He had gone back and forth to the city over hills and valleys caught in the glamor of golden stasis, September, this time of hastening transformation that always seems so perfect and changeless. Sat by her long hours as she lay suffering, and learned at last how you could believe, how you could be grateful for being able to believe, that really truly there was someone inside the integuments of suffering flesh, someone who could never be touched, never hurt, who only waited patiently in bondage to be freed.
And now that time was come again, once again. Unfolding tirelessly and willingly as it always had, always would. The older he grew and the faster the seasons came around the more permanent and inescapable they seemed, even though in fact he hurtled through them toward escape, his own escape.
He wasn't afraid of dying, never had been. He was uncomfortably, childishly afraid of being dead, in his grave, gone down into the underworld. Maybe because of living so long in that basement apartment. No afterlife had ever been convincing to him except that commonwealth beneath the earth, Pluto's realm, and none had ever seemed quite so dreadful either. It was going to be like that, it was; at any rate he feared it was going to be like that, which came to the same thing; after he was truly dead he did not expect to fear that or anything.
What he thought was that when Hermes came for him, to guide him down into the dark land (oh he could see his kind uncaring face), he would try to beguile him. That god had a special fondness for writers, wordsmiths as the papers called them; so Kraft thought he would ask him to listen, before they departed for that gate, to a story he had written in his honor. And if the god did not remember his own history, which probably a god never forgot, he might work on Hermes the trick Hermes had once worked on hundred-eyed Argus, to escape his vigilance: tell him a tale so involving, so long, so tedious finally, that his eyes would close, and he would sleep, well before the end was reached.
Which Kraft was not going to get to anyway.
He didn't grieve for himself, as good as a ghost already; he grieved for those others, men and women of flesh and blood, real people still caught in the machineries of history, whom he had toiled to release, and now must abandon.
Rabbi David ben-Loew, the Great Rabbi of Prague, who made or didn't make the golem, often repeated the saying of Rabbi Tarphon, that we are not required to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. He meant the work of saving the fragments of divinity, sparks of life lost in the dark world of suffering matter, so that God could be healed. We redeem them by our prayers and our religious duties, the rabbis said. Dr. Pons had said that it was by Knowing. Dr. Pons said Knowing was salvation. But though knowing might be salvation, it was not release, it was harder than not knowing, it was only a more intense, a clearer suffering.
He wiped the tears from his face, with his own kerchief, his own. Better to labor than to sleep. We who have spent ourselves in the labor of making the Stone, or saving it from the dark matrix wherein it has been caught: we call the work a game, a walk in the woods, a play, a ludus, a ludibrium, a joke: and that is because the only way to make the Stone is by the action of the Stone. In other words by means of that lesser art, transformation: his own art, wherein he had spent himself. So at the end of life we turn homeward, weary, and with the work far from finished, but our own task anyway is done. And surely, surely turning homeward will not be climbing down into, but up out of: up out of a dark mine into the ordinary air, the surface of the earth, where we can wash and rest. He would believe it to be so, if he could.
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?
8
"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.