Endless Things (39 page)

"Because of the scorpions,” said Roo.

They walked up higher, toward the cloudy-headed heights; they sat in a glade—he hadn't before ever found himself in a glade, he didn't think, but here was one for sure—on a fallen log and listened to the insects seethe. Royal blue butterflies of impossible luster visited Oz like blooms, stamen and pistil, comically obscene.

"It's real,” Roo said. “It's all real."

"It is."

As they held hands and looked around themselves like the First Boy and Girl, a pair of slow mammals appeared from out of the forest, cat sized, great eyed, with tall tails erect, a boy and a girl, maybe; what were they called? Coatimundi, Pierce remembered or imagined.

"So do you ever,” Roo in time said, “really think about kids?"

"In what respect?"

"Well, for instance. Having kids. Being a parent."

"You think about that?"

"Yes."

"It's something you want."

She didn't answer; it wasn't a question; hers to him remained in the air unanswered.

"Well,” he said. “I have a son."

She didn't say anything for a time, neither did she move, though she removed her hand from his. “You have a son?"

"I had one. Not a real one. An imaginary son."

Nothing.

"His name,” Pierce said, looking down or out but not at her, “was Robbie."

"Robbie."

"Yes."

He knew that he was about to tell her that Robbie, who had not long ago been more real to him than almost every corporeal person he knew, was only twelve, or maybe thirteen, though big for his age in some respects, and of all that happened between them and after. It was as though he could see himself from afar sitting there beside Roo on the fallen log, as though he were at once the poor stupid mortal he in fact was and at the same time a laughing god watching him, watching him dig himself deeper. He told her. It took a while.

"Oh my God that is so strange,” she said softly. She had raised her hand to her mouth, as though she saw a wound she hadn't known he bore. “That is so creepy."

He took his own hand, looked at his feet.

"And you just made him up? Just like that?"

He couldn't say that he had made him up, because it was so clear to him that Robbie had arrived, unsummoned; wished for, yes, though not in such a form, not foreseen or imaginable even. Would he have to say
Yes I made him up
in order for him to be able to pass away and not have been? He tried to think of a way to say that it hadn't really been his idea, somehow; that yes he had welcomed Robbie and elaborated his presence—added facts and flesh and a gaze to him, whatever he was—had been glad, so glad he'd come; but that still he hadn't thought him up, had only and suddenly found him to be there, complete, as though on his doorstep. Which he knew mitigated nothing.

"It seemed,” he said, “to solve a problem. That's what it felt like. It solved a problem, at last. I was glad."

"But the stuff you did.” She swallowed. “I mean are you, is that something you."

"No,” he said. “I never did. Never before. Not even when I was a kid. Never. I never even thought of it.” He said nothing more for a long time, and she said nothing, only looked at the forest floor, the beasts and bugs.

"I don't know,” he said at last, “where he came from. I really don't. I don't know why."

"Was it,” Roo said carefully, as though afraid to guess wrong, “like a dream? Like dreaming? Or like pretending?"

"I,” said Pierce. It was like dreaming in being given, and unchosen; not like a dream in its willfulness. “Like sort of a dream."

"Well.” She touched his arm, and then in a moment withdrew her hand again, as though she found him too hot. “You know how they say everyone in a dream, all the people, are you. You yourself turned around, or put outside of you for you to see."

"Yes."

"And,” she said, thinking. “And here's a son and a father. And didn't you want your father's love? I mean wasn't it taken away from you? Like you told me."

"I,” Pierce said. “I.” Something huge was gathering in the forest around him, and now built toward him, or it arose greatly and swiftly within him, in the forest within.

"So this Robbie,” Roo said, “came to get love from his father. Right? You said. And you could give him that. And what you gave, you could get. Sort of in a way. If you're both."

"Both."

"Well, yes, sure. You were him as much as you were you."

"Ah. Ah, ah. Ah."

"Pierce? You okay?"

The sounds Pierce had begun all suddenly to make were startling, outlandish.
Ah, ah ah. Ah ah.
He threw his face into his hands as though to contain them; they seemed summoned from somewhere she hadn't known sound could issue from in a person, and she touched him again.

Tears shed in Eden. It went on a long time, he trying to cease, mop up, then bursting again as though whelmed in grief. It
was
grief, astonishing and right, grief ungrieved till now, witheld for no good reason but ignorance. You were him as much as you. What amazed him most just then, as he wept, was that he could not ever, never ever, have thought of it himself, when it was so obvious to her: she took that old crabbed page from him, turned it over and right side up, and he could read it immediately. Later on what amazed him most was that he had to climb such a mountain to hear it said.

"But,” he said. “But then why that, why
that
."

"Yeah, well, that's what's sad,” she said. “That you could only think of that. Of that one way."

He tugged his shirttail from his pants to daub his eyes. “He wasn't real,” Pierce said. “He really wasn't. And now he's gone."

"He's gone?"

"Gone.” Still he didn't dare look at her, still he clung to his own hand and then his knees. “So anyway now you know,” he said. “About me."

"Yes,” she said. “I guess now I know."

"I had to say."

"Yes."

"Yes."

Unsilence of the glade.

"There's more,” he said.

To travel down from that green mountaintop was to pass through one climatic zone and then another, the air growing hotter, the vegetation changing, until they reached the sea, the unstilled Pacific. He swam with her and he lay beside her under the netting of their bed, for some nights in a stillness and isolation that finally neither could stand, then making cautious plain love while the bugs gathered on the net and watched. He walked, as she taught him to do, walked for miles behind her and beside her along the tiger-striped coconut walks, or over the beast-shaped rock heaps that lay in the surf just off the endless empty swathe of sand; he studied her and thought about her, he found himself waiting for something she would do or say, without knowing what it was, thinking maybe it had already been said and he had missed it; he recounted his own story to himself, seeking for the premonition or foreshadowing that would point him toward what he must say or do. Why was this so hard? Coleridge had written (yes he'd brought a big thick
Biographia literaria
, small print, hard thoughts) that “the common end of all
narrative
, nay of
all
poems, is to convert a
series
into a
whole
: to make those events, which in a real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a
Circular
motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth.” And a poet is a maker, and a
poeia
is a made world, and in his own world or history, real or imagined, he perceived no such figure, long and hard as he had tried, much as he desired to.

And if not that story, what? If he had reached deep enough into the sun-erased pages of the
Biographia
he held, he would maybe have noticed where Coleridge mentions the distinction made in alchemy between the
automatica
(things that are changed by a power in themselves) and the
allomatica
(things that are only changed by the action of something—which in alchemy is almost always some
one
—else).
Automatica
can change, and change back, but only the
allomatica
change by changing what in turn changes them: a spiral rather than a circle, going on and not returning. But he didn't get that far.

"So tell me,” he said. “If somebody sometime wanted to ask you to marry them, do you think that having had such a bad time before would..."

"No."

"No?"

"No. Like they say: that was then, this is now."

She had in her hand a bottle of soda, and on it was a picture of Betty Boop, looking like an old flame of his, or every old flame of his, as she always would, and her name in this country was Lulú.

"So if,” he said.

"Watch it,” she said. “It says in all the books that you're not supposed to propose when you're on vacation."

"All the books?"

"You're having fun, you're free of everything, feeling romantic. You can fool yourself. You could make a big mistake."

"Thanks for the warning. I'll take no steps without consulting you. But I wasn't proposing."

"What were you doing?"

"Wondering."

"As usual."

"As usual."

Anyway it
was
there, of course, it had been there “all along,” that prolepsis, foreshadowing, figure, destiny he felt he needed: the three of them (of course it was three) at the Full Moon party, rising naked together before him from the waters of the Blackberry, the endless river:
a dark, a light, a rosé
. And one of them her. There they are still, unchanged except in meaning, or rather with their meaning not yet unfolded, a
complicans
of which his life thereafter was to be the
explicans
. Pierce no longer remembered seeing them, right there at the beginning, nor did he understand what it had meant, if it really had a meaning beyond or within the fact of its having been. So his very last solemn wish went forever ungranted, unspoken in fact, though not the less urgent for that: his wish that he might, please, be allowed to do what he must, and to know it too. But no, he had to choose it for himself, by himself, in ignorance and incertitude, and then do it. And eventually, but just in time, he did.

Three years later, Pierce sat down in the office of the dean of studies at a community college in a northeastern city, to be interviewed for a teaching job.

The dean was struck by the shape of his résumé, as anyone considering hiring him would have to be: how he had quit or been let go from Barnabas College, where he'd been tenure track, then vanished (the résumé described work on a book, but there was no book) and some time later surfaced as a second-tier private-school dogsbody, teaching history and English and running the chess club and the debate team. Pierce, hands clasped in his lap, knew what this looked like, and knew better than to account for it. Never complain, never explain.

"Downside Academy,” said the Dean. He was a boulder-shaped black man in a tight three-piece suit and stiff collar, tight too, gray bristles on his big cheeks. “I'm not real familiar with this institution. Is it large?"

"Small,” said Pierce.

"Downside?"

"Downside.” It had been a fine, even an evocative name for years, but now the trustees were rethinking. “It's about fifty years old."

The unsmiling dean continued to regard the name, as though it would grow transparent, and allow him to see the place itself behind it. “You had a house there."

"I was a housemaster, yes,” Pierce said, and felt a wave of pointless embarrassment.

"You're married?"

"Yes. Three years."

"Your wife teaches too?"

"No. No, oh no. She's. She's going to be studying to be a nurse. She's actually been accepted at a school here in the city. That's one reason this position would be. Well.” He stopped this line, his own convenience not the important consideration here. He crossed his legs.

"It's good you're continuing again in your vocation,” the dean said. “I think you will find the students here to be different from those you might have had in the past, at other institutions. Some of them will not be as prepared as even the upper students at your private school were. On the other hand they'll bring to your classes a wealth of other experiences, life experiences. And you'll find them eager to get from you all that they can use in their own lives. Unlike some young people in other institutions, most of our students—and not all of them are young—they mostly know why they're here, they know what they want from this place, and they are ready to work to get it. They are remarkable people, many of them."

Pierce nodded. He was leaning forward, all ears. He thought he could descry what the dean meant, and what those students might be like, and in what sense his own case was theirs. He found himself moved by them, never having met any of them, and by the round man before him, by his tender gravity, his careful pomposity, and how he might have come by them, after what experiences, like his students'. Moved too by what he, Pierce, was being charged with: his old vocation.

"Frank Walker Barr,” said the dean, returning to pore over Pierce's slim résumé. “There's a name."

"Yes."

"You did your thesis with him."

"Yes.” No, not exactly, but Barr was certainly not going to come forward to deny it. Not any longer.

"He was never found,” said the dean.

"No. Never found."

Years had passed by then since Barr had disappeared into the
sahará
south of Cairo while on expedition with two other scholars. Never found: no rumor, no body, no story. He had (maybe, probably) walked out at night from the lodge where the party had stopped. The Valley of the Kings, the American papers said, but it was actually a nameless place to the south of that, near the ancient location of the island sanctuary of Philae.

"Remarkable."

"Yes."

"A great scholar."

"Yes."

Isis, still worshipped at Philae
, said a writer at the end of the fifth century CE. It was Isis who “by roses and prayer” returned Lucius Apuleius from his asinine to his human shape when he was visited at last by a vision of her
. Her vestiment was of fine silke yeelding divers colors, sometimes yellow, sometime rosie, sometime flamy, sometime (which troubled my spirit sore) darke and obscure, covered with a blacke robe whereas here and there the stars glimpsed
. (It's Adlington's translation.)
And she disdayned not with her divine voyce to utter these words to me: Behold Lucius I am come, thy weepings and prayers hath moved me to succour thee.