DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (54 page)

He wanted to defy them, as Plato Goodenough had done. Over the years between that time and now he had often wanted to, had
felt a limitless desire for an end to desire. But the way out in that direction was as closed to him as the way downward that
led through MM and Mal Cichy’s temptations. It was escape; and escape was what was forbidden to him. He thought of the animals
he had seen around the world who, hitched to a stone or a wheel, walked in circles, treading in their own dusty or muddy footprints
till they died: beasts without whom the villagers would not survive.

The beautiful young foolish Wisdoma God! She had a partner now, and the partner was her own Anguish. And with that partner
she brought forth a son! The lion-shaped lion-headed one, Jove Jehovah Jaldaboth, the maker and ruler of the heavens that
we see and that we labor under
.

There it was again, Radio WIAO, still emitting its rays, the stronger the farther west, the same ceaseless unwearied hectoring
as he had heard in that past time, when he had wept to pass on, and known that he could not.

Oh brothers and sisters! The holy suffering Wisdoma God caught in the pitchy dark of the World Underneath! Waiting in the
prison of the Lion-headed One for Jesus to come and strike off her shackles! Oh how many times has it happened, in how many
ages of ages! In our hearts too, brothers and sisters, in our own hearts, in the secret prisons made there and maintained
there by the black heavenly Powers within us!

They are all Her children, all the Powers are: for she’s Mother as well as lost child, and her restlessness and her smart
mouth are the source of our miseries, but also the source of our saving consciousness of them; Mother yes of the ones who
oppress us, but always our help against them too, teaching us how to evade or defeat them, like the giant’s wife helping Jack.
Her tricks and techniques being what we call Human Life on Earth. She herself is the source of our knowledge that she must
be rescued, source too of our knowledge that we can do that: rescue her.

We can do that: he, Beau himself, any of us.

Apostle Peter! He spoke to Simon the Magus and he said to him: How can you say what Jesus never said, that you are the embodiment
of the Entire Holy Power and Lighta God? And Simon answered him saying: Because every soul on earth is. And Peter asked him
again: How can you say that this woman Helen, this this this woman of ill repute,
is the present incarnation of the holy beautiful suffering Wisdoma God? And Simon answered: Because there is no woman that
is not
.

Beau lifted his eyes to the green signs and the stern choices they offered in stark white letters, on front or back, upward
or down, and he slowed, and exited. He was between East and West. Rain was falling, and up ahead, illuminated in their separate
small booths, were the two people, a man on one side and a woman on the other, who admit those who go travelling and take
the fare from those who have travelled.

Beau stopped his car there where you were not permitted to stop unless you were overtaken by some emergency, or were yourself
a servant of the highway.

He thought: the thing to be found and fought for has come into being. The thing without which the new age could not be made
different from the old, the thing that is also nothing but a kitten saved from drowning maybe, or a cocoon on a milkweed pod
taken indoors to open in the warmth. Not an age or even a year from now but now.

Right in his own backyard too, waiting for his return. How could he not have known? Every image, every moment in which it
could have come clear to him now returned, one after another, linked in a memory chain so clear and incontrovertible it made
him want to laugh, or to weep. Yet he didn’t blame himself for not knowing sooner; it was likely he could not have known until
this moment was born, grew up, and reached him to whisper or cry into his ear. He only hoped he hadn’t gone too far, taken
too long in coming to this certainty, that he would not be too late getting back. For even if he had allies, and his allies
had allies that he knew nothing of, and so on out to spheres he had never travelled to, he knew that at the same time this
was his alone to do, just as it was each of theirs. It always is.

Beau made a U-turn.

R
osie Rasmussen drove Pierce home in the morning, and though Pierce almost wanted to slip away from her into his unwelcoming
little house, she made him stop and give her a hug, rough skin of his cheek against her smooth one. They had already said
to each other that the night before hadn’t of course actually meant anything, and that that was the sad part actually, that
it didn’t and couldn’t; anyway she said that, and Pierce assented.

But that night she called him anyway.

“I talked to Mike finally,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Just on the phone.”

“Oh.”

“I told him I thought what he had done was so unjust. I told him that if he had done that because his religion said it was
the right thing then his religion was fake and so was he. I said that if he or any of those people put her in danger, I’d.”

Pierce gripping his phone listened to smoldering silence. It lasted for a time, and then she said:

“I didn’t really say any of that stuff.”

“No?”

“No. Just, like, when could I see her again. How to get some things to her. How to get her prescription refilled. Stuff like
that. That I was asking for a new hearing.”

“Yes.”

“You know what he said? He said that unless the rules are changed he doesn’t have to let me see her at all. He said that.
He said he would though.”

“Oh boy. Oh, Rosie.”

“I talked to her. For a minute.”

“Yes?”

“A minute. That’s all.”

Silence again, long and bleak.

“So whatcha doing?” she asked him.

“Making my costume. For the Ball.”

“Oh yeah? What is it?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Aw come on.”

“I’ll tell you this,” he said. “It’s what I’m not.”

His conception had been a chess knight’s horse head, like the helmet of the good White Knight who guides Alice through the
wood of no names. But he was unskilled in mask-making; having no idea how to begin, he had first built an armature of cardboard
and tape, referring to an encyclopedia volume still open there on the table, to an article on sculpture, where Cellini’s huge
equestrian statue of Montefeltro was analyzed. He had got the great arch of the neck pretty well, but the delicate length
of temple and nose had come out blunt and ignoble; probably the old mouton cap he had found in The Persistence of Memory Shoppe
and cut up for hair and mane had been a bad idea, too woolly and thick; and the ears, lovingly crafted and successful in themselves,
were just too big, grossly big, no time to change them or make new ones, and a sense grew within Pierce as he contemplated
them that none of it was his choice anyway: or all of it was, and this was it.

Gross buckteeth of wadded
papier-mâché
that (surrendering to the obvious) he painted yellow. In the
Hieroglyphica
of Valerian, the Ass is the symbol of the Scholar, humbly chewing his dry diet of texts, laboring mightily for Learning.
The lacquered eyeballs moist, intelligent maybe, but a little cocked, not easy to make them both look in the same
direction. Left side the wackier one, mad and errant; right side patient and mild.

Time to try it out. Despite what he had said to her, he feared that he had actually violated the rule that Rosie had laid
down, that what he would become inside this head smelling of
papier-mâché
and his own hot breath—he hoped it was what he was not, but felt pretty sure that this hope was vain.

When it was given its last touches, feathery lashes of curled paper and a last painting, he placed it to dry and cure there
on the kitchen table, ogling the wall with its cockeyes; he had another drink, and went to sleep or at least to recline upon
the daybed in the office; from there though he could still see the creature’s snout, and the teeth.

After a time he could hear its voice too, quite clearly, telling its life story.

Once
, it began,
I was a real Ass
.

Pierce was actually asleep then, of course. Or maybe this conceit is from a later time: a “false memory” of himself on that
daybed, plaid blanket pulled up to his nose and his own eyes wide in horror hearing the empty paste-and-paper thing discourse.
Or it’s neither of those things, it’s a
ludibrium
, the one about the ass that saves the world, whose name is or was
Onorio
.

Yes it’s the
Cabala del Caballo Pegaseo
, Bruno’s story or kabal of the Universal Ass, patient/mocking, shiftless/hardworking, wise/stupid, stubborn/willing little
gray Onorio, the Pegasean Steed of every age; returning again and again after his life on earth to be swallowed up in Amphitrite
or Fullness, and spat out again.

His work still not done though; Hermes-Mercurius has always further tasks for him; in every age there is plenty of scope for
an Ass. Braying and kicking, or mild and patient, Onorio again and again is turned back from Heaven’s cool shores and the
prospect of green fields, to embody down on earth the
coniunctio oppositorum
, the best and worst, and to show us what it means to know and suffer. Or to laugh and refuse to suffer, same thing.

Bruno in the dungeons of the Venetian Inquisition told the whole story of Onorio to his fellow prisoners. (He cast their fortunes
for them too, writing phrases from Psalms inside circles he drew in the dirt.) He said to them: Samson killed a thousand Philistines
with an ass’s jawbone; what could he have done with a whole, living Ass? He told them—we know this from the prisoners themselves,
a couple of whom were spies put in with him to record his sayings—that the Pope was a great Ass, that the friars (of whom
he had been one) were asses, and the teachings of Holy Church
dottrini d’asini
. Of course Bruno knew that what he said would be reported. He supposed that the Venetian inquisitors would get the joke,
and ponder it.

The Venetians certainly wrote it all down, and perhaps they did ponder it.

When the Roman Inquisition demanded that Bruno be turned over to them (they had been waiting twenty years to have a talk with
him about his opinions) the Venetians, who usually resisted such requests, gave in. Bruno was sent to Rome.

He seems to think that iron bars and stone walls are as nothing
, the Venetians wrote to the Romans.
He comports himself as though he were an honored guest, and when he is questioned he trims and with a smile makes little of
his beliefs, not out of fear but as though he wished not to offend us, his hosts. He has sought, he says, an audience with
the Most Holy Father, for whom he has news of great importance, and with a bow thanks us for transporting him thither
. And lastly they added this note concerning the strange man they had kept for a time without fathoming:
If he is proven to be mad, we ask that all mercies be shown him
.

* * *

Now all over the Faraways, men and women were dressing up as persons, places and things they were not, laughing at themselves
in mirrors, as the day died and the shadows lengthened.

“Sybil,” said Val to Rosie. “She’s a character I read about. In that book I showed you.”

“The
Dictionary
,” Rosie said. “I just saw that book at Pierce’s house.”

“No wonder I couldn’t get it. I had to do this from memory.”

Val was vast, swathed in white sheets over pink long underwear, gold rope crossing between her breasts and cinching her waist,
cape and hood of red velvet, and a long golden curly wig. In her arms a big loose book or folder, full of paper burned around
the edges.

“So okay,” said Rosie. “What.”

“Sybil. She was a fortune-teller; she knew the secrets of the future. An oracle.”

Rosie laughed. “Right. Good choice.”

“‘Come as you aren’t,’ right?”

“Right.”

“She had this book, full of prophecies about this family. And she brought it to the mother of the clan, the matriarch. And
says, Pay me, like, a hundred gold pieces.”

“Right.”

“The mother is ripped. A hundred? No no. Too much. So the Sybil takes a page out of the book—a
leaf
, that’s a page, right?”

“I think.”

“And tosses it in the fire. What the hell are you
doing?
Okay, says the Sybil, the price is now two hundred.
Two
hundred? For
less?
She’s not paying more for less. So the Sybil rips off another leaf, and tosses it in too.”

Rosie laughed, getting it.

“Now the price is three hundred.” Val held up three fingers. “And the mother is going nuts, watching her burn up the future.
She’s raging. Too much? Okay another page goes. Price goes up.”

“And?”

“At a thousand, with one page left, she still refuses. In the fire. But before it goes, the mother shouts
Wait I’ll pay!
Sybil snatches it out. Half a burnt page left.” Val grinned wickedly. “And she pays.”

“Is this a warning? To your customers?”

“Customers?” Val said, offended. “And so what about you?” She pointed to Rosie’s old jeans and sweater. “You’re just you.
No?”

“I know. I’ve got to think of something.”

“Rosie! It’s about two hours from now!”

“Right. Well let’s see.”

She looked around herself at the living room and hall of Arcady where they stood, as though a ball gown or fairy wings might
be hanging on the hall tree or the back of the closet door.

“I’ve been so crazy,” she said. “Sam. Mike. I mean you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

She went to the basement door beneath the stairs, opened it a crack, thought of the clothes turning in the washing machine
down there, thought of Sam, thought of Pierce, thought of Boney’s old housekeeper Mrs. Pisky. Shut the door again.

“Okay,” she said.

She went to the stairs up, and Val followed her, who had never been taken up the stairs here before, would not have asked
to be, would have sneered at the offer of a tour. What broad dark stairs upward. The light in Rosie’s eye was alarming, as
though she were seeing something unseeable except to her, and just ahead.