Endless Things (42 page)

Two young people at Bruno's feet, spooning (living young people, not bronze), looked up at Pierce when he laughed, or wept.
Che?

"Bruno,” Pierce said, pointing up. “Giordano Bruno."

Ah yes. They nodded, looking to each other for more, getting nothing. They looked up at Bruno above them as Pierce might at a statue of Millard Fillmore in a public park. Just then Roo came up beside him, and she bore a trio of red roses, just bought at one of the flower-sellers’ stalls around them burdened with poppies and roses, oxeye daises, lilies and blue lupines. She put them in Pierce's hands. Swallowing in embarrassment and grief, with the incurious eyes of the hylic youth in their beauty upon him, he laid them at the statue's base, and stepped away. He took Roo's hand, amazed to see her eyes had filled.

"There,” she said.

The next afternoon they went up through the Castel St. Angelo, as Pierce had done alone: Hadrian's empty tomb, the catacombs and tunnels now as harmless as a funhouse, laughing children in plastic sandals racing up the newly cleaned and plastered spaces lit with bright strip lighting, laughing at the underground dungeons and at the tub made for the fat pope, who was hoisted with that block and tackle to take his bath, no really; and up and out into the sunlight, all Rome around. There was an alfresco bar there, at the very top, fully furnished with bored waiters, Campari ashtrays, wooden tables under grapevines, and all other things. The
prigione storiche
, though, were gone: Pierce circled the tower twice to find the entrance he remembered, but time had closed it and hidden the door. There wasn't even a sign.

"Maybe it was someplace else,” Roo said.

"No. It was here. I can't understand.” He had told her how he had visited that cell, the cell that might or might not have been Bruno's, the stone bed, the high narrow window, the strip of sky. “It couldn't be anywhere else."

They had come around again to the same place, the arched way back downward, the tables of wine and coffee drinkers who pointed out at far places in the city beyond.

"I'm sorry,” Roo said, and took his arm, sad for him: but his own heart actually lightened, as though a window had opened within him, light airs allowed in, and old things out. Oh well, he thought: oh well.

"We'll ask,” Roo said. “We'll go back and start over."

"No. They've probably been renovated out of existence. Probably somebody found out they were really just storerooms after all. Revision."

They sat instead, and ordered wine. The sky was clear green and gold, stained with dark contrails. Of course he knew that they were there somewhere, the row of dark doors, one of them his, and he felt sure he knew now why he wouldn't and couldn't find them, why no more than in dreams could he go back to a place he had once been, start over, and find the right way ahead. But it was all right. The world is only a cruel maze if you think you ought to be able to find a way from where you have been to where you want to be. He knew nothing of the sort; where he had been was the unvisitable Then, and this was the never-before-imagined Now. So maybe he was, and had always been, if he had only known it, a lucky man.

In an April of the following decade, Rosie Rasmussen drove over to Cliff's, going the back way over a hump of the Faraway Hills from her office in the Rasmussen Conference Center. Unafraid of spring mud in her new car or truck (it was a little of both, and called a Sport-Utility Vehicle) she went down an old road officially closed, bouncing and splashing hilariously through a slough at the bottom, and stopping to hear what she hadn't yet heard this year: peepers in their hundreds.

Upward again, and the roads improving as she rose, till the still-bare woods gave way a little and there were houses, many new ones, some huge ones, on new-made lots. A dozen years before no one lived out here but Cliff; pretty soon now it would be a neighborhood, the school bus would have to come. In some of the new driveways there was a Sport-Utility Vehicle like hers.

Cliff's place was still part of the woods more than it was part of the world. The entrance, marked only by a yellow mailbox on the other side of the road, was as easy to miss as a woodchuck's burrow; you turned in and went down a rutted way through a tunnel of trees more than a dozen years taller than they had been that first time she came, to a fairy-tale glade, where Cliff's house was. Cliff had made the house, with Spofford and others too to help sometimes, and it had seemed raw and just hewn when she had first seen it (Spofford was bringing her then, to have her heart healed or looked into): made of bare beams and boards, a row of old storm windows not all alike making up a front wall, the scragged necks of trees that had been roughly executed in the yard. Now it was different: the never-painted wooden heap looked ancient and gray, archaeological even, a lost galleon at the bottom of the sea. Not forbidding anymore. Maybe because she'd come so often since then; maybe because her heart had healed.

Cliff was working on the engine of his truck, an oily rag on the fender where tools rested. He looked up to see Rosie drive in and roll to a stop. He too, she thought: fifteen years ago his hair was as white as it was today, and almost as long, but back then it was shocking, wrong, like his pink pale skin and colorless eyes. Now he was only, or might seem only, an old man gone white with years.

"Hi, Rosie."

"Hi, Cliff."

"Just let me clean up."

"Don't hurry."

He smiled. It's what he told her: don't hurry. What he had told her so often, as though he knew she had a lot of time, when she didn't feel she did: no time at all.

When Spofford first brought her here, Cliff hadn't been at home. It was the Fourth of July, emblematic summer day; it was the day of the night Boney died, leaving Rosie (though Rosie wouldn't know it for some time) in charge of his house and his family foundation and all the business he had refused to finish. So that day nothing of what Spofford said Cliff could do was done to her.

Once, when Spofford was at his lowest, coldest, saddest, Cliff had bent over him, placed his mouth against Spofford's breast and made a sudden loud noise. A noise like a shout or a bark.
Hey! Wake up!
And Spofford had felt the whole of his being shaken, and startled tears had rushed to his eyes.

She too, when he had done the same to her: like one of those machines they start a stopped heart with. He had done it only twice.

He made her tea, which she didn't really need but which she thought he had his own reasons for wanting to occupy himself with. His house smelled of the fires that had burned all winter in his tall stove—his wife, Cliff called the stove, because of its matronly hourglass figure maybe, and its merry warmth. He asked Rosie about herself, about Sam.

"Sam's away,” she said. “Did I tell you where she's going?"

"No."

"The Antarctic,” Rosie said gravely. “Can you imagine?"

"That far."

"It's a university research trip she was selected for. Two months. She ought to be there by now."

Cliff took no notice, but she knew he listened.

"So, Cliff,” she said softly. “Do you ever think of that night."

"That night."

"When Beau and you and I went to The Woods.” She took the cup he gave her, and put her hand around its warm body. “That night in winter. When Sam was there."

He sat before her, sliding onto his stool with that wasteless motion, and bending toward her as though she had not asked for a memory or a story but offered to tell one.

She didn't need to, of course. Cliff knew it. How Sam's father, Mike Mucho, had joined a supposed Christian group, the Powerhouse, and they'd helped him to get legal custody of Sam. How then on a night in December Beau Brachman had gathered them, she and Spofford and Val and Cliff, like a SWAT team or band of brothers, and they had gone up to The Woods where the Christian group was squatting, and Cliff and Beau went in, and in a while they came back out, with Sam. And never after had that group or Mike complained or tried to get her back or sued to recover her. Why? No one could tell her that either. Mike went away to the Midwest where he'd come from, just a trip, he'd said, and then to California, where eventually he'd married a Christian wife; he'd sent long letters to Sam telling her stories about God and prayer that she liked at first and then grew bored with, then angry at: like a tiresome old aunt who keeps sending you babyish clothes or cheap jewelry long after you've got too old for it, because she can't really imagine you.

He loves you, though, Rosie would say.

He doesn't love me, Sam said simply, a fact. How can you love somebody you don't know?

Rosie had never decided if Sam had really ever been in danger from those people; it might be (she thought later, not then) that they were well intentioned and kind enough in their way, but only narrow and self-deluded, their conceptions driving them to cruelties they couldn't even perceive or count as cruelties. Maybe. But what she remembered—it was all that she could remember now with any of the intensity she'd felt then—was how Sam was returned from dark to light, danger to safety, like a lost child in a fairy tale rescued from an ogre who had imprisoned her and meant to eat her. It seemed at that moment, that winter night, as she took Sam in her arms, that the world ceased rocking in its socket and settled down to turn equably again.

Even the weather. Hadn't a drought, one that had lasted for months, ended the very next day—well, it might have been a week later—in a series of vast and heartening snowstorms all over this sector of earth? Heartening, exhilarating, alarming finally as the ploughed snow piled over Sam's head and nearly over her own, as it had when she was a kid herself; she watched Sam incorporate it all, the felt physics of frozen water, bluejay on the seed-speckled snow-clad pine, unforgettable even if you never exactly remembered it either.

The time she had spent there with them in The Woods, too. She'd had a seizure there, before Beau and Cliff and Rosie had arrived. Rosie used to ask her, with care, then and later: Sam, what happened? Do you remember? Do you remember being there? And she always said she forgot, or wouldn't say what she remembered.

The two profoundest words there are:
remember
and her brother
forget
.

"She's okay then,” Cliff said, as though that were his answer to her question.

"She's good."

"Beau,” he said. “Beau asked me that night to go up there with him. He said it meant everything."

"He told me that too. But not why."

Beau also told her, that night, that she wouldn't see him again, but not why, or where he would go, and thereafter no one had heard of him again, or if they heard of him, what they heard was that somebody else had heard of him, or seen him. But he never came back.

"Where is he? Don't you wonder? Don't you want to know?"

"If he wanted me to know, I'd know,” Cliff said. But he didn't try to show in his face that this made it all better. “You know some people think he'll come back, maybe after a long time; that things will come back around, and so will he. Sometime. But some other people think the world is made differently; that it doesn't go around in circles or in spirals, that it splits."

"It splits.” Rosie was content to listen to these things, not questioning or even doubting them, as she never had when Beau talked about them. She only thought they didn't have anything directly to do with her, or the world she inhabited: they were like travelers’ tales, tales of lands from which the tellers had come, to where they were going.

"It's like a Y,” Cliff said. From a cluster of pencils and pens in a cracked mug he took out a black wooden pen with a chisel point affixed, a Speedball: Rosie had one like it. And a paper from a pile of scraps. “If the world is like a Y, then you can never go back. He can never come back.” He dipped the pen in a bottle of India ink, and drew the letter on the paper: where the pen's point struck the paper flush, it drew a wide vertical bar, the upright, and then another wide bar, the left-hand way, the pen pulled toward him to intersect with the upright's top. And last the right-hand way, the edge of the pen point sliding upward from the intersection, leaving only a slim trail.

He turned it to face her. “If the world without Beau in it goes the big way, and he took the narrower way, then he only gets farther away the farther on we go."

Rosie studied it, the great brace or crotched tree he'd drawn. She thought: if it were drawn by a left-handed man, the left way would be the narrow one. And she thought of The Woods, and the night. Suppose it was we who had left the main way then, and he'd gone on. Without us. “Is that what you think?"

"No,” Cliff said. “I don't think there's one big Y in the road, where the world turns off. Parts company. No. I think there's a Y every single moment we're alive."

"Did Beau think so?"

"I don't know,” Cliff said. “He and I. We start from different places. It's why we could work together, sometimes. Sometimes not."

"Different places how."

"Beau knew—he thought, he believed, he saw—that everything begins in spirit. He thought reality was spirit, and the physical things and events of life were illusions, imagination. Like dreams. And he wanted us to wake up. He knew he couldn't just shake us awake: for one thing he knew he was dreaming too, most of the time. What he thought he could do, what could be done, is go down into dreams, the dreams we share, the dreams we call the world, and alter them. Or he could teach us how to alter them ourselves. He said that he could be leaven, like Paul in the Bible says we can be."

"And then."

"And then, if we could do that, we'd know they were dreams. All hopes and fears, power, pain, but also all gods. Ghosts. Earth, nations, space and time. It's not that they don't exist; they exist
as dreams
, and people are bound by them. They exist as much as anything can. But none of them is
final
, even if everybody shares them."

"And you don't think that?"

"I know what he means. I listened. I heard.” He looked around himself, and ran his hand over the surface of his table, smooth and varicolored wood and not quite level, like a plain or a body's back. “I think I'm from here,” he said. “I think this is so, this is actual. I think that all we do and can do and will do arises from it. I just think we don't know all of what
it
is. We learn. We learn by doing what we think we can't, and when we can, we share, and so we find out more of what
it
is, or can be."