Endless Things (29 page)

A cloud, harmless, covered the sun, and Fellowes Kraft saw that far down at the end of his drive an unfamiliar big car was turning in. Not the high school boy's old Rambler, nor Boney's Buick. An Oldsmobile, an 88.

Am I not done now? he asked, of someone, of all. I can't finish. Is there really more yet to tell?

"It was in that autumn that he died then?” Pierce asked.

"No,” said Rosie Rasmussen. “He got pretty sick, I guess. He spent some time in and out of the hospital. But he didn't die."

"He didn't."

"No. In fact I think I remember that he actually got quite a bit more work done that winter."

"You think so?"

"I mean I think Boney said so, but I don't remember all that well; it didn't seem so important to keep track of it. Why are you talking so softly?"

Pierce shifted the phone to the left side and bent into the corner of the little booth. “The phone here isn't actually supposed to be used except for emergencies,” he said. “Not for like long conversations."

"Oh.” There was a pause, suggestive of puzzlement, perhaps preparatory to asking where “here” was, but then she only said, “So why did you want to know?"

He couldn't yet say why, or what he was looking for in Kraft's last days. He had come within sight of the end of Kraft's typescript and felt as though he had caught up with him, had reached the point Kraft himself had reached when he ran out of certainties, and now the two of them stood together on the brink of branching possibilities, facing decisions: which now Pierce alone could make.

"You know Beau knew him in that year,” Rosie said.

"Beau Brachman?"

"Yes. Beau came to the county just about then. He used to go visit at Kraft's a lot."

"Why? I mean what would he want there?"

"I don't know. This is before I came back. I was living in Bloomington then."

Beau Brachman thought the world is made from stories. He had told Pierce that, and surely not Pierce alone. All stories, he said, are one story. Or maybe he had said: one story is all stories.

In Pierce's cottage in the Faraway Hills, on a winter morning, the last day Beau had been seen in the Faraways. One story. You're not required to finish it, Beau said. But you're not supposed to give up on it, either. And so Pierce had set out.

"You still there?” Rosie asked.

"It's just not like his others,” Pierce said. “It's different."

"Just because of the time when he wrote it, maybe,” she said. “You know. In those years. Everything was becoming different. After being the same for so long."

"Yes,” Pierce said. “For a while it seemed like that."

"Every day you woke up and something was different from the way it had been when you went to sleep. I remember."

"Yes."

"Hair. Go to bed and wake up and every man you meet has sideburns down his cheeks."

"I remember."

"Go to bed married,” she said. “Wake up free."

"So you don't know,” Pierce said, “how close he came to finishing."

"Nope."

"Nope?"

"Well, I guess it depends,” she said, “on how long it was supposed to be."

"For a longer book, of course, he would have had to start sooner.” Silence. “I'll just keep going,” Pierce said. “I'm not far now."

"Call me when you get there. Wherever you are."

He hung up the instrument but for a time didn't leave the little cranny, small as a confessional, where it had been installed. There was a pencil stub, hideously chewed, there on the ledge, and a white wall never soiled with graffiti or the numbers of lovers. He thought what might be appropriate to scrawl.
Credo quia absurdum. Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. Call VAt 69—the Pope's phone number
.

In his cell again he sat at the plain desk, where the photocopy of Kraft's book lay, beside the gray slab of his computer. The computer was a Zenith; the “Z” in the name on the lid was the same lightning-bolt zag as on the great radio and record player they had listened to in Kentucky, whereon Sam had played his Caruso records, his Gershwin rhapsody. Two slider tabs on either side unlocked it, and it opened then like a box, the lower half being the keyboard and the works, the other half the glass tablet or screen whereon the work was shown. It was called a laptop, though wearisome to hold in a lap, even one as broad as his. Before him, on the keyboard half, were two small trapdoors, each made to hold a square flat “disk” of magically encoded information: on the left side, the instruction set by which the machine would learn and act; on the right side, the disks containing Kraft's book, which Pierce was retyping from Rosie's photocopy and rewriting as he went.

He turned it on. No daemon of Bruno's or Dee's as potent as this; when this one was born, this one and its million fellows, then the world began anew. So those who loved them and served them—and were served by them—were just then claiming. As it awoke it spelled out on the screen a question for him, a question he had set it to ask:
how can I help you?

He directed it, with a few cryptic keystrokes, to call from its right-hand pocket the last of the twenty-five files he had made of Kraft's book, named in order by the letters of the alphabet. Thank the great stillness here: he was nearly done copying it all. The one that collected itself now upon the screen before him was called
y.doc
. In bright daylight the screen was dim and the letters and words hard to perceive, but now at evening it was a clear pool, book, lamp, and thought in one.

The book itself, Kraft's original, had turned out to be less complete even than Pierce remembered it being. As the pages had silted up Kraft had seemingly begun making the worst of fictional errors, or ceased correcting them: all those things that alienate readers and annoy critics, like the introduction of new major characters at late stages of the story, unpacked and sent out on new adventures while the old main characters sit lifeless somewhere offstage, or stumble to keep up. New plot movements, departing from the main branch of the story for so long that they
become
the main branch without our, the readers', agreement or assent. All of it inducing that sense of reckless haste or—worse—droning inconsequence that sooner or later causes us—us, the only reason for any of it, the sole feelers of its feelings, sole knowers of its secrets—to sigh, or groan in impatience, or maybe even end (with a clap) the story the writer seems only to want to keep on beginning.

At the bottom of the pile it began to turn into alternative versions, partial chapters, stuff that seemed to be maybe even from some other book entirely as the plot ran down or ran away. Pages started off hopefully with a standard coupling (
Meanwhile in another city
) only to be abandoned after a few sentences, or contained only a single paragraph of thought or explanation left floating alone on a blank sea. Then finally it just stopped. It actually stopped in midsentence—as Philip Sidney's
Arcadia
did, and Thucydides, and the
Chemical Wedding
, and Dante's
De eloquentia vulgaris
, for that matter, good company for an abandoned book, if it was abandoned. It actually seemed to Pierce, as he worked over it, not that the book was failing, running out of gas, but that a progressive disease was eating it up, and might go on doing so despite Pierce's efforts, corrupting it pastwards from the conclusion, which was already gone.

gone, gone to hide her head where no one knows, until someday somewhere

That was all the last page said. Which was maybe a sort of foreshadowing or unkept promise, and stories can end with those, but this one wasn't even the end of the matter of the story, for some of the events actually occurred later in time than this moment, though told of earlier, and if it were true, it would make those earlier parts untrue, roads not taken and impossible now to take.

Well. Beginnings are easy. Everybody knows. So are continuings. It's endings that are hard. Not only hard to think up, but maybe hard to assent to: the closer you get to the tugging of the final knots, the more reluctance you might feel, Kraft might have felt, after all his labor, decades long in a sense, since this was the culmination and closing of a series as well as of a volume. And the end of his own span approaching.

So maybe he just couldn't bring himself to end it, even if he knew how, and knew he must. All right then: the computer's winking cursor stood on the last line, at the last character, and Pierce's finger hovered over the point key, yet unwilling to press it, not even the conditional three times, certainly not the final single full stop. Of course if he did, if he “entered” it, he needed only to press another key and make it disappear; for it
was not yet
, that was the strange and unsettling thing about it here on this machine, none of it was
yet
in a way, all of it was still malleable, he could send a tide of change backward through it all with another key press or two. If he chose he could, with a few key taps, reduce it all to a simple list of words in alphabetical order.

But all novels are like that. This one only revealed to be so because of this new immaterial or unstable mode it was cast in. For readers, time in a novel goes only one way: the past told of in the turned pages is fixed, and the future inexistent till read. But actually the writer, like God, stands outside of time, and can begin his creation at any moment in it. All the past and all the future are present in his conception at once, nothing fixed until all of it's fixed. Then he keeps this secret from the reader, as God might keep his secret from us: that the world is as though written, and erasable, and rewritable. Not once but more than once: time and again.

Which isn't so, of course: which isn't so. Only in here.

He said or thought
Oh
. He felt a flight of little laughing
putti
tumble through the air of his cell and vanish
. Oh I see.

For a long time he only sat, and no one observing him—no observer looking into that cell from outside, if such an observer there were or could be—would have supposed that Pierce saw anything more than the same words he had been looking at before. Then slowly he put out his hand, turned it, and looked at his watch, and then at the glow of the garden outside. The bells rang for Vespers, the close of day. He stood; then after a time he sat again. He took and turned over, faceup, the facedown pages of Kraft's book. And began again to read.

The abbey where Pierce read and thought was a recent foundation; its church was a great strong Romanesque one, as simple and lasting as the hill it stood on, but not old. It reminded Pierce of the welcoming and comforting structures of stone and timbers built in the wild places by the government just a few decades before, when labor was cheap and hopes were high, the lodges and the nature centers of state parks, the riparian works and dams, places Pierce had loved to come upon as boy when his cousins and he went on travels in summer to other, more American places than the one they lived in. Like those rough but thoughtfully crafted places too were the oak pews of the abbey church, the pale flagged floors, the ironwork hinges and candle stands. In high plain niches were statues, but only the required few, the family figures of Mary and Joseph on either side of the stage where their Son's passion and transformation were daily enacted. They and all the other pictures and devotional objects were on this evening blind and obscure, wrapped for the last weeks of Lent in their purple shrouds.

It was Compline, nine o'clock at night. In the bell tower, the bells swung and their carriages rocked, sometimes carrying the bells around in a complete circle, the circle children think they might make if they push their swings out far enough. At this hour Christ prayed in the garden, on the Mount of Olives. Around him his apostles slept and dreamed of what?
If this cup may not pass away from Me except I drink it, then not My will but Thine be done
. A problematic scene for trinitarians, Pierce thought. Jesus seemed to grow less sure of himself the nearer the agony came. Just a frightened human after all. What have I done.

Pierce was not, at this night hour, in the dim blank-windowed church at prayers with the brothers. He was seated again in the confessional-like telephone cubby. When the bells ceased he lifted the handset and after a moment's pause dialed a number, not Rosalind Rasmussen's this time. He told the operator that he wanted to reverse the charges. And when the phone was lifted and answered there, he heard the operator ask,
Will you accept the charges?

"Yes. I'll accept the charges."

"Hi,” Pierce said then.

"Hey. It's you."

"It's me."

"I thought you wouldn't call. That you couldn't. Except emergencies."

"Well."

"It's not an emergency?"

"No. No emergency."

Silence. She had a way—always had—of leaving phone conversations, going silent, having nothing to say it might be, or pondering or distracted. Unafraid that her interlocutor might think she'd gone, or was mum from hostility or impatience.

"So I had a little breakthrough,” he said at last. She didn't respond, and after a while he said, “I was wrong about it. The book. I had, well, an insight. I think. Today."

"Good. How is it there?"

"It's okay."

"Just okay?"

"I don't know if I can make it. The whole two weeks."

"What."

"Prayer. Bells, every three hours. At every meal we listen to tapes, about meditation. This murmuring."

"Doesn't sound so bad."

"I kind of dread it. I shrink from it. I may be having an allergic reaction to Catholicism. After all."

She laughed. Pierce could hear cries and hilarity in the deep far-off, where she was.

"Like hives,” he said. “I didn't expect it. How are the girls?"

"Jeez, Pierce, they're great. They're so great. You know I went to the doctor yesterday..."

"Yes and what..."

"And he remembered back when they were toddlers and I went to him for a physical and he asked was I getting any exercise. You remember? And I said well gee no not really, and then I said well actually I do. I lift weights. Yeah. Their names are Vita and Mary."