Endless Things (38 page)

"So do you get health insurance?"

"I don't know."

"You didn't ask?"

"No."

Deeper stillness, baleful.

"Pay scale?” she said into the dark. “Like is there a way of figuring raises?"

"I don't know."

"You didn't ask."

"Um no."

"Don't care?"

"Um well."

"What did you talk about? If it wasn't this stuff."

"Latin. Could I teach Latin."

Her scorn was so deep that at last it lifted him to his elbow to look into the mystery of her face. “Listen,” he said. “If you know so much about this, about about. Life. All the questions to ask. Then why are you, why. You yourself. I mean."

She didn't move or speak for a long time. He had no way to take back what he'd said.

"You mean,” she said, “why should I talk. Because I haven't got shit."

"No. Come on."

But it was so. He could see it even in her still body and the eyes that looked into the dark vacuity of the room; he could almost hear her thinking it. Like him she had somehow come to nothing. She had gone away and not come back, not anyway to the crossroads where she had turned aside; but nothing had become of her out there either, nothing that stuck or stayed. She lived in a room in her father's house, but that didn't mean she'd returned to him, or to it, not really. She had no job but selling cars part-time, which she usually got out of doing, preferring to sweep the floors and file; but she never looked at want ads, not as seriously even as himself.

"Just because,” she said, “you know how to get to the future. Just because you know it's real. Doesn't mean you think it can happen to you."

He had the illusion—maybe the soft passing of great trucks at regular intervals, like falling surf—that his cabin was beside the sea.

"But how can you know that it is, or could be, or anyway,” he started to say, meaning futures, their metaphysical or ontological unreality all he really knew about them; but she too now rose on an elbow and put her face pugnaciously close to his.

"You're a dope,” she said. “What made you such a dope?"

The way she said it made it seem not a mere rhetorical question, insult or upbraiding, and staring at her, searching for a comeback, Pierce for the first time in his life wondered if indeed there were a reason why he was such a dope, one reason, and if it could be known, and if so how, and if known at last, could be wrestled with, dragon or worm or slug at the base of his being, and defeated, or ousted. Would just knowing be enough? Probably not. Necessary, maybe, but not sufficient, and inaccessible to him anyway, right now and always so far, if not forever.

She had watched and waited for his answer for long enough, and turned back to her pillow beside his. She crossed her arms as though she were standing upright and confronting something, him forgotten.

"Any future that gets too close to me better watch out,” she said. “If it knows what's good for it."

He laughed then, at this, and after a moment and a sidelong glance at him, so did she. “Shit you know,” she said. “I have a really bad attitude."

"Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I like that in a woman.” And he and she laughed more together.

Later though, very late, he rolled over toward her in the melancholy bed, and—as though she had not slept at all—she turned immediately to him and put her long arms around him and clung with the single-minded silence of someone who can't swim clinging to someone who has come to pull her out, clinging so fiercely that they might both drown if they don't both make shore together.

After Downside's letter had sat beneath the ashtray on his pressboard dresser for a week, he suddenly (
Oh well
) wrote to accept. For some time he didn't tell Roo, for reasons he couldn't say, even to the other side of his self, the one that didn't show; that he thought didn't show. When he did tell her, she only regarded him for a long time without speaking.

"So when are you quitting at Novelty?” she said then.

"Oh God,” he said.

"If you quit they have to give you your vacation pay. A week's worth. Ten days. Maybe you should take a vacation. Before you start this job."

"Sure,” he said. “Take a jaunt to a tourist spot. Get a motel."

For a moment he perceived her head, like Oz in the movie, as though engulfed in affronted flames, and expected an awful curse. It might actually be nice to get away, he thought then, run and hide someplace right now, if there were someplace.

"Okay, well,” she said. She left with a curt goodbye.

When she came back a couple of days later, she said, “I got an invite.” She held out a typewritten letter, airmail stationery. “I'm going to Utopia. Maybe you'd like to come."

"To Utopia. That's
Noplace
, you know."

"It's real,” she said. “Really Utopia. The best place. I've wanted to go there for years."

"Me too,” Pierce said. “Years. So does everybody."

"Well, it can't be for everybody,” she said.

"No?” said Pierce.

"That's what ruins it."

"Ah,” said Pierce.

"The masses,” she said. “Then you get the Big Brother thing."

"Plus ungood,” said Pierce.

"You'll see,” she said. “If you want to come."

"You know how to get there? I thought there was a lot of uncertainty about that."

"I do,” she said. She took a thick book from her bag. “I've got a guidebook. See?"

A book, another book. A map, directions, commands. But this was a new paperback, and bright with color, and it said
Let's go!
in happy letters, and she proffered it with guileless delight, and the world right then unfolded and laid out the land that the book described, brightly colored and as real as real.

You got to Utopia by flying there; it lay in another direction he had never traveled far in, on the wry neck of the continent, very near the peaks of Darien.

"I can't go to the tropics,” he said, even as they drove to the airport. “I hate beaches. I have beachophobia."

"What!"

"I get burned,” he said. “I lie on the bare shingle staring at the sun. Me and a hundred naked others, each on his towel square. It's like going to existential hell. And the pointless sea repeating itself."

"Oh for heaven's sake.” She wore sunglasses already, in the wintry light. “You don't just lie there. And you don't try to
read
. I bet you try to read."

He didn't admit this.

"Hard books. Small print.” She changed lanes, the airport turn ahead. “No. No no. You've got to get up, and walk."

The capital of Utopia was, surely still is, called the City of Eternal Spring. Not its name, but what its name is called. To reach it they would fly to Florida first, and cross the state in a rented car, and fly again from the Gulf Coast. She'd found out it was the cheapest way.

So on the way they stopped in that small and largely bypassed resort town where Pierce's mother and Doris, her partner of many years, kept a small motel.

"You're going where?” his mother said in bewilderment. “You're doing what?” Having been asleep till late, she stood in the kitchen of her small house and office in her rayon negligee (could this be one of those that she'd had when he was a boy? Or was she still able to find and buy them somewhere?) and looked at their swollen backpacks—Pierce's borrowed—and at him, and at Roo. “You hate the beach,” she said.

"It's not just beach,” Roo said. “It's mountains."

"Jungle,” said Pierce.

"Rain forest,” said Roo. She put her arm around his shoulder, as though she were the taller of them. “He can do it."

That night, though, she stayed far from him in their double bed in their cabin, which he had insisted on paying for—the same cabin he had once suffered in, you remember—as though a sword had been laid between them. Next day she bade goodbye to Winnie cheerfully, almost euphorically, as Winnie did too back to her, and on the road again, silent beside her in the rent-a-car, Pierce understood in amazement that he, or he and Roo, had started an emotion in his mother, the first new one he had witnessed in decades, and it was jealousy.

The little City of Eternal Spring (high enough in the mountains, near enough to the equator, that its useless thermometers stood every day at room temperature) was plain, nearly paradigmatic: a grid of streets, some named for heroes and the dates of victories and the rest numbered; a brown and white population neither rich nor poor, churches neither grand nor squalid, the one cathedral humbly made of wood. Pierce and Roo took buses here and there, sitting amid placid people and their babies. How still they sat. A peace began to descend on Pierce, and Roo took his hand. Later he would doubt that he had, in the weeks they spent in that nation then and afterward, ever seen a child crying.

Some thirty years before, a brief and nearly bloodless revolution had toppled a corrupt oligarchy. A Cincinnatus from the countryside had come to power; he disbanded the army, reformed the electoral system, set up national welfare and health care. They wanted him to be president for life but he told them No no you must have political parties, and candidates, and you must vote; and then at the end of his term he went back to his ranch, and they did what he had told them to do, and now election days are joyous celebrations, and everyone votes.

"It's true,” Pierce said. “All true."

"I know,” Roo said. “All true. Not even the police have guns. I told you."

They went on a bus out of the City of Eternal Spring into the country. The people of the country were woodworkers, famous for what they made of the hundred different woods of the forest. Their houses, even humble ones where chickens scratched the dirt, had great paneled carved doors that would last a century. After going a long way downward they changed in a sultry plaza for a smaller hand-painted bus and went upward again, rising toward another mountain (there were three mountains pictured on the great seal of the nation, two tall peaks like a wide green M with the third between them, like Randa, Merrow, and Whirligig in the land from which they had come). The bus lurched, straining like a fat man to climb steep dirt roads increasingly narrow, its holy pictures and beaded valances and rosaries swaying side to side. People got on and others got off. “It's on ahead,” said Roo.

Up on the mountain that they climbed, at the end of the tortuous track, was where she had been invited to come. There, a body of American pacifists, Christian farmers, had come long ago fleeing the draft that wanted to take their sons, and there they had established, on the eternal cool green meadows of the mountain's heights, the new nation's first and now its largest commercial dairy. Pierce thought of them arriving here, self-exiled, in a small nation just disarmed, to make milk.

"We walk from here,” said Roo, studying a travel-stained typed paper she had carried from the States, her directions; they'd come to her from an entomologist, an old friend or boyfriend, Pierce gathered, who with a dozen other researchers from around the world lived and worked here too, as though in Eden, naming the animals: bugs in particular, of which there were countless kinds. He'd invited Roo; Pierce didn't know if he had also been expected. There were scorpions around too, Roo said; scorpions galore.

"This way saves a lot of time,” she said. “The bus goes all the way around the mountain. We can go straight up. There's a path—see?"

They weren't the only ones setting out on it, there were mothers with bundles and children and a man with a machete slung at his waist in a worked leather scabbard, like a knight's sword. Pierce lifted the backpack, slung it over his shoulders as she'd shown him, and pulled the waistband tight. That was the secret, she'd said. You can carry a lot of weight, if you balance it right.

A lot of weight. Almost immediately sweat tickled on his brow. The path wound upward, and one by one those who walked with them came to their houses, small farms and cabins, and waved farewell. Roo asked the way, said the name of the dairy and the research station, and they nodded and pointed ahead. The path entered the forest and narrowed, as though making up its mind what it must do, and then decided to ascend straight upward, seeming to disappear. Take small steps, she called back to Pierce. You don't have to lope, she said. You don't have to stride. Just make a little progress, a little steady progress.

And they came at length over a crest, and into green meadows, right amid the clouds: clouds actually stood on the next higher crest, and the next crest beyond that couldn't be seen at all under its broad hat of white. Black and white cows lifted their heads to see them, and one by one returned to cropping the emerald grasses. A flight of parakeets occurred, red and yellow. A tall, vanishingly thin man was walking toward them, white shirt ballooning, gibbon's arm raised in welcome, what a coincidence.

They three walked together, Roo and her friend in reminiscence. To Pierce it seemed not like visiting the tropics but like returning to the land his fairy ancestors had come from. The lowing cows, belled and horned, were called home at evening, winding slowly o'er the lea. Little lanes led through the dewy grass and along the tangled hedges from house to house, and from their open Dutch doors he and Roo would be hailed in cheerful English, but rainbows, single, double, triple, came and went continually over the breasted fields as the big clouds and their small children passed over just above their heads, and warm showers wet their faces for a moment. Underfoot grew a million small flowers in candy colors, just like the flowers that color the edges of the forest floor in woodland cartoons—they were called, Roo said,
impatience
.

Why impatience? She didn't know. They seemed patient enough to him; the whole place seemed imbued with a holy patience, the brindled cows at evening, the changeless weather—there weren't even silos, because the green sprang yearlong. But at night Roo's weedy entomologist friend—Pierce's too already, unjealous as a saint or a house pet—hung a white sheet on his cabin wall, and shone a black light on it, and from the surrounding night there came will-lessly in the things he studied, in all their multitudes: bugs just like twigs a half a foot long, great beetles like warhorses caparisoned in heraldry, tiny sparks and atomies, moths with trailing raiment green and gold. He told them about the army ants that, on a biological cycle not yet understood, would appear suddenly in billions on the horizon and march like an army of Wallenstein's through fields, through houses even, eating everything in their unswerving path—meats, clothes, green lizards, unfortunate infants; then gone till next time. And he told them to shake out their shoes in the morning.