"Help me, Doctor, I've got Lewy's bodies,” Axel said. “And he's got mine.” And he made a show of laughing gamely.

"Anyway, it's not Alzheimer's. Though apparently Dr. Alzheimer and Dr. Lewy knew each other. They were chums."

"And what,” Axel asked, “is the prognosis?"

"Well. If you actually have it, more things like the things that have happened to you. Hallucinations. Sleepwalking. Vivid dreams. Paranoia."

Axel gave a great shuddering, self-pitying sigh. And Pierce remembered Brooklyn for a moment.

"I have not had hallucinations,” he said. “I am haunted. But by the real. The quite, quite real."

"The girls,” Pierce said softly, “want you to tell them again about the time you got hit by a train."

Axel's great white head turned on him, eyes full of affront. “Train?"

"They said you said—oh never mind."

Day grew brighter.

"Is it,” Axel asked, “progressive?"

Pierce said nothing.

"Oh God, Pierce. You'll have to lock me in my room. I might commit some hideous crime. And not know."

Pierce made reassuring noises, but Axel rose up distracted, nearly upsetting his cup. He gripped the bedpost and stared.

"Oh Pierce,” he said. “I'm so tired. I long to die."

"Oh you don't either."

"I to my grave, where peace and rest await me. I do, sometimes I do."

"Sometimes! Sometimes I do."

"Thou thy earthly task has done,” Axel said. “Home art gone, and met thy maker."

"Home art gone,” Pierce said, “and ta'en thy wages. Is how it goes."

"Golden lads and girls,” said Axel. “Oh God.” He was weeping, head high now. He wept a little almost every day, and Pierce had begun to weep with him, which astonished them both. Much of the rest of the day he was cheerful; he was, he said, himself.

"Can you get dressed? I mean, will you get dressed? We want to get going on this expedition."

"This what?"

"Journey. Trip. To the Faraway Hills."

"Oh leave me behind. Leave me, leave me."

"No,” Pierce said, softly but definitively. “No, no. No."

* * * *

"He says he can't tell sometimes whether time is passing, or rather how much time is passing,” Pierce said to Roo at the breakfast table. “He thinks sometimes it's days since I went up to see him. That after I've gone it's hours till I come back, when it's been minutes. Not believes. Just doesn't know."

"Tell him to pray,” Roo said. She was doing Vita's hair.

"Well, gee."

"No, I mean it. He remembers all these prayers. The Hail Mary. The Our Father. The Whatever. They aren't going to go. So tell him he should pray, and keep count, and that way he'll know how much time is going by. Keep aholt of it."

He looked at her: hair clip in her teeth, Vita's dark fell of hair in her hands.

"Okay,” he said.

* * * *

"Just another day,” Pierce said, loading his car, the Festina wagon. “Another day of living and striving in the fields of the actual and the possible."

Striving is from strife, he thought, like living from life. Wiving from wife. He called out to his children and his father. Let's get on our way. Way is from Via, and Via is Vita; we think so, because we are the beasts who know we are on the way, that we've come from somewhere and are going somewhere else, and it might be somewhere good and it might be bad, we don't know.

"Beep the horn,” said Vita. “Bye-bye house."

"Bye-bye."

"Bye-bye."

Great animals had used to roam the roads they took toward the Faraways, but they were mostly gone now, the last of them weary and slow and liable to be seen on the side of the road, hood erect or an orange sticker blinding their mirror: Cougars, Mustangs, Stingrays, Barracudas, Eagles, Lynxes. The new cars had neither beast names nor number names nor names of glamorously speedy things like Corvettes and Javelins and Corsairs; their names were meaningless syllables, which were maybe the cars’ own real secret names in the land they came from, Carland: that's what Pierce told the girls. Camry. Jetta. Jolly. Corolla. His own Festina, which he was sure wasn't Latin.

Crows rose from the greening fields, or messed with dead things by the roadside, prancing and picking delicately. “God bless you, crows!” the girls called out, as their mother would too sometimes to the dusky tribe, the crow being her Totem Animal, because of her name, Corvino. “Have a nice day!” they called back to the retreating crows. “And we really mean it!"

Names. Vita and Mary, reciting their own origin story, recounted their mother's name, and how it, therefore they, came to be.

"Because her mother's name was Rose,” said Mary, “and her father's name was Kelley,” cried Vita, “and so she was named Roseann Kelley Corvino,” they said together, and they laughed, as they always did at this point in the story, hearty stage laughter. How Grandpa Corvino later came to be known as Barney and how the “Roseann” turned into “Roo” or was dropped were later chapters they sometimes wanted their mother to recount. But now they stopped listening and played rhyming games, rhythmic rapid hand-patting in a pattern too quick and complex for Pierce to follow, left hands to right hands, right hands to right hands, hands to knees and hands together, never missing.

Mama mama lyin’ in bed

Called for the doctor and the doctor said

Let's get the rhythm of the hand

Let's get the rhythm of the head knock knock

Let's get the rhythm of the haaawt dog

Let's get the rhythm of the haaawt dog

"Who's been teaching your children these ribald rhymes?” Axel asked.

"What's that mean?” Roo said. “'Ribbled?’”

"He means dirty,” Pierce said. “Erotic. Full of double entendres."

"Are you kidding?” Roo said. “That one's on Sesame Street."

"It's a doctor joke,” Pierce said. “Everybody knows."

The girls repeated that one a while—the last line had a rudimentary or vestigial hip swing or grind to go with it, Sesame Street or no—and then embarked on another, more complicated one: smiling even in their deep concentration at the jokes, but sometimes breaking rhythm to laugh, and then beginning again.

Miss Sophie had a steamboat

The steamboat had a bell

The steamboat went to Heaven

Miss Sophie went to

Hello operator

Please give me number nine

And if you disconnect me

I'll cut off your

Behind the frigerator

There was a piece of glass

Miss Sophie sat upon it

And cut her little

"Well?” Pierce said.

"Oh can it, Pierce."

Ask me no more questions

I'll tell you no more lies

The boys are in the bathroom

Zipping up their

Flies are in the parlor

Bees are in the park

Miss Sophie and her boyfriend

Are kissing in the d-a-r-k dark dark dark

It occurred to Pierce that you might be able to date some parts of the rhyme by internal evidence: that operator, like the one in Bondieu, gone now forever. But more of it was universal, eternal, coded wisdom older than the old gods. Life on earth. Oh dark dark dark.

The dark is like a movie

A movie's like a show

A show is like tee-veehee

And that's not all I know.

"There's the exit,” Roo said.

* * * *

They left the old turnpike, entered Skylands, and crossed the Jenny Jump Mountains; they skirted the Land of Make Believe without stopping, despite the children's pleas. At a certain point they crossed out of that state, and in not too long a time found themselves on the eastern bank of a wide southwest-flowing river.