To help me understand, Father said that I should think of the universe as a giant painting rendered in more than three dimensions; some scientists say eleven, some say fewer, some say more, but no one knows — or will ever know — for sure. In an art gallery, when you stand too close to a large canvas executed in only two dimensions, you can see the artist’s brushstrokes and certain details clearly, but you can’t understand either the full effect of the piece or the artist’s intentions. You have to step back and step back again, and sometimes yet again, in order to grasp the totality of the work. To understand the universe, our world, and all life in the world, you have to step out of time, which for living humanity is not an option, because we are a part of this painting, characters within it, able to perceive it only as a continuing series of events, episodes. However, because we are conscious creatures with the gift of reason, we can seek and learn and extrapolate from what we learn, and conceive the truth.
In a universe in which past, present, and future came into existence all at once, complete from beginning to end, with all possible outcomes of every life woven through the tapestry, there is no chance, only choice, no luck, but only consequences. A penny polished by moonlight is only a penny, though its existence — minted by thinking creatures for the purpose of commerce in the present and investment in the future — might be a kind of miracle, if you’re imaginative enough to credit miracles. He said that the penny would not bring us luck, that even if it had been a million dollars, it would not of itself bring us luck and change our lives, that what happened to us was of our election — and therefore allowed us more hope than luck could ever provide.
I was only twelve that April night, but already worn to wisdom by the friction between me and the world aboveground. When Father took luck away from me, I was not downcast but exhilarated. The penny didn’t mean anything, but what I did with the penny mattered. I put the coin down on the bandstand floor, where I had found it, in the hope that whoever discovered it next might, by the loving guidance of someone like my father or by his own heart, be led to the revelation to which I had been led.
And so, more than fourteen years later on a snowy night, I knew with conviction that Gwyneth had not been dropped into my lap by Lady Luck. She and her love for me were one of the infinite number of ways that things might have been, but now they were what was, by virtue of countless decisions that she and I had made, moment by moment throughout our lives, which we could never hope to track in retrospect.
I could only lose her if, from this moment forward, I made wrong choices, or if she made them. But I would take those odds rather than the odds that luck offered.
63
In the main room of my subterranean home, Gwyneth moved along the shelves, reading the titles on the spines. “I knew there would be books, and I knew what the character of them would be.”
Her presence here was the most magical turn of events in this night of myriad wonders. Gladness expressed itself in my covered countenance, in my voice, manner, action. The girl was fully aware of my happiness, and she delighted in my delight. I could not take my eyes off her, and in respect of that, she did not turn her eyes toward me.
“Your courage humbles me,” she said.
“Courage? Not really. I’m a coward by necessity. We always had to run from any threat.”
“To live in these cramped spaces, without sun, for eighteen years, the last six without company, and always with the expectation that there would never be more than this, to endure that and not be driven mad … Sanity in such circumstances takes more courage than I possess.”
With that, she gave me a somewhat different perspective on my life, and I didn’t know what to say.
She said then, “What do you want to take with you, Addison?”
“Take with me?”
“What’s most precious to you? Don’t leave it here. After we go, you won’t ever be coming back.”
I couldn’t fully comprehend her meaning, and it seemed that I must have misheard what she said. “Not coming back? But where would I live?”
“With me.”
“You mean in the apartment with the piano?”
“No. We’re not going back there, either. That’s over. All of it is over. We’re moving on to something new.”
Until then, I would not have thought that great happiness could coexist with fear, but the latter came upon me without fading the former. I found myself trembling, not in either dread or rapture, but in a kind of neutral expectation.
“We have a lot to do in the next few hours,” she said. “So hurry and decide what you don’t want to leave behind, and let’s be going.”
Trust, I told myself, and I did trust.
Pressed between two books on one of the shelves, an envelope contained a photograph, a simple snapshot, that I never wanted to be without. From between the front cover and the endpaper of a special book on another shelf, I withdrew an index card on which Father had printed words of special meaning to me. I slipped the card into the envelope and tucked the envelope into an inside pocket of my jacket.
I followed Gwyneth to the passageway that led from the hammock room — which was also my kitchen — and there I paused to look back. I had lived more than two-thirds of my life in those windowless rooms, and for the most part they had been years of contentment and hope. I felt as though ten thousand conversations between Father and me were recorded on those concrete walls and that if I could only sit quietly and attentively enough, with adequate patience, they would replay for me. Nothing in this world, not even the most mundane moments of our lives, is without meaning, nor is any of it lost forever.
In leaving, I had neglected to turn off the lamps. I considered going back through the rooms to extinguish them, but I didn’t. I left them aglow, as the lights in a shrine are never put out. Following Gwyneth, I allowed myself to imagine that the bulbs in those lamps would prove to be blessed with uncanny life and that if, a thousand years from now, some adventurous explorer of storm drains were to come across that haven, he would be welcomed by lamplight, by books perfectly preserved, and would know that in this humblest of places, in ancient times, many treasured hours had been passed in happiness.
64
Snow sheeting through the headlights, the streets vacant except for the laboring plows, the people of the city sequestered in their warm and civilized rooms, the wind keening across the windshield and along the passenger door beside me …
Gwyneth drove a route familiar to me, and only minutes after we set out, her cell rang. She glanced at the screen, put the phone on SPEAKER, and said, “I would pray that Simon haunts you forever, but he deserves his rest.”
“How touching that you should care so much for a useless burnt-out boozer who couldn’t even keep from pissing his pants at the end.”