Why had he been in the bowels of the old Terminus? Had he just returned by train from the Sunshine State? Or was it chance? Seeing three of most things, a damp leg where he had pissed himself some time before, in the small hours he strode purposefully (though going nowhere; if he didn’t stride purposefully he would take a header; this walking business was more complicated than most people supposed) down ramps and through catacombs. A fake nun, wimple filthy and eyes alert (Auberon had long ago realized this figure was a man) shook a begging cup at him, more in irony than expectation. He passed on. The Terminus, never silent, was as silent now as it ever was; the few travelers and the lost gave him a wide berth, though he glowered at them only to make them singular, three of each was too many. One of the virtues of drink was how it reduced life to these simple matters, which engaged all the attention; seeing, walking, raising a bottle accurately to the hole in your face. As though you were two years old again. No thoughts but simple ones. And an imaginary friend to talk to. He stopped walking; he had come up against a more-or-less solid wall; he rested and thought Lost.
A simple thought. One simple singular thought, and the rest of life and time a great flat featureless gray plain extending in all directions; consciousness a vast ball of dirty fuzz filling it to its limits, with only the hooded fire of that one thought alive within it.
“What?” he said, starting away from the wall, but no one had spoken to him. He looked around at the place where he stood: a vaulted intersection where four corridors met in a cross. He stood in a corner. The ribbed vaulting, where it joined in descending to the floor, made what seemed to be a slot or narrow opening, but which was only joined bricks; a sort of slot, which, it seemed, if you faced into it you might peer through.
“Hello?” he whispered to the darkness.
“Hello?” Nothing.
“Hello.” Louder this time.
“Softer,” she said.
“What?”
“Speak real soft,” Sylvie said. “Don’t turn around now.”
“Hello. Hello.”
“Hi there. Isn’t this great?”
“Sylvie,” he whispered.
“Just like you were right next to me.”
“Yes,” he said; “yes,” he whispered. He pressed his consciousness forward into the darkness. It folded up closed for a moment, then opened again. “What?” he said.
“Well,” she said, in a small voice, and after a darkling pause, “I think I’m going.”
No, he said. No, I bet not, I bet not; why?
“Well, I lost my job, see,” she whispered.
“Job?”
“With a ferry. A real old guy. He was nice. But boring. Back and forth all day…” He felt her withdraw somewhat. “So I guess I’ll go. Destiny calls,” she said; she said it self-mockingly, making light of it to cheer him.
“Why?” he said.
“Whisper,” she whispered.
“Why do you want to do this to me?”
“Do what, baby?”
“Well why don’t you just God damn go then? Why don’t you just go and leave me alone? Go go go.” He stopped, and listened. Silence and vacuity. A deep horror flew over him. “Sylvie?” he said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Where? Where are you going?”
“Well, further in,” she said.
“Further in where?”
“Here.”
He gripped the cold bricks to steady himself. His knees were falling back and forth from locked to loose. “Here?”
“The further in you go,” she said, “the bigger it gets.”
“God damn it,” he said. “God damn it, Sylvie.”
“It’s weird here,” she said. “Not what I expected. I’ve learned a lot, though. I guess I’ll get used to it.” She paused, and the silence filled the darkness. “I miss you, though.”
“Oh god,” he said.
“So I’ll go,” she said, her whisper already fainter.
“No,” he said, “no no no.”
“But you just said…”
“Oh god Sylvie,” he said, and his knees gave way; he knelt heavily, still facing into the darkness. “Oh god,” and he thrust his face into the nonexistent place he spoke into, and said other things, apologizing, begging abjectly, though for what he no longer knew.
“No, listen,” she whispered, embarrassed. “I think you’re great, really, I always did. Don’t say that stuff.” He was weeping now, uncomprehending, incomprehensible. “Anyway I have to,” she said. Her voice was already faint and distant, and her attention turning elsewhere. “Okay. Hey, you should see all the stuff they gave me… Listen, papo. Bendicion. Be good. G’bye.”
Early train-takers and men come to open tawdry shops passed him later, still there, long unconscious, on his knees in the corner like a bad boy, face wedged into the door into nowhere. With the ancient courtesy or indifference of the City, no one disturbed him, though some shook their heads sadly or in disgust at him as they passed: an object-lesson.
Ahead and Behind
Tears were on his cheeks too in the little park where he sat, having salvaged this, the last of Sylvie, the living end. When he had at last awakened in the Terminus still in that position, he didn’t know how or why he had come to be there; but he remembered now. The Art of Memory had given it all back to him, all, to do with what he could.
What you didn’t know; what you didn’t know arising, spontaneously, surprisingly, out of the proper arrangement of what you did: or rather what you knew all along but didn’t know you knew. Every day here he had come closer to it; every night, lying awake at the Lost Sheep Mission, amid the hawkings and nightmares of his fellows, as he walked these paths in memory, he approached what he didn’t know: the simple single lost fact. Well, he had it now. Now he saw the puzzle complete.
He was cursed: that’s all.
Long ago, and he knew when though not why, a curse had been laid on him, a charm, a disfigurement that made him for good a searcher, and his searches at the same time futile. For reasons of their own (who could say what, malevolence only, possibly, probably, or for a recalcitrance in him they wanted to punish, a recalcitrance they had however not punished out of him, he would never give in) they had cursed him: they had attached his feet on backwards, without his noticing it, and then sent him out that way to search.
That had been (he knew it now) in the dark of the woods, when Lilac had gone away, and he had called after her as though his heart would break. From that moment he had been a searcher, and his searching feet pointed Somehow in the wrong direction.
He’d sought Lilac in the dark of the woods, but of course he’d lost her; he was eight years old and only growing older, though against his will; what could he expect?
He’d become a secret agent to plumb the secrets withheld from him, and for as long as he sought them, for just so long were they withheld from him.