“No, not just now.” With all the practiced skills of a secretive nature Auberon had managed to avoid George Mouse for a week in his own farm, coming and going with a mouse’s forethought and haste. But now here he was. Never had Auberon experienced such embarrassment, such a terrible caught-out feeling, such an awful sense that no common remark he could make would not carry a load of hurt and rejection for another, and that no pose, solemn, facetious, offhand, could mitigate that. And his host! His cousin! Old enough to be his father! Usually not at all intensely aware of the reality of others or of others’ feelings, Auberon just then felt what his cousin must feel as though he inhabited him. “She went out. I don’t know where.”
“Yeah? Well, this stuff is hers.” He put down the shopping bags and plucked the hat from his head. It left his gray hair standing upright. “There’s some more. She can come get it. Well, a load off my mind.” He tossed the fur coat over the velvet chair. “Hey. Take it easy. Don’t hit me, man. Nothing to do with me.”
Auberon realized he had taken a rigid stance in a corner of the room, face set, unable to find an expression to suit the circumstance. What he wanted to do was to tell George he was sorry; but he had just enough wit to see that nothing could be more insulting. And besides, he wasn’t sorry, not really.
“Well, she’s quite a girl,” George said, looking around (Sylvie’s panties were draped over the kitchen chair, her unguents and toothbrush were at the sink). “Quite a girl. I hope yiz are very happy.” He punched Auberon’s shoulder, and pinched his cheek, unpleasantly hard. “You son of a bitch.” He was smiling, but there was a mad light in his eye.
“She thinks you’re terrific,” Auberon said.
“Izzat a fact.”
“She said she doesn’t know what she would have done without you. Without your letting her stay here.”
“Yeah. She said that to me too.”
“She thinks of you like a father. Only better.”
“Like a father, huh?” George burned him with his coaly eyes, and without looking away began to laugh. “Like a father.” He laughed louder, a wild staccato laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” Auberon asked, not certain he was meant to join, or whether it was he who was being laughed at.
“Why?” George laughed all the harder. “Why? What the hell do you want me to do? Cry?” He threw back his head, showing white teeth, and roared. Auberon couldn’t help joining in then, though tentatively, and when George saw that, his own laugh diminished. It went on in chuckles, like small waves following a breaker. “Like a father, huh. That’s rich.” He went to the window and stared out at the iron day. A last chuckle escaped him; he clasped his hands behind his back and sighed. “Well, she’s a hell of a girl. Too much for an old fart like me to keep up with.” He glanced over his shoulder at Auberon. “You know she’s got a Destiny?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Yeah.” His hands opened and closed behind him. “Well, it looks like I ain’t in it. Okay by me. Cause there’s a brother in it, too, with a knife, and a grandmother and a crazy mother… And some babies.” He was silent awhile. Auberon almost wept for him. “Old George,” George said. “Always left with the babies. Here, George, do something with this. Blow it up, give it away.” He laughed again. “And do I get credit? Damn right I do. You son of a bitch, George, you blew up my baby.”
What was he talking about? Had he slipped into madness under the pressure of grief? Would losing Sylvie be like that, would it be so awful? A week ago he wouldn’t have thought so. With a sudden chill he remembered that the last time Great-aunt Cloud had read the cards for him, she had predicted a dark girl for him; a dark girl, who would love him for no virtue he had, and leave him through no fault of his own. He had dismissed it then, as he was in the process of dismissing all of Edgewood and its prophecies and secrets. He dismissed it now again, with horror.
“Well, you know how it is,” George said. He pulled a tiny spiral notebook from his pocket and peered in it. “You’re on for the milking this week. Right?”
“Right.”
“Right.” He put away the book. “Hey listen. You want some advice?”
He didn’t, any more than he wanted prophecy. He stood to receive it. George looked at him closely, and then around the room. “Fix the place up,” he said. He winked at Auberon. “She likes it nice. You know? Nice.” He began to be caught by a fit of laughing again, which burbled at the back of his throat as he took a handful of jewelry from one pocket and gave it to Auberon, and a handful of change from another and gave him that too. “And keep clean,” he said. “She thinks us white people are a little on the foul side most of the time.” He headed for the door. “A word to the wise,” he said, and chuckling, left. Auberon stood with jewels in one hand and money in the other, hearing, down the hall, Sylvie pass George on her way up; he heard them greet each other in a volley of wisecracks and kisses.
IV.
It often happens that a man cannot recall at the moment, but can search for what he wants and find it… For this reason some use places for the purposes of recollecting. The reason for this is that men pass rapidly from one step to the next: for instance from milk to white, from white to air, from air to damp; after which one recollects autumn, supposing that one is trying to recollect that season.
Ariel Hawksquill, greatest mage of this age of the world (and a match, she was not too modest to think, of many great ones of the so-called past, with whom she now and then discoursed), possessed no crystal ball; judicial astrology she knew to be a fraud, though she had uses for the old pictured heavens; she disdained spells and geomancies of all kinds, except at great need, and the sleeping dead and their secrets she let sleep. Her one Great Art, and it was all she needed, was the highest Art of all, and required no vulgar tools, no Book, no Wand, no Word. It could be practiced (as, on a certain rainy afternoon of the winter in which Auberon came to Old Law Farm, she was practicing it) before the fire, with feet up, and tea and toast at hand. It required nothing but the interior of her skulclass="underline" that and a concentration and an acceptance of impossibility which saints would have found admirable and chess masters difficult.
The Art of Memory, as it is described by ancient writers, is a method by which the Natural Memory we are born with can be improved tremendously, beyond recognition in fact. The ancients agreed that vivid pictures in a strict order were the most easily remembered. Therefore, in order to construct an Artificial Memory of great power, the first step (Quintillian and other authorities agree on this, though they diverge at other points) is to choose a Place: a temple, for instance, or a city street of shops and doorways, or the interior of a house—any place that has parts which occur in a regular order. This Place is committed to memory carefully and well, so well that the rememberer can scurry around it backwards, forwards, any which way at will. The next step is to create vivid symbols or images for the things one wishes to remember—the more shocking and highly-colored the better, according to the experts: a ravished nun, say, for the idea of Sacrilege, or a cloaked figure with a bomb for Revolution. These symbols are then cast onto the various parts of the memory Place, its doors, niches, forecourts, windows, closets, and other spaces; and then the rememberer has simply to go around his memory Place, in any order he wishes, and take from each spot the Thing which symbolizes the Notion which he wishes to remember. The more one wishes to remember, of course, the larger the house of memory must be; it usually ceases to be an actual place, as actual places tend to be too plain and incommodious, and becomes an imaginary place, as large and varied as the rememberer can make it. Wings can be added at will (and with practice); architectural styles can vary with the subject-matter they are meant to contain. There were even refinements of the system whereby not Notions but actual words were to be remembered by complex symbols, and finally individual letters: so that a collection of sickle, millstone, and hacksaw instantly brings the word God to mind when gathered from the appropriate mental nook. The whole process was immensely complicated and tedious and was for the most part rendered obsolete by the invention of the filing-cabinet.