Endless Things (34 page)

"Really."

"They took me to church and stuff. Family dinners. I slept over a lot. Then sneaking out too. A lot of laughs."

"Uh huh."

"Maybe it was just because it was a big family, and I was a singleton. The little ones used to line up for baths at night by age, or size. It was sweet. But that's not all. I think what I liked, or wanted, was something about their being Catholics."

"Yes?"

"Because Catholics,” she said, “have mercy. That's a good thing. They have that."

"Well,” Pierce said, astonished and ashamed, ashamed for his old church, old in its countless sins and its un-mercy. “Well, yes. That's what they say.” Tears had bloomed in her eyes when she said it:
mercy
. He didn't yet know how easily it happened with her, at the suppressed motions of the soul within her.

"Because justice,” she said. “You can demand justice, but there's an end to justice, when everybody gets their fair share. But there's no end to mercy."

She looked around her at the room, the sad-clown painting askew on the wall, the gas heater, the chenille bedspread sliding to the floor. Him.

"I've got to go,” she said.

"Don't,” he said. “Stay."

The first time they'd shared this bed—after a couple of drinks at the Sandbox, and well after they'd first begun to consort often—she had seemed unsettlingly cagey. She kept breaking off, or slipping away, to change the radio, or fool with the heat; and she kept talking—not about what was going on right there between them, but about other things, general remarks, questions about life, his life, his thoughts.
So tell me
. He wondered if it were some kind of test, see if he could keep up his concentration, or his attention to her. He was about to ask if maybe she'd rather just stop, and talk, but just then a sort of smothered fire within her seemed to burst softly, and she pressed hard into him; she ceased to say words, only sounds, sounds that seemed, somehow, like further admissions, hard to make at first and then more willingly made.

"It's late,” she said, and lay back again on the pillows.

It was late, a night deep in May by now. It was still that time in a love affair (neither of them called it that or thought those words in any hollow of their hearts) when it's hard to sleep together, something always seeming to remain undone or to be continued or gone on with, that wakes you after an hour or two of sleep, to find the other's awake too in the hollow of the bed's deep inescapable center; or that never lets you shut your eyes at all, till dawn's approach at last calms everything. Maybe sometimes too a sense of fighting off something that approaches, or at least preparing to fight. Fight or flight.

"So what was it about?” she asked him.

"What was what about?"

"Your book."

"It was,” Pierce said after a moment's thought, “a historical novel."

"Oh yeah? About what period?"

"About ten years ago."

She laughed a low laugh, her tummy rolling beneath his hand.

"You remember,” he said. “You were there. You were actually here then."

"I don't remember that much,” she said. “And I wasn't here."

"But you came back."

"Family's all you got,” she said, and he pondered why—it wasn't wisdom that seemed to apply to her, or to him. So many people said it: when did it become true for them? Would it ever for him? “Anyway there isn't any back."

"That's what my book was about. How if you change the way ahead, the way behind changes too."

"Seems kind of obvious,” she said.

It seemed so when she said it; it was obvious, or at least a commonplace. More than one history of the world; one for each of us. A bright moment arriving when you choose a new way into the future, which illuminates a new past, the backward way, at the same time. Everybody knows. It had been true all along.

"Because, you know,” she said. “You can't step in the same river twice. You ever hear that?"

"Nope,” he said, pressing her now meaningfully downward to supine, enough talk. “News to me."

She had always willed her way forward: and if that was so, then what was the name of the thing that was the opposite of it, the force or quality or power that had brought her back again? It was something
like
will, just as forged and handmade; something not easier anyway. It was only people who had never done it that could say running away was easy; people used to say to her that going back was hard, but they couldn't tell her what the hard parts really were, or how you did them. Running away, you hurt yourself by what you did; going back, it was what had been done to you that hurt. It was like the difference between falling hard and getting up again: which is worse? She found out that what she must do in going back (and it
was
hard) was that you had to come to believe that the world you had left behind and all its contents really had existed, and moreover that you yourself brought it and all the obscure pain of it into being by doing that—by believing that it really had been
the case
(as Pierce said)—and thus you were somehow then responsible for it too, which hurt you all over again. But only by thus bringing the past into existence could you ever really turn all the way around again, and go on from there. It was so. Actually it was what everybody knew: and as soon as you learned it for yourself, you knew that too, that everybody else knew what you had just learned.

The farthest place she had reached when she went, the place she had to begin to start back from, was Cloud City. To remember how she left Cloud City was to create the things that happened to bring her to Cloud City in the first place—it was to go forward backward, to go down the mountain, losing on the way down all the things you knew, in order to regain the things you had forgotten on the way up. You had to put yourself back on the path, just past sunset, at the same hour when you first saw Cloud City up on the bluff, itself still in the light though you no longer were: the Watchtower seeming to be silvered in mercury, as real and insubstantial as that (
quicksilver
) and the white wings and hyperbolic sails of the City too, colored by sunset just in the way the white clouds in the west were colored, rare shades that had no names she knew. How she had got there, on the path upward to the bluff, was the first thing that turning back would reveal, maybe, the names or faces of the one or ones who'd brought her there.

There were such places then, places you found your way to and couldn't have imagined before you reached them, places that other people knew of and could lead you to if you said
yes
, places coming into being as you approached and then vanishing again as you went away. That's what it seemed like. Even some that were a million years old—mountain hot springs where in winter the naked people soaked for days, their long hair jeweled with droplets and steaming in the cold, their pale bodies distorted and fishlike down in the water and wiggling in glee—she thought even such places as that might not still exist, or couldn't any longer be found, and Cloud City had been made of nearly nothing.

What was his name, that tall stork of a guy in his homemade haircut and his supply of old dress shirts, the one who had thought up Cloud City and seen it built, only to stop thinking about it when it was still unfinished? A last name for a first name like Watson or Hoving or Everett but none of those. He shook her hand once, gripping hard, smiling and screwing her arm around as though the handshake could produce something from her. Then she'd seen him hovering here and there in the City as though he should be standing on one leg, or he'd be meditating in a group but a whole trembling head higher than the others. It was Beau (
his
name she would not forget, no matter how far backward she went from there), Beau who told her that it was he, Wilson or Evans, who had conceived a city made of tents under tension, that the wires and couplings and the fabrics all existed to do this, and the sun would heat the interiors and a hundred flaps and diaphragms would vent and cool it; a city that could be rolled up and carried away to be built elsewhere, maybe over the ruins of those made of stone and steel when they failed and died. And they had experimented with a thousand shapes for their tents, the older ones still standing as the newer and bigger ones went up. All were white, not for no reason, and the light of day within them was sourceless, bright, cool, the building an idea on the point of evanescence, only the colored carpets, sun catchers, clay water pots, hanging strings of coral peppers, and dirty-faced naked children who were contained in it solid and actual. Watching one put up, all the laughing laboring people pulling gently at the wires, the fabric taughtening into curves that math described: like a barn raising in Heaven.

It was already different, though, when she left there to go down into the plains with Beau: the City people had stopped thinking about earth and air and the properties of polyesters and the physics of stretch, because a change of heart or mind had come over many of those living there, one of those waves of sudden weird conviction that in those days could sweep over families like theirs, as someone among them or arriving among them declared a revelation, or a revival, or a long-buried new-arisen truth. At Cloud City they were mostly spending their days asleep and their nights awake, outside, looking upward, awaiting those they called the Old Ones, mild good wise beings from the stars, or the skies anyway, who were supposedly now willing to draw closer to those who perceived their existence and strove to know them in spirit. That was what the Watchtower was for, to gather and focus the spirits of the city dwellers to be projected outward in love toward those waiting great-eyed ones (some of the Cloud City family could see their faces in meditation) to bring their ships down to the wide dusty floor of the mesa, a place left empty for their landing. Beau with his faint eternal smile had watched the people and spoken to them and listened to them with a kind of attention she had never seen anyone give anyone else, at once open and untouched; and he said (not just to her) that they were right, in a way, about these Old Ones who came from elsewhere, but what they didn't know, and would be a long time learning this way, was that they were themselves those Old Ones whom they awaited; they were looking in the wrong direction, out not in.

So they walked away from Cloud City, she remembered the way down now, Beau and some others and herself, following another tale that Beau had come to possess. They went down into the dry plains, and there they met the dark small people who had come on foot hundreds of miles from their homes far to the south, as they did every year just at this time—this journey, this hunt they were set out on, was the bearer and the continuer of their lives, not a thing they did to find sustenance or goods but that which brought into existence all sustenance and all goods. The ten or dozen people from Cloud City, Beau and Roo and others who had learned of their quest and come to meet them and learn from them, were permitted to accompany them on their hunt, which was a hunt for a person, a person infinitely beloved, who must be shot and killed—they had bows, decorated in feathers and yarns, and arrows remarkably long. The prey they sought turned out to be small indistinct growing things sheltering amid the rocks and cactus, and whenever found it was pierced with the long arrows and held aloft amid cries and mourning, though the hunters’ dark faces never seemed to change.

Through that night by a fire of gray greasewood they shared the flesh of the person they had killed, which was the worst thing Roo had ever tasted, not a thing to be consumed at all, and she couldn't continue with the rest of them, and never could tell if what she knew ever after had been imparted to her by the being they had all partaken of that night or was something she would have come to know anyway. Beau had said that we, we here, are the Old Ones that were awaited in Cloud City, and she knew then what it meant to say that, though she might not ever be able to say what she knew—that she was indeed old, the result of a process ages long; that her body was
hers
, a thing infinitely complex and valuable, made of the rarest and most delicate materials and parts, that she would have to bear it and tend to it and keep it from harm every day of her long, maybe endless life. Wonder and weariness. She laid it on the desert floor by the fire, wrapped it gently like a mummy in her sleeping bag, fended off the enormous stars from entering too far into it.

All of that—all that knowing, those stars, that search, those roads—was feelably gone now, persisting in her tissues if at all in amounts almost too small to perceive, by no matter what tests, just trace elements. Maybe because of an association with tracer bullets, Roo thought of
trace elements
as brief stardust streaks across or within the matrix or mass they were detected in, evanescing as soon as caught, without effect. She had only ever been an observer of those people and places, those tribes and crowds and families she made her way into; as willing as she had been to seek them and lucky as she was in finding them, she hadn't ever really quite been able or been allowed to join or become enfolded with them. Why? They were no less wanderers than she was, she was an ox for work, she had insights into their ways that she knew they could use if they'd listen. But she remained outside, and always walked away, and when she was long gone she felt sometimes with weird conviction that she had caused that world of wonders to cease to be because she could not be part of it, and now it was lost to everyone.

Anyway she went on, and her onwards came more and more to resemble her backwards, because that was when she parted from Beau and those who went with him. Because Beau, the only one she would have stayed with, was unclaimable—not all the nights she had spent by his side had let her into him, he would stop at her frontiers, always, or gently stop her at his own—and it was so painful and disorienting that she thought she had better find out if it was because of something that was in her or something in Beau or something in all men, something that wouldn't couple with whatever it was in her, as though she were threaded wrong, or they were. She went into town, went into the city, found a job and then another job, recovering those things (cities, towns, jobs) and taking them on again as she had done on her way away in the first place. Figuring out how to live, pulling a way to live out of the future, careful not to hope, careful not to trick herself into thinking she could see far or know much about what was coming next. She got good at a few things she would later have to unlearn. She got married, and divorced, and pregnant—those weren't among the few things, though the few things maybe led her there, the worst hole or burrow without exit she'd ever find herself in, she
found herself
as though finding a zombie twin, inert and helpless. The rage she'd learned was aimed at herself, at that self, as much as it was at the morons and hardheads and inert unmovable men she'd lived among in those days—for now she had a
those-days
that could be counted again, counted in rented rooms and thirdhand cars that she could name, their wheels turning backward to link one to the previous one (
ah, the Nova; oh right, the Barracuda
) until in them she passed back eastward again, creating the world in that direction as she went. And as she did so she could almost (never entirely) remember how she had first gone west, on those same roads. How she'd shut the door on her life in the Faraways, or the life of her house at any rate—it didn't seem to her that it was her life, nor had it been hers for a long time; she couldn't have said when it ceased to be hers, it ought to have been easy to identify it with the year her mother was caught by love and left, but when Roo told herself the story that way, it seemed not to be a story about herself; all she knew was that the onward-pointing life she had afterward occupied with Barney led down an ever-narrowing tunnel or gullet, like those tight spots she now and then willingly and stupidly (
oh well okay
) entered into in dreams, eventually to be stuck irremediably and suffocating till she woke asweat, heart racing. Anyway it was some sensation like that which impelled her outward and west (the note she left Barney said east, but that was a lie, the only lie she told). She hadn't understood then all that had gone into her decision, but she definitely applied a lot of good sense to the doing of it. She had money saved, all her own. There were plenty of rides to choose from around the house, always three or four cars in the driveway, some splendid and glossy and others more odd and declassé, trade-ins that Barney had an interest in—she suddenly remembered (but not until she hit Route 6 on her way back, when she got within a few miles of the dealership) the very one she had left in, the scabbiest and least valued of those available on that June day, crimped rocker panel, babyshit color, Japanese in the days when that meant cheaply made and impossible to fix when broken—most of the intersecting roads she'd taken thereafter had sprung from garages where grinning mechanics without even a set of metric wrenches had stared into the ridiculous mysteries of its innards, while she sat in the bitter sun smoking a Lucky and awaiting the offer that she got used to arriving at just that juncture, an offer from somebody to go somewhere.