The Carp Castle Read online

  Glances from the red bow tie to the corpses. “And what did you say about them?”

  “I wouldn’t say I said anything about them. The dissertation is a compendium of what is known or alleged about angels, drawn from such sources as Scriptures, the writings of the early Church Fathers, and the Cabala.”

  “Is it doctrinaire?”

  “No, it is not.”

  “Is it universal?”

  “No, it confines itself to the Judeo-Christian tradition, with some ancillary material from Sufi and Zoroastrian texts.”

  “Did you find these sources consistent on the subject?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which might suggest that angels really do exist.”

  Romer only said, “It all probably came from ancient Persia in the beginning.”

  “What part is played in the classification of angels by Dionysius the Areopagite?”

  Romer was a little stunned by the erudition of this question. He suspected that Professor Winwein had been looking into the encyclopedia before the interview. However, this was easy stuff after his doctoral examination. “He ought properly to be called the Pseudo-Areopagite, since the historical figure didn’t write books. He is responsible for the concept of the Divine Orders, ranging from Seraphim and Cherubim to Angels properly speaking. The book in question is the De Hierarchia Celesti, dating from the fifth century and known in English as The Celestial Hierarchy,” he added in what was perhaps a terrible blunder, suspecting that they might take it as a slur on their mastery of Latin.

  Professor Winwein let it pass. And now, to Romer’s surprise, one of the corpses galvanized into life, opened his mouth, and asked a question.

  “Do you know how many angels can stand on the point of a pin?”

  “Yes I do. As everyone knows, this was a popular subject of debate among scholars in the Middle Ages. Ultimately, it is a matter of whether angels have a corporeal existence and occupy space, a very cogent question and one that lies at the very heart of the nature of angels. Most medieval scholars, the ones whose arguments prevailed, contended that any number of angels could stand on the point of a pin, that is, that angels have no corporeal existence and do not occupy space. This is comforting to logic but disappointing to the emotions. A minority of scholars, those who lost the argument, believed that only one angel could stand on the point of a pin, but without discomfort. That is, that angels do have corporeal existence and occupy space, but have no weight. The question of whether there could be material substance without weight was one that was left to the subsequent epoch, the Renaissance. It is only in modern times that scientists have discovered that in fact there do exist particles of matter without weight. So, concerning the problem of the nature of angels, the doctrine, out of favor since the twelfth century, is once more plausible.”

  A silence followed this lecture. Professor Winwein’s kind wrinkles strove with his judgmental ones. The three corpses exchanged glances, but Professor Winwein stared thoughtfully at the floor.

  “You a Christian?” grunted one of the corpses.

  “No, sir.”

  “Well,” said Professor Winwein, heaving himself around to another position in his uncomfortable chair, “there are other candidates.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Teaching ability is of the essence. You teach?”

  Romer wasn’t sure whether he meant can you teach, have you taught, or will you teach. “Yes, sir.”

  “Let you know by mail. Be sure to leave your correct address with Miss Wayde in the front office.”

  “Good luck, young feller,” said the corpse who had asked if he was a Christian. “You got a guardian angel?”

  “Everybody does.”

  “Damned right they do.”

  There were no farewells, just as there had been no greetings. Romer returned to the yellow anteroom, left his address as instructed, and walked out onto the sylvan and green, misleadingly innocent campus. A boy sitting on the grass in an athletic sweater was playing a ukelele for a girl with cherry lips and a bow in her hair. It seemed unlikely that these two would take his course in angels even if he should get the job. He strode with long paces, his two burdens dangling from his arms, toward the town a short distance away. He had neglected to find out how you got back from the university to the bus station. All the people who had helped him find the philosophy department had now disappeared, probably shunning him because of the dismal results of the interview. A respectable old lady in black went by, carrying a reticule. A nasty little boy who smirked. A campus guard who was dressed like a bobby in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, with a soup-bowl helmet. That explanation was really unlikely; he changed his judgment and decided that it was an actor in costume going to a rehearsal.

  Wending down a tree-shaded avenue in search not of the bus station but of someone who would tell him where the bus station was, he found himself approaching a building that looked very much like a church without a steeple, except that it had a flat room with rounded edges like a Civil War fort, or a badly-made cake; why then did it seem to him like a church when it had no qualities of a church? Something about the atmosphere it exuded, the sickly ivy languishing along the wall, the grass trampled by many feet, the double row of lilacs on the walk leading up to the stout oaken door. According to the sign over the entrance the place was called Amity Hall. In the lawn by the door was a kind of picture-frame set on posts, and inside it a surface of felt into which white celluloid letters could be pressed. What the white letters said was so prescient and yet so ludicrous that his soul responded only with a flat sour laugh.

  THE SECRETS

  OF

  METAPHYSICS

  Romer stood on the sidewalk captivated by this naive and confident advertisement for the solution to the mysteries he had pursued through a hundred libraries and a thousand books, secrets that the Fathers of the Church, the German Idealistic philosophers, and the Sufis of the desert had pursued for centuries, starving and praying, tearing their hair and throwing dust on themselves, all the arguments in which Hegel had disputed Kant, Bishop Berkeley with Hume, the midnight lucubrations of Spinoza, Saint Teresa weeping in ecstasy, the epic quarrels of the great councils of the Church, the Revelations of Saint John; and now these white celluloid letters, the ingenious product of the American chemical industry, proposed to have solved it all and to be ready to explain it at seven o’clock this evening, no entrance charge.

  Romer sat down on the lawn of the Amity Hall and laughed silently, and after a while he found that this exercise was making tears come into his eyes; he didn’t know what this meant but he suspected that such absolute foolishness was so close to God that it made the spirit rise. He abandoned any hope of finding the bus station. He sat for a while longer on the grass (he realized now that he was very tired from his journeys, from the nights without sleep on the bus, and from the strain of the interview now that it was over), then he got up with his two burdens and walked a couple of blocks until he found a German bakery, where he bought a cruller and ate it along with some tap water he stole from a faucet in somebody’s front yard.

  He was back at the Amity Hall at a quarter to seven and went in and took his seat. There were already several dozen people scattered around in the hall, which was illuminated with dim tulip bulbs around the walls. From his scant knowledge of American folklore he recognized now what the place was, a hall built for meetings of the Chautauqua Institution, a form of popular education which flourished around the end of the previous century. Only in a Chautauqua Hall would they undertake to explain all the secrets of metaphysics in one evening, and go on the next week to The Problems of the Indian Sub-Continent, or The Truth About Evolution. He waited while the hall filled up, first slowly, then rapidly, with a rush of humanity like sudden bird-wings at the end so that every seat was taken. There was no pulpit or lectern, but at the front of the hall was a small raised platform, a kind of plinth, with a green tapestry behind it on a frame. In the dim light he was aware of a number of young men a
ll the same age, about twenty-five, clad in Greek tunics and leggings, who floated about the hall in an apparently aimless way; and as a counterpoint to them, an equal number of females of the same age, who wore similar classical garb with headbands and stood in fixed places as though they were serving as columns of an imaginary temple.

  A stir passed over the hall, then it became silent; then it stirred again, as though the faintest rustle of wings were brushing its walls. There was an odor of varnish and furniture wax, and the usual other unpleasant odors that reminded Romer of churches and religion: candle-wax, stale flowers, lilac, fly-spray, mildewed lace, a faint hint that someone had passed a small amount of intestinal gas about a half an hour before. The rustle died away again and left a silence in which the grains of dust in the air could be heard crepitating and a single fly buzzed against a window. The tulip-lamps around the walls dimmed, then a new light arose over the plinth at the front of the wall, a pale greenish phosphorescence.

  Someone next to Romer was breathing. It was a woman, a young woman as far as he could tell; all he could make out of her in the gloom was her eyes, a swatch of red hair, and a face with freckles. To judge from her breathing, this person was at an extraordinary pitch of anticipation, as though she were trembling at the door of the nuptial chamber. Romer was filled with skepticism; he laughed inwardly but discovered to his chagrin that the laugh had somehow come to the surface and burst out through his larynx, making a sound like a fox barking. The freckled girl stared at him severely—he could only see the glowing eyes and the lids that enclosed them but that was enough—then she raised a judgmental finger and laid it briefly on his knee. He was about to object to this, or to lay his own finger playfully on her knee to see what she would do, when all thoughts, feelings, emotions, even the sense of his own bodily existence and his position in time and space were driven from his consciousness.

  Skeptical by nature, he strove to identify the source of this sensation or altered state. At first he felt nothing but a green glow in his own body, or in the space where his own body had been just a moment before. Then it came to him, as though it were an extraordinary discovery, that he still had eyes and they were still functioning, and he could go on using them much as he had before. Ears, even. All his senses seemed to be relatively intact, although altered now by some sea-change, as though he were seeing colors never seen before and hearing sounds at previously unknown wavelengths. He was being touched all over, but very gently, by the green glow. He grasped at last (although it was only a fraction of a second later) that all these phenomena were connected with the fact that a previously invisible figure had taken form in the phosphorescence before the tapestry, a woman neither young nor old, with a crown of golden hair and a complexion tinged with greenish-gold, wearing a gown similar to those of the vestals holding up the imaginary temple but more elaborate, with tiny specks of something that sparkled, and a braided belt curving down to end in a knot at her groin. The gown was embroidered with elaborately varied forms of the letter M, and there were other ornate M’s on the tapestry behind her. Her body seemed emaciated, glowing, faint, as though sustained by spirit. He made out now the source of the green light in the atmosphere; floating in the air over her head, without any visible suspension, were letters that spelled MOIRA in turquoise fire so bright that it seemed to press into his brain.

  He didn’t notice when she began speaking; she had been speaking for some time before he started to himself and realized that, just as his eyes and ears still worked, so did words still have significance and could be listened to and understood. She was speaking, in fact, of the Wisdom of the East, although Romer couldn’t have given a clear factual account of what she was saying and instead received the purport of her message in some subliminal way that transcended language and logic. He caught the terms Atman and Maya; she spoke of the ascending nature of the person, of the spirit, the body, and the Astral Body. She went on to speak of the senses. She was saying in her melodious voice that we believe we have five senses, yet a man born blind believes there are only four. He has no notion of this fifth sense that lies beyond his grasp; he cannot conceive what it would be like to see something, what the nature of that experience would be, whether it would be anything like smell, or touch, or hearing. Sight cannot be described to anyone who has not sight. But in reality we possess not five senses but a hundred; and the discovery of these other senses is open to us, and can lead us through porphyry gates into endless exquisite gardens of instruction and ecstasy. And he knew all at once that this was true; he saw the porphyry gates, he caught glimpses of the shining connected gardens like links on a chain stretching into the distance, and he felt an intuition suddenly what one of these new senses would be like; not all of them, that would be too much for the mortal mind to absorb; yet since this one was revealed to him, vouchsafed to him like a gift, he knew for a certainty that the others existed too, links in the chain to be sought out one by one. This first of his new faculties was in the middle of his head, near the pineal gland, and although he didn’t know how to use it yet he knew that its function was to see through the flesh into the soul-gardens of others. All this was only an effect of the lighting, a small rational voice inside him told him. As a skeptic, he was quite well aware that his consciousness was being manipulated by the darkness, by the churchly and mephitic odors, by the motionless maidens, by the fiery legend over the head of the woman who spoke and the phosphorescent pinpoints that buzzed in the air around her like electric fleas; he knew this and he didn’t care! It was absolutely unimportant! No matter if she were a piece of cardboard moved by a child’s magnet; she had shown his way to the sill where foe could catch a glimpse of a sixth power, one that he one day might possess and learn to snap like a whip, to play like a violin, but only if he kept his eyes fixed on this vision in the dark and lucent air.

  Moira.

  He became aware that she was still speaking, and now that she was addressing him directly, even that she had her eyes fixed on him; like a portrait in a museum, whose painted eyes are fixed always on the viewer no matter if he moves to one side of the room or the other, she had found the trick of catching and holding the eye of each single member of the throng in the hall, so that the room and everything in it was enclosed in one huge Eye as though swimming in a watery planet, seas, realms, lands, cities, forests curved and enclosed in this orb in which everything was mirrored by itself and yet everything was transformed, curved, distorted, bending gracefully on itself, shining like a new coin; and so her words, like the rays from this oblong sphere of mirrors, also enclosed and permeated the hall, speaking at once to all and yet to the most secret listening-ear of the soul: you have sought in many books, you have coursed over the world, consulting sages and poring over musty volumes, you have questioned doctors and pundits, you have sat in lecture-halls until your buttock-bones were sore, and you came out the same little boy that you went in. Your mind is full and your soul is still hungry. Or perhaps these were things that he, Romer, was telling himself. Because she was also speaking out loud, and to everybody.

  “Who is Moira, you ask? Moira is your mother, your lover, and your innermost friend. Moira is the comforting shadow that goes always with you, the voice that answers when you cry out in the void. Moira is your other self, the reflection you seek when you go about in the world looking for the eternal Other who is to be your mate in the world and in Heaven.”

  And then she told a fable, familiar to Romer from his philosophical studies, although he hardly recognized it in her new words, according to which man and woman were once a single creature joined together, blissful and complete, and then an angry god came along and divided them in two, so that they wandered eternally about the world like two wounded seashells, with their naked flesh exposed, seeking, while hardly knowing what they were doing or why they were doing it, to be reunited with their missing halves. She invited them to close their eyes and imagine finding this longed-for other half of their being and becoming one with it again; they would s
ee this vision, she promised them; and they all closed their eyes and saw, at least Romer did; he was not rejoined with his long-lost and yearned-for female reflection but he saw in an advertisement, so to speak, how this would be, in the most vivid of colors, shapes, and feelings, as though he only had to rise and speak, to offer his soul in humility, to lay a coin on the step of the temple, and this would happen. Her voice went on, melodious and low, so fresh it seemed almost that of a girl; she was speaking now of the Land of Gioconda which takes its name from a smile, where everything is jocund, gay, mirthful, cheery, and joyous—“For where the spirit is, so also is mirth; the spirit is not somber, it is not restrained, it bursts out in the gaiety of laughter”—a land perhaps of the soul, perhaps a real land in geography, she was not specific—where the creatures of the earth are intoxicated by warmth and perfume, where the sap of the earth flows freely, where the divided souls portrayed by the Philosopher, she promised, would be at last reunited in bliss.

  Then the voice ended, with a small plash like a dwindling brook, and he heard only the breathing of the redheaded girl next to him. His eyes were still closed, he realized, in an effort to catch a final glimpse of the reuniting of this divided and lovelorn sea-creature, half of which was himself; he opened them and saw again the bright turquoise letters in the air and the effulgence of light hovering over Moira’s visage, an illumination which seemed to fill the hall as the egg fills the egg-shell, penetrating every corner, but gently and without effort. The five letters of light were bright green, the illumination of the air about her head was pale green, and the energy that filled the hall was a dream-green of so faint a hue that it seemed merely a green thought inhabiting the air. He knew why the color of Moira’s power was green, and now he struggled to express this with the—as it now seemed to him—pitiful apparatus of language that his mind had been given to think with. Irish, Ireland, leprechauns, Little People, the fundamental power and provender of grass, the green of the electric spark, the green of the sea, of the salamander, of the lemur’s eye, of the most occult of planets and stars, the green flash that, for those who watch carefully, is visible for a fraction of a second in the last thread of the setting sun. But all these were greens of the senses, of the visible world, and fell short like maggots climbing a mountain as soon as they attempted to express this radiant and invisible essence of the nature of Moira. “Gioconda is green,” he heard her saying. He had not been listening for some time. “Gioconda is verdant, fertile, melodious, loving, and healing. Gioconda is plenitude. Gioconda is deep in the earth and it is on the surface of your heart. And now I bless you all, go forth into the world, disseminate your love in dark places, and listen with your innermost ear for the Music of the Spheres.”