Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

“Prester John was a friend of Julie’s,” Farrell said. “I really need to know, Hamid.”

“Nothing to know.” Hamid’s voice was as quiet and reasonable as the people who climbed the stairs to Sia. “Nothing to tell. Whatever happened, it happened, no way to make it unhappen.” He implied a bow without actually performing it and turned away.

“A whole lot of people sure trying, though,” Lovita Bird said to the air.

Ben’s car was in the driveway when Farrell got back, but Sia and he were already in their bedroom, although it was still early for them. Farrell ate an apple, dialed all but the last digit of Julie’s phone number twice, felt morosely pleased with himself for not interrupting her work, and spent an hour coaxing a fever-eyed Briseis out of the broom closet. She could not be dragged anywhere near the front door, so they went out back together and sat in Ben’s garden, listening to the distant respiration of traffic and the vicious squabbling of nightbirds.

As it turned out, saying anything to Ben in the following days would have been like trying to subpoena a quark. He managed to be gone every morning, no matter how early Farrell made a point of coming down to breakfast, and the only weekend difference was Sia’s excuse for his absence. Farrell knew his office hours and twice used his own rotating half-day off to visit him on campus; both times he was told that Ben had left ten minutes before. As aware as Farrell had always been of his own skill at avoiding even the shadow of an inconvenient confrontation, he had never suspected that Ben shared the same gifts, and he marveled and was indignant. What I do is what I do, but I really thought better of him. What kind of model is that for our youth ?

Inevitably, of course, they were both in the same house on the same evening. They were not in the same room any more than Ben could help it; but on four separate occasions, they sat down with Sia to the same dinner. Somewhat to his own surprise, Farrell let none of those encounters go past without bringing up the matter of the dance in Barton Park, Ben’s disappearance after it, and Sia’s mysterious and bruising standoff with Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner. He threw in McManus once, partly by accident, but partly because he was genuinely enjoying the new experience of being the relentless Hound of Heaven. Very addictive, wanting to know things. Lead you into worse ways if you’re not careful .

Three times, like one of John Erne’s students, Ben turned Farrell’s attack lightly, using as his shield a careless mix of jokes, digressions, and an all but insulting account of overdosing on nut-brown ale and getting clumsily mugged by equally drunk incompetents. When Farrell asked why he had kept his membership in the League For Archaic Pleasures secret, Ben only shrugged, half smiling. “Part of it was Crof Grant, I guess. I couldn’t quite see telling you that that fool and I played the same dress-up game. And it was you, too, because you’ve always had an idea of me that doesn’t go with dress-up. As if it would be all right for you to get involved with something like the League, but not for me. I really thought about your being embarrassed for me. Probably why I didn’t want to recognize you.”

Farrell looked hard at Sia, but the gray eyes under their thick lids were as brutally empty— or as full of things I can’t see —as Egil Eyvindsson’s eyes had been.

But on the fourth evening, the first tentative words out of Farrell’s mouth on the subject of vanishings and visitations brought Ben to his feet, leaning across the table to shout a furious confession. “God damn you, Joe, I have seizures! You know about seizures? As in fits? As in roll on the ground, foam at the mouth, swallow your tongue, run into walls? As in start out for work and wake up two days later in the drunk tank, the mental ward, Intensive Care? Any of that stuff ring a bell?” He was stammering and shuddering with rage, and his face seemed out of focus because of the way the small muscles were struggling under the skin.

“Epilepsy?” Farrell’s voice sounded in his own ears like a mumbled request for spare change. “You never missed any school. I was the one.” Ben shook his head, interrupting him impatiently. “It isn’t epilepsy. No one can tell me just what it is. And I never had it when we were kids, it didn’t start until—” He hesitated only minimally. “—until after college.” Amazingly he smiled, but it was a flinch of the lips, lasting no longer than the pause. “As a matter of fact, I had two attacks when we were living on Tenth Avenue. One time you weren’t home, and the other you were busy with some girl, you wouldn’t have noticed a UFO. And they were a lot milder back then, the seizures.”

Sia had vanished unnoticed, as she could always do when she chose. Farrell said, “You should have told me.”

Ben sat down again, his anger exhausted as abruptly and frighteningly as it had flowered. “No, I shouldn’t have. I should not have.”

“The way you’ve been ducking and sliding and softshoeing around here, you know what I’ve been imagining? What the hell would have been wrong with telling me?”

Ben was silent, rubbing so hard at the base of his throat that Farrell could see the fingermarks flushing. He said finally, “Joe, this university doesn’t yet know how to deal with women asking for equal pay. They tolerate Blacks and Chicanos out of fear—and expect to be praised for it—they flat-out hate gays, and they practically cross themselves every time they pass the one admitted diabetic on the faculty. Try imagining what would happen if they found out I had fall-down fits. I’ve never told anyone but Sia. I really wish to God you didn’t know.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Farrell said. He dug into his flan with the vigorous relief of renewed self-assurance. “Did I tell when you wrote that poem to Lidia Mirabal? Her boyfriend, Paco, he practiced a little after-school acupuncture on me every day for a week, but my lips were sealed. Mostly with East Twenty-ninth Street, but anyway.” Ben was staring down at the table. Farrell said, “It never happens in class? When you’re working?” He took a twitch of the hunched shoulders for affirmation. “Well, there you are, what can they do to you? You’re a star, you’re a hotshot, next year you’ll have tenure and then you won’t even have to show up on campus. Come on, if that’s all you’re worried about.”

Ben touched his wrist, so lightly that it made Farrell shiver once, all over. Then he went out of the dining room, and Farrell sat still for a long while, watching the lamplight puddle and run up and down the pepper mill. When he felt the timorous nudge of Briseis’s cold nose on his ankle, he looked up to find Sia placidly watering house plants. Her gray-black hair lay loose on the shoulders of the faded Mongolian robe that she liked to wear in the evenings, and from Farrell’s angle she appeared strangely youthful, almost childlike, as she moved around the room. Even when he said, “So you knew all the time,” and she turned, heavily as ever, to peer at him shortsightedly, he was still as startled and chilled as if the twining dragons on her robe had all lifted their barbed golden heads to seek him.

She said, “I knew what had happened to him, yes, and I knew exactly where he was. But there was nothing I could do.”

“I could have done something,” Farrell said. “I could have brought him home. In a considerable damn sight better shape than they did.”

“You would never have found him. And if you had, there is not a chance in the world that you would have known what to do with him.” She never interrupted her work on the plants. “In a way, it was the best thing that those two found him. But the waiting was hard.”