Endless Things (3 page)

Then to make our way forward again, through all the new branching ways, to where we left from, which will
not
be the same place, but instead will be the place we ought to be, the course of our real lives.

We plot and plan how we might help ourselves out of every little pitfall and pothole—
not the checked suit, you dope; lose the checked suit
—no that's idle, not worth the investment of longing, of rewriting. But oh if we could decide on just the one moment, the one
critical
moment, and we can; and if we could reduce the time asked for to the barest minimum, no big discourse but only the few minatory words that would change everything, the words that we could not have thought or said then.
Marry her. Don't marry her
. Surely if the time required were so little, and only the one instance asked for, and the need so obvious.

When we come to cease fretting in this way, if we ever do cease, then at the same time we come to know, for sure, that we will die.

Pierce Moffett had known times (more than one, each one canceling all the former ones) when his need to go and knock on his own door had been so great, the bleak longing for things not to have turned out as they had so intense, that he was able to believe for a second or two that an exception to a universal one-way rule might be made just for him, since it was so clear what he ought to have done: not panic or dither or comically misunderstand or fall into mind-clouding passions, but to be temperate, fair, and wise. Of course and always, this involved not being himself as he had once been, but himself as he had later become, had become because of the very vicissitudes through which he had passed, on the very roads he had chosen or been forced along, suffering what he there suffered, learning what he learned.

Now he was older than his father had been when he blew the question about the Samian letter on network television; he had long ago wished his last desperate with-all-his-heart wish. He did know very well that he would die, and he knew what was still left for him to do so that he might earn that death. He wouldn't go back if he could. And yet he was still one who spent or wasted much mental time in reviewing past choices and chances, even without that irritable striving toward correcting them. He did it with events in history, he did it with the lives of his parents, with his own life too: tugging on the infinite lines, to see what he might have caught instead. And the place he now was—the place he had come to—was the right place to ponder: the things he once did that he should not have done, the things he should have done and did not do. Years could be spent here in the contemplation.

Pierce lifted his eyes from his endless copy work, and fetched breath. It was spring, and opalescent buds were visible on the twig tips of the espaliered shrubs that branched and rebranched across the walls of the walled garden outside his door, a garden no bigger than the little room he sat in.

Go back, go back. This is how you climb Mount Purgatory, by going on and back at once. And it gets easier (they all say) the farther up you get.

The low bells rang for Terce, calling the brothers from field and cell and workshop to their prayers.

Years before, Pierce set out from the little house he then had in the Faraway Hills, going by bus to New York City, where he had lived before that, thence to travel by air to the Old World. He was bound by a spell he had mistakenly cast on his own soul, and a number of small devils had attached themselves to him; they rose away like blackbirds from a cornfield when he shook himself hard enough spiritually, but settled again as soon as his attention was turned. He wasn't the first traveler to hope that if he moved fast enough they might fall behind.

The Rasmussen Foundation—Boney Rasmussen himself, in fact—had commissioned the trip, though Boney was now dead and what he wanted Pierce to accomplish abroad was perhaps therefore made moot. The Rasmussen Foundation had chosen Pierce because he had discovered, in the home of the late novelist Fellowes Kraft, an unfinished historical epic or fantasia of Kraft's that Boney Rasmussen had been sure was a map or a plan or a guide or a masque or an allegory of some kind that he, Pierce, was uniquely equipped to explicate. Pierce had with him a couple of just-pressed credit cards, the bills for which would be going to the Rasmussen Foundation's accountant ("Don't you lose them,” Rosie Rasmussen, the foundation's new director, told him as she tugged straight the lapels of his overcoat), and a pocketful of cash as well, in the form of azure Peregrine's Cheques, each with the familiar little etched cartouche containing St. James with staff and shell.

Also, he had a new red notebook, made in China; an old guidebook, also red, once the property of Fellowes Kraft, annotated by him in ghostly pencil; and Kraft's autobiography,
Sit Down, Sorrow
, a limited edition probably not meant for a vade mecum and looking to fall apart before the journey was done.

From those two books, and from some letters of Kraft's to Boney and other remains, Pierce and Rosie had worked out an itinerary. Modeled on Kraft's last trip to Europe in 1968, ten years before and more, it was basically a running line connecting certain map names, some of them very well known and some not: cities and towns, empty plains, fortresses, rooms in high castles, views from promontories. It was arranged west to east, for convenience; it ought maybe to have been more roundabout, narratively, but still it had a shape as laid out that wasn't untrue to the logic of his pursuit, logic being mostly all it had. It would bear him beyond the Iron Curtain if he followed it to the end, a prospect he found absurdly unsettling: to high mountains where ancient medicinal baths bubbled and stank, and in summer porcine party leaders (crowned heads, once) lay sunk in warm mud. From such a spa Kraft had years before sent home a telegram to Boney Rasmussen:
Have what we sought for, packed w/ troubles in old kit bag
.

At last to the marvelous caves, high up and down deep, that were marked with two stars in the red guidebook (Pierce was studying it again as his bus pulled into Port Authority station in New York City): one a printed star and the other drawn by Kraft in pencil, the quick star we make with a single running line.
Crossing a narrow trestle bridge over a cascade that falls to the valley of the Elbe, we pass for 10 km along the Polish-Czech frontier, and then we join again the road from Joachimsbad. A short but stiff climb takes us up to the cavern entrance, from where guided tours descend several times daily to the wonders below the earth.

Despite this prolepsis, Pierce wasn't sure in what his pilgrimage would issue, if in anything. Certainly it was for no discoveries that she supposed he would make that Rosie Rasmussen had sent Pierce off; it was more for his own sake, as she sent her daughter off on some task—to gather flowers, or water them—when the griefs of life came too close, and threatened to engulf her. Pierce was supposed to have a book of his own to finish, too, that he was to do research for in the libraries of England and Europe; but what he hadn't told Rosie, sure that if she knew she would withdraw the foundation's offer, was that there was no book; he had ceased trying to write it.

These nesting negatives—the thing Fellowes Kraft had not really brought home, or Boney had not got from him; the book he hadn't finished, and the one Pierce couldn't write; Rosie's unbelief, and the untruths of the ages that in her opinion had fed Boney's unwillingness to see life, and death, as they are—ought to have added up to only a bigger nothing, but descending from the bus at Port Authority Pierce didn't feel foolish or imposed upon, or even as wretched as he had long been feeling. The air—his own, not the city's—seemed terribly clear for once, the world somber and chastened, emptied somehow but real: as it can seem the day after a dreadful storm-driven argument with a loved one, in which things long unsaid are said or shouted, and then can never be withdrawn. What now? you think on such a day. What now?

He climbed from the bus at the central station and went out into the streets. It was February, and the stirred pudding of snow and filth was thick; the year was an abyssal one in the life of his old city, all former hopes seemingly defeated and the new wealth, though coming on, not yet apparent or even able to be conceived of, by Pierce anyway.

First he had to go twenty blocks south, to where his agent had her office, not different from her apartment, a place he'd never seen before. Julie Rosengarten had shared his own apartment in another part of town, another world-age than this one. He had a tale to tell her, heavier to carry than the bags he lugged, about how he would not be writing the book that she had, on the basis of a few pages of mystification, sold for him to a great and impatient publisher. He was embarrassed at his failure, but more embarrassed at the thing itself that he had conceived of, and as glad to be free of it as a man who has lost a gangrened limb: the rest of him was all the sounder. It was a dumb idea, transcendently, flagrantly dumb, a cheap trick if it had worked and it would not have worked. If ever he wanted to achieve something in history or scholarship, he had to drown those kittens, and never tell.

But passing down through the metropolis, he thought why these scruples, why had his feet grown cold, didn't he see which side his bread was buttered on? If there wasn't this to do, what the hell would there be? And what big crime was the metaphysical trick his proposed book was to play when weighed against the other things now jostling one another onto the best-seller lists (Pierce still kept tabs on these lists)—the sequel, for instance, to
Phæton's Car
, all about alien visitations in ancient times, by an author once held up to Pierce as an example of how far he might go and not be scorned; another, about Jesus faking his own execution and escaping to England, himself his own Grail, thence to Spain where he founded a royal line, his heirs still traceable today. Or
You Can Profit from the Coming Last Days
, twenty weeks on the list. Or—everyone was reading it, Pierce saw its glossy black covers everywhere—a long tract about fairies, and their world inside this one, and an endless winter they will turn at last to spring.

And yet:

"I can't write it,” he said to Julie. “I'm not going to."

"Oh for God's sake, Pierce."

"No, really."

"Writers hit these blocks. I know. Believe me."

Subtly plumper, and richer in more ways than one, Julie had otherwise remained the same: her face a direct descendant of the one he'd known, her place her place, and recognizable as such the moment he looked around.

"Tell me,” she said.

"I just,” he said. “I just can't go on pretending that I believe these things are possible."

"What things?"

"All the things. More than one history of the world. Magic. Cosmic crossroads, world-ages, an altered physics. The possibilities."

"Possibilities are always possible,” Julie said.

"Tell me what'll happen when I inform them I can't do the book. I've sort of spent all the money."

"Pierce, listen."

"I could offer them something else instead. I don't know what.” Around him on her high shelves, on her desk and on her bed, were other possibilities: mystery, horror, romance, true crime, sex advice, pathos. All of those he had suffered.

"Just show me what you have."

"I didn't bring it. I left it behind."

She regarded him in some disgust. “Okay, what happens,” she said, “is that we say nothing to them. When your deadline comes we say nothing. When they ask about it we say you've run into some difficulties and are hard at work on them, and we get another deadline; we don't ask for the next installment on the advance. Time passes."

"Uh huh."

"Meanwhile lots of things could happen. You could change your mind, and you will, or if you don't you could change the book. The publisher could change his mind, decide he doesn't want the book, return you the rights. The publisher could go out of business."

"The horse could learn to talk."

"Anyway what you don't do is give the money back. For sure not yet."

"My father owns a house in Brooklyn,” Pierce said. “I'm not sure what its situation is, but I thought maybe I could borrow against it."

Her look of disgust had softened to a kind of amusement, with something long-suffering in it; for just a moment she resembled his mother. “Pierce,” she said.

"All right, all right."

"So who's paying for this trip you're taking?” she asked. “And isn't it part of the same mission? The same, I mean, project?"

"Yes, in a way."

"Are you going to give them back their money?"

"Well, theirs is a grant,” he said. “It's sort of exploratory. I mean nothing necessarily has to come of it. Nothing has to be produced.” He smiled and shrugged:
that's all I know
. For a time they regarded each other, not yet thinking of the long-ago life they had shared, but not thinking anything else either.

"You okay?” she said then.

"I don't know."

"Then that's not okay."

"You know when all this started?” he said.

"All what?"

"This thing I'm doing. Or actually not doing. It was a night on Tenth Street. The night of the student takeover at Barnabas College. Remember?"

"I remember that day,” she said. “Listen. Will you send me what you've got? Maybe I can think about it."

"Ægypt,” he said. “That was the day, or the night, I remembered. You were in bed. It was hot. I stood at the window."

Come to bed
she had said to him, stoned and sleepy; he wasn't sleepy, though the short night was all but gone. Earlier that day the little college where he taught had been taken over by young people (some not so young) demanding Paradise now, and other things; faculty, including Pierce, locked themselves in their offices till the students were ejected by police. Pierce, released and having returned to his railroad flat downtown, thought he could still taste tear gas in the midnight air. Anyway the neighborhood around was all alive and murmuring, as though on its way, a caravan drawn on toward the future from the past, going by him where he stood. And he knew that of course you had to be on their side, you had to be, but that he himself must go back, if he could, and he knew that he could. While the others went on, he would go back, to the city in the farthest east of that old land, the city Adocentyn.