Wakings-up
Life—her own life anyway, Sophie had come to think, as it grew longer—was like one of those many-storied houses of dreams she had once been able to build, where the dreamer, with a slow or sudden rush of understanding like a wash of cool water, knows himself to have been merely asleep and dreaming, to have merely invented the pointless task, the grim hotel, the flight of stairs; they go away, tattered and unreal; the dreamer awakes relieved in his own bed (though the bed for a reason he can’t quite remember is laid in a busy street or afloat in a calm sea), and rises yawning, and has odd adventures, which go on until (with a slow or sudden rush of understanding) he awakes, he had only fallen asleep here in this desert place (Oh I remember) or (Oh I see) in this palace antechamber, and it’s time to be up and about life’s business; and so on and on: her life had been of that kind.
There had been a dream about Lilac, that she had been real, and Sophie’s. Then she had awakened, and Lilac wasn’t Lilac at alclass="underline" she came to see that, came to see that something dreadful had happened, for no reason she could imagine or remember, and Lilac was neither Lilac nor hers, but something else instead. That dream—one of the awful kind, the kind where something terrible and irrevocable has happened, something that oppresses the soul with a special, unrelievable grief—had gone on for nearly two years, and had not truly ended on the night (the night she could still not think about without shudders and involuntary moans, no, not after twenty years) when in desperation, telling no one, she had brought the false thing to George Mouse: and the fireplace: and the blasts, and the phosphorescence, and the rain and the stars and the sirens.
But anyway, awake or not, she had no more Lilac then at all; her dream was another kind then, the Endless Search, that one where some goal recedes forever, or changes when it is approached, leaving you always with further work to do and, though pressing always on your attention, is never nearer to completion. It was then that she had begun to seek for answers from Cloud and her cards: not only Why, but also How; Who, she supposed she knew, but not Where; and, most important of all, would she ever see, have, hold her real daughter again, and When? Cloud, try as she might, could give no clear answers to these questions, though she held that still the answers must be in the deck and its conjunctions somewhere; and so Sophie began to study their falls herself, feeling that the intensity of her desire might allow her to discover what Cloud could not. But no answer came for her either, and soon she gave it up, and took to her bed again.
But life is wakings-up, all unexpected, all surprising. On a certain November afternoon, twelve years ago, from a certain nap (why that day? Why that nap?) she had awakened from sleeping: from eyes-closed, blankets-up-to-chin, pillow-sleep Sophie awakened, or had been awakened, for good. As though someone (while she slept) had stolen them, her powers of sleeping and escaping into the small dreams within the large had gone away; and Sophie, startled and lost, had had to dream from then on that she was awake, and that the world was around her, and to think what to do with it. It was only then, because her sleepless mind had to have an Interest, any Interest, that (without any hard question, without any question at all) she had taken up the study of the cards, beginning at the beginning humbly as Cloud’s tutee.
And yet, though we wake, though there is no end to waking and saying Oh I see, not ever (Sophie knew it and was patient), still within the dream in which we find ourselves every other dream is nested, every one we have awakened from. Sophie’s hard first question to the cards had not, precisely, gone without an answer, it had been transmuted into questions about the question. It had branched and rooted like a tree, growing questions like buds, and then at some moment all the questions had become one question: what tree is this? And as her study progressed, as she shifted and shuffled and laid out in geometrical figures the greasy, comerless, speaking cards, the question intrigued her further, involved her, at last absorbed her utterly. What tree is this? And yet always at its base, between its roots, beneath its branches, still unfound and growing unfindable, a lost child lay asleep.
No Going Back Out
Six of cups and four of wands, the Knot, the Sportsman. The queen of coins reversed. The Cousin: contention with the Fool in the middle of the deck. A Geography: not a map, or a view, but a Geography. Sophie looked down at the puzzle of it, shifting her consciousness across it, paying attention without quite paying attention, pricking up the ears of her thought and easing them again as hints of speech proceeded from and then retired back into the gabble of the cards’ alignments.
Then:
“Oh,” Sophie said, and again “Oh,” as though suddenly in receipt of bad news. Cloud looked up at her questioningly, and saw Sophie pale and shocked, eyes wide with surprise and pity—pity for her, Cloud. Cloud looked down again at the Geography, and yes, in a twinkling it had contracted, like those optical illusions where a complex urn becomes without your choosing it two faces regarding each other. Cloud was used to these vagaries, and to this message; Sophie evidently was not yet.
“Yes,” she said softly, and smiled at Sophie, reassuringly she hoped. “You hadn’t seen that before?”
“No,” Sophie said, both in answer and in denial of what was there in the linked gavotte of cards. “No.”
“Oh, I’ve seen it before.” She touched Sophie’s hand. “I don’t think, though, that we need tell the others, do you? Not just yet.” Sophie was weeping, softly, but Cloud chose to ignore it. “It’s the difficult thing, the hard thing, about secrets,” she said, as though in some small annoyance at the fact, but really passing on to Sophie in the only way she could hope to, the last, the only important lesson about reading these cards. “Sometimes you really don’t want to know them. But once you do, there’s no going back out; no unlearning them. Well. Now buck up. There’s still a lot you can learn.”
“Oh. Aunt Cloud.”
“Shall we study our Geography?” Cloud said, and picked up her cigarette, and inhaled smoke gratefully, voluptuously, and breathed it out again.
Slow Fall of Time
Cloud moved crabwise amid the furniture of the house, down three stairs (the note of her sticks changing as she went from wood to stone) and through the puzzle of the imaginary drawing-room where a tapestry on the wall moved in a draft with spooky life. Then the stairs upward.
There were three hundred and sixty-five stairs within Edgewood, her father told her. The left-hand stick, the right-hand foot, right-hand stick, left-hand stick, left-hand foot. There were as well seven chimneys, fifty-two doors, four floors, and twelve—twelve what? There must be twelve of something, he wouldn’t have left that out. Right-hand stick, left-hand foot, and a landing where a lancet window poured a pearly stain of winter light on the dark wood. Smoky had seen an ad in a magazine for a sort of chair-elevator to move old folks up and down stairs; it even tilted up to deposit the aged body at its chosen floor. Smoky pointed this out to Cloud, but she had said nothing. An object of perhaps some abstract interest, but why was he showing it to her? That’s what her silence said.
Upward again, the minute risers—nine inches exactly— growing ever more cliffy no matter how big she was herself, no matter that the banisters shouldered her and the coffered ceiling pressed on her bent neck. It was wrong in her, she thought as she toiled, not to have warned Sophie of what she, Cloud, had for a long time known about, what had become a kind of recurrent obbligato in her recent readings of the cards, a memento mori that could show up in any fall cast for any person; but it was so constant lately that Cloud had really ceased to notice it. She didn’t anyway need, at her huge age, any reminders in her cards of what was obvious to anyone, and most of all to her. It was no secret. She was packed and ready.