And now and then, at no fixed interval, a little group had used to gather at his mother's house and tell that story in other forms, or tell other stories with the same form, for it was thought to require many iterations, until one or another telling awakened the selfsame story lying coiled and unsuspected in the hearer's own heart.

The story, he would come to learn, was the one that Dr. Pons had to tell, and it was from Dr. Pons they had learned it, if they had not learned it from Dr. Pons's own teachers. When they told it in the house on Mechanic Street, the parts were acted out by abstract nouns that behaved like personages: Wisdom. Light. Truth. Darkness. Silence. Wisdom fell outside the Limit that was Spirit, and in her fall the Darkness came into being; so she was the Light caught by the Darkness. And she wept: and her tears became the world we live in. If he listened—which usually he did not—the big words would flicker into life in his mind for a moment as they were spoken of, only to go out again, like the terms in a physics lecture, Velocity, Force, Mass, Inertia, featureless balls and blocks colliding in no-space and not-time, which are yet supposed to contain the answer to the hardest question, or the second-hardest actually: why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead?

They were a funny-looking bunch, Kraft remembered, most of them a little off-kilter or oddly shaped, hairless or wooly, with round soft stomachs or asymmetrical eyes or lumpy brows; they stuttered and fidgeted and sat without ease: as though their spirits had long lived uncomfortably within their swollen or shriveled bodies, which showed the signs of the struggle for dominance, still undecided. Some of them he would come to know pretty well, for they were later his mother's tenants, taking the two upper apartments briefly, living and sometimes dying up there, visited in their extremity by some—not all—of the others. They all seemed to die young of unlikely diseases or live to terrible old ages, burdened with bodily needs that they, and his mother, were contemptuous of but patient with. Mrs. Angustes has to go, son. Silently laboring toward the purgatorial john on his arm. How is it (he would come to wonder) that the adherents of a cult can elect to have, out of the common life we all must undergo, just those experiences that confirm them in their exclusive vision; how do they make themselves into people such as their cult believes all people to be?

For it was a cult he had grown up in, as he later understood, as he had understood in the simplest terms of specialness and exclusivity even when he was a kid: a small, a practically infinitesimal cult, but an old one, he was amazed when he learned how old, a thin but unbreakable dark thread unwound through the world for ages. The complex equations of suffering and scheming abstractions that his mother's friends talked of, and which Dr. Pons would in his serene whisper school him in, were an ancient answer to the truly hardest question of all: why is there anything at all, and not just nothing?

Once, before the beginning of anything, a number of great beings, angels with limitless, inconceivable powers, gathered together, driven by restless dissatisfaction that they could not account for. To distract themselves, they began to play a game of their own invention. They divided themselves into the various players, constructed parts and appendages for themselves by which they might play.

Though it never wholly assuaged their profound boredom, they became caught up in the game they had invented. The rules, continually elaborated to make the play more interesting, entangled them in limitless possibilities. They played on, forgetting why they played, forgetting themselves, their origins, forgetting finally that they played a game. They came to take their own idle construction—which we call Time and Space—for actuality; they forgot they had themselves devised the rules, and came to assume they had always been subject to them.

So the game has gone on being played, Dr. Pons said, from that time-before-time down to this; except that now and then some subdivided entity, some mirror fragment or mask piece of the original players, a pawn in the game, will stop in his tracks, seized by a restless dissatisfaction he can't account for: longing, boredom, and a certainty of belonging elsewhere. For those great beings who invented the game of time and space, the Archons: what they had done was simply to reduplicate themselves and their quandary over and over, dividing and redividing their infinite substances into all the things that are, animal vegetable mineral, and all the representations of those things, in an effort to fill their own emptiness.

That was to begin the story in medias res, but in fact there was nowhere else to begin except in medias res. For what was being told was not so much a story as a situation, a circumstance endlessly elaborating itself without ever unfolding any further, like an infinite carpet in which the central figure is surrounded by the same figure in a larger size, and that by the same figure in a still larger size, over and over.

And all those figures, Dr. Pons taught him, earthly and heavenly and above the heavens, are wrapped around a single infinitesimal spark of light at the center of being, like the layers and layers of pearl with which an oyster coats the grain of sand that irritates him so. That grain of light, irreducible, eternal, infinite even in being infinitesimal, is simply the centermost point of your heart.

Here Dr. Pons touched the corduroy above the boy's own heart.

And not until the last grim furious Archon remembers this, not until she surrenders her stake and tosses in her cards—and with them the hopeless delusion she has labored under (that she is ruler, that there is something to rule)—will that vast game board be folded up at last and put away, and the Players, knowing themselves to be incomplete, turn again toward the Pleroma, the Fullness, God: whose lack is all they really are.

God. Who is like a mother whose child has decided to run away from home, a child who packs his paper sack with lunch and his knapsack with things and then sets out never to return, and gets farther than he ever has before, the borders of lands so large and far he can't comprehend them; and thereupon forgets why he got so sad or angry or disgusted or impatient, and remembers his mother at home; and so he turns, and goes back, to find his mother in the kitchen, who only smiles at him and takes his hat from his head and tells him to wash up, unaware that he was ever gone, so long gone.

"We,” Dr. Pons would say (and the boy he spoke to thought he meant you and I, and then later on he thought that Dr. Pons meant we human persons, and lastly he knew he meant we few, our kind): “We are the ones who remember. We are the latest and littlest of the replications of divine forgetfulness: and yet in our remembrance lies the salvation of all. For as we are the lowest and the last, farthest from the light, so we are also closest to the center, and the spark of light is near within us: the spark that, once awakened, we can fan into a flame."

* * * *

Well. Kraft could recite the weird catechism still today, though he could only in the briefest moments (reminded by a smell of coal smoke, or the feel underfoot of cinders on ice) experience the drama Dr. Pons told of, and the limitless darkness in which as a boy he had always imagined it taking place.

His mother called it Knowing, but as he got older it seemed to him that it wasn't Knowing so much as it was Knowing Better, a kind of universal I-told-you-so that could be astonished by nothing. Mocking, cynical about human sentiment, except that what she mocked was not human pretensions but human humility: human trust in the goodness of life and the giver of life, human groveling before contemptible and shoddy nature. Ma always acted as though there were some metaphysical guarantee that a thing would do or be just what its name said it would do or be: if glue didn't stick two things together satisfactorily, she took it not as a sign that the things and the glue weren't suited or that the weather was damp; she saw (with mixed disgust and triumph) that the universe had (once more) failed to act on its promises, proving (once again) that it was not the place it purported to be. She was a tourist in a shoddy tourist cabin, only willing to put up with the inconvenience for the length of a brief vacation, and the weather turning wet.