"Yes."

"And,” she said, thinking. “And here's a son and a father. And didn't you want your father's love? I mean wasn't it taken away from you? Like you told me."

"I,” Pierce said. “I.” Something huge was gathering in the forest around him, and now built toward him, or it arose greatly and swiftly within him, in the forest within.

"So this Robbie,” Roo said, “came to get love from his father. Right? You said. And you could give him that. And what you gave, you could get. Sort of in a way. If you're both."

"Both."

"Well, yes, sure. You were him as much as you were you."

"Ah. Ah, ah. Ah."

"Pierce? You okay?"

The sounds Pierce had begun all suddenly to make were startling, outlandish. Ah, ah ah. Ah ah. He threw his face into his hands as though to contain them; they seemed summoned from somewhere she hadn't known sound could issue from in a person, and she touched him again.

Tears shed in Eden. It went on a long time, he trying to cease, mop up, then bursting again as though whelmed in grief. It was grief, astonishing and right, grief ungrieved till now, witheld for no good reason but ignorance. You were him as much as you. What amazed him most just then, as he wept, was that he could not ever, never ever, have thought of it himself, when it was so obvious to her: she took that old crabbed page from him, turned it over and right side up, and he could read it immediately. Later on what amazed him most was that he had to climb such a mountain to hear it said.

"But,” he said. “But then why that, why that."

"Yeah, well, that's what's sad,” she said. “That you could only think of that. Of that one way."

He tugged his shirttail from his pants to daub his eyes. “He wasn't real,” Pierce said. “He really wasn't. And now he's gone."

"He's gone?"

"Gone.” Still he didn't dare look at her, still he clung to his own hand and then his knees. “So anyway now you know,” he said. “About me."

"Yes,” she said. “I guess now I know."

"I had to say."

"Yes."

"Yes."

Unsilence of the glade.

"There's more,” he said.

* * * *

To travel down from that green mountaintop was to pass through one climatic zone and then another, the air growing hotter, the vegetation changing, until they reached the sea, the unstilled Pacific. He swam with her and he lay beside her under the netting of their bed, for some nights in a stillness and isolation that finally neither could stand, then making cautious plain love while the bugs gathered on the net and watched. He walked, as she taught him to do, walked for miles behind her and beside her along the tiger-striped coconut walks, or over the beast-shaped rock heaps that lay in the surf just off the endless empty swathe of sand; he studied her and thought about her, he found himself waiting for something she would do or say, without knowing what it was, thinking maybe it had already been said and he had missed it; he recounted his own story to himself, seeking for the premonition or foreshadowing that would point him toward what he must say or do. Why was this so hard? Coleridge had written (yes he'd brought a big thick Biographia literaria, small print, hard thoughts) that “the common end of all narrative, nay of all poems, is to convert a series into a whole: to make those events, which in a real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a Circular motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth.” And a poet is a maker, and a poeia is a made world, and in his own world or history, real or imagined, he perceived no such figure, long and hard as he had tried, much as he desired to.

And if not that story, what? If he had reached deep enough into the sun-erased pages of the Biographia he held, he would maybe have noticed where Coleridge mentions the distinction made in alchemy between the automatica (things that are changed by a power in themselves) and the allomatica (things that are only changed by the action of something—which in alchemy is almost always someone—else). Automatica can change, and change back, but only the allomatica change by changing what in turn changes them: a spiral rather than a circle, going on and not returning. But he didn't get that far.

"So tell me,” he said. “If somebody sometime wanted to ask you to marry them, do you think that having had such a bad time before would..."

"No."

"No?"

"No. Like they say: that was then, this is now."

She had in her hand a bottle of soda, and on it was a picture of Betty Boop, looking like an old flame of his, or every old flame of his, as she always would, and her name in this country was Lulú.

"So if,” he said.

"Watch it,” she said. “It says in all the books that you're not supposed to propose when you're on vacation."

"All the books?"

"You're having fun, you're free of everything, feeling romantic. You can fool yourself. You could make a big mistake."

"Thanks for the warning. I'll take no steps without consulting you. But I wasn't proposing."

"What were you doing?"

"Wondering."

"As usual."

"As usual."

Anyway it was there, of course, it had been there “all along,” that prolepsis, foreshadowing, figure, destiny he felt he needed: the three of them (of course it was three) at the Full Moon party, rising naked together before him from the waters of the Blackberry, the endless river: a dark, a light, a rosé. And one of them her. There they are still, unchanged except in meaning, or rather with their meaning not yet unfolded, a complicans of which his life thereafter was to be the explicans. Pierce no longer remembered seeing them, right there at the beginning, nor did he understand what it had meant, if it really had a meaning beyond or within the fact of its having been. So his very last solemn wish went forever ungranted, unspoken in fact, though not the less urgent for that: his wish that he might, please, be allowed to do what he must, and to know it too. But no, he had to choose it for himself, by himself, in ignorance and incertitude, and then do it. And eventually, but just in time, he did.

6

Three years later, Pierce sat down in the office of the dean of studies at a community college in a northeastern city, to be interviewed for a teaching job.

The dean was struck by the shape of his résumé, as anyone considering hiring him would have to be: how he had quit or been let go from Barnabas College, where he'd been tenure track, then vanished (the résumé described work on a book, but there was no book) and some time later surfaced as a second-tier private-school dogsbody, teaching history and English and running the chess club and the debate team. Pierce, hands clasped in his lap, knew what this looked like, and knew better than to account for it. Never complain, never explain.

"Downside Academy,” said the Dean. He was a boulder-shaped black man in a tight three-piece suit and stiff collar, tight too, gray bristles on his big cheeks. “I'm not real familiar with this institution. Is it large?"

"Small,” said Pierce.

"Downside?"

"Downside.” It had been a fine, even an evocative name for years, but now the trustees were rethinking. “It's about fifty years old."

The unsmiling dean continued to regard the name, as though it would grow transparent, and allow him to see the place itself behind it. “You had a house there."