The two profoundest words there are: remember and her brother forget.
"She's okay then,” Cliff said, as though that were his answer to her question.
"She's good."
"Beau,” he said. “Beau asked me that night to go up there with him. He said it meant everything."
"He told me that too. But not why."
Beau also told her, that night, that she wouldn't see him again, but not why, or where he would go, and thereafter no one had heard of him again, or if they heard of him, what they heard was that somebody else had heard of him, or seen him. But he never came back.
"Where is he? Don't you wonder? Don't you want to know?"
"If he wanted me to know, I'd know,” Cliff said. But he didn't try to show in his face that this made it all better. “You know some people think he'll come back, maybe after a long time; that things will come back around, and so will he. Sometime. But some other people think the world is made differently; that it doesn't go around in circles or in spirals, that it splits."
"It splits.” Rosie was content to listen to these things, not questioning or even doubting them, as she never had when Beau talked about them. She only thought they didn't have anything directly to do with her, or the world she inhabited: they were like travelers’ tales, tales of lands from which the tellers had come, to where they were going.
"It's like a Y,” Cliff said. From a cluster of pencils and pens in a cracked mug he took out a black wooden pen with a chisel point affixed, a Speedbalclass="underline" Rosie had one like it. And a paper from a pile of scraps. “If the world is like a Y, then you can never go back. He can never come back.” He dipped the pen in a bottle of India ink, and drew the letter on the paper: where the pen's point struck the paper flush, it drew a wide vertical bar, the upright, and then another wide bar, the left-hand way, the pen pulled toward him to intersect with the upright's top. And last the right-hand way, the edge of the pen point sliding upward from the intersection, leaving only a slim trail.
Y
He turned it to face her. “If the world without Beau in it goes the big way, and he took the narrower way, then he only gets farther away the farther on we go."
Rosie studied it, the great brace or crotched tree he'd drawn. She thought: if it were drawn by a left-handed man, the left way would be the narrow one. And she thought of The Woods, and the night. Suppose it was we who had left the main way then, and he'd gone on. Without us. “Is that what you think?"
"No,” Cliff said. “I don't think there's one big Y in the road, where the world turns off. Parts company. No. I think there's a Y every single moment we're alive."
"Did Beau think so?"
"I don't know,” Cliff said. “He and I. We start from different places. It's why we could work together, sometimes. Sometimes not."
"Different places how."
"Beau knew—he thought, he believed, he saw—that everything begins in spirit. He thought reality was spirit, and the physical things and events of life were illusions, imagination. Like dreams. And he wanted us to wake up. He knew he couldn't just shake us awake: for one thing he knew he was dreaming too, most of the time. What he thought he could do, what could be done, is go down into dreams, the dreams we share, the dreams we call the world, and alter them. Or he could teach us how to alter them ourselves. He said that he could be leaven, like Paul in the Bible says we can be."
"And then."
"And then, if we could do that, we'd know they were dreams. All hopes and fears, power, pain, but also all gods. Ghosts. Earth, nations, space and time. It's not that they don't exist; they exist as dreams, and people are bound by them. They exist as much as anything can. But none of them is final, even if everybody shares them."
"And you don't think that?"
"I know what he means. I listened. I heard.” He looked around himself, and ran his hand over the surface of his table, smooth and varicolored wood and not quite level, like a plain or a body's back. “I think I'm from here,” he said. “I think this is so, this is actual. I think that all we do and can do and will do arises from it. I just think we don't know all of what it is. We learn. We learn by doing what we think we can't, and when we can, we share, and so we find out more of what it is, or can be."
"So spirit's made of this too,” Rosie said. “Made here. Home-made."
"I think so."
"But not Beau."
"No."
"Do you think,” Rosie said, “he could dream a place for himself to go off into and be lost? Lost to us, I mean."
"Maybe. Not something I know."
"You used to say"—Spofford used to quote it to her, so that it became her truth too over time, to be used with a thousand meanings—"you used to say that life is dreams, checked by physics."
His great broad smile at once shy and cocksure.
"Beau I guess wouldn't say that."
"No,” Cliff said. “But Beau's not here, and I am.” He took away from her the cup he had given her. “Do you want to do some work?"
* * * *
At the post office in Stonykill Rosie emptied the Rasmussen Foundation's big box, a slurry of stuff, it never stopped coming, glossy announcements and posters and news of other conferences elsewhere, in other centers here and abroad, a great circuit or intellectual circus entertaining itself. Among the stuff was a letter for her, though, in a hand she knew: not a postcard but a real letter.
Mom—I've got some bad news, bad for me anyway but not bad bad. I tried to get away with something and it didn't work, and now I'm in trouble. Here's what happened. I didn't tell the captain of this boat, ship I mean, or the director of the program, that I'm taking seizure medication. I know I should have, I know it was the right thing to do, but you know sometimes I get tired of telling people, sometimes I want to just not, and be like everybody. Don't tell me there's no “everybody.” I know. I just want to be like everybody. You don't know the feeling, but you don't need to know. Anyway I got separated from the damn pills, and I couldn't go searching for them, and what do you know, after five years okay, that very night I get hit with a biggie. Wet the bed and all. I still might have got away with it except that my bunkmate was awake and saw it and freaked. O God they were mad. Ranting at me for concealing a serious medical condition, breach of trust, impossible for me to go on with them.
No oh no. Oh poor babe.
So there I was like the Ancient Mariner and I've got to go. We had to turn back so I could be put ashore. I thought they were going to leave me on an ice flow or floe. At least we were only a day out of Rio Grande on Tierra del Fuego, where by the way the phones aren't working this week. There's a plane out tomorrow to LA, I'll get Dad to get me there maybe. Mom I'm so hurt and ashamed. I wanted so badly to be there. I get why they said what they said but I wanted to be there and I wanted them to take a chance, and they wouldn't. So I'll call. I'm coming home.
Life is dreams, checked by physics: and physics made or ruled biology, and so also our brains and the flaws in them, and also the medicines that sometimes fixed them, which were dreamed up by other brains, their dreaming limited by physics too, which they therefore had to learn. And they did learn, and kept dreaming, and so did Sam, and only stopped where she had to. For now. Because maybe physics has no end, no end we know, any more than dreaming does.
Oh my dear, oh my dear dear.
But she was coming home anyway. The thought filled Rosie with an expectant hunger, a wondrous craving to see and touch her again. Almost scary to want something—no, someone—that much, but more wonderful than scary: wonderful that you could so much want to have what you actually had. The thought of Sam called down into her heart as Cliff's yell had done long ago when it was asleep or cold: woke it, and started quick tears in her eyes, as though it was, itself, their source.