Y.

It stood at the head of the tall double-columned page, above and precedent to all things that only begin with Y, Yaasriel and Yalkut and Yggdrasil and Yoga and Yoruba: both a signum and its initial, which is what had attracted Pierce's attention to it. Only A and O and X were accorded the same status in this book, which was called A Dictionary of the Devils, Dæmons, and Deities of Mankind, by Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle.

The twenty-fifth letter of the English alphabet, the book told him, it is also the tenth of the Hebrew—the Yod. Its numerical equivalent is Ten, the perfect number. In the Hebrew Cabala it is the membrum virile and is expressed by the hand with bent forefinger. The Y, or upsilon, is the litera Pythagoræ, and was long believed to have been first constructed by the Samian philosopher himself (it was often called the “Samian letter") and its mystic significance is Choice: the two branches signify the paths of Virtue and Vice respectively, the narrow right way leading to virtue, the wider left to vice.

Pierce didn't know then why ten was the perfect number, but he guessed what a membrum virile might be (bent his forefinger to resemble his own). After some searching he found the Samian philosopher too: avoider of beans, reincarnationist, man-god.

A sign for human life, its form taken from crossroads and tree forks and the springing of arches. Lydgate will have it that the stem stands for the years of youth, before the hard choices of maturity are made. In Christian thought its branches separate Salvation and Damnation, the horns of the tree of life, the Cross. Nor does this exhaust its significations: a more secret dogma is supposed to be expressed in it, one that certain Rosicrucians pretended to be on the point of disclosing, before that sect spoke no more.

At the age he was when he first read this—ten or eleven—Pierce had no sense of how much time or space separated these characters, Samians and Hebrews and Rosicrucians; somehow they all existed together in the root of time, back before the choice of a way was made. Gathered together in this book they seemed gathered in a world of their own, openable and closable, discrete, though containing many things his own world also did. Later on he would wonder if certain pages of it hadn't become entangled with his growing brain, so that he wouldn't always know what he had taken from it and what he had conceived himself. He could be haunted for days by a not-quite-recoverable image—a blackened obelisk, with palms and elephant; or find himself saying over and over to himself like a charm or a madman's rant a word that he seemed to have made up but surely hadn't (Yggdrasil, Adocentyn), and he would, sometimes, guess that that book was the source. Sometimes it was.

Pierce never revealed that he'd known the answer to the question that defeated Axel.

So he had had his own secrets and unsayable things, things out of which a double life is made, as his father's and his mother's lives were made of them. Sometimes laid deep like mines or bombs (he thought you'd have to explain this to young people nowadays, who didn't live such lives, probably) so that you had to proceed with care along your way, not come upon them unexpectedly or at the wrong time, at a juncture, and have them explode.

Homo, viator in bivio, the Latin Church declared, offering to help. Man, voyager on forking paths. There's no provision, though, for going back, is there, back over the thrown Y switches of our lives, the ones that shot our little handcar off its straight way and onto the way we took instead, as in the silent comedies that Axel loved: no way to go back and fix the thing broken, or break the silence that later exploded. An infinite number of junctures lies between us and that crisis or crux, and passing back again across each one would generate by itself a further juncture, a double infinity, an infinitesimal calculus; you'd never get back to there, and if you could you'd never return again to here where you started from: and why would you need to go back in the first place except to learn how to go on from right here, to go on along the way you have to go?

And yet we want always, always to go back. What if we could, we think, what if we could. We want to make our way back along those tracks, over every switch, to the single, consequential divide: there where we can see ourselves still standing, indecisive and hesitant, or cocksure and about to step off firmly in the wrong direction. We want to appear before ourselves—shockingly old, in strange clothes (though not so strange as we then imagined we would by now be wearing)—and clothed too in the authority of the uncanny. We want to take ourselves aside, in the single brief moment that would be allotted us, and give ourselves the one piece of advice, the one warning, the one straight steer that will put us on the correct road, the road we should take, the road we have a right to take, for it is truly ours.

Then to make our way forward again, through all the new branching ways, to where we left from, which will not be the same place, but instead will be the place we ought to be, the course of our real lives.

We plot and plan how we might help ourselves out of every little pitfall and pothole—not the checked suit, you dope; lose the checked suit—no that's idle, not worth the investment of longing, of rewriting. But oh if we could decide on just the one moment, the one critical moment, and we can; and if we could reduce the time asked for to the barest minimum, no big discourse but only the few minatory words that would change everything, the words that we could not have thought or said then. Marry her. Don't marry her. Surely if the time required were so little, and only the one instance asked for, and the need so obvious.

When we come to cease fretting in this way, if we ever do cease, then at the same time we come to know, for sure, that we will die.

Pierce Moffett had known times (more than one, each one canceling all the former ones) when his need to go and knock on his own door had been so great, the bleak longing for things not to have turned out as they had so intense, that he was able to believe for a second or two that an exception to a universal one-way rule might be made just for him, since it was so clear what he ought to have done: not panic or dither or comically misunderstand or fall into mind-clouding passions, but to be temperate, fair, and wise. Of course and always, this involved not being himself as he had once been, but himself as he had later become, had become because of the very vicissitudes through which he had passed, on the very roads he had chosen or been forced along, suffering what he there suffered, learning what he learned.

Now he was older than his father had been when he blew the question about the Samian letter on network television; he had long ago wished his last desperate with-all-his-heart wish. He did know very well that he would die, and he knew what was still left for him to do so that he might earn that death. He wouldn't go back if he could. And yet he was still one who spent or wasted much mental time in reviewing past choices and chances, even without that irritable striving toward correcting them. He did it with events in history, he did it with the lives of his parents, with his own life too: tugging on the infinite lines, to see what he might have caught instead. And the place he now was—the place he had come to—was the right place to ponder: the things he once did that he should not have done, the things he should have done and did not do. Years could be spent here in the contemplation.

Pierce lifted his eyes from his endless copy work, and fetched breath. It was spring, and opalescent buds were visible on the twig tips of the espaliered shrubs that branched and rebranched across the walls of the walled garden outside his door, a garden no bigger than the little room he sat in.