mouse, the one who-well, if you went back far enough it was all his fault really, and if anyone owed him explanations...the problem was that no one did. And no one was stingy; if they had them they would share them as they shared everything else. That coffee couldn't be easy to come by down here. And George, some things never change, was breaking off a small piece of a greasy black bar of hashish wrapped in yellow brittle newspapers from a century ago. They shared everything, that was part of the problem, and Smoky'd had a hundred pet theories he wanted to unfurl somewhere, but they dissolved as he started to speak them. He wondered if Sophie ever felt like this, trying to explain all the things she'd seen when she dreamed a decade away.
Sophie, her limbs warm and drowsy, her bed...
George blinked.
"Things sure have changed down here," Smoky said dumbly.
George nodded. "But not up there?"
"Oh, they have," Smoky said. He wasn't sure how to describe it. Gotten smaller, perhaps? Sometimes the house seemed to, in its aging and stiffening. But then he thought it was only their part of it that grew smaller, and the part that belonged to Something Else was growing.
"And the girls?"
"Good." All three of them. Or was it four?
George was looking at him as if he didn't know where to start, and so he wasn't going to; he only patted the ratty couch and nodded at the coffee and the hash, and then Smoky would sit down, and if he smoked and drank and relaxed he would start to remember things he didn't know he'd forgotten, about who it had been who had first drawn him into this Tale in the first place. The fierce love was real, and the promises were real and the faith had been real, but it hadn't really been Daily Alice who had chosen him first, had it?
Mouse Drinkwater Stone.
"This place is falling apart," George said with grim cheer. "You oughta see what those roots are doin' to the foundations of this place. But I'm surprised it's lasted as long as it has...guess they built even the slums to last once upon a time. It's seen worse than some roots, some goats...but I'm not sure this country's seen worse, you know?"
"It does feel..." Smoky took a deep breath, and coughed green smoke. The smoke was making him daring. "Old. Coming to an end."
"I wouldn't've thought it could...when I was a young man, anyway. But the young folks always think that, don't they? Hey, I used to resent everything that was older than me."
"I didn't," said Smoky, leaning back against the grotty sofa that shaped itself against him companionably. "I liked it. There was a world before me, and there'll be one after." The world that included Suetonius that also included all those I states, and his ephemeral father...was it also the one described in 'The Architecture of Country Houses'? It had to be the same one, didn't it? And none of them could end the way a story ends. Could it? He had always thought the Tale would go on and on, long after his frail hand at last turned its last personal page and fell away, for he was only a very minor character in the world. Most people were, after all.
George gave him a strange look, glittering and sad. George clearly wasn't sure of this. But he shrugged, and blinked again, fluttering his dark eyelashes a little sleepily, and started describing the colors behind his eyes and the way the black water of the harbor at night had gleamed and danced and shivered full of a thousand little reflections and refractions when he used to do his fireworks shows, how the smelly and violent artistry of gunpowder and sparks was the closest he'd ever come to presenting the journeys of his eyes in a way that other people could see.
Rather stiffly Smoky lay his graying head on the threadbare shoulder, long salt-and-pepper locks against his cheek, a strange move for him--but with this closeness he could nearly see the eruptions in the sky, sentient and brief and dying. George was not a minor character. He had been a Protagonist all along. Perhaps Smoky should have followed that thread instead, taken that plot twist and seen where it led, so many City streets left unexhausted and Stones unturned in their beds, the old Dutch men and the Greek scholars and the proud black church ladies and the Spanish girls and George moving through them like a swirling little wind-cloud, taking a taste of it all. And Smoky had given love up for love, and at the end of the day regretted only that life was so short-of a man, of a nation, of a Tale-and that in the winter, summer was so hard to see.
George smelled of a meadow, just a little bit of coffee and goat, and largely of grass; his hands aged but supple with work; his laughter deeper and harsher. "Oh Smoky old sport. It's been so long!"
"So very long," Smoky said.
"I think we're almost there," George said softly, tiredly, hand at Smoky's neck, as the birds rose up in their dawn chorus outside where once car horns had been.
~fin~