"I don"t know. It seemed like a boy, perhaps."
"Race?"
"Irish or Italian, I think."
"Those are not races. Where from?"
"From the islands."
"We don"t get so many of those anymore, not since they industrialized. The population was decimated."
"This was before that."
"Twenty years ago?"
"That"s right."
"Maybe, maybe... I could help you find someone who pa.s.sed through this place twenty hours agoa"maybe. But not twenty days ago, and not twenty weeks, and never under any circ.u.mstances twenty months. Twenty years? That"s almost funny. You might as well go to a wheat field in Kansas and try to trace an individual grain that fell off the stalk two decades before you got there. Whole generations spring up and die without being remembered. Everyone is forgotten. If the parents are alive, which I doubt, I guarantee you that they, too, have forgotten.
"Look, there you find child prost.i.tutes, not one or two, but dozens. They live, if you can call it that, until about age nineteen.
Then it"s too much cocaine, or syphilis, or a knife. Shall I take you to the room where we keep only the pieces that we find, and the cadavers that have been two months in the rivera"or for years in some hovel, undiscovered? Shall I show you the half-dozen other rooms in this hospital where these scenes are repeated? And what of the other hospitals? Printing House Square is small and tame. Even in the private inst.i.tutions uptown you can see a show just like this: there is nothing as disgusting as an obese cadaver in which all the futile pleasures of many years finally arise to fill it full-blown with stinking rotten gases. The city is burning and under siege. And we are in a war in which everyone is killed and no one is remembered."
"What am I supposed to do, then," Peter Lake asked,"if it"s like you say?"
"Is there someone you love?"
"Yes."
"A woman?"
"Yes."
"Then go home to her."
"And who will remember her?"
"No one. That"s just the point. You must take care of all that now."
ACELDAMA.
PETER Lake rode Athansor at a lope over snow-covered streets with the north wind against him. It was very cold, and the wind put icicles on his mustache. Though the doctor hadn"t known that the woman Peter Lake loved was in the midst of dying, his advice could not have been more appropriate or more painful to hear, especially because it echoed what Beverly had said not long before in the second (though by far not the last) delirium in which he was to see her."I"m just like you," she had told him."I come from another age. But there are many things that we must take care of now."
Because he was confounded so by the strength of his love for Beverly, its suddenness, and its onrushing end, and perhaps because he had no way of helping her, he joined her in what she believed.
Far-fetched as it was, he accepted it simply because he loved her and would share any mortification or pathetic confusion just to be with her. And only after he had come to half-believe what she said did he give it any thoughta"only after he had been to the hospital in Printing House Square.
If she were correct, it would explain why the world sometimes seemed to be a stage behind which was a strangely benevolent, superior, and indifferent power. The suffering of the innocent would be accounted for, if, in ages to come or ages that had been, the reasons for everything were revealed and balances were evened. It would explain destiny, and coincidence, and his image of the city as if he had been looking from high above at a living creature with a pelt of dusky light. It would explain the things that called to Beverly from a far distance and a far time. It would suggest that Athansor, who could leap high into the air, was leaping toward something he already knew. It would explain the strong feeling Peter Lake had that every action in the world had eventual consequences and would never be forgotten, as if it were entered in a magnificent ledger of unimaginable complexity. He thought that it might explain freedom, memory, transfiguration, and justicea"though he did not know how.
Peter Lake remembered when, once, for no apparent reason, Pearly had leapt back, drawn his pistols, and fired ten. 45-caliber rounds at a dark window behind which had been nothing but a winter night. Pearly had shaken for an hour afterward, saying that, leering at him from outside the window, with its teeth bared, was a giant dog twenty feet high, the White Dog of Afghanistan, come to get him from another time. Peter Lake thought he was mada"too much b.u.mping of the head on doorposts and tabletops. When Pearly had finally stopped quivering, he slept for forty-eight hours and had nightmares every single minute.
The Baymen were waiting, Peter Lake knew, for a great window in the cloud wall to open and reveal a burning city that was not consumed, a city that thrashed like an animal and yet did not move, a city suspended in the air. Sharp on detail and alert to small signs, they insisted that such a thing would appear, and that, after it did, the world would light up in gold.
All these things were shaken about within Peter Lake like pots and pans banging against the side of a peddler"s swaybacked horse It was hard to bear the weight of partial revelations which refused to venture past the tip of his tongue. He was no Mootfowl or Isaac Penn, not a deep thinker at all, but just a man. He was only Peter Lake, and he rode to the Penns" with the uncomplicated expectation of taking a bath in the slate bathing pool and then watching Beverly as she dressed to go to Mouquin"s. He rode fast through the lights of early winter traffic, weaving among panting horses, clouds of steam lacquered carriages with bra.s.s lamps, and showers of dry cold snow. Athansor"s gait was so smooth that riding him was like riding a noiseless whip, or gliding down the slope of a mid-ocean swell. Peter Lake and Beverly would go to Mouquin"s oblivious of all dangers. The new year was rolling at them as wide and full as a tide racing up the bay, sweeping over old water in an endless coil of ermine cuff.
With Athansor bedded down on a pallet of hay in the Penns" stable, forelegs stretched before him and head bowed in a restful dream, Peter Lake ran up to the second floor of the house and spun the hot-water valves. After the bitter cold, the water was an unparalleled joy. As he floated and turned, buoyed by great volumes of foaming bubbles, the door opened and Beverly came in.
"They"re all at The Sun," she announced, pulling her blouse over her head in a movement as quick as a good fly-fisherman"s cast."The New Year"s party won"t be over until seven or eight."
"What about Jayga?" Peter Lake asked, wary of Jayga"s compulsive peeping and eavesdropping.
"Jayga at this moment is under my father"s desk in the city room, a tray of smoked salmon on her knees, a magnum of French champagne at her side. They find her on the third of January, after an exhaustive search of the entire building. She will have eaten enough salmon, caviar, chopped liver, and shrimp to carry her through a much longer hibernation. But only she, Harry, and I know that. We are her confidants."
"We"re alone then."
"Yes!" Beverly shouted, and threw herself into the pool. They embraced as they floated, they circled, they were turned by flowing water and dashed under the falls. Beverly"s unplaited hairspread around her, soft and humid; her b.r.e.a.s.t.s had their own way in the water; she kicked her long graceful legs in a rose-and-white scissors; the heat added a fine patina to her skin; and her penetrating eyes were softened and cheered. They glided over to a ledge, where they talked, their words half hidden in the white fall.
Numb with desire, Peter Lake managed to tell her what had happened with Cecil Mature, Mootfowl, Jackson Mead, and the doctor in the hospital in Printing House Square. She had no answers for him. Though she was rea.s.suring, her method was inexplicable. She made no reference to his implied questions, and continued to speak in calm certainties.
"There are animals in the stars," she declared,"like the animal that you describe, with a pelt of light, and deep endless eyes. Astronomers think that the constellations were imagined. They were not imagined at all. There are animals, far distant, that move and thrash smoothly, and yet are entirely still. They aren"t made up of the few stars in the constellations that represent thema"they"re too vasta"but these point in the directions in which they lie."
"How can they be bigger than the distance between stars?" he asked.
"All the stars that you can see in the sky don"t even make up the tip of a horn, or the lash of an eye. Their s.h.a.ggy coats and rearing heads are formed of a curtain of stars, a haze, a cloud. The stars are a mist, like shining cloth, and can"t be seen individually. The eyes of these creatures are wider than a thousand of the universes that we think we know. And the celestial animals move about, they frisk, they nuzzle, they paw and rolla"all in infinite time, and the crackling of their coats is what makes the static and hissing which bathes an infinity of worlds."
Peter Lake stared at the water as it came over the fall."I"m as crazy as you are," he said,"maybe crazier. I believe you. I do believe you."
"That"s only love," Beverly answered."You don"t have to believe me. It"s all right if you don"t. The beauty of the truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing form each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too."
He lifted her in the water and set her gently on a slightly higher step."How do you know all this?"
She smiled."I see it. I dream it."
"But if they"re just dreams, then why do you speak as if they"re facts?"
"They"re not just dreams. Not anymore. I dream more than I wake now, and, at times, I have crossed over. Can"t you see? I"ve been there."
CONTRACICTIONS, paradoxes, and strong waves of feeling were things that Peter Lake had long before learned to call his own, so he was not surprised to be surprised by the gentleness of Mouquin"s usually boisterous New Year"s Eve. He remembered that it had been the same when the century had turned, when the celebrants had been unable to celebrate and could only stand in awe of history as it moved its ma.s.sive weight (as Peter Lake saw it) like the vault door of a central bank. On the night of December 31, 1899, despite a thousand bottles of champagne and a hundred years of antic.i.p.ation, Mouquin"s had been as quiet as a church on the Fourth of July. Women had wept, and men had found it hard to hold back the tears. As the clockwork of the millennia moved a notch in front of their eyes, it had taken their thoughts from small things and reminded them of how vulnerable they were to time.
But this odd-numbered frozen year far outdid the turn of the century in solemnity and emotion. Then, the quiet had set in an hour or so before midnight. Now, when Peter Lake and Beverly arrived at nine, they and the well-dressed people who had come for an evening of drunken dancing found themselves bathed in clear light, aware of every detail, tranquil, and contemplative. There was no customary ring of people around the fire soaking up its heat and screaming at each other, with drinks in their hands and an eye always c.o.c.ked to see who had come in out of the cold. Nor did the women magnetize the scene as they could and often did, setting the pace for their men. There was no tension as in richer places, and none of the usual dances like the Barn Rush, the Rumbling Buffalo, the Grapesy Dandy, or the Birdwalla Shuffle. When the orchestra finally did begin to play, the incomparably beautiful "Chantpleure and Winter-glad" of A. P. Clarissa was offered for stillwater quadrilles and other dances of counterpoint and restraint in which mainly the eyes moved, and the heart pounded as if in the breast of a hunted stag.
This was no place for Pearly, but he and a dozen Short Tails were there anyway with what they called womena"high-toned madams, corrupted country girls sick of working all day in hairdressing salons and oyster houses, lady pickpockets, and professional gun-bearing molls with, as Pearly said,"teats so sharp they could cut cheese." When Pearly saw Peter Lake come in, he rose in anger and his eyes began to electrify. But when Beverly joined Peter Lake, it was as if her presence sent darts into Pearly"s flesh, pacifying him with antivenom. Glazed and paralyzed, he and the other Short Tails could do nothing but stare fixedly toward the kitchen, in the manner of a Five Points cretin with a tin cup. Astounded molls tugged at the Short Tails" sleeves and turned to one another in amazement. The Short Tails were dreaded amba.s.sadors of the underworld, whose active presence was feared and tolerated. Had Mouquin"s not accepted them, they would have immediately burned it to the ground. Despite the fact that Pearly usually hit his head when he came through the doorway, he and his underlings ruled the place. But now they were entombed in a nerve dream. A dentist could have worked his wily and expensive arts on them without eliciting the slightest protest.
Peter Lake glanced at Pearly, a giant white cat all suited-up in clothes half a century out of date, and wondered how long his enemy would be immobilized. Beverly seemed able to push Pearly deeper and deeper into a condition in which he was cemented in a body that was trapped absolutely in stilled time.
Peter Lake and Beverly took a table and ordered a bottle of champagne, which was brought to them in a silver bucket full ofhysterical ice.
"The only time I ever saw this place this dull was the night before nineteen hundred," Peter Lake said."Maybe, purely by coincidence, all the people here have just lost dear relatives."
"Liven it up," Beverly commanded."I want to dancea"the way they were dancing at the inn that night."
"Who, me?" Peter Lake wanted to know."How can I liven it up? I suppose I could shoot or stab Pearly now that he"s stuck on the flypaper of time. But then everyone would run out. We"ll have a quiet evening, and wait for the new year."
"No," she said."It"s my last d.a.m.ned New Year. I"d like to see some fire in it."
She turned about in her seat and faced a set of French doors against which the cold wind was pushing a shower of winter stars. Without warning, they burst open. Then, inexplicably, the next set of doors flew open, too, and so on and so forth right down the line, until the twenty-one sets of doors at Mouquin"s had all opened in a machine-gunlike percussion that stopped the orchestra and the dancers. The fresh air stoked the fire and turned it from a softly purring cat into an enraged Bessemer furnace, and the icicle-covered trees outside began to ring like a thousand sleigh bells. Then the hands of the clock started to race like the tortoise and the hare, and both reached midnight at the same time. The clock struck along with every clock in New York, and church bells, fireworks, and ship whistles sounded all at once, turning the entire city into a giant hurdy-gurdy.
It soon got so cold that the men rushed to close the doors. When they had shut them and the room was again silent, they saw that several women had begun to cry. The women said it was because of the numbing air that had washed over their bare shoulders, but even strangers embraced sadly as they coasted into the new year and felt its strength commencing. They cried because of the magic and the contradictions; because time had pa.s.sed and time was left; because they saw themselves as if they were in a photograph that had winked fast enough to contradict their mortality; because the city around them had conspired to break a hundred thousand hearts; and because they and everyone else had to float upon this sea of troubles, watertight. Sometimes there were islands, and when they found them they held fast, but never could they hold fast enough not to be moved and once again overwhelmed.
"Country dances!" shouted a man as he jumped to his feet, and he was echoed by the fashionable crowd. In lightness and relief they began even before the music caught up to them. Now the floor of Mouquin"s pounded under the pure white reels of the winter countryside, and the magic of the Lake of the Concedes swirled almost visibly about them. Beverly, in a blue silk dress, danced with Peter Lake. There was much talk among the crowd as Pearly and the Short Tails began to thaw. Gla.s.ses sparkled until they broke. The room grew hot. Beverly was dancing. In the oyster houses, in the stove-lit salons of the ferryboats out on the bay, in the ballrooms uptown so gilt and argent that in the daytime they thought they were banks, in the common rooms of hospitals, and in the miserable dark cellars, they danceda"even if only for a moment.
Peter Lake sensed that some stupendous inner machinery of the world had turned, rendering its decision, and that much would follow. But soon he stopped thinking and was quickly lost in the sight of Beverly, a young blond and blue-eyed schoolgirl who twirled and kicked with the rest. Her hair flew. The music seemed to be in her, and she stomped the floor at just the right times, a precise and joyous part of the dance. She had always conserved her motions, gathering them to her and storing their power. Now she unleashed them. He had never seen her this way: she had never been this way. Though he feared for her, he sensed that this scene would not be lost, and that by some mechanism of translation or preservation it would last and be free sometime to start up again. Her motions flowed in a hundred thousand pictures, each of searing beauty, each on its way through the black cold of archless accommodating s.p.a.ce. They would land somewhere, he thought, bravely. Everything always comes to rest, and flourishes. That, anyway, was his hope.
They lost themselves in dancing, staking everything upon the images that billowed out from Mouquin"s and expanded effortlessly in all directions.
"I WAS terrified," Beverly said as they were riding home in a motorized taxi.
"Terrified? How do you figure that? You were the queen of the world. First you put Pearly to sleep. Then you seemed to have opened the doors, stoked the fire, and made the clock spin. You led thedances like a prima ballerina. The evening revolved around you. When we left, the party collapsed like a wet tent."
"I was so afraid," she said."I was trembling the whole time."
Peter Lake lifted a skeptical eyebrow. She ignored him.
"I"m so glad it"s over. I hate crowds of people. I wanted to doit once," she p.r.o.nounced with measured deliberation,"and I"ve done it."
"I didn"t see that you were at all nervous." "But I was."
"There wasn"t the slightest sign of it." "That"s because it was so deep."
No one was home when they arrived. New Year"s had scattered the Penns all around New York. Even Willa was sleeping over at the house of Melissa Bees, the daughter of Crawford Bees, yet another master-builder, a lord of stone and steel. Peter Lake and Beverly threw themselves down on a couch in Beverly"s second-floor bedroom. He noticed that she was hot and sweating, but she seemed so happy and light that he believed her when she told him that it was just the normal evening elevation in temperature. After a bath, and some cold hours on the roof in the dry winter air, she said, she would be fine. She felt as if she were getting better, and claimed that she was stronger than she had ever been. In fact, she wanted to try cycling or skating the next day, for she was sure that she could breathe more easily now. Something had happened. Despite her optimism, Peter Lake was scared, and despite his fear, they made love.
They were at once so desperate and so determined that they kept their clothes on, and, to get to her, Peter Lake had to go through a stage set of silk and cotton. And once he had found his way and entered her, they stared at one another as if across a dinner table. His carnation was still pinned to his jacket. Her velvet ribbons still hung correctly. They might have been at a formal party, and yet they arose from the same base, and they were pinioned together underneath all the clothes tighter, hotter, and wetter than they had ever been. As if they were dancing, they put their hands on the small of one another"s backs, and moved their fingers slowly up and down the slick surfaces of their clothing. Beverly"s delicate features seemed to rise from afountain of blue, and the skirts spread over the bed were like the water that had fallen back from the plume.
They weren"t watchful, and wouldn"t have cared if anyone had come into the house. Isaac Penn knew very well what was going on. In other circ.u.mstances, it would have been scandalous that the young, fragile, and refined Beverly should be allowed, during her sickness, to know the bittersweet pleasures of a worldly woman. But Isaac Penn recognized that she had fallen in love with Peter Lake, and, despite the risk, wanted her to be free in whatever time she had left to compress the pa.s.sions that are allowed to us in this life.
She had indeed discovered grace, or madness, in her visions of the starlight. Whichever it was, it frightened her father when she hinted at it or tried to tell him about it, for he knew that young people gifted with long, sharp, and n.o.ble vision often paid for it in an early death.
Sometimes, when visiting her on the roof, in the deepest part of the night, he expected to find her asleep, but would instead find her in a breathless trance, possessed, her eyes forced open and fixed on the constellations."What do you see?" he would ask, frightened for her sanity."What is it that you see?"
And once, only once, when he found her in the slack and weakened state of someone who had just been seized, broken, and released, she had tried to tell him. He barely understood her when she spoke about a sky full of animals whose pelts were made of an infinite number of stars. They moved slowly and smoothly, for, really, they were motionless. Though their faces could not be seen, they were smiling. There were horses in dark celestial meadows, and other animals that flew, fought, or playeda"all without movinga"in swirling ruby-colored places of complete silence."Places," she said,"where we have been."
"I cannot comprehend this," answered her father."The G.o.ds of my understanding have been always hidden in clouds and very far away."
"Oh no, Daddy," she had said."They are here."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, they are here."
BY spring, Beverly"s soul had ascended. She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity. He would never drive from his mind the things she said before she dieda"ravings about scarves that were songs, torrents of silver sparks, stags with voices like horns, and feasts in fields of black light where the dandelions were suns. And for the rest of his days he would be oppressed by the image of her whitened emaciated body eternally motionless in a dark root-pierced gravea"or so he thought.
SHORTLY after Beverly"s death, Isaac Penn followed. One night he called Harry into his bedroom, and said,"I"m dying right now. I feel tremendous speed. I"m frightened. Falling." And then he died, as if he had been s.n.a.t.c.hed away by some great thing that had been pa.s.sing at unimaginable speed.
Willa and Jack were farmed out to relatives in the country, the servants were given annuities and dismissed, and the house was sold and soon demolished to make way for a new school. Harry left for Harvard, from which he would then go to the war in France. The Sun stayed much the same, ready for Harry to survive Chateau-Thierry and the Marne if he could, and return to take charge. Suddenly and sadly, the Penns disappeared from the city. In several strokes, a thriving family was silenced. For Peter Lake, who had never before known loneliness, the city was now empty. But even defeated soldiers sometimes survive. If they make the right motions, they are brought from battle. Peter Lake was left alive.
When there was no one remaining to care for, and nothing more to do, he took Athansor and rode into the Five Points, reckless and angry, trying as best he could to run into Pearly. He wanted to die.
But all that summer, as if by magic, he stayed out of Pearly"s wayand remained (to his disgust) a free man. He wandered about on Athansor, who, for lack of exercise and sympathy, began to seem more and more like an ordinary white horse that used to drive a milk wagon in Brooklyn. Where Peter Lake went is anyone"s guess, for at times his whereabouts were hidden even from him. The deep maze of the city, its winding streets, tumultuous avenues, and remote squares, circles, and courts with their teeming thousands, swallowed him up easily, and he became one of the great army of the unknown, the ragmen, the wanderers, the ones who cried on the street.
Though he always managed to feed Athansor, and sometimes managed to feed himself, he was never aware of how he did it, except that he could walk down a crowded street and emerge with a hundred dollars that seemed to come from the air but which came, really, from people"s pockets. He hated the idea of this, and fought not to do it. But his hands were more loyal to his stomach than to his head. He had grown ragged, and his clothes were olda"but not as old as his face. One day, a wet-eyed young dandy in a sealskin coat approached him and put a bunch of silver coins in his hand, saying,"For you, Father."
"I"m not your father, you stupid son of a b.i.t.c.h," was Peter Lake"s reply, but he kept the money.
As uncomfortable as a penitent who has sworn some stupendous oath, Peter Lake wanted to part with the silver. He and Athansor wandered a few miles, and then stopped while a convoy of military trucks crossed their path. It took so long that he dismounted and looked around. He was standing in front of a movie theater, something of which he had recently heard, and he decided to see what was inside.
He was not expecting the darkness to be shattered by a stunning explosion of light. But the perfect square of even white fire upon the wall seemed to have a heart and depth. The light was measured in pulses much more rapid than those of a furnace. He heard the even gait of electrically driven gears, and the flutelike pitch of a highspeed cooling fan that was undoubtedly beneath them. Dust was trapped in the slanted beam of arc-light like a herd of buffalo embarra.s.sed by the intruding lamp of a locomotive, and the particles scattered about the huge hall, transforming it into a universe of mobile stars. How strange it was when the physics and the mystery combined to depict people in ordinary rooms, on the street, or tied to railroad tracks. For half an hour, Peter Lake watched a world of gray in which everything moved too fast and actors spoke in silence. White light filled the room again, and then deferred to a small sketch ent.i.tled,"A Winter Scene in Brooklyna"How We Were."
A village appeared, snow-covered and motionless. Then a horse drawing a sled galloped across the wall and vanished into the curtains. Doors opened, half a dozen women came out, and as if life proceeded in this fashion, they began to churn b.u.t.ter. All at once, they went back in, and the same scene was repeated with men chopping wood, then milkmen delivering milk, boys delivering papers, and a long parade of police chasing a long parade of crooks. All the police were in one group, as were all the crooks.
"What"s *were" about that?" asked Peter Lake indignantly and aloud.
"Shhh!" hissed a woman who had not removed her hat. Then another white flash struck Peter Lake and pushed him back in his chair. They were to witness a film portraita""The City in the Third Millennium." When it came on the screen, Peter Lake almost jumped up to shout in anger: this was a film of the painting that had been done for the Penns. t.i.tles announced each moving tableau."Flight" was a wonder of floating lights traversing the night sky over the city. There were hundreds of these lights, as graceful as schooners but as fast as express trains, tracing lines in the darkness with a remarkable purposefulness. The city had grown upward into cliffs of silver boxes that flashed and glowed and shone out over the water in a rippled musical pattern. Remarkably, most of what was visible in it was light itself. Cold wind raced along the narrow boulevards, jingling the frozen trees. Winter clouds, small and tight, filtered through the ramparts like a river threading through a weir. The clouds moved at a height only about a quarter that of the buildings, and yet they were not low clouds or fog but those high riders that come with strong dry winds. How could this be?
Another t.i.tle appeared: "As the City of the Future Burns." Flames could not be seen, only vast banks of illuminated smoke thatcoiled over the city in braids or swelled like mountains. Then the film broke, and Peter Lake was caught up in blinding white almost as if he were trapped in the backwash of a waterfall crashing into its thundering pool.
Athansor was waiting like a dog tied up outside a store. His silent dispirited master slowly walked him to the east. Athansor"s coat was streaked with soot and dust, and he didn"t look much like a statue anymore. Peter Lake was tired and worn out, and had no place to go. But it was one of those nights in mid-September when, like a cannonade in the distance, Canada threatens winter, and because they had to find shelter they ended up in a cellar, not far from the great bridge. A tallow candle lit a small room in which were a few piles of straw. Athansor stood near one wall, and Peter Lake sat down and rested his back against another. After a while, a man came in and put a bucket of oats and a bucket of water in front of the horse. He left, and returned carrying an iron skillet of grilled fish and vegetables in one hand and two bottles of cold beer in the other. These he put down in front of his guest."You want hot water in the morning?" he asked.
"Sure," said Peter Lake."I haven"t had hot water in a while." "Then the lodging for you and the horse, the oats, the hot water, the food, beer, and the candle will be two dollars altogethera" two and a half if you don"t want anyone else in here with you. You can pay in the morning. Checkout time is eleven A. M." "Checkout time?" "I used to work in a hotel."
The fish and vegetables were fresh, the beer ice-cold, and the straw warm and comfortable. Peter Lake was reminded of his first night in the city, with the spielers, when he and they had fallen asleep by the light of a flickering tallow candle. But now there were no women. He thought that he might never touch, love, or be with a woman again. Everything had come apart, and the world was gray rain. With even a harder road ahead than he thought, he fell asleep clutching straw between his fingers, content to be alone in a warm and dirty cellar.
Athansor, on the other hand, stood straight and lifted his head. He was restless, his ears slewed about continuously as if he werekeeping track of a mosquito, and his eyes shot back and forth. Had Peter Lake not been lost in sleep, he would have seen that his white horse was tensed like a war-horse who senses a distant battle. There was something in the air, and as the white horse grew more and more alert, astonishing memories began to flood his heart.
MANY hours later, Peter Lake had a dream in which he saw himself lying on the straw, with his back against the wooden wall for warmth. Athansor, a white blur in the darkness, was fretting and ill at ease. Peter Lake knew that he was dreaming, and was not surprised when, long before morning, silver light began to flood through the cracks where the cellar walls neared ground level, and the one high window began to frost over as if it were plated with ice and taking the full blast of a beaming December moon. This light grew stronger, like the dawn, but it was much faster, and it had no warm halftones, blood colors, yellows, or oven-whites. Instead, it was all whited silver and blue that grew thicker and brighter as it approached. Had it had the weight of ordinary sunlight, it would have shattered the dream, but being the kind of illumination that seems to make everything float, it only made the dream more profound.
The strengthening silver-blue light was accompanied by a collection of restless sounds. Tones and static battled, entwined in a war that led them upward. Wind and voices were woven into an impenetrable shield. It was the incandescent cloud wall in full agitation, moving toward Manhattan and pushing before it the lost and broken sound and light that would be swept along the island"s edge like amber and sparkling sh.e.l.ls driven onto a beach in a necklace-making storm.