"Beau Brachman?"

"Yes. Beau came to the county just about then. He used to go visit at Kraft's a lot."

"Why? I mean what would he want there?"

"I don't know. This is before I came back. I was living in Bloomington then."

Beau Brachman thought the world is made from stories. He had told Pierce that, and surely not Pierce alone. All stories, he said, are one story. Or maybe he had said: one story is all stories.

In Pierce's cottage in the Faraway Hills, on a winter morning, the last day Beau had been seen in the Faraways. One story. You're not required to finish it, Beau said. But you're not supposed to give up on it, either. And so Pierce had set out.

"You still there?” Rosie asked.

"It's just not like his others,” Pierce said. “It's different."

"Just because of the time when he wrote it, maybe,” she said. “You know. In those years. Everything was becoming different. After being the same for so long."

"Yes,” Pierce said. “For a while it seemed like that."

"Every day you woke up and something was different from the way it had been when you went to sleep. I remember."

"Yes."

"Hair. Go to bed and wake up and every man you meet has sideburns down his cheeks."

"I remember."

"Go to bed married,” she said. “Wake up free."

"So you don't know,” Pierce said, “how close he came to finishing."

"Nope."

"Nope?"

"Well, I guess it depends,” she said, “on how long it was supposed to be."

"For a longer book, of course, he would have had to start sooner.” Silence. “I'll just keep going,” Pierce said. “I'm not far now."

"Call me when you get there. Wherever you are."

He hung up the instrument but for a time didn't leave the little cranny, small as a confessional, where it had been installed. There was a pencil stub, hideously chewed, there on the ledge, and a white wall never soiled with graffiti or the numbers of lovers. He thought what might be appropriate to scrawl. Credo quia absurdum. Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. Call VAt 69—the Pope's phone number.

In his cell again he sat at the plain desk, where the photocopy of Kraft's book lay, beside the gray slab of his computer. The computer was a Zenith; the “Z” in the name on the lid was the same lightning-bolt zag as on the great radio and record player they had listened to in Kentucky, whereon Sam had played his Caruso records, his Gershwin rhapsody. Two slider tabs on either side unlocked it, and it opened then like a box, the lower half being the keyboard and the works, the other half the glass tablet or screen whereon the work was shown. It was called a laptop, though wearisome to hold in a lap, even one as broad as his. Before him, on the keyboard half, were two small trapdoors, each made to hold a square flat “disk” of magically encoded information: on the left side, the instruction set by which the machine would learn and act; on the right side, the disks containing Kraft's book, which Pierce was retyping from Rosie's photocopy and rewriting as he went.

He turned it on. No daemon of Bruno's or Dee's as potent as this; when this one was born, this one and its million fellows, then the world began anew. So those who loved them and served them—and were served by them—were just then claiming. As it awoke it spelled out on the screen a question for him, a question he had set it to ask: how can I help you?

He directed it, with a few cryptic keystrokes, to call from its right-hand pocket the last of the twenty-five files he had made of Kraft's book, named in order by the letters of the alphabet. Thank the great stillness here: he was nearly done copying it all. The one that collected itself now upon the screen before him was called y.doc. In bright daylight the screen was dim and the letters and words hard to perceive, but now at evening it was a clear pool, book, lamp, and thought in one.

The book itself, Kraft's original, had turned out to be less complete even than Pierce remembered it being. As the pages had silted up Kraft had seemingly begun making the worst of fictional errors, or ceased correcting them: all those things that alienate readers and annoy critics, like the introduction of new major characters at late stages of the story, unpacked and sent out on new adventures while the old main characters sit lifeless somewhere offstage, or stumble to keep up. New plot movements, departing from the main branch of the story for so long that they become the main branch without our, the readers', agreement or assent. All of it inducing that sense of reckless haste or—worse—droning inconsequence that sooner or later causes us—us, the only reason for any of it, the sole feelers of its feelings, sole knowers of its secrets—to sigh, or groan in impatience, or maybe even end (with a clap) the story the writer seems only to want to keep on beginning.

At the bottom of the pile it began to turn into alternative versions, partial chapters, stuff that seemed to be maybe even from some other book entirely as the plot ran down or ran away. Pages started off hopefully with a standard coupling (Meanwhile in another city) only to be abandoned after a few sentences, or contained only a single paragraph of thought or explanation left floating alone on a blank sea. Then finally it just stopped. It actually stopped in midsentence—as Philip Sidney's Arcadia did, and Thucydides, and the Chemical Wedding, and Dante's De eloquentia vulgaris, for that matter, good company for an abandoned book, if it was abandoned. It actually seemed to Pierce, as he worked over it, not that the book was failing, running out of gas, but that a progressive disease was eating it up, and might go on doing so despite Pierce's efforts, corrupting it pastwards from the conclusion, which was already gone.

gone, gone to hide her head where no one knows, until someday somewhere

That was all the last page said. Which was maybe a sort of foreshadowing or unkept promise, and stories can end with those, but this one wasn't even the end of the matter of the story, for some of the events actually occurred later in time than this moment, though told of earlier, and if it were true, it would make those earlier parts untrue, roads not taken and impossible now to take.

Well. Beginnings are easy. Everybody knows. So are continuings. It's endings that are hard. Not only hard to think up, but maybe hard to assent to: the closer you get to the tugging of the final knots, the more reluctance you might feel, Kraft might have felt, after all his labor, decades long in a sense, since this was the culmination and closing of a series as well as of a volume. And the end of his own span approaching.

So maybe he just couldn't bring himself to end it, even if he knew how, and knew he must. All right then: the computer's winking cursor stood on the last line, at the last character, and Pierce's finger hovered over the point key, yet unwilling to press it, not even the conditional three times, certainly not the final single full stop. Of course if he did, if he “entered” it, he needed only to press another key and make it disappear; for it was not yet, that was the strange and unsettling thing about it here on this machine, none of it was yet in a way, all of it was still malleable, he could send a tide of change backward through it all with another key press or two. If he chose he could, with a few key taps, reduce it all to a simple list of words in alphabetical order.

But all novels are like that. This one only revealed to be so because of this new immaterial or unstable mode it was cast in. For readers, time in a novel goes only one way: the past told of in the turned pages is fixed, and the future inexistent till read. But actually the writer, like God, stands outside of time, and can begin his creation at any moment in it. All the past and all the future are present in his conception at once, nothing fixed until all of it's fixed. Then he keeps this secret from the reader, as God might keep his secret from us: that the world is as though written, and erasable, and rewritable. Not once but more than once: time and again.