Endless Things (6 page)

He hadn't told Charis that he had asked Rose to marry him, one night, one endless night. It was all he could think of to do, and it was not in order to rescue her, but himself: if she could say yes, then her soul would not be theirs, she would not be their captive forever and his own soul die. That was the deal he offered. She didn't take it.

It turns out—he'd read the literature, actually—that such affairs as theirs was don't often flourish or last long, because at bottom what the two
folles
in the
folie à deux
want from each other is impossible to have, indeed what each one needs makes it impossible to give what the other wants. For A wants B to place herself—say
her
just for instance—entirely in his power, willingly, in each instance: to say Yes with all her being and desire. But B needs A to
deprive
her of her will, take away her power of assent or dissent, so that what is done is not done by her at all.

So what they do, A and B, is to pretend, for each other's sake, on each other's behalf: A pretends to unfeeling cruelty, B to resistance and ultimate capitulation. And, sly game players that they often are, they can go on long pretending, but the farther they press the game, the closer comes the moment when the contradiction becomes clear to each of them, not always the same moment for both unfortunately. That's why it's so often A who in the end is on his knees, and saying Please please, and B whose eyes are cold and turned away, wondering why she's there.

Poor A, poor B.

In the street it smelled of snow coming. He turned toward the subway, closing his coat with his right hand, pocketing his left. The little figurine—he had already forgotten it was there—slipped into his fingers, and the sudden touch of her ivory flesh was mild and pacifying. For the next months she lay there, he felt her placid curves amid the loose pence and marks and lire, the maps and subway tickets; when his trip was done and he hung the old coat on a hook, she remained. The winter after that he got a new coat, a wadded parka like everyone else's, and not until the old coat was gathered up one day with other things for the Salvation Army did another hand reach in and find her there amid the long-ago litter, unremoved.

He returned to Brooklyn and Park Slope, and to his father's house. Axel was still not there, and neither was the Chief; the young men who came and went and lay around gave him beer to drink and a spot on the couch before the big TV that had come to inhabit the corner. The Ayatollah's face and pisshole eyes, that seemed to hang on the screen like Emmanuel Goldstein's for a full two minutes’ hate.

He got away as soon as he could to his old room, and to his bed, which felt as though it had been slept in by many, one at a time at least, he hoped. He slept, startled awake by the comings and goings of Renovators and Reclaimers; he dreamed that he had a dream about his father, who was lost and sick and in trouble, dead maybe and in Purgatory, asking for help, but Pierce couldn't answer somehow, nor ask what was the matter; and when he woke up he found himself on a cold hillside, the house and all Park Slope gone. Then he woke up.

There was silence in the house so deep it might have been empty. Pierce scribbled a note for Axel (one of the silent sleepers must be him) and went carefully out through the darkened rooms. He collected his dreadful bags and carried them bumping the walls down to the street. Snow was falling thickly. It was nearly an hour before he could attract the attention of a gypsy cab, and still he stepped out at the airport way too early, unshowered, unbreakfasted, afraid.

The abbey bells rang Sext, the sixth hour of the day, high noon. Pierce lifted his head to listen. What is the meaning of the sixth hour, on what then do we meditate? At this hour Adam was made, at this hour he sinned; at the sixth hour Noah went in to the Ark and at the sixth hour came out again. At the sixth hour Christ was crucified, reversing Adam's sin. Every hour of the monk's day contains a part of the day-shaped history of the world.

Through the universe, the human world, and the year, the stories recapitulate, reverse, return. Every Mass is the story of the making, loss, damnation, redemption, and remaking of the world, the Sacrifice at its center. Adam was born or conceived on the hill that would later be named Golgotha, the center of the world, beneath the Y of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, from whose wood the Cross would in time be made; and the letters of his name ADAM name the four directions in Greek: North, South, East and West. He was born on the Equinox, the same day the coming of Jesus was announced to Mary:
Ave
, said the angel to Mary that spring morning, reversing the damnation that sprang from
Eva
.

Blessed circularity, never done. Even the End of the World was able to be repeated in the course of every turn of the heavens around earth—or rather of earth's spin around the sun, a shift of perspective that made no difference on earth really, though it had seemed once to be an utter upset of that same circularity. Of course the Christian story at its first appearance had been not an embodiment but an enemy of circularity, a one-way street from Creation through Cross to Conclusion, and for millions (he supposed it must be millions) it still was. For Pierce and others (millions too, he was sure, though maybe a vertical millions reaching back toward prehistory, rather than the horizontal millions going to church and mosque today) the simple straight story was uniquely repellent, repellent in a way no other could be; for him and his like, the whole history of the church (his church, this church) was nothing but a process by which its original one-way progression was tamed, and turned around like the Worm to bite its own tail or tale, which would otherwise be
insupportable
, impossible to assert or believe. On Good Friday in the abbey church, the perpetual light above the altar, always burning night and day, would be put out: God would die, the world grow cold. Everything would be over. On Easter Sunday it would be lit again, never to go out: God lives again. The next Holy Days, the same. We live in a story with a Beginning, a Middle, and an End, but within that story is another, the same, and within that one, also another, and each is bigger and longer than the previous one, and of
that
there is no beginning and no end.

It was like Adam and his navel.

He thought this, in just these words—
like Adam and his navel
—and without his willing it (in fact he was surprised, his attention caught, as though he'd felt a tug just then on Ariadne's thread) he remembered several things at once.

He remembered the great book wherein the Y and a thousand other mysteries had been explained or set for him to ponder, and the entry on ADAM.

He remembered the day when he had first arrived in the Faraway Hills, and how at a Full Moon Party by the Blackbury River he had suddenly known he would abandon his calling as a teacher of history, and try to make a living elsewhere by other means; maybe (he'd thought in the sweetness of liberation) he'd set up shop, and for a buck apiece wrangle hard questions people had that history could answer. Like the question of how, when we get to Heaven, we will know which man there is father Adam. Not a minute later a tall barefoot woman in a glowing sundress had passed him by, and he heard someone call to her.
Hi, Rose
.

And he also remembered how, near the bitter end of what began at that party with that motion of his soul or head, he lay in his small house beside the same river, and Rose Ryder was with him. The hour must have been Matins, he thought: the hour of Judgment, and the hour of the perishing of the world. They were not sleeping but talking, and the subject was biblical inerrancy. Pierce had for some weeks been spending a lot of his actually pretty substantial erudition, wide if shallow, in resolving for her sake a few of the chasms between the Word and the world, at the same time as he tried to tease her into laughing off the whole stupid thing and returning into his orbit once again, and she did laugh, often enough, at his act. So this night she had said something (this was delicate archaeology, recreating that ancient black predawn, from here where he now sat in the sun) something about evolution and the evidence for it, which he said was of course indisputable, please. And she had, what, she had demurred, or said it wasn't the point anyway. And he said Don't worry, the question could be easily resolved and nothing lost, not God's omnipotence or the Bible story or the millions of years of bones and fossils, and he knew how.

How?

Well, he'd said, it's like Adam's navel.

An old trick question, very old, medieval maybe. When we get to Heaven how will we be able to know which man there is Adam? We will because
he'll be the one without a navel
. Because he was never attached to an umbilical cord. He had no mother, came from no womb, had no history. So there it was. But no, of course he
did
have a history: his own grown body was a history, and so were the plants and the animals around him, the slow-forming stars he saw in the sky. The answer is (Pierce with raised forefinger explicated this) that there is no time for God, no past-present-future, he can bring the universe into existence
at any moment of its history
: the universe comes to be at the moment when God wills it to be, with all its previous millennia intact. Do you see? he'd said to Rose. It never existed before that moment, and after that moment it always did. And on the sixth day he makes a man of dust, and breathes life into him: and hair has already grown on his head, and teeth in his mouth, and a beard on his face, and he has a navel on his stomach, from his nonexistent life as a fetus, his ontogeny that never happened recapitulating a phylogeny ditto.

See how useful, how neat? That whole evolution problem rendered moot, do you see? It's all okay; it's not Mere Chance. If God chose, he could take six days to do it all in, which is what the Bible says, what Rose in the bed beside him then was committed to believing. But of course, if you like, you can think he chose to create it all, all its starry depths in all their cosmic evolution, in a single moment: say, just in that moment when Adam opens his eyes to perceive it.

She was impressed. He thought she was. He remembered that she had been. He'd left aside the question of who, just at that moment when the lamp was lit in Adam's head, was creating whom. But he couldn't refrain from pointing out that if you didn't accept the Bible chronology, and had none in particular to replace it with, then you had no way of saying what moment God would choose in which to bring the universe into being. It could be any one; a billion years ago, or just now. Right now, this moment, he'd said, and he sat up and stretched out his arms and closed his eyes: just now, as I open my eyes. All time and history, all my own history too, right up to the very memory I have of just now closing my eyes—it all never existed before, and would all, right now, come into being.

Now
. And he opened his eyes on her.

She was on her elbow, looking at him, bare, lost to him; and his cold bedroom was around them; and a huge grief or pity (but for whom?) had seized his throat; and he had begun helplessly to weep, sobbing as she looked on in amazement.

Pierce felt in his body the bell claps of noon, each one stepping upon the trailing tail of the previous one, until no more came, and the twelfth sang alone and died away.

He thought how, in one way if only in one way, Rose and Charis were alike. He thought that neither had ever loved any man, not in the times when he had known them, nor before. Charis had surely known this; but like a person color-blind from birth she probably hadn't regretted it very much, and had gone on (still went on, maybe) secretly believing that others had fooled themselves into thinking a valuable and useful facet of the world—color, love (or Love)—supposedly existed but didn't really. Emperor's new clothes. He hadn't seen her or heard of Charis for a dozen years or more, and wondered sometimes what deal she had struck, if she had, for what she needed, whatever it was.

Sometimes, though, he could perceive Rose, not as she had been, as he had known her, but as she might be now. He would sometimes see with startling suddenness, as in a showstone or a confirming dream, how she lived with them still, her Bible cult, the Powerhouse; getting along, dealing with its hierarchies and its powers as she had always dealt with the world—by indirection, conditional assent, abstraction of her spirit from things she couldn't get her body out of, willingness too to try to live up to others’ standards, at least until she saw no path there for herself and her nature. It must be the case that, in any cult not murderous or psychotic, life eventually settles down and becomes like life anywhere, livings still to get, dishes to wash, rubs and hurts to assuage or nurse in secret. Self-regard to maintain by cunning or other means. Lies to tell. Of course.

It was likely she had never been truly subject to them even back then. The God or godliness she wanted to get for herself was only a new good offered to her to pursue, not really different from health or wealth. It was only he who thought she had laid a way out of the world; only he who ever really believed or feared there was such a way. Following the path that he had made or found through her body he had come himself to be within their unreal heaven and hell, under the rule of their god and his prophets, an enchantment he had not known could happen to a human of his time and place, though common enough (he knew by report) in other times and places. It was there, in that false world, that his spirit had resided while his body walked the Old World searching for the thing lost, in his bad shoes and his overcoat from which the lining had begun to droop. Under his arm that mad guidebook of Kraft's, and the new little red notebook, made in China—still with him here, its pages foxed with London rain and Roman wine—and an umbrella for the endless drizzle, one of a series of umbrellas that he bought and lost as he went, one at almost every
pensione,
on every train.

Boney Rasmussen was already dead when Pierce set out that winter to find the Elixir to make him better. So there was no one on whose behalf he could have sought it but his own. In fact, as he knew very well even then, there is no other living person for whom it can be sought: though it can only be found, if it's found, for everyone.