"Tell me,” she said.

"I just,” he said. “I just can't go on pretending that I believe these things are possible."

"What things?"

"All the things. More than one history of the world. Magic. Cosmic crossroads, world-ages, an altered physics. The possibilities."

"Possibilities are always possible,” Julie said.

"Tell me what'll happen when I inform them I can't do the book. I've sort of spent all the money."

"Pierce, listen."

"I could offer them something else instead. I don't know what.” Around him on her high shelves, on her desk and on her bed, were other possibilities: mystery, horror, romance, true crime, sex advice, pathos. All of those he had suffered.

"Just show me what you have."

"I didn't bring it. I left it behind."

She regarded him in some disgust. “Okay, what happens,” she said, “is that we say nothing to them. When your deadline comes we say nothing. When they ask about it we say you've run into some difficulties and are hard at work on them, and we get another deadline; we don't ask for the next installment on the advance. Time passes."

"Uh huh."

"Meanwhile lots of things could happen. You could change your mind, and you will, or if you don't you could change the book. The publisher could change his mind, decide he doesn't want the book, return you the rights. The publisher could go out of business."

"The horse could learn to talk."

"Anyway what you don't do is give the money back. For sure not yet."

"My father owns a house in Brooklyn,” Pierce said. “I'm not sure what its situation is, but I thought maybe I could borrow against it."

Her look of disgust had softened to a kind of amusement, with something long-suffering in it; for just a moment she resembled his mother. “Pierce,” she said.

"All right, all right."

"So who's paying for this trip you're taking?” she asked. “And isn't it part of the same mission? The same, I mean, project?"

"Yes, in a way."

"Are you going to give them back their money?"

"Well, theirs is a grant,” he said. “It's sort of exploratory. I mean nothing necessarily has to come of it. Nothing has to be produced.” He smiled and shrugged: that's all I know. For a time they regarded each other, not yet thinking of the long-ago life they had shared, but not thinking anything else either.

"You okay?” she said then.

"I don't know."

"Then that's not okay."

"You know when all this started?” he said.

"All what?"

"This thing I'm doing. Or actually not doing. It was a night on Tenth Street. The night of the student takeover at Barnabas College. Remember?"

"I remember that day,” she said. “Listen. Will you send me what you've got? Maybe I can think about it."

"Ægypt,” he said. “That was the day, or the night, I remembered. You were in bed. It was hot. I stood at the window."

Come to bed she had said to him, stoned and sleepy; he wasn't sleepy, though the short night was all but gone. Earlier that day the little college where he taught had been taken over by young people (some not so young) demanding Paradise now, and other things; faculty, including Pierce, locked themselves in their offices till the students were ejected by police. Pierce, released and having returned to his railroad flat downtown, thought he could still taste tear gas in the midnight air. Anyway the neighborhood around was all alive and murmuring, as though on its way, a caravan drawn on toward the future from the past, going by him where he stood. And he knew that of course you had to be on their side, you had to be, but that he himself must go back, if he could, and he knew that he could. While the others went on, he would go back, to the city in the farthest east of that old land, the city Adocentyn.

Dawn winds rising as night turned pale. It was there that it started; and if it wasn't there it was somewhere else, near there or far off, where? If it had no starting place, it could have no ending.

"I'll do what I can,” he said.

* * * *

He got off the train again in Brooklyn, at Prospect Park, to walk the rest of the way; to see the arch at Grand Army Plaza, walk west to Park Slope past the Montauk Club, where his father used to point to the Venetian arches and brickwork, talk about Ruskin, and show him the frieze that displays the history of the Montauk Indians in terra-cotta. Terra-cotta. Pietre-dure. Gutta-percha. Cass Gilbert, the architect who designed the Woolworth Building, once lived in that pleasant brownstone, built by himself. He had stopped to greet Axel one day, one day long ago, an aged, aged man; Pierce was a boy in a gabardine suit with short pants, and was given a nickel with a bison on one side and an Indian, not a Montauk, on the other.

Was it so? He had been plagued lately by false memories suddenly occurring to him, more vivid and sudden than the real thing, unless they were the real thing, rushing in to supplant the old memories, themselves now become false.

His own old house. All through his childhood he had carried a key to this door, his latchkey (the only one he had ever referred to so). And then somewhere he had lost it and never replaced it. He went to press the bell's cracked black nipple—beside it the little typewritten card yellowed and faint with his own last name on it, the selfsame as ever—and then he noticed that the door was not fully shut.

He pushed it open and stepped in. On the entranceway floor a mosaic of two dolphins chasing each other's tails. A thousand Brooklyn buildings had one like it; it had made Axel talk of Etruscans and Pompeii and the Baths of Caracalla, and Gravely the super had used to wash it and wax it often. It could hardly be seen now. Gravely was dead: the last time Pierce spoke to Axel, Axel had told him that. Pierce when he was a child had always been told to call him Mr. Gravely, as though the world probably wouldn't readily grant him that honor and Pierce must remember to.

The door of Axel's apartment on the second floor stood open too.

Hearing laughter inside, Pierce looked in, and the laughter ceased. Three guys, stretched at their ease on his father's ancient furniture, looked upon him; they certainly seemed at home, booted feet on the coffee table and beer bottles close at hand on the floor.

"Hi,” Pierce said.

"Looking for somebody?"

"Axel. Axel Moffett."

From the bathroom in the hall there came then, as though summoned by Pierce's request, another man, barefoot, plucking at the front of his sweatpants. By their looks the three on the couch referred Pierce to him.

"Yeah?"

He had a gold cross in the V of his shirt, a broken nose like a thug in the funny papers, and a watchcap on his grizzled head.

"Where's Axel?” Pierce asked.

"Who wants to know?"

"I'm his son."

"You're kidding."

"No."

"Well, for Christ's sake.” He scratched his head, rubbing the rough cap back and forth with a forefinger, and regarded Pierce's bags. “You come to stay?"

"No actually."

"There's room."

"No. I'm only here one night. I'm flying to Europe tomorrow."

"No shit.” The man seemed unimpressed, maybe unconvinced, and went on regarding Pierce with what seemed a hostile, reptilian scrutiny, unblinking. “Axel know that?"

"I came to tell him."

Two of the three on the couch now laughed, as though they found this comically inadequate, which it was. The older man looked their way, and they stopped.