Though I was no longer in pain, I felt as though I had become extremely ill. Something had shifted in my relationship to my surroundings. Physically, materially, they were unchanged, but in some essential way they seemed to be receding from me, or I from them. It was as though I had switched sides in a train, and what once rushed to meet me had started slipping away. I looked at the furnishings with an odd feeling that I recognised after a moment as yearning. I wasn’t so much seeing these ordinary things – the black-stained chairs, the sunflower clock, the pottery mugs, the five-to-seven-cup Hot Pot Coffee Maker – as yearning for them. I was filled with nostalgia for them as if my world and theirs had already parted company.
All the while I was telling myself that the pale horn sticking from my forehead would be gone when I next looked in the mirror. But this did not turn out to be the case. There it still was; white and pointed, interacting with the light and shade as complicatedly as any non-apparitional body part. I assured myself that however real it seemed to me, it couldn’t possibly be visible to anybody else, and that I should just act as if it were not there. Through a gap in the hemlocks outside the window, I saw a janitor wheel his mobile cleaning station into the science building across the campus, and I realised I had little time to spare if I wanted my sojourn here to pass unnoticed. But I found myself unable to leave the room. I felt that I would simply drop dead of shame the moment someone set eyes on me.
I might well have stayed there until I was discovered, had I not remembered Barbara Hellermann’s maroon beret, which I had put back in the closet along with the rest of her clothes, after my return from Corinth. I took it out and put it on. The horn bulged oddly underneath the baggy fabric, giving it the shape of a child’s bicycle helmet – a surreally soft one – but at least it was concealed.
As I left the room I gave a last glance round, and happened to notice the book I had taken down earlier that semester – the one whose moving bookmark had formed my first, unwitting brush with Trumilcik. Impulsively, I put it in my coat pocket. Then I slipped out, hurrying down Mulberry Street to the train station.
There were mercifully few people on the train at that hour. I sat by myself in one of the reversible plastic seats, crouched down and gazing out of the window at the poisoned creek oozing along past the crumbling habitations that lined the track. I wondered what it was that so fascinated me about this spent landscape. Ugly as it was, it had something compelling about it – a strange, fallen beauty that held one’s gaze in spite of one’s horror. Some days, the ledges of ice shelving across the stream were pinkish in hue, some days mint green; depending, I supposed, on which gland of which deceased chemical plant or paint factory happened to have just ruptured and spilt its bilious juices into the groundwater. Even the pockets of woodland still standing here and there had a bleakly enchanted look – the trees thin and scraggly, so close together they produced not branches but parasitical-looking masses of wire-thin suckers that covered each one with a sinister furze. Bleached plastic bags fluttered up in the twigs, all one could imagine them producing by way of foliage or blossom.
It struck me that I should have brought Carol out here. With her interest in purity and pollution (when she left me she’d been writing an article on the interminable disputes over sewage and waste-disposal that apparently kept the Assizes of Nuisance in medieval Europe fully occupied), she’d have made sense of this landscape. How I would have liked to be sitting by her, listening to her clear voice – always a little amused by the things her intelligence alighted on – discoursing on these matters! I found myself remembering the little colored arrows she had showered down through my father’s manuscript. From there the drift of my thoughts went to my father himself – his tumor, and then the morbid question of whether I had perhaps just come into some grim physiological legacy, a notion I retreated from as fast as I could, backtracking to the sweeter image of his arrow-struck papers, whereupon I remembered a particular reference they had made; one that, in the absence of any other plan, took hold of me with the force of a directive.
However it might appear to the contrary, I had no other motive for going to the Cloisters Museum that day.
It was a cold, beautiful morning. The museum – a pantiled medieval fantasy – rose above the Hudson with a gleaming look as though it had been freshly chiseled out of the sunlight.
I had never been there before, and I was struck by how austerely the collection was mounted. There was none of the usual clutter of information and security. Stone walls and plain wooden rafters created an atmosphere of monastic simplicity. The rooms were furnished sparely, giving the eye space to study each artefact in peace. Gaunt wooden saints, gilt-emblazoned altar screens, monumental chests of drawers, stood with an impassive, time-scoured look of repose. A continual chant of plainsong drifted through the rooms, and from time to time a bell tolled with an authentically cracked tone. There was even the distinct ecclesiastical odor of candlewax and oiled wood.
It was John D. Rockefeller, I read in the pamphlet I picked up, who purchased the museum’s most celebrated treasure, the Unicorn Tapestries. He saw them when they were sent to New York from France for an exhibition in 1922. ‘I merely lingered five minutes to satisfy my eye with the beauty and richness of their color and design’, he wrote, ‘and bought them forthwith.’
The seven tapestries, depicting seven stages in the hunt of the unicorn, hang in a room specially constructed to resemble some intimate inner chamber of a medieval castle. I wandered in, the only visitor, and walked slowly around.
I was in there for probably no more than twenty minutes, but when I left the room I felt dazed, engulfed almost, as though I had just sat through some long, harrowing film full of scenes that stood in relations of dreamlike reciprocity or mysteriously revealing opposition to my own life. Out of the stilled images of the tapestries, my mind appeared to have created a fluid continuum of action, so that I had the impression of having witnessed the entire hunt in all its vivid beauty and violence.
Right before my eyes, it seemed, the young huntsmen had set off with their spears and hounds from the flower-sprinkled glade, riding through the forest till they came upon the unicorn at a stream, kneeling down and dipping his horn to purify the waters for the other creatures of the forest. Momentarily awestruck, the huntsmen watched in silence while he performed this sacred office. But as soon as he was finished the spell lifted, and they closed in with raised spears and faces full of hatred. Unable to flee, the harried unicorn defended himself, turning on his attackers with a wildness that seemed out of character in such a gentle-looking creature, kicking out both rear legs at a man attempting to spear him from behind, while at the same time ripping a savage gash in the flank of an unlucky greyhound with his horn. Meanwhile a woman with narrow, beautiful, sly eyes was beckoning to the huntsmen, as if to whisper to them the secret of luring unicorns into captivity. And sure enough, the poor creature was soon at her feet, kneeling there with a look of gentle resignation, while the woman’s pale hand rested on his head. A moment later he was brutally gored to death. His carcass was slung over a saddle and taken to the gates of the royal palace, where his horn was ceremoniously offered to the king and queen.
That was all, as far as the hunt itself was concerned, but in an abrupt, wondrous coda, the unicorn appeared again, miraculously restored to life, sitting in a wooden palisade against a flower-spangled background of exceptional loveliness.