"When you get to Hell,” she said, “mention my name. You'll get a good deal."

"I'll remember that,” he said.

"No, you won't,” she said.

She was done, pretty soon after that, with her set or stint, and after a few vacant moments another woman began hers, inserting into a boom box on the stage her own special recorded selections, little different to Pierce's ear. She wore cowboy boots, a hat, and a rudimentary vest, but these last were soon discarded; the ecdysiastic art was reduced here to a gesture or two. Softer and less defined than the earlier dark pale woman, her parts smaller and more secret, she reminded Pierce of the first woman he had been naked with, how he had felt faintly embarrassed for her, so undressed, which had not caused him to cease his attentions to her; no more than to this one, striking poses over them in her boots, soft thighs quivering a little. Beyond her at the stage's edge a third woman sat waiting on a stool, bare legs crossed, cigarette in hand, a sort of vampiric or devil-doll one, but really no different, just another young woman. Pierce folded his hands before him. Since there was no end to it, only repetition, there was no reason to leave at any time, and no reason to stay longer than now. He thought of waiting till his original friend came around again, and it occurred to him that it was after all possible to spend a lot of money here. At last he was lifted up as by some external hand, and propelled toward the door. He passed the first woman, sitting at the bar, drinking with chums, now minimally clothed; she lifted her dark brows and trilled her fingers at him, so long. And when thou descendest to Hell, where thou shalt see me shine in that subterrene place, shining (as thou seest me now) in the darkness of Acheron, and raigning in the deep profundity of Styx, thou shalt worship me, as one that hath been favourable to thee.

He felt oddly triumphant, faintly atremble, erect generally but not specifically. He was as though rinsed in something, something delightful and right yet equally unfamiliar. He wondered if this was what the ancient Gnostic worshippers felt in their chaste naked prelapsarian orgies: that by this nakedness the rules, the iron rules of the Archons who made the world, could be broken, shuffled off, and the world and the self experienced, if only for that moment, as though the rules didn't exist. Not just the social or cultural rules that any outlaw can flout but rules a lot deeper than that: species-specific rules of courting, mating and bonding, male and female, competition and procreation, the million-year-old mammalian rules that can't be broken, that underlie endlessly mutating human culture and all society, tight or loose.

That was what Rose Ryder wanted, he thought. To be carried, by the breaking of the rules, by the making of other rules absurd in their strictness, to that limit beyond which everything could be forgotten, every physical constraint and fear; there to be naked and enwrapped, filled and hungry, at once and endlessly, beyond will, beyond pleasure, beyond even the limits of the flesh that bore it. He hadn't had her wild mad courage, but what he had sought in her for himself, and not only in her, what he had bent his heart and strength toward in all the multiplying beds and hearts and cunts in all his former life, what he had so often traded whatever he had for, without any deal, it was the same—not to overpower or win or have or achieve or succeed or know or even love but to escape, to reach escape velocity, flee through the only cleft or crack (!) that was open in the closed universe he found himself in.

But no, of course it was foolish, there wasn't any escape, there hadn't ever been an escape, for there was nothing to escape from. All human journeys, all flights and fleeings, can only be inward, farther into the world, no matter which way they point or where they lead, to whatever heavens or hells: because there just isn't anywhere else. That's all.

He stopped, in the cold spring air of the parking lot, with his car keys in his hand, in the chartreuse light of the Paradise Lounge girl.

And yet there is a realm outside.

There is a realm outside.

It wasn't a thought or a notion arising in his heart or head, it was as though presented to or inserted within him, something that wasn't of or from himself at all. He had never felt even the possibility of it before, and yet he knew it now with absolute plain certainty. It wasn't even a surprise.

There is an enveloping realm, beyond everything that is and everything that might be or can be imagined to be. It was so.

Not Heaven, where the Logos lives, where everything is made of meaning, or better say, where meanings are the only things. That realm, of any, is deep deep within. But beyond the realms of meaning; beyond even any possible author of all this, if there was one, which there was not; outside or beyond even Bruno's infinities, outside of which there could be nothing; outside all possibility, lay the realm in which all is contained.

It was so. He knew it, without any wonderment; he knew it by its total usefulness.

It answered.

It provided all that was needed for this world to be, but it touched nothing here. It made nothing, altered nothing, wanted nothing, asked nothing, urged nothing; the fact of its existence beyond existence had nothing to do with what went on here, didn't shine through it as through a dome of many-colored glass. No. This world shone with its own light, and its light is all the light there is.

It made no difference to the world, it didn't even know of our world's existence. All knowledge went only outward, toward it. The only part of it that could ever be in this neighborhood of ours was the knowledge that it existed. And yet that made all the difference.

Pierce knew: and now that he knew, nothing was ever going to be the same again. Here at this place, existence divided in two, before and after, though nothing, not an atom, had changed because of it, nor would.

Here at this parking lot, in this electric light, this spring night. The dancers’ music returned into his ear, and he realized that for some time he had not been hearing it or anything. He looked down at the car keys he still held in his hand, three thick keys with their own golden or silver sheen, the tips of their teeth alight, so real and irrefutable. For an unmeasured time he had stood here with them in his hand.

How had he come to know this? Had he labored to learn it, without understanding that he was doing so, and here at last it was, or was it a gift, or just a random collision here of this soul with the secret? The knowledge was as infinite as the thing known, it was infinitesimal, it dwelt at the root of himself, not different from the root of being, and always had.

He opened his car door and folded himself within. The door of the Paradise opened and the music grew loud for a moment; men came in and went out; around him pickups were lustily revving their engines. He turned his lights on and drove out of the parking lot and upward again.

Well how do you like that, he thought, not shamed by his own inanity. How do you like that. In his rear-view mirror he saw the spot of light that was the Paradise grow smaller, and vanish into darkness around a curve of the road. He supposed he would soon forget this thing that he now knew, or rather he would cease to truly know it without forgetting that on this night he had for a moment been certain of it. He had begun to forget it already. He wished—he even prayed—that, now and then, it might come again to him, a whisper or a call in his ear, though he supposed it couldn't be compelled: once was more than he had known was possible, and was enough. He knew why there are things, endless things, and not nothing. And as though they had all forever been waiting for this, all leaning forward eagerly or impatiently and fixing on him, waiting to see if he would finally get it, those things now sank back, and let go, and letting go they went comfortably to sleep. It was all right. Pierce yawned hugely.