And in 1989, the old ironbound empire rusted away, all in a few months; it had lost meaning even for those who most depended on its continuance, who couldn't bring themselves to call out the armies to defend it, and went to prison or exile or into the arms of their former victims with stunned expressions, you saw them every night on television, as one by one the sets were struck behind them, their cosmos rolled up as a scroll to reveal reality behind, shabby, scabby, blinking, like the prisoners let out from their dungeons in Fidelio, but right there where it had been all along. The elation of hearing human voices speaking, not in the accents of revolution or revenge but of plain humanity, civility, sense, as though you were truly face to face with them. Surely it was only because we here had not been paying attention that it seemed so sudden, whole regimes evanescing overnight and in the streets commonsensical smiling men and women young and old saying obvious things to cameras, surrounded by tens and hundreds of thousands of others.

So it happened: a new age really did begin, just as Pierce had once been tempted to promise in a book, no matter that he could actually have neither imagined nor foreseen it. And it began in Prague, there where it must, golden city, everyone's best city, city of the past and future become the present at last: just as if they had found and brought forth the stone of transformation, had known all along where it had been kept, as we all do. Václav Havel and his fellows met and spoke and argued and smoked like steam trains in their favorite spelunkas and then they held their forums in the Realistic Theater. Some theaters are more realistic than others. Or they met to make their plans and imagine an as yet nonexistent civil society in the basement of another theater, the Magic Lantern. The magic lantern was first described in 1646 by Athanasius Kircher, who succeeded Kepler as mathematician in chief to the Hapsburg court, and who decoded or thought he had decoded the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The magic lantern is pictured in his book Ars magna lucis et umbrae, the Great Art of Light and Dark, and in his illustration of the invention (p.768), the slide that is projected against a wall for some reason shows a soul suffering in Purgatory, raising his arms to ask for prayers, the prayers that will free him.

Light, darkness. In that autumn, in a Prague shop window, a poster appeared, showing a big number 89, and on it the word Autumn; arrows were drawn around it to show how it could be turned right around, and 89 would become 68, and on it when it was upended was the word Spring.

And then Mary and Vita were seven years old, and asleep in their small beds, and Pierce Moffett was preparing his midterms in Shakespeare and in world history, and Rosie Rasmussen called to give him a job.

10

Endings are hard. Everybody knows. It's probably because in our own beginningless endless Y-shaped lives things so rarely seem to end truly and properly—they end, but not with The End—that we love and need stories: rushing toward their sweet conclusions as though they rushed toward us, our eyes damp and breasts warm with guilty gratification, or grinning in delight and laughing at ourselves, and at them too, at the impossible endings; we read and we watch and we say in our hearts, This couldn't happen, and we also say, But here it is, happening.

When in his abbey cell he had set out on Kraft's typescript, Pierce thought it was going to turn out to be like a work out of the former age of the world, one of those vast ones like The Faerie Queene or The Canterbury Tales, which are unfinished but not therefore necessarily incomplete, their completion actually hovering perceptibly around them like a connect-the-dots puzzle half connected, or like the ghost limb that amputees feel, only not amputated but never grown. And he thought that maybe if Kraft could himself have ended it, it might have been in that way, so that what he had left undone would be clear.

But no, it wasn't like any of those works. That was obvious to him now, now having reached the end of it again, again. It wasn't like any work of the former age. Nor was it a work of the first age, like one of those endlessly cycling epics that Barr used to talk about, with simply no reason to end. Rather it seemed to be trying to become a work of the age now beginning, the age to come, which it and other works like it (not only in prose or on paper) would bring into being, of which the new age would at length be seen to consist: works that don't cycle or promise completion as the old stories or tales did, nor that move as ours do by the one-way coital rhythms of initiation, arousal, climax, and inanition, but which produce other rhythms, moving by repetition, reversal, mirror image, echo, inversion: vicissitudes of transformation that can begin at any point, and are never brought to an end at all, but just close, like day.

At the close of an August day a lot of years before, in Kraft's own study in his house in Stonykill in the Faraway Hills, Pierce had first read these pages Kraft had piled up in his last year or two and put into a copy-paper box. He had wept to discover in them a country he had once lived in, a country too far ever to reach again, even walking backward forever. And he had asked then, asked of no one, why he must live always in two worlds, a world outside himself that was real but never his own, and another within, one that was his, but where he could not stay. This old question. Rosie Rasmussen was out in Kraft's garden that day, he could see her from the window of that small room where he sat: she and Samantha her daughter, gathering flowers from Kraft's overgrown garden.

But there is only one world. Was, is, will be: a world without end. Kraft's book was finished; Kraft had finished it. It was without end but it was finished.

He left his cell, the face-down pile of papers and the glowing engine, and went through the silent halls to the little cubby where the phone was. He dialed Rosalind Rasmussen's number.

"Hello?"

Dim sleepy possibly alarmed voice. Pierce thought of or felt another time he'd awakened her by phone, far later than this: Brent Spofford beside her then, as he probably was now.

"Hi, Rosie. Sorry if it's late. It's Pierce."

"Oh. No. It's fine. I fell asleep in front of the TV."

A silence. He sensed her rubbing sleep from her eyes and brain. “So."

"So."

"How's it going?"

"Well, interesting. Rosie, it's finished."

"Oh. Wow. You've got it all copied? You're done with it?"

"I mean it's finished,” Pierce said. “Kraft didn't leave it unfinished. It's a finished work."

"But you said it was a mess."

"I know. I didn't understand it."

"Well.” Pause for thought, or yawn. “If you didn't, is anybody else going to?"

"I don't know. I don't know if it's successful. I don't know if it's good. But I know he finished it."

"There were lots of things left unresolved. In the story."

"Yes."

A soft silence like an erasing wave.

"So we can publish it now?” she asked.

"Well, it's finished,” he said. “But now I'm not."

"What do you mean?"

"Now that I understand it,” he said, “I have to go back and take out a lot of my improvements."

"Oh really? That might make it worse."

"Well. Maybe."

"Why did he write it that way? If it takes so long to understand."

"Mercy,” Pierce said. “I think."

"Mercy?"

Mercy. Kraft knew that endings, all endings, trap characters in completions, and he wanted not to bind them but to free them. Not merely to end their stories in freedom, in the way that stories often do end, as several even of Kraft's own earlier books had ended—a door opens, dawn breaks, the road unrolls ahead, The End—but never to end them at all.