He pushed open the door with his fingertips, and it swung inward gently, accommodatingly. He remembered that he had dreamed of doing this once, but not what had happened next. In actuality this door had often not latched properly when he shut it behind him, and apparently hadn't even when he had shut it behind him for good. It had stood open, then, for months perhaps. He stepped within cautiously, prepared to meet a new tenant, squatter or beast.
No one. The place smelled of cold, dust, mildew, his sadness. How could he have thought to live here, then or now.
You remember how it was laid out: the front door opening right into a little living room; the kitchen on one side and, through an arch on the other side, a dining room that he had made into an office. A flagged and screened porch in back, yes. A bathroom, and beyond it the bedroom, the bedroom Rose Ryder had called Invisible. You went into the Invisible Bedroom through that closed door, the door that he could see from the office where he stood.
None of the books had changed their places or disappeared, though they looked weary and bored. Piles of his papers. For a moment he couldn't think what they contained, only that he feared them. His typewriter slept on the desk, a sheet of paper still rolled within it, and he went and tapped the key that rolled it forward, just to see. And the machine, still connected, awoke and responded: the paper chucked forward two steps. There were only three words on it.
I am going
What had he meant to say? I am going mad. I am going to sleep. I am going to awaken. I am going home. Back. Farther. To learn better. To be brave. To lose. To die.
No way now to know what a man of that kind, in that kind of trouble, might have been about to say or think. Unless the sentence was in fact complete.
He tugged open a file drawer, and drew back with a shudder: in a shredded mass of his notes and facts a mouse family was living, pink infants wriggling blindly, four five six.
He sat down on the daybed there, its clothes still disordered from the last night he had spent in this house, when he had been forbidden the wide bed in the far room. He put his hands to his face and at last wept for real.
Love, Charis had said to him. That's just love, Pierce, real love.
His rag-and-bone shop. What if there was nowhere for him to go from here, nothing to do but lie down with what he had done here, to her and to himself. Yeats, or his angel visitant, said that after death there comes a long time—long for some—called the Siftings, when the soul sorts through its last life on earth, sits unpicking the garment, undoing what was done in hope and error and desire.
Ah well. He said Ah well, ah well. And he grew conscious of the approach of a car outside, and stood.
No, she was in Indiana, or in Peru, she had said, at the work of converting Peruvians or Hoosiers to her crabbed little faith. Or she'd given it all up, gone on her way, her way dividing eternally from his.
When he dared look out the window he saw a long gold-colored Cadillac that he recognized, just coming to a stop before his door. From it after a moment there came with some little effort a man he also knew: his landlord, Mr. Winterhalter.
Almost before Pierce could assemble himself and select an attitude, the man was in the house, rapping his knuckles in a merely symbolic way on the open door and calling out Hello hello. Then he was standing in the office archway.
"Well,” he said. “The return of the native."
It was impossible: the last time Pierce had seen this man he was a shrunken wreck, hardly able to breathe, on his way south evidently for the last time. Now in a fur-collared coat and gleaming dentures he was hale, thrusting a mitt toward Pierce in a gesture that was at once conciliatory and hostile.
Pierce took the hand, unable not to, tried to crush back as he was crushed.
"We're just back this week,” Mr. Winterhalter said.
"I just came to look in and,” Pierce said at the same time.
"Yes, yes,” said Mr. Winterhalter. “So you couldn't manage here."
"It couldn't be managed,” Pierce said, and clasped his hands behind him.
"Now now,” said Mr. Winterhalter. “Anyway our place didn't burn down without you. All is well.” He clasped his own hands behind his back, but lifted and pointed with a grizzled chin. “We've decided not to ask you for the rent for those two months."
"I'm leaving,” Pierce said. “I've just come in to look around, start to pack."
"You've got a lease. It runs till next year."
"It's impossible to live here,” Pierce said. He was afraid for a moment that he might weep again. “Impossible."
"Now now,” Mr. Winterhalter said again, and clapped Pierce on the shoulder in a buck-up gesture he could not have made in the fall; he seemed to have added inches to his stature. He was again the man from whom Pierce had rented the place in the summer, hale then too, stumpy and barrel chested, a pistol-shaped hose nozzle in his hand.
Rose Ryder with him then. Coming in the day to rent the house they had broken into in the night one year before, though they didn't know at that instant that it was the same house; not at that instant.
"Impossible,” he said. “Really."
Mr. Winterhalter had turned away and was examining the room. “You're quite the reader,” he said. “Lots of quiet here for reflection."
"Listen,” Pierce said.
"My brother's something of a woodworker. Maybe we can knock up some bookshelves for you."
"No, listen.” He buttoned his coat, and picked up his bookbag, thrust some papers into it that he didn't want as though he wanted them very much, had come only for them and was now gone, out of here.
"I'll go over the water system with you again. It was some little thing you did. Or didn't do.” What operation had he had, what pills had been given him? His burnished face glowed like a cartoon sun. “Anyway it's a long time till then. It's nice now. Days are getting longer, you notice? Warmer. Pretty soon you'll be wanting these windows open.” He unzipped his own coat. “I'm back. The winter's over."
"I've got to go,” said Pierce.
"Tell me you'll think about it,” Mr. Winterhalter said. “We don't want to be hasty. A lease is, as you know, a legal document.” He had stepped into the bathroom, and Pierce thought he meant to throw open the bedroom door, but instead he turned the porcelain handles of the hot and cold faucets at the sink. Water came out of them, stopped; they coughed and gagged, their tracheae trembling noisily; then more water, brownish, then clear. Mr. Winterhalter held out a hand to them and one to Pierce, grinning as though to say, Come, drink and wash, it's all right.
* * * *
Not thinking where he would go, wanting only to leave Littleville behind and not turn yet toward Stonykill and Arcady—where he imagined Rosie ensconced amid Boney's books and papers, awaiting him and his tale—Pierce turned off and up Hopeful Hill toward the other side of the Faraways. He found himself then at the Shadowland crossroads, with nowhere to turn but back toward the Jambs or up the Shadow River road and Mount Whirligig. As though he played snakes and ladders here, or some such game without exits, only returns.
Halfway toward the turn to The Woods he came upon the driveway of the little cabin Rose had lived in the summer before. The windows (he glimpsed as he went by; not for anything would he stop, he might have to do it all again if he did) were still covered in gray plywood, sheets he had himself put up.