Why impatience? She didn't know. They seemed patient enough to him; the whole place seemed imbued with a holy patience, the brindled cows at evening, the changeless weather—there weren't even silos, because the green sprang yearlong. But at night Roo's weedy entomologist friend—Pierce's too already, unjealous as a saint or a house pet—hung a white sheet on his cabin wall, and shone a black light on it, and from the surrounding night there came will-lessly in the things he studied, in all their multitudes: bugs just like twigs a half a foot long, great beetles like warhorses caparisoned in heraldry, tiny sparks and atomies, moths with trailing raiment green and gold. He told them about the army ants that, on a biological cycle not yet understood, would appear suddenly in billions on the horizon and march like an army of Wallenstein's through fields, through houses even, eating everything in their unswerving path—meats, clothes, green lizards, unfortunate infants; then gone till next time. And he told them to shake out their shoes in the morning.
"Because of the scorpions,” said Roo.
They walked up higher, toward the cloudy-headed heights; they sat in a glade—he hadn't before ever found himself in a glade, he didn't think, but here was one for sure—on a fallen log and listened to the insects seethe. Royal blue butterflies of impossible luster visited Oz like blooms, stamen and pistil, comically obscene.
"It's real,” Roo said. “It's all real."
"It is."
As they held hands and looked around themselves like the First Boy and Girl, a pair of slow mammals appeared from out of the forest, cat sized, great eyed, with tall tails erect, a boy and a girl, maybe; what were they called? Coatimundi, Pierce remembered or imagined.
"So do you ever,” Roo in time said, “really think about kids?"
"In what respect?"
"Well, for instance. Having kids. Being a parent."
"You think about that?"
"Yes."
"It's something you want."
She didn't answer; it wasn't a question; hers to him remained in the air unanswered.
"Well,” he said. “I have a son."
She didn't say anything for a time, neither did she move, though she removed her hand from his. “You have a son?"
"I had one. Not a real one. An imaginary son."
Nothing.
"His name,” Pierce said, looking down or out but not at her, “was Robbie."
"Robbie."
"Yes."
He knew that he was about to tell her that Robbie, who had not long ago been more real to him than almost every corporeal person he knew, was only twelve, or maybe thirteen, though big for his age in some respects, and of all that happened between them and after. It was as though he could see himself from afar sitting there beside Roo on the fallen log, as though he were at once the poor stupid mortal he in fact was and at the same time a laughing god watching him, watching him dig himself deeper. He told her. It took a while.
"Oh my God that is so strange,” she said softly. She had raised her hand to her mouth, as though she saw a wound she hadn't known he bore. “That is so creepy."
He took his own hand, looked at his feet.
"And you just made him up? Just like that?"
He couldn't say that he had made him up, because it was so clear to him that Robbie had arrived, unsummoned; wished for, yes, though not in such a form, not foreseen or imaginable even. Would he have to say Yes I made him up in order for him to be able to pass away and not have been? He tried to think of a way to say that it hadn't really been his idea, somehow; that yes he had welcomed Robbie and elaborated his presence—added facts and flesh and a gaze to him, whatever he was—had been glad, so glad he'd come; but that still he hadn't thought him up, had only and suddenly found him to be there, complete, as though on his doorstep. Which he knew mitigated nothing.
"It seemed,” he said, “to solve a problem. That's what it felt like. It solved a problem, at last. I was glad."
"But the stuff you did.” She swallowed. “I mean are you, is that something you."
"No,” he said. “I never did. Never before. Not even when I was a kid. Never. I never even thought of it.” He said nothing more for a long time, and she said nothing, only looked at the forest floor, the beasts and bugs.
"I don't know,” he said at last, “where he came from. I really don't. I don't know why."
"Was it,” Roo said carefully, as though afraid to guess wrong, “like a dream? Like dreaming? Or like pretending?"
"I,” said Pierce. It was like dreaming in being given, and unchosen; not like a dream in its willfulness. “Like sort of a dream."
"Well.” She touched his arm, and then in a moment withdrew her hand again, as though she found him too hot. “You know how they say everyone in a dream, all the people, are you. You yourself turned around, or put outside of you for you to see."
"Yes."
"And,” she said, thinking. “And here's a son and a father. And didn't you want your father's love? I mean wasn't it taken away from you? Like you told me."
"I,” Pierce said. “I.” Something huge was gathering in the forest around him, and now built toward him, or it arose greatly and swiftly within him, in the forest within.
"So this Robbie,” Roo said, “came to get love from his father. Right? You said. And you could give him that. And what you gave, you could get. Sort of in a way. If you're both."
"Both."
"Well, yes, sure. You were him as much as you were you."
"Ah. Ah, ah. Ah."
"Pierce? You okay?"
The sounds Pierce had begun all suddenly to make were startling, outlandish. Ah, ah ah. Ah ah. He threw his face into his hands as though to contain them; they seemed summoned from somewhere she hadn't known sound could issue from in a person, and she touched him again.
Tears shed in Eden. It went on a long time, he trying to cease, mop up, then bursting again as though whelmed in grief. It was grief, astonishing and right, grief ungrieved till now, witheld for no good reason but ignorance. You were him as much as you. What amazed him most just then, as he wept, was that he could not ever, never ever, have thought of it himself, when it was so obvious to her: she took that old crabbed page from him, turned it over and right side up, and he could read it immediately. Later on what amazed him most was that he had to climb such a mountain to hear it said.
"But,” he said. “But then why that, why that."
"Yeah, well, that's what's sad,” she said. “That you could only think of that. Of that one way."
He tugged his shirttail from his pants to daub his eyes. “He wasn't real,” Pierce said. “He really wasn't. And now he's gone."
"He's gone?"
"Gone.” Still he didn't dare look at her, still he clung to his own hand and then his knees. “So anyway now you know,” he said. “About me."
"Yes,” she said. “I guess now I know."
"I had to say."
"Yes."
"Yes."
Unsilence of the glade.
"There's more,” he said.
* * * *
To travel down from that green mountaintop was to pass through one climatic zone and then another, the air growing hotter, the vegetation changing, until they reached the sea, the unstilled Pacific. He swam with her and he lay beside her under the netting of their bed, for some nights in a stillness and isolation that finally neither could stand, then making cautious plain love while the bugs gathered on the net and watched. He walked, as she taught him to do, walked for miles behind her and beside her along the tiger-striped coconut walks, or over the beast-shaped rock heaps that lay in the surf just off the endless empty swathe of sand; he studied her and thought about her, he found himself waiting for something she would do or say, without knowing what it was, thinking maybe it had already been said and he had missed it; he recounted his own story to himself, seeking for the premonition or foreshadowing that would point him toward what he must say or do. Why was this so hard? Coleridge had written (yes he'd brought a big thick Biographia literaria, small print, hard thoughts) that “the common end of all narrative, nay of all poems, is to convert a series into a whole: to make those events, which in a real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a Circular motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth.” And a poet is a maker, and a poeia is a made world, and in his own world or history, real or imagined, he perceived no such figure, long and hard as he had tried, much as he desired to.