"Uh huh."

"They talk to them. Hi, how are you today. Somebody just this side of a cadaver. One nurse told me: I know he's not in there anymore, but he's still right around here somewhere. He can hear. He minds if I don't say hi."

"Uh huh."

"How do they. That humility. It's what you have to have. Never thinking you know when somebody's life ought to be written off. It must be so hard. You could pretend, but it's not like being a used-car salesman. It would be hell to go to that job every day and pretend. You just couldn't. Your heart would die."

Pierce listened, pondering the limits of his own humility, his own humanity. He'd never liked Barney, and he wanted to stay as far from Barney's yellow canines and domineering intimacies as he could get. But his own father. Himself. If you do not know how to die never trouble yourself, Montaigne said. Nature will fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will do all that part for you; take you no care for it. Maybe not, not these days.

When Barney had at last made it over (his cropped head, too, laid upon her lap) Roo told Pierce she wanted to go to school and study nursing. “It's a future I can see,” she said to Pierce. “But also it's really the first one I think I can get to."

"Okay. I'll help."

"It's actually a good job. A good career. Steady."

"Yes."

"It's gonna cost, though. You have to trust me."

"I trust you,” he said.

* * * *

After a further interview, Pierce was hired by the community college.

"It was a tough decision,” the dean said. “I hope you don't mind my saying that. I myself was a definite yes vote. I thought we could overlook some of the gaps in your CV.” He leafed through the file he held. “You know we never got a letter from the dean of Barnabas College. A Dr. Santobosco?"

"Really."

"No matter. You impressed me, Pierce, and not only with the accomplishments. You can't always go on those alone. You have to go with what you see."

"I hope,” Pierce said, “to live up to your expectations. I certainly will try to. You have my promise.” And he meant this, with all his heart, as he had meant so little in his life; almost, indeed, couldn't get through the saying of it for a hot lump that rose in his throat. He got to his feet, and shook the dean's great fat warm hand.

"First we'll go down and look at your office,” said the dean, taking a big ring of keys from his pocket. “You'll be sharing with Mrs. Liu, whom you've met, she's Elements of Communication."

"Yes."

They went down through the plain halls of a standard utilitarian building, the dean greeting students with a raised hand as though in blessing.

"In here."

A battered gray desk, near another similar but different one; steel shelves and a gooseneck lamp; and a wide window.

No he hadn't been an alcoholic, or insane, nor had he burned down his life smoking in bed, or thrown it away by mistake like a winning lottery ticket, but he was as grateful as if he had done a thing like that, and been saved, for no reason. Lucius thou art at length come to the port and haven of rest and mercy: thus said many-colored Isis to Lucius the Golden Ass, not an ass anymore at last. Neither did thy noble linage, thy dignity, thy doctrine, or any thing prevale, but that thou hast endured so many servil pleasures, by a little folly of thy youthfulnes, whereby thou hast had a sinister reward for thy unprosperous curiositie; but howsoever, the blindness of Fortune tormented thee in divers dangers: so it is, that now unawares to her, thou art come to this present felicitie: let Fortune go, and fume with fury in another place.

"Welcome to our family,” the dean said.

* * * *

So Pierce and his wife became urban pioneers in that city, which was a real city in a real conurbation and not just a hallucinatory compound of fears and longings, omphalos of a smoky underworld—say it was Holyoke, or Bridgeport, or Albany. It was a city that had got rich very quickly about the middle of the nineteenth century and then slowly got poor again. When it was rich, and the rich didn't mind living near the factories and mills and canals that supported them, the city had built splendid neighborhoods of huge houses, houses that now nobody wanted, for most of those who could afford to live in them wanted to live farther away. Even Roo and Pierce—moved as they were by the big echoey rooms with parquet floors, the curved bay-window glass, the massy radiators and tubs that the desperate salesmen pointed out—in the end couldn't feature managing so much.

But then they found, beyond those proud sad streets and their great trees, in the direction of the (former) farmlands, one of those little suburbs that about 1910 developers were arranging out at the end of the trolley lines, places designed to be the best of town and country. Once surrounded by rose-burdened walls, entered through rough ivy-clad brick gateways (gone when he and she drove through in the Rabbit), it was surrounded now by a shabby nameless precinct of the city, and overlooked by a medical building done in raw concrete (they would see its minatory red cross in their bedroom window in the leafless winter). But it still clustered around its own little rocky sunken parkland and duck pond, and the Tudor red-brick and Queen Anne shingled houses were nearly all still there, some clad in vinyl siding, some with fiberglass carports or chain-link fences. Several of them were for sale.

The one they got, where they still are, was at the end of Peep o’ Morn Way, right on the Glen (as the parkland was called). It was absurdly narrow and tall; two stories faced on the street, and another went down behind as the house fell off a steep ledge into its little garden and backyard down in the Glen. Oh it was cute. Tall trees watched over it and its neighbors; its paneled door sheltered shy behind an arched trellis and a fence; a little gate opened in the fence by the house's side, and a winding wooden stair went down and around the house until it reached the backyard far below. Down there they could glimpse, as they stood by the gate, a wooden bench, and pots and potting tools, and a pair of old gardening gloves.

It was probably the gloves that sold it.

It was large for them, three stories large, though each story was no more than two or three rooms deep or wide; they had no plans to fill it further when they bought it. No firm plans, though looking back Pierce can see himself propelled by an unspoken urgency toward propagation. Roo had always told him she couldn't imagine growing old all alone, and he came to know that what Roo could not imagine she would not allow to befall her: she would instead bring into being what she could imagine.

7

On the fourth anniversary of their marriage, Roo won an office pool at the dealership in Cascadia that the salesmen had put her name into, a sort of memorial to her or to Barney. The prize, to Pierce's horror, was a pair of tickets to Rome and four days-three nights in a chain hotel to which Barney's dealership was somehow connected.

"Uh-uh,” he said to her.

"What?"

"I don't want to go back to the old Old World,” Pierce said. “Besides, I'm not sure it still exists to return to."

"Let's not be silly,” Roo said with something like patient indulgence. “I am not returning anywhere. I've never been, and I think it would be a good and great thing to see what you've seen."

"You don't want to see what I've seen."

"You'd be good to go with. You could explain it all to me. The churches, the pictures. The meaning of it all.” It had surprised Roo that, on the odd occasions (other people's weddings or christenings, chance, curiosity) when they found themselves in a Catholic church, Pierce was able to decode the surreal images in plaster and stained glass, the woman with the toothed wheel, the man in brown with the lily, the man who wasn't Jesus bound to a pillar and pierced with darts, the effulgent bird and crown, the random letters, INRI, XP, JMJ. “Couldn't you?"