And if not that story, what? If he had reached deep enough into the sun-erased pages of the Biographia he held, he would maybe have noticed where Coleridge mentions the distinction made in alchemy between the automatica (things that are changed by a power in themselves) and the allomatica (things that are only changed by the action of something—which in alchemy is almost always someone—else). Automatica can change, and change back, but only the allomatica change by changing what in turn changes them: a spiral rather than a circle, going on and not returning. But he didn't get that far.
"So tell me,” he said. “If somebody sometime wanted to ask you to marry them, do you think that having had such a bad time before would..."
"No."
"No?"
"No. Like they say: that was then, this is now."
She had in her hand a bottle of soda, and on it was a picture of Betty Boop, looking like an old flame of his, or every old flame of his, as she always would, and her name in this country was Lulú.
"So if,” he said.
"Watch it,” she said. “It says in all the books that you're not supposed to propose when you're on vacation."
"All the books?"
"You're having fun, you're free of everything, feeling romantic. You can fool yourself. You could make a big mistake."
"Thanks for the warning. I'll take no steps without consulting you. But I wasn't proposing."
"What were you doing?"
"Wondering."
"As usual."
"As usual."
Anyway it was there, of course, it had been there “all along,” that prolepsis, foreshadowing, figure, destiny he felt he needed: the three of them (of course it was three) at the Full Moon party, rising naked together before him from the waters of the Blackberry, the endless river: a dark, a light, a rosé. And one of them her. There they are still, unchanged except in meaning, or rather with their meaning not yet unfolded, a complicans of which his life thereafter was to be the explicans. Pierce no longer remembered seeing them, right there at the beginning, nor did he understand what it had meant, if it really had a meaning beyond or within the fact of its having been. So his very last solemn wish went forever ungranted, unspoken in fact, though not the less urgent for that: his wish that he might, please, be allowed to do what he must, and to know it too. But no, he had to choose it for himself, by himself, in ignorance and incertitude, and then do it. And eventually, but just in time, he did.
6
Three years later, Pierce sat down in the office of the dean of studies at a community college in a northeastern city, to be interviewed for a teaching job.
The dean was struck by the shape of his résumé, as anyone considering hiring him would have to be: how he had quit or been let go from Barnabas College, where he'd been tenure track, then vanished (the résumé described work on a book, but there was no book) and some time later surfaced as a second-tier private-school dogsbody, teaching history and English and running the chess club and the debate team. Pierce, hands clasped in his lap, knew what this looked like, and knew better than to account for it. Never complain, never explain.
"Downside Academy,” said the Dean. He was a boulder-shaped black man in a tight three-piece suit and stiff collar, tight too, gray bristles on his big cheeks. “I'm not real familiar with this institution. Is it large?"
"Small,” said Pierce.
"Downside?"
"Downside.” It had been a fine, even an evocative name for years, but now the trustees were rethinking. “It's about fifty years old."
The unsmiling dean continued to regard the name, as though it would grow transparent, and allow him to see the place itself behind it. “You had a house there."
"I was a housemaster, yes,” Pierce said, and felt a wave of pointless embarrassment.
"You're married?"
"Yes. Three years."
"Your wife teaches too?"
"No. No, oh no. She's. She's going to be studying to be a nurse. She's actually been accepted at a school here in the city. That's one reason this position would be. Well.” He stopped this line, his own convenience not the important consideration here. He crossed his legs.
"It's good you're continuing again in your vocation,” the dean said. “I think you will find the students here to be different from those you might have had in the past, at other institutions. Some of them will not be as prepared as even the upper students at your private school were. On the other hand they'll bring to your classes a wealth of other experiences, life experiences. And you'll find them eager to get from you all that they can use in their own lives. Unlike some young people in other institutions, most of our students—and not all of them are young—they mostly know why they're here, they know what they want from this place, and they are ready to work to get it. They are remarkable people, many of them."
Pierce nodded. He was leaning forward, all ears. He thought he could descry what the dean meant, and what those students might be like, and in what sense his own case was theirs. He found himself moved by them, never having met any of them, and by the round man before him, by his tender gravity, his careful pomposity, and how he might have come by them, after what experiences, like his students'. Moved too by what he, Pierce, was being charged with: his old vocation.
"Frank Walker Barr,” said the dean, returning to pore over Pierce's slim résumé. “There's a name."
"Yes."
"You did your thesis with him."
"Yes.” No, not exactly, but Barr was certainly not going to come forward to deny it. Not any longer.
"He was never found,” said the dean.
"No. Never found."
Years had passed by then since Barr had disappeared into the sahará south of Cairo while on expedition with two other scholars. Never found: no rumor, no body, no story. He had (maybe, probably) walked out at night from the lodge where the party had stopped. The Valley of the Kings, the American papers said, but it was actually a nameless place to the south of that, near the ancient location of the island sanctuary of Philae.
"Remarkable."
"Yes."
"A great scholar."
"Yes."
Isis, still worshipped at Philae, said a writer at the end of the fifth century CE. It was Isis who “by roses and prayer” returned Lucius Apuleius from his asinine to his human shape when he was visited at last by a vision of her. Her vestiment was of fine silke yeelding divers colors, sometimes yellow, sometime rosie, sometime flamy, sometime (which troubled my spirit sore) darke and obscure, covered with a blacke robe whereas here and there the stars glimpsed. (It's Adlington's translation.) And she disdayned not with her divine voyce to utter these words to me: Behold Lucius I am come, thy weepings and prayers hath moved me to succour thee.