"Really."

"They took me to church and stuff. Family dinners. I slept over a lot. Then sneaking out too. A lot of laughs."

"Uh huh."

"Maybe it was just because it was a big family, and I was a singleton. The little ones used to line up for baths at night by age, or size. It was sweet. But that's not all. I think what I liked, or wanted, was something about their being Catholics."

"Yes?"

"Because Catholics,” she said, “have mercy. That's a good thing. They have that."

"Well,” Pierce said, astonished and ashamed, ashamed for his old church, old in its countless sins and its un-mercy. “Well, yes. That's what they say.” Tears had bloomed in her eyes when she said it: mercy. He didn't yet know how easily it happened with her, at the suppressed motions of the soul within her.

"Because justice,” she said. “You can demand justice, but there's an end to justice, when everybody gets their fair share. But there's no end to mercy."

She looked around her at the room, the sad-clown painting askew on the wall, the gas heater, the chenille bedspread sliding to the floor. Him.

"I've got to go,” she said.

"Don't,” he said. “Stay."

The first time they'd shared this bed—after a couple of drinks at the Sandbox, and well after they'd first begun to consort often—she had seemed unsettlingly cagey. She kept breaking off, or slipping away, to change the radio, or fool with the heat; and she kept talking—not about what was going on right there between them, but about other things, general remarks, questions about life, his life, his thoughts. So tell me. He wondered if it were some kind of test, see if he could keep up his concentration, or his attention to her. He was about to ask if maybe she'd rather just stop, and talk, but just then a sort of smothered fire within her seemed to burst softly, and she pressed hard into him; she ceased to say words, only sounds, sounds that seemed, somehow, like further admissions, hard to make at first and then more willingly made.

"It's late,” she said, and lay back again on the pillows.

It was late, a night deep in May by now. It was still that time in a love affair (neither of them called it that or thought those words in any hollow of their hearts) when it's hard to sleep together, something always seeming to remain undone or to be continued or gone on with, that wakes you after an hour or two of sleep, to find the other's awake too in the hollow of the bed's deep inescapable center; or that never lets you shut your eyes at all, till dawn's approach at last calms everything. Maybe sometimes too a sense of fighting off something that approaches, or at least preparing to fight. Fight or flight.

"So what was it about?” she asked him.

"What was what about?"

"Your book."

"It was,” Pierce said after a moment's thought, “a historical novel."

"Oh yeah? About what period?"

"About ten years ago."

She laughed a low laugh, her tummy rolling beneath his hand.

"You remember,” he said. “You were there. You were actually here then."

"I don't remember that much,” she said. “And I wasn't here."

"But you came back."

"Family's all you got,” she said, and he pondered why—it wasn't wisdom that seemed to apply to her, or to him. So many people said it: when did it become true for them? Would it ever for him? “Anyway there isn't any back."

"That's what my book was about. How if you change the way ahead, the way behind changes too."

"Seems kind of obvious,” she said.

It seemed so when she said it; it was obvious, or at least a commonplace. More than one history of the world; one for each of us. A bright moment arriving when you choose a new way into the future, which illuminates a new past, the backward way, at the same time. Everybody knows. It had been true all along.

"Because, you know,” she said. “You can't step in the same river twice. You ever hear that?"

"Nope,” he said, pressing her now meaningfully downward to supine, enough talk. “News to me."

3

She had always willed her way forward: and if that was so, then what was the name of the thing that was the opposite of it, the force or quality or power that had brought her back again? It was something like will, just as forged and handmade; something not easier anyway. It was only people who had never done it that could say running away was easy; people used to say to her that going back was hard, but they couldn't tell her what the hard parts really were, or how you did them. Running away, you hurt yourself by what you did; going back, it was what had been done to you that hurt. It was like the difference between falling hard and getting up again: which is worse? She found out that what she must do in going back (and it was hard) was that you had to come to believe that the world you had left behind and all its contents really had existed, and moreover that you yourself brought it and all the obscure pain of it into being by doing that—by believing that it really had been the case (as Pierce said)—and thus you were somehow then responsible for it too, which hurt you all over again. But only by thus bringing the past into existence could you ever really turn all the way around again, and go on from there. It was so. Actually it was what everybody knew: and as soon as you learned it for yourself, you knew that too, that everybody else knew what you had just learned.

The farthest place she had reached when she went, the place she had to begin to start back from, was Cloud City. To remember how she left Cloud City was to create the things that happened to bring her to Cloud City in the first place—it was to go forward backward, to go down the mountain, losing on the way down all the things you knew, in order to regain the things you had forgotten on the way up. You had to put yourself back on the path, just past sunset, at the same hour when you first saw Cloud City up on the bluff, itself still in the light though you no longer were: the Watchtower seeming to be silvered in mercury, as real and insubstantial as that (quicksilver) and the white wings and hyperbolic sails of the City too, colored by sunset just in the way the white clouds in the west were colored, rare shades that had no names she knew. How she had got there, on the path upward to the bluff, was the first thing that turning back would reveal, maybe, the names or faces of the one or ones who'd brought her there.

There were such places then, places you found your way to and couldn't have imagined before you reached them, places that other people knew of and could lead you to if you said yes, places coming into being as you approached and then vanishing again as you went away. That's what it seemed like. Even some that were a million years old—mountain hot springs where in winter the naked people soaked for days, their long hair jeweled with droplets and steaming in the cold, their pale bodies distorted and fishlike down in the water and wiggling in glee—she thought even such places as that might not still exist, or couldn't any longer be found, and Cloud City had been made of nearly nothing.

What was his name, that tall stork of a guy in his homemade haircut and his supply of old dress shirts, the one who had thought up Cloud City and seen it built, only to stop thinking about it when it was still unfinished? A last name for a first name like Watson or Hoving or Everett but none of those. He shook her hand once, gripping hard, smiling and screwing her arm around as though the handshake could produce something from her. Then she'd seen him hovering here and there in the City as though he should be standing on one leg, or he'd be meditating in a group but a whole trembling head higher than the others. It was Beau (his name she would not forget, no matter how far backward she went from there), Beau who told her that it was he, Wilson or Evans, who had conceived a city made of tents under tension, that the wires and couplings and the fabrics all existed to do this, and the sun would heat the interiors and a hundred flaps and diaphragms would vent and cool it; a city that could be rolled up and carried away to be built elsewhere, maybe over the ruins of those made of stone and steel when they failed and died. And they had experimented with a thousand shapes for their tents, the older ones still standing as the newer and bigger ones went up. All were white, not for no reason, and the light of day within them was sourceless, bright, cool, the building an idea on the point of evanescence, only the colored carpets, sun catchers, clay water pots, hanging strings of coral peppers, and dirty-faced naked children who were contained in it solid and actual. Watching one put up, all the laughing laboring people pulling gently at the wires, the fabric taughtening into curves that math described: like a barn raising in Heaven.