He bent and rested his cheek against the cool bare brow of his Remington.

The power of transformation, which he and everyone had sought as the goal. It had of course been all along right in his own backyard, a magic small and white, but as necessary to the heart (to his heart, but not only to his) as its own beating.

O get up, he urged himself, walk to town. Keep moving, he ordered himself, an Arctic traveler facing a long dark night. Which he did face, una eterna nox dormienda, as Catullus had it, one everlasting night's sleep. Boney had been quite taken with that chilling little phrase.

He rose and breathed, looked at the clock. There was a high-school boy he paid to truck him around, take him shopping, rake his lawn or mow it in season. Hauls my ashes too, he joked or choked to no listener, old flaccid satyr. Anyway the boy had apparently forgotten today, youth forgets, no matter.

He put on a straw hat and took a stick from an urn of them by the door; the choice would once have occupied a minute or two of pleasurable fussing, no more now the games that you liked to play.

He got no farther than the garden. Stood in its midst astonished at how late the year had grown, had autumn come early? No, it was September; there was nothing unlikely in the leaves fallen amid the wild asters and the larkspur, the last daisies drooping, their leaves aged and eaten. Pitiful how it had gone unattended. Some sort of vine with star-shaped leaves was clambering over the rhododendrons, he hadn't even noticed it, but now it had blushed deep red and he saw it.

It was in this season that his mother had died, not so many years back that he could not still be filled with pointless grief on hot colored brambly days like this. She hadn't told him how ill she was, of course, she who hardly distinguished between illness and being alive. But then she decided to check herself into a hospital, and after a quick consultation with a doctor had elected to have a prolonged and risky surgery, get at this once and for all or die under the knife—he was sure that was how she had conceived of it, not even having a firm opinion as to which she would prefer. The operation had gone badly, complications, she had neither been killed nor cured, only lingered in awful discomfort and longing while more dreadful things were done to her.

He had gone back and forth to the city over hills and valleys caught in the glamor of golden stasis, September, this time of hastening transformation that always seems so perfect and changeless. Sat by her long hours as she lay suffering, and learned at last how you could believe, how you could be grateful for being able to believe, that really truly there was someone inside the integuments of suffering flesh, someone who could never be touched, never hurt, who only waited patiently in bondage to be freed.

And now that time was come again, once again. Unfolding tirelessly and willingly as it always had, always would. The older he grew and the faster the seasons came around the more permanent and inescapable they seemed, even though in fact he hurtled through them toward escape, his own escape.

He wasn't afraid of dying, never had been. He was uncomfortably, childishly afraid of being dead, in his grave, gone down into the underworld. Maybe because of living so long in that basement apartment. No afterlife had ever been convincing to him except that commonwealth beneath the earth, Pluto's realm, and none had ever seemed quite so dreadful either. It was going to be like that, it was; at any rate he feared it was going to be like that, which came to the same thing; after he was truly dead he did not expect to fear that or anything.

What he thought was that when Hermes came for him, to guide him down into the dark land (oh he could see his kind uncaring face), he would try to beguile him. That god had a special fondness for writers, wordsmiths as the papers called them; so Kraft thought he would ask him to listen, before they departed for that gate, to a story he had written in his honor. And if the god did not remember his own history, which probably a god never forgot, he might work on Hermes the trick Hermes had once worked on hundred-eyed Argus, to escape his vigilance: tell him a tale so involving, so long, so tedious finally, that his eyes would close, and he would sleep, well before the end was reached.

Which Kraft was not going to get to anyway.

He didn't grieve for himself, as good as a ghost already; he grieved for those others, men and women of flesh and blood, real people still caught in the machineries of history, whom he had toiled to release, and now must abandon.

Rabbi David ben-Loew, the Great Rabbi of Prague, who made or didn't make the golem, often repeated the saying of Rabbi Tarphon, that we are not required to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. He meant the work of saving the fragments of divinity, sparks of life lost in the dark world of suffering matter, so that God could be healed. We redeem them by our prayers and our religious duties, the rabbis said. Dr. Pons had said that it was by Knowing. Dr. Pons said Knowing was salvation. But though knowing might be salvation, it was not release, it was harder than not knowing, it was only a more intense, a clearer suffering.

He wiped the tears from his face, with his own kerchief, his own. Better to labor than to sleep. We who have spent ourselves in the labor of making the Stone, or saving it from the dark matrix wherein it has been caught: we call the work a game, a walk in the woods, a play, a ludus, a ludibrium, a joke: and that is because the only way to make the Stone is by the action of the Stone. In other words by means of that lesser art, transformation: his own art, wherein he had spent himself. So at the end of life we turn homeward, weary, and with the work far from finished, but our own task anyway is done. And surely, surely turning homeward will not be climbing down into, but up out of: up out of a dark mine into the ordinary air, the surface of the earth, where we can wash and rest. He would believe it to be so, if he could.

A cloud, harmless, covered the sun, and Fellowes Kraft saw that far down at the end of his drive an unfamiliar big car was turning in. Not the high school boy's old Rambler, nor Boney's Buick. An Oldsmobile, an 88.

Am I not done now? he asked, of someone, of all. I can't finish. Is there really more yet to tell?

8

"It was in that autumn that he died then?” Pierce asked.

"No,” said Rosie Rasmussen. “He got pretty sick, I guess. He spent some time in and out of the hospital. But he didn't die."

"He didn't."

"No. In fact I think I remember that he actually got quite a bit more work done that winter."

"You think so?"

"I mean I think Boney said so, but I don't remember all that well; it didn't seem so important to keep track of it. Why are you talking so softly?"

Pierce shifted the phone to the left side and bent into the corner of the little booth. “The phone here isn't actually supposed to be used except for emergencies,” he said. “Not for like long conversations."

"Oh.” There was a pause, suggestive of puzzlement, perhaps preparatory to asking where “here” was, but then she only said, “So why did you want to know?"

He couldn't yet say why, or what he was looking for in Kraft's last days. He had come within sight of the end of Kraft's typescript and felt as though he had caught up with him, had reached the point Kraft himself had reached when he ran out of certainties, and now the two of them stood together on the brink of branching possibilities, facing decisions: which now Pierce alone could make.

"You know Beau knew him in that year,” Rosie said.