Aegypt Read online

  Pierce read on. Printing had been invented, and the bookstores were suddenly full of odd wares. There were new newssheets in lurid, smudgy colors, there were almanacs and books of prophecy, there were strange scriptures, ballads, broadsides. Deeply surprised, Pierce began to find among them bright-clad reissues of books that had meant much to him in childhood, a childhood that had been largely spent between the covers of books, one way and another, a childhood he found he was able to taste again by cracking the same books, unseen since antiquity, since his own Age of Gold.

  Here for example were Frank Walker Barr’s ten- and twenty-year-old books, being reverently brought out in a uniform new paper edition, including the ones Pierce knew, like Time’s Body and Mythos and Tyrannos; someone had had the brilliant idea of covering them all with a single titanic Baroque painting crowded with figures, each volume’s cover only a detail, so that when they were all in print and assembled, they would form the whole picture. And here also was Sidney Lanier’s Boy’s King Arthur, with all the original illustrations, as bright as Christmas morning and as cold to his touch; a shabby edgeworn copy had stood long on his boyhood bookshelf, a present from his father. And a book he didn’t at first recognize in its new soft covers, only to find inside a book he knew immediately, like a childhood friend unmasked, because it was simply a photo reproduction of the old one he had read. It was Bruno’s Journey, a biography of sorts, by the historical novelist Fellowes Kraft, and he remembered nothing of it but that he had once been deeply affected by it; what he would think of it now he had no idea. The page he had opened to was this:

  The immense laughter of Bruno when he understood that Copernicus had inverted the universe – what was it but joy in the confirmation of his knowledge that Mind, in the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of? If the Earth, the old center, now was seen truly to revolve somewhere halfway between the center and the outside; and the Sun, which before had revolved on a path halfway to the outside, were now the center, then a half-turn like that in a Mobius strip was thrown into the belt of the stars: and what then became of the old circumference? It was, strictly, unimaginable: the Universe exploded into infinitude, a circle of which Mind, the center, was everywhere and the circumference nowhere. The trick mirror of finitude was smashed, Bruno laughed, the starry realms were a jewelled bracelet in the hand.

  Copyright 1931. Who was publishing these things newly? How did they know he needed them? Why did he see their spines under the arms and in the tasseled satchels of the effendi, woodsmen, Injuns of the gong-tormented streets? He had the funny feeling that doors long bolted within him were being forced, that in the general amnesty of carnival something jailed in him since puberty was being let out – somewhat by mistake – into the open air, to be welcomed by the cheering mob.

  Something: what?

  When the weather turned cold the jingling throngs sought shelter, huddling wrapped in aged furs on stoops or in heated public places; Pierce took in the odd stray for a night or a week. Boys with head colds, far from home, boiled brown rice on his stove, girls practiced simple native crafts cross-legged on the floor, shared the bed, moved on. In their endless talk, periodless, a slurry of outlandish possibilities as real to them as the dangerous city and the workaday world around them were unreal, Pierce with elation and trepidation heard the end – not of the world, no, but of the world he had grown up in, the world that everyone, growing up, imagines will never change. Climacterics would one day suggest to him that the world forever grows up and explodes into possibility, revolts against the past, evolves the future, and settles down to grow staid and old, all at exactly the same rate as each person experiencing it does; but Pierce didn’t know Climacterics then; he let his hair grow long, and looked out his window at the parade, and thought: Nothing now will ever be the same again.

  FIVE

  Barnabas College, like a fast little yacht, had quickly tacked with the new winds that were blowing, even while old galleons like Noate were wallowing in the breakers. Courses in the history, chemistry, and languages of the old everyday world were semester by semester cut to a minimum (Pierce’s History 101 course would, eventually, very nearly reach the present day from time-out-of-mind, even as the 200-level courses, out of his provenance, came to deal chiefly not with the past at all but in possibilities, in the utopias and armageddons all adolescents love). The old standard textbooks were chucked, replaced by decks of slim paperbacks, often the students’ own choices, they are after all (said Doctor Sacrobosco) paying the bills. Veteran teachers faced with this fell tongue-tied or turned coats garishly; young ones like Pierce, his students’ coeval almost, still had trouble facing children who seemed to have come to Barnabas chiefly to be instructed in a world of their own imagining.

  Earl Sacrobosco tried to help him out. ‘You’re not plastic enough,’ he told Pierce, molding something invisible in his hands. ‘The kids want to play with these ideas that are new to them. So play with them. Entertain them.’

  ‘Entertaining students is not my idea of . . .’

  ‘The notions, Pierce. Entertain the notions.’

  Sacrobosco himself taught an astronomy course which was, at his students’ insistence, coming to include practical training in judicial astrology, so he knew whereof he spoke. Earl was as plastic as they come.

  Pierce did his best, he could entertain notions, he could and did, but he continued to think of his course as a history course, on the model of those he had taken under Frank Walker Barr at Noate: a history course, however commodious and full of digression. His students apparently wanted something else.

  They liked the stories he was gleaning from his newly wide reading, and made round sounds of wonder at the notions he put forth, which they entertained indiscriminately, mixing them with their other mental guests in a bash that Pierce found hard to crash. They had come to college not, as Pierce’s generation seemed to Pierce to have gone to college, to be disabused of their superstitions, but to find new and different ones to adopt; they seemed not to understand the nature of evidence, and were vague about whether the Middle Ages came before or after the Renaissance; they were resentful of Pierce’s careful distinctions, and insulted when he showed himself to be appalled at their ignorance. ‘But this is a history course,’ he would plead before their truculent faces. ‘It is about past time and what has in fact occurred. Stories told about that past time are no good unless they can account for events that really happened, which we therefore have to learn, which is why we study history in the first place. Now about this other stuff, maybe in Dr. Sacrobosco’s course or Mrs. Black’s course on the Witch Cult as a Women’s Movement . . .’ But after class they would crowd around his desk, uncowed, bringing him news of Atlantis, the secrets of the pyramids, the Age of Aquarius.

  ‘What,’ he asked Earl Sacrobosco, ‘is the Age of Aquarius?’

  Pierce and another young teacher, a woman named Julie who had just come to the school to teach New Age journalism, were at a small dinner party at the Sacroboscos. Earl had acquired a little pot, ho ho, for him and the youngsters to try out after Mrs. Sacrobosco had gone to bed.

  ‘The Age of Aquarius?’ Earl said, his eyebrows wrinkling up and down rapidly (his toupee remained motionless though, always a giveaway). ‘Well, it’s an effect of the precession of the equinoxes. Very simple really. See, the earth turning on its axis’ – he pointed his forefingers at each other and revolved them – ‘doesn’t have a regular motion, it has a little bobble in it, it moves sort of like a top when it’s running down.’ The fingers described this eccentricity. ‘One whole movement, though, takes a long time, about twenty-six thousand years to complete. Now one effect of this is that the direction the axis points in the sky – true north – changes slowly over time; the star pointed to, the North Star, is a different star at the beginning of the cycle and halfway through.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Pierce, visualizing.

  ‘Another effect,’ Earl went on, ‘is that the star background shifts vis-à-
vis the sun. Just as the relative positions of things in this room change if you waggle your head slowly around.’ They all did that, and fell to giggling for a while. ‘So, so,’ Earl said, ‘the star background shifts. You can measure this by noting, at a specific day every year, what sign of the zodiac the sun is rising with; and the days you choose are the equinoxes, the days that are the same length as the nights, if you see what I mean. And if you do that over a very long time, centuries, you can see that the sun is very gradually falling back. It’s rising, on the equinox, slightly later every century, that is, in a slightly more easterly part of the sign. And you can suppose, well, it will keep on doing that till it has fallen all the way back around. And so it does.’ He lapsed into thought, brow rising, rug remaining fixed. ‘So it does.’

  ‘Yes?’ Pierce said. ‘And so?’

  ‘So every once in a while, a long while, the sun rises one morning in a new sign. It has slipped right out of one and back into the previous one. Right now it rises on the spring equinox in some early degree of the sign Pisces. But it’s always on the move – relative to us, that is, it’s really us who are on the move; and pretty soon – well, astronomically speaking pretty soon, a couple hundred years or so – the sun will begin to rise in the sign of Aquarius. Thus the end of the Piscean Age, that started two-thousand-odd years ago, and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.’

  Two thousand years ago, the Piscean age, the world shifts from B.C. to A.D. Jesus. And Jesus was a fish.

  Oh. ‘Oh,’ said Pierce.

  ‘Always precedes, you see,’ Earl said dreamily. ‘Precedes. Before Pisces was Aries the ram, and before that Taurus the bull, and so on.’

  Moses had ram’s horns, who overthrew the golden bull-calf. And then comes Jesus the fish, two thousand years on, new heaven and new earth, and shepherd Pan flees from the mountainsides. And now the world watched and waited for the man with the water jug.

  ‘The kids,’ Pierce said, ‘claim it’s starting now.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Earl said indulgently.

  Pierce felt again, intensely, that sensation of a series of magic-lantern slides projected within him, all at once, all overlapping, all the same slide. Had he heard about this before too, and only forgotten it? Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna: yes, sure, the Virgin returns, because if, when Virgil was writing that line two thousand years ago, the sun was entering Pisces, then on the autumnal equinox it would rise in one two three four five six yes in Virgo. So Virgil it seems knew about this stuff too. And he, Pierce, had read him and studied him at St. Guinefort’s, and hadn’t understood. He felt as though if this kept up he would find himself sitting once again before his earliest ABC books, his first catechism, saying Oh I get it, this was the story encoded in these stories, this is the secret that was kept from me.

  Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead: the great god Pan is dead.

  ‘I thought,’ Julie said, ‘that the equinox is March 21st.’

  ‘So it is, about,’ said Earl.

  ‘But that’s Aries.’

  ‘So it was, once. Maybe when the whole system was codified, it was.’

  ‘But then all these sun signs and birth signs are wrong.’ She sounded affronted. Pierce knew she set great store by her own sign and what it implied for her. Around her neck hung an enameled copper scorpion. ‘They’re way off.’

  ‘It’s adjusted for, in the system,’ Earl said vaguely. He moved his hand as though tuning a TV. ‘Adjustments are made.’

  Pierce shook his head, buffaloed. Some kind of collision seemed to be taking place within him, a collision of just unprecedented magnitude, two vast sedans, both of them his, coming together in slow, slow motion, their noses crumpling, their drivers aghast. ‘But it’s just this little bobble,’ he said.

  ‘Imagine the effect, though,’ Earl said, raising the smoldering joint to his lip, ‘if the earth were stationary. The whole heavens would be shifting. Very important-seeming stuff.’

  ‘But they aren’t,’ Pierce said.

  Earl grinned. ‘Well, all that stuff is coming back,’ he squeaked with held breath. ‘It’s a new age.’

  Redeunt Saturnia regna: the old gold age that once was is come again. Walking home through the illuminated streets, in bed with Julie, at breakfast, on the toilet, standing abstracted before his students, Pierce came to feel often, like a clutch in his throat or a hum in his ears, that sense of collision he had first felt at Earl’s: as though he had come upon some kind of crossroads, no, as though he were himself a crossroads, a place where caravans met, freighted with heavy goods, come from far places, colliding there with others come from different far places, headed elsewhere: pack-trains, merchants carrying jewels sewn in their clothing, dark nomads from nowhere carrying nothing, imperial couriers, spies, lost children. The history he thought he knew, the path called History which he walked every working day, the path that led backward through a maze of battles, migrations, conquests, bankruptcies, revolutions, one damn thing after another, men and women doing and saying, dreaming and playing, till it coiled finally and unknowably upon itself at the side of a cold campfire on some vast and silent veldt – from that path, it seemed, there forked another, just as long and just as mazy, only long since lost; and for some reason now, just now, it had suddenly become visible again, to him as to others, dawn winds rising as night turned pale. It seemed to spring out from the very foot of the napless velveteen armchair (recently rescued from the street) in which late at night Pierce sat thinking.

  Down that road, the past did not grow darker with distance, but brighter; that way lay the morning lands, wise forefathers who knew what we have forgotten, radiant cities built by arts now lost.

  Nor did that road go curling off to an ending lost amid the beasts: no, though far shorter than the road Pierce called History, it was in fact infinite, because just as its furthest age rolled back to its first days, the whole road completed a circle; the serpent took in its mouth the fast-dwindling tip of its tail. Nowadays history is made of time; but once it was made of something else.

  Now that would be a story to tell his kids, wouldn’t it, he thought. The story of that history not made of time; that history which is as different from History yet as symmetrical to it as dream is to waking.

  As dream is to waking.

  He pulled himself from his new armchair with some difficulty and went to the window; he turned out his lights and stood looking out into the never dark city.

  There had been a morning once, when he was a child – how old had he been, not more than five or six – when he had awakened from frightening dreams, labyrinthine pursuit and loss, and his mother had tried to explain to him the nature of dreams, and why it is that, though you seem in them to be in mortal danger, you can’t be hurt, not really. Dreams, she said, are only stories: except they aren’t stories outside, like the ones in books, the stories Daddy tells. Dreams are your own stories, inside.

  Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning, whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of.

  Funny, he thought; funny funny funny. In fact he had begun to feel funny, as though the rotation of the earth could be felt through his naked feet. Maybe he hadn’t really lost his vocation, after all; maybe he had just misplaced it, had long ago closed the door by mistake on the one story that could not be outgrown: this story about how there is a story. That old closed door had blown open in the winds that were rising, and there were other doors beyond it, door after door, opening backward endlessly into the colored centuries.

  When he had first begun teaching at Barnabas, because of his rather ambiguous degree in Renaissance Studies Pierce had been set to teaching not only history but freshman lit, or Introduction to World Literature, a course that still had compulsory status then. Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes all fled past in the first semester, well over most of the students’
heads, slow-flapping pterosaurs dimly glimpsed; Pierce supposed that if in later life they met any of those authors, it would be nice to be able to claim they had once before been introduced.

  When he got to Dante, whom he had always found a trial, Pierce used to employ a trick he had learned from Dr. Kappel at Noate, who had taught him the equivalent freshman course and had also found Dante unsympathetic. At the beginning of class, as Dr. Kappel had, he would draw a circle on the blackboard.

  ‘The world,’ he would say.

  A hatch mark on the world’s edge. ‘Jerusalem. Beneath Jerusalem is Hell, going down sort of spirally or in a cone shape like this.’ A spiral to the center of the world circle. ‘In here are the souls of the damned, as well as many of the fallen angels. In the very center, in a frozen pit, a gigantic figure: the Devil, Satan, Lucifer.’ A little stick man. ‘Now.’ He drew a blip on the far side of the world, opposite Jerusalem.

  ‘Over here is a seven-level mountain, Purgatory, standing all alone in the empty southern sea. Here on various levels are more of the dead, lesser sinners whose crimes have been forgiven but not paid for.’

  With a sweep of chalk, he next drew a circle around the earth circle, and a crescent on it. ‘Above the earth, circling it, the moon. Above the moon, the sun.’ More circles, extending outward: ‘Mercury. Venus. Mars.’ When he had got seven circles indicated around the circle of the earth, one more: ‘The stars, all fixed, turning around the earth once in twenty-four hours.’ He tapped the board with his chalk: ‘Outside it all, God. With myriads of angels, who keep it all rolling in order around the earth.’

  Then he would step back, contemplating this picture, and he would ask, ‘Now what’s the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe here, which is the picture Dante presents us with in his poem?’

  Silence, usually.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Pierce would say. ‘The very first most evident thing about this picture.’