Endless Things (49 page)

"And what,” Axel asked, “is the prognosis?"

"Well.
If
you actually have it, more things like the things that have happened to you. Hallucinations. Sleepwalking. Vivid dreams. Paranoia."

Axel gave a great shuddering, self-pitying sigh. And Pierce remembered Brooklyn for a moment.

"I have not had hallucinations,” he said. “I am haunted. But by the real. The quite, quite real."

"The girls,” Pierce said softly, “want you to tell them again about the time you got hit by a train."

Axel's great white head turned on him, eyes full of affront. “Train?"

"They said you said—oh never mind."

Day grew brighter.

"Is it,” Axel asked, “progressive?"

Pierce said nothing.

"Oh God, Pierce. You'll have to lock me in my room. I might commit some hideous crime. And not know."

Pierce made reassuring noises, but Axel rose up distracted, nearly upsetting his cup. He gripped the bedpost and stared.

"Oh Pierce,” he said. “I'm so tired. I long to die."

"Oh you don't either."

"I to my grave, where peace and rest await me. I do, sometimes I do."

"
Some
times! Sometimes
I
do."

"Thou thy earthly task has done,” Axel said. “Home art gone, and met thy maker."

"Home art gone,” Pierce said, “and
ta'en thy wages
. Is how it goes."

"Golden lads and girls,” said Axel. “Oh God.” He was weeping, head high now. He wept a little almost every day, and Pierce had begun to weep with him, which astonished them both. Much of the rest of the day he was cheerful; he was, he said, himself.

"Can you get dressed? I mean,
will
you get dressed? We want to get going on this expedition."

"This what?"

"Journey. Trip. To the Faraway Hills."

"Oh leave me behind. Leave me, leave me."

"No,” Pierce said, softly but definitively. “No, no. No."

"He says he can't tell sometimes whether time is passing, or rather how
much
time is passing,” Pierce said to Roo at the breakfast table. “He thinks sometimes it's days since I went up to see him. That after I've gone it's hours till I come back, when it's been minutes. Not
believes
. Just doesn't know."

"Tell him to pray,” Roo said. She was doing Vita's hair.

"Well, gee."

"No, I mean it. He remembers all these prayers. The Hail Mary. The Our Father. The Whatever. They aren't going to go. So tell him he should pray, and keep count, and that way he'll know how much time is going by. Keep aholt of it."

He looked at her: hair clip in her teeth, Vita's dark fell of hair in her hands.

"Okay,” he said.

"Just another day,” Pierce said, loading his car, the Festina wagon. “Another day of living and striving in the fields of the actual and the possible."

Striving is from strife, he thought, like living from life. Wiving from wife. He called out to his children and his father. Let's get on our way. Way is from Via, and Via is Vita; we think so, because we are the beasts who know we are on the way, that we've come from somewhere and are going somewhere else, and it might be somewhere good and it might be bad, we don't know.

"Beep the horn,” said Vita. “Bye-bye house."

"Bye-bye."

"Bye-bye."

Great animals had used to roam the roads they took toward the Faraways, but they were mostly gone now, the last of them weary and slow and liable to be seen on the side of the road, hood erect or an orange sticker blinding their mirror: Cougars, Mustangs, Stingrays, Barracudas, Eagles, Lynxes. The new cars had neither beast names nor number names nor names of glamorously speedy things like Corvettes and Javelins and Corsairs; their names were meaningless syllables, which were maybe the cars’ own real secret names in the land they came from, Carland: that's what Pierce told the girls. Camry. Jetta. Jolly. Corolla. His own Festina, which he was sure wasn't Latin.

Crows rose from the greening fields, or messed with dead things by the roadside, prancing and picking delicately. “God bless you, crows!” the girls called out, as their mother would too sometimes to the dusky tribe, the crow being her Totem Animal, because of her name, Corvino. “Have a nice day!” they called back to the retreating crows. “And we really mean it!"

Names. Vita and Mary, reciting their own origin story, recounted their mother's name, and how it, therefore they, came to be.

"Because her mother's name was
Rose
,” said Mary, “and her father's name was
Kelley
,” cried Vita, “and so she was named
Roseann Kelley Corvino
,” they said together, and they laughed, as they always did at this point in the story, hearty stage laughter. How Grandpa Corvino later came to be known as Barney and how the “Roseann” turned into “Roo” or was dropped were later chapters they sometimes wanted their mother to recount. But now they stopped listening and played rhyming games, rhythmic rapid hand-patting in a pattern too quick and complex for Pierce to follow, left hands to right hands, right hands to right hands, hands to knees and hands together, never missing.

Mama mama lyin’ in bed

Called for the doctor and the doctor said

Let's get the rhythm of the hand

Let's get the rhythm of the head knock knock

Let's get the rhythm of the haaawt dog

Let's get the rhythm of the haaawt dog

"Who's been teaching your children these ribald rhymes?” Axel asked.

"What's that mean?” Roo said. “'Ribbled?’”

"He means dirty,” Pierce said. “Erotic. Full of double entendres."

"Are you kidding?” Roo said. “That one's on
Sesame Street
."

"It's a doctor joke,” Pierce said. “Everybody knows."

The girls repeated that one a while—the last line had a rudimentary or vestigial hip swing or grind to go with it,
Sesame Street
or no—and then embarked on another, more complicated one: smiling even in their deep concentration at the jokes, but sometimes breaking rhythm to laugh, and then beginning again.

Miss Sophie had a steamboat

The steamboat had a bell

The steamboat went to Heaven

Miss Sophie went to

Hello operator

Please give me number nine

And if you disconnect me

I'll cut off your

Behind the frigerator

There was a piece of glass

Miss Sophie sat upon it

And cut her little

"Well?” Pierce said.

"Oh can it, Pierce."

Ask me no more questions

I'll tell you no more lies

The boys are in the bathroom

Zipping up their

Flies are in the parlor

Bees are in the park

Miss Sophie and her boyfriend

Are kissing in the d-a-r-k dark dark dark

It occurred to Pierce that you might be able to date some parts of the rhyme by internal evidence: that operator, like the one in Bondieu, gone now forever. But more of it was universal, eternal, coded wisdom older than the old gods. Life on earth. Oh dark dark dark.

The dark is like a movie

A movie's like a show

A show is like tee-veehee

And that's not all I know.

"There's the exit,” Roo said.

They left the old turnpike, entered Skylands, and crossed the Jenny Jump Mountains; they skirted the Land of Make Believe without stopping, despite the children's pleas. At a certain point they crossed out of that state, and in not too long a time found themselves on the eastern bank of a wide southwest-flowing river.

"The Blackberry River?” asked the girls, but no it wasn't quite; Pierce told them how it got its name, from a certain Lord Blackbury, to whom the king long ago gave a grant of land, in what was then called Ferroway County. Long, long ago.

"Is that true?” they said.

"It's true,” he said.

They crossed the bridge at Fair Prospect, and since now they had been on the road some hours, they had to stop, and there ahead, as it had always been, just where those who have turned toward the Faraways are meant to stop, was the village store by the side of the road. Pierce told the story of how he had first come to stop here, when his bus had failed; he imitated how it had tried to climb the last hill like the Little Engine that Could, only it couldn't, and here had stopped.

"Daddy, is that true?"

"You took a
bus?
"

They all exited from the Festina, small to tall, and dispersed.

The soda machine like a long red sarcophagus was, of course, no longer there; from the dark, cold waters within it Pierce had on that August afternoon chosen a Coke, and opened it on the rusted fang by the slot where you put in the quarter that it cost. Instead, a huge glowing repository gaudy as a jukebox offered drinks twice the size for four times the money. At the register, though, stood the same rack of cigarettes he remembered, many brands the same, and he picked out his brand, the ones he'd always smoked when he didn't roll his own, back in the days long ago when he smoked. The oblong pack in satiny cellophane, the smokes within yielding to his thumb-press. But it was too small: it felt absurdly little in his hand, as though it had shrunk with distance, or stayed the same as he went on, same thing. For a long time he held it as the incurious clerk observed him: turning and turning it, intrigued by the impossibility.

"The cigarettes?” asked the clerk, finger on his register.

"No, no,” he said. “I don't smoke."

"Never too late to start."

"Ha ha.” Camel, pyramids, sandy waste. And where would you go if you found yourself lost in this desert? Why, you'd go around to the city on the back. He returned the pack to its place.

Outside he sat down at the picnic table that was still there, going gray like himself, to wait for his women to finish in the bathroom. A great maple shaded it, its leaves begun but not done, veined damp and tender like the wings of newborn insects. Full, plush, and heavy when he'd first sat here. A little breeze had on that day stirred the leaves, and his hair. And out from that side road, beyond that now-shuttered house, had come Spofford and his sheep. Pierce sipped the Coke, and thought of those elaborately contrived fictions popular (or at least intriguing, to some) in the days he had first left the city to come here: stories that, though maybe vastly long, are shown at the end to have taken place all in a night's or a day's or even just a single moment's imagining, at the end of which the world of the beginning picks up again: the drink that was on the way to being drunk is drunk, the cigarette that was being lit is lit and the match shaken out. No time at all, thank God, has passed, except in the realm of thought, or desire: all ways (but one, for the now-chastened hero) lie still open.

"Let's go,” said Roo beside him.

Now Vita and Mary were carried past the scenes of Pierce's life and Roo's life here, before their own existence. See that motel? Daddy lived there. Daddy, you lived in a
motel?
And see that place that sells cars? Mommy sold cars there; well, she helped to sell cars, with her father, Grandpa Barney. Mom, you sold
cars?
The road had been widened, the strip repopulated with the new franchises, the dealership sold Yugos and Nissans. Barney had said once that he wanted to be buried on the lot, where the test-driven cars could ride over him every day, but he lay in a cemetery, a small brass plaque at his head noting that he was a veteran of the U.S. Army, his rank and unit: like Sam Oliphant's far away.

Everything had grown smaller. Pierce caught himself thinking he was glad to have come back before it all became too small to enter, but when they actually came close to them, doors and roads and gates let them pass the same as ever. Relativity. See down that road? See that big yellow house? Daddy used to live there; not
there
, but down that way, no, let's not go down, let's go on.

At Arcady, the Rasmussen Humanities Center, Roo parked in the new parking lot that covered a swathe of meadow where once Spofford had kept his sheep. Spofford and his truck had turned in just ahead of them, coming from the other way.

"No more sheep?” Pierce said to him, taking his hand and then falling into an embrace. “Your Totem Animal."

"Too much damn trouble. It was all I could think about, even when I put ‘em on the table. The damn trouble they were.” He was grinning, turning to Pierce's girls to be introduced. And Rosie was suddenly there, in the doorway of Arcady, unchanged, it seemed, not gone gray as he and Spofford were rapidly doing, bright shawl around her shoulders, and beside her a young woman Pierce didn't know, a woman who seemed to be both here and not here, graciously present, secretly absent.
Self-possessed
, he might say.

"God, Pierce!"

"Hi, Rosie, hi. Rosie, you remember Kelley Corvino, my wife. My father, Axel Moffett. And our girls, Mary and Vita, no Vita and Mary."

Roo raised a cool hand to Rosie, and put forward the girls, who in earlier years would have hung back and hid behind her, but not now. Roo didn't know that Pierce and Rosie had once slept together, but then Pierce didn't know that Spofford and Roo had. Indeed they could hardly, any of them, exactly remember these things, only the bare names of them. Gone.

"And you all know my daughter, Samantha,” Rosie said, and the young woman, dark brown curls and plumbless blue eyes, put out her hand to Pierce.

Rosie took Pierce and his package—the photocopied typescript, which she'd said he should chuck but which he found he couldn't, and the set of little plastic squares within which the book hid, at once changed and unchanged—down the hall to the office.
It
was all certainly changed, clean and bright; even the floors had been bleached and varnished so that they glowed like buttered toast.

"You haven't seen all this before,” she said.

"No."

"Like it?"

"Um,” he said, not knowing how to answer. In the office, the same fruitwood bookcases anyway, filled with software manuals and file cases of white plastic. There were posters and notices of lecture series, conferences, calls for papers.