Endless Things (7 page)

What he hadn't known, and would never learn later, was that by then the thing lost had already been found. It had been found by him and others, and redeemed from the place where it was hidden and at threat, and restored to the place it should possess; and this event had stopped the decline of the whole world toward dissolution, toward frozen inanition and repetition such as Pierce had experienced in the cold halls and hot rooms of Rose. The world—"the world,” all this, day and night, self and others, things and other things, inside and out—had been coasting to a stop, and just in time had been put back in a forward gear again. And then it could continue, and would, until all traces of that moment of redemption were erased from all hearts and memories (But you remember it, don't you? Night, and the woods, and the lights put out, and one light restored?). New-wakened Adam would then open his eyes again, the beautiful circle would close, and roll on forever into the future and the past at once.

So:

The snow had continued to fall, and grown steadily fiercer, till the airport, great-winged white bird, was wrapped in it. Outside the wide windows, airplanes were ghostly, moving to their assigned runways with lights burning. Then not moving. Pierce, ticket in hand, heard that his flight was to be delayed. Then further delayed. Then canceled. New arrangements to make for the night flight, if there was to be one.

At evening, Pierce and his fellows arrayed themselves on hard benches designed only for a brief alighting in passage, not for the comfort of the benighted and delayed; there was no way Pierce could twist his big frame into more than a moment's repose. He gazed in envy at men and women and children who had tucked up nearby with their coats up to their chins or their heads under their wings, breathing softly as though enchanted. The short day turned toward darkness.

Maybe he wouldn't go, after all. He thought this, and grew still. Maybe he'd sit here as the snow flew and covered the world, sit for days, for months; he'd sleep and dream, fill his new red journal with what he might have done but finally did not do, and go farther inward than he would ever dare to go outward.

And just then in the limbo-like procession of snowbound souls through the great space, a figure attracted his attention, and at the same moment the figure seemed to notice him: a man not large but somehow big around, in a jaunty feathered fedora and a fur-collared coat, a leather document case tucked under his arm and a small suitcase on a little trundle he pulled along.

It was Frank Walker Barr, once Pierce's professor and advisor at Noate University. His eyebrows rose, and he stepped or rolled toward Pierce with an air that seemed to suggest he was conscious of illustrating the ancient wisdom about coincidences—that if you run into someone you haven't seen in years, it's certain you will very soon run into him again, and then a third charmed time. For Pierce had, not two months before, walked and talked with Barr in an obscure resort in Florida, and been told truths, and tried to listen. This after he had not seen his old mentor for a decade.

"Hello again,” Frank Walker Barr said to him. The plump coat over his tweeds made him a Humpty Dumpty, the same chummy, threatening smile cleaving his great face almost in two, hand held out to shake. “You're traveling?"

"Yes."

"Abroad?"

"Well, yes. Britain, then Europe. Italy. Germany."

"Research."

"Um in part. And you?"

"I hadn't been planning on it, but yes. In part,” Barr said, regarding him with interest, “because of the conversation we had in Florida."

"Oh?"

"Your book."

"Oh."

"Soon after we got home. I decided to go to meet some colleagues instead of resting at home."

"Colleagues where?"

"Taffy worried, because she couldn't come. Family matters. She worries too much. She thinks she needs to be near me at all times. To take down my last worlds maybe. I mean words."

"Aha."

"Egypt,” Barr said. “A small conference of paleographers."

"And you're delayed as well?"

"Oh hours. We'd better have a drink. Come along."

"I think they closed the bar."

"The Olympic Club. For frequent flyers. Just down here,” Barr said.

An awesome refusal broached in Pierce's soul. He already suspected that he had entered into one of those chain narratives where an innocent is handed on from one garrulous interlocutor to another, follows fingerboards to the next who points him to the next. Until he refuses to play anymore. And so wins
. You're nothing but a pack of cards
.

After a moment, though, he gathered up his shabby impedimenta and followed his former teacher, who had begun to roll away purposefully through the crowd.

It was his mother whom Pierce had gone to Florida to visit, on the first leg (as he would come to see it) of this his way away: the little motel where she and her friend Doris now lived and made a living, where she had gone after Sam Oliphant was dead. Pierce came to make her speak, to answer him at last, to explain why it was that everything that happened to him or ever could happen to him seemed to have been fixed by his twelfth year, why he could somehow never go onward but only turn back: a fate like one of those diagrams in the Boy Scout manual he had once cherished, bowline on a bight maybe, a rope following minute arrows, inward, around, out but always back in again, strong and un-undoable.

For instance, there in that little Florida resort town, on the esplanade, he'd met Barr. He'd first read a book of Barr's in his twelfth year. Barr had afterward been his advisor at Noate University, and had used his long pull to get Pierce his first teaching job, at Barnabas College. There was apparently no life passage he could make without Barr standing there, or nearby, amused and foresighted.

"Now tell me all about it,” Barr had asked him, there in the sun-warmed Florida evening. “Your concept."

He had brought Pierce to his own little condo on the beach, to have a drink with him and his wife, Taffy.
Second
wife. Over the last dozen years Taffy had been appearing more and more prominently in the forematter of Barr's books, moving up from the Acknowledgments page (where she had first appeared under her own last name), to a Dedication, to a line beneath Barr's own on the title page (though in smaller type), lastly to full partner, not in smaller type. By Frank Walker Barr and Taffy B. Barr. The books themselves seemed unchanged.

"Well,” Pierce said, sun through their window impaling the promised drink in his hand. “It was something you said. Once when we met in New York."

"Ah yes."

"You talked about how someone might do history even if there weren't universities and tenure. How you could go to work answering questions, questions about the past that people have."

"Ah yes,” Barr said again, though Pierce was unconvinced he actually remembered this exchange, in a dark hotel bar so long ago.

"As an example,” Pierce said, “you asked why so many people believe that Gypsies are able to tell fortunes. Prophesy. Do magic. Where they get these supposed powers."

Taffy, who was years younger and a couple of inches taller than her husband, watched and listened as she made a cold supper in the condo's tiny galley. Pink shrimp and avocado and bright tomatoes. Her coloring was what Pierce thought was called
roan
in horses; she had that strong and slightly desiccated look of women who were cute early on and are going to make it through to handsome age, but just barely.

"That's where it began,” Pierce said.

"It,” said Barr.

"Yes, I found out,” Pierce said.

"Simple enough,” Barr said.

"You said,” Pierce said, and swallowed—this was hard to recount, because
it
was Pierce's book, which he had been compelled by Barr's question to set out on, and which he already suspected would never be completed. “You said that there is more than one history of the world. More than one. One for each of us, you said."

"Yes."

"I thought what would happen if you took that as true. Literally true, not metaphorically or."

"Not just more than one history of the world,” Barr said. “More than one world?"

"It seemed to me a case could really sort of be made.” He knew he was saying too much, and couldn't stop, as though here before these beings, regarding him kindly enough but with a shaming wisdom in their tolerant smiles—so lucky, too, unlike him, lucky in each other—he had perforce to unburden himself of this, this. “So then I'd consider how such other worlds are made, or were made,” he said. “How does one world turn into another, become the next. How are they, you know, cast."

"
Cosmopoeia
,” said Barr. “World-making."

"Um yes."

"That
poeia
being the root of our word poetry, of course. Poets being makers. Makers of poems, and of the worlds in them.” He sipped the martini he held. “So I'd guess you're embarked on a piece of poetry too. And that your taking this metaphor literally is itself a species of metaphor."

Pierce said nothing in response to this, tried to smile inscrutably, knowing he could not himself have thought of that formula, and wondering if it was so.

Taffy was now stripping the skin from tiny blood oranges and dropping the sections in a cut-glass bowl. “I'd need an example,” she said. “An instance."

"That's what I mean,” Pierce said. “I mean that's where the question led me. To Egypt, which is where Gypsies come from, and where magic was invented, and the gods first worshipped."

"Oh?"

"Only of course they don't,” Pierce said. “They were
believed
to come from there. But the place they were believed to come from wasn't the Egypt we know. It was another Egypt."

"Ah yes,” said Frank Walker Barr.

"Another Egypt,” said his wife. “Well, now."

Pierce began to explain about the ancient writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, priest and king of Egypt, and the error that Renaissance thinkers had made, to suppose that these late-antique Greek metaphysical vaporings were authentic Egyptian beliefs; and Barr put in that at that time hieroglyphics of course couldn't be read, and were interpreted as mystic signs when mystic signs were all the rage; and Taffy went on working, raising her eyes now and then to one or the other of them; and Pierce had the impression that she actually knew all this already, and that Barr knew she knew it, and they were both at work eliciting it from him, Pierce, like cops at an interrogation, or parents listening to a child's story, not news to them.

"Ægypt,” he said. “A land that never existed. Where Hermes was king, where magic worked; and the memory of it descends to us to this day, and we can remember it even though the land ceased to exist, and now never existed. We made a new one to replace it. Egypt."

"'When I was a king in Egypt,'” Taffy declaimed, “'and you were a Christian slave.’”

"Babylon,” said her husband.

"I'm not babbling,” she said. “It's a poem."

She had enough oranges now in her bowl, it seemed, and to them she added a bag of tiny marshmallows. She noticed Pierce watching her preparations.

"Ambrosia,” she said. She poured honey over it from a jar. Sue Bee. “That's what it's called. I don't know why. Frank loves it."

Frank smiled, in fact he beamed, and the beam fell upon Pierce. “Want some?” he asked.

"Oh no,” Pierce said. “Oh no. None for me, thanks. None for me."

That wasn't all that befell Pierce there in the Sunshine State that week. It was then that he discovered something he had once promised he could find but had never actually believed existed, a thing he had told Julie Rosengarten would be disclosed in the last pages of his book, a thing—maybe the only thing—that had survived from a former age when things were not as they are now but worked in a different way, something that really still worked that way, the way things once did. He found it in the place where he should have known it was, but had not before been able to see into; down a different passage, in the deep dark, and yet not far away at all. That's all been told; the story's still there to be discovered in at least a few libraries and in those blessed stores that keep unwanted books until their time at last comes around, if it does, or at least until they catch someone's eye or stir someone's heart, unless their paper yellows and crumbles into illegibility first: the whole story of how Pierce found the thing that he had sought for, right in his own backyard. Not that it mattered then, really, materially, since Pierce was never going to write that book nor any other like it; and this he confessed to Barr in the Olympic Club at JFK.

"That's too bad,” Barr said. “Too bad. Because of course there's been some remarkable new thinking on the subject lately. Egypt and Greek wisdom. You must have been following. Major controversy."

Pierce nodded cautiously. He hadn't been following.

"I'm guessing,” Barr said, “that you got your grounding in this matter largely from Frances Yates.
Dame
Frances Yates."

Pierce was vaguely shocked, hearing the name said aloud, a cloudlet of actuality emitted on the stale false air. A sort of category error. No one should speak that name but him, in his heart.

"Wonderful woman.
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
. It's where we all got it, isn't it? You're going to London? You should look her up. She's at the Warburg Institute, you know."

"Yes."

"Wonderful woman. Major influence. Give her my regards when you see her. She could be wrong, though."

"Wrong in what way?"

"Well, centrally, her thesis—it's hardly hers alone—is that the Renaissance made this colossal mistake in the dating of the pseudo-Egyptian manuscripts that they attributed to a single author, this semidivine Hermes Trismegistus; that what they had were in fact Hellenistic writings that had been given a false provenance by their author, or authors, as was so common in that time. So the wonderful mystical Egyptian world they depicted was in fact post-Plato, even post-Christian. A dream."

"Yes."

"That's the consensus view. All the scholars. But what if they're wrong? They were the latest word when you were at school, but that was some time ago.” Twinkle. “I think a case can be made—well, it
is
being made—that those writings, the so-called Hermetic Corpus, go back well before Christianity."