The Solitudes

  Maybe it was only because he had read so little fiction in recent years, had read nothing but what at least purported to describe what was in fact the case, that he felt in his breast this weird warmth, this satisfaction in some deep part of him that had not for a long time been satisfied; this vision of the book’s contents as of morning mountains, receding row on row into pale distance, all new, all to be explored, yet somehow already known.

  What a simple conceit, though, really, what a metaphor, the most revelatory of all: that once, once upon a time, the world actually was different. Was not the way it is now.

  And Bruno the harbinger, messenger to the future, sure that the age to come will bring in more magic, not less: like those who cried the new age in Pierce’s own time.

  Bruno, cheek in hand at John Dee’s table, drawing with a chip of chalk the circles of the next universe, the revolution of the orbs of heaven. Once it wasn’t this way, but now it is, and from now on will be.

  Dee, though. Dee knows better, forewarned by his angels, themselves due to pass away. He’ll lay down his wand and (empty) globe at last, Pierce guessed, drown his books like Prospero. All over now.

  A huge shudder, but why, covered Pierce and made him grin.

  What if it were really true?

  Time’s immense body now and then waking from sleep, shifting its massy limbs, disposing them differently, groaning, sleeping again. Hm. And nothing ever the same thereafter.

  He remembered how once at St. Guinefort’s he had been beguiling the time in study hall with a volume of the Catholic Encyclopædia, and had come upon a condemned opinion of Origen’s: that this world we know, in which Adam sinned, which Christ had come to redeem, to which He would return in the glory of the final battle—this world, after it was rolled up like a scroll, would be succeeded by another, in which none of that would happen; and that world, after its end, by another; and so on endlessly—and Pierce reading it had felt for a moment the purest sense of relief, a gust of something like freedom, to think that this might actually be so.

  Might actually literally really be so.

  He laughed. The greatest secret story of all, the container and explainer of all secret stories whatever, explainer too of why they were secret. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, harsh in the breakfastless dawn; and he perceived a corollary.

  If then was one such time, now must be another.

  Yes. In order for him to entertain the notion, the world must just now be on the turn again: for it would only be in such moments of turning—when not only all possible futures come into view but all possible pasts as well—that the previous moments of turning become visible, Time awaking and rubbing his eyes, Oh I see, I remember. Wasn’t that really what Kraft was saying, or rather leaving to the reader to discern? Then was one time; now is another.

  Now; the white decade just past; the children in motion, the days when a closed world like Dante’s had opened, and the still earth moved, both rotating and revolving; and Pierce had found himself at a sudden crossroads, dawn winds rising as night turned pale. And this book of Kraft’s coming to be, yellow page by page, a book like no other he had ever written.

  Pierce thought of Julie, sitting on the bed in his old apartment, the hubble-bubble on the floor beside her, painting her nails in stars: It makes a lot of sense.

  The sky had lightened now, and there were oblongs of yellow lamplight in the face of Beau’s house across the street. A dog barked. Beau’s screen door banged, and Pierce rose from his chilly seat. What if it were so.

  Wouldn’t Julie be knocked out, he thought, wouldn’t she be astonished if the book he was writing for her were to make the claim that it was so. Kraft’s book was, after all, only a novel, a metaphor; but what if his own book could actually adduce evidence that it was so. A world more lost than Atlantis, perceived again beneath the sea of time, recovered, its treasures told. His own fortune made, and Julie’s too.

  He laughed again aloud. You cut it out now, he counselled himself; you be careful. He was still laughing softly when he entered Beau’s yard, and his puzzled neighbors smiled at him.

  “Hi, hi,” he said, and set to helping them fit picnic baskets and children into Beau’s car, a large dented Python that did not always function.

  “Ready? Ready?” said one of the kids to him, horribly excited.

  “Ready,” said Pierce, climbing in. He found it funny that while he had been out of the world of auto travel, the nature of jalopies had changed. This was not a humpbacked Nash like Sam had owned, or an old winged DeSoto; this Python was one of the sleek predator-like cars of, well, of the recent past; a new-car type of car, and yet no, it was already old, a junker, it had that smell of burnt oil and damp upholstery and it had the plaid rug thrown over the back seat. Funny.

  At the Donut Hole there were two or three pickups parked in the yellow lamplight, but otherwise town was still and seemed strangely nonexistent, the morning and the river so large around it and so real and odorous. They cruised out the Shadow River road and upward: and even the excited child in Pierce’s lap was hushed by the white river’s breath and the ghostly pines and the wet wind pouring through the car.

  But what if it were so, Pierce went on thinking, or perhaps only saying in his heart, what if it were so: that the world could be, and had once been, different than it is. And the more he thought or felt it, the more he understood—without any real surprise—that in fact he had long supposed it to be so. Had always supposed it to be so: yes: had never truly believed that History lay behind him in the same stream of time he floated in, that all those people places and things colored like the ten digits had ever actually occurred in the world in which he had his own being, where water flowed and apples ripened. Never. Whatever he had told himself, or his students or his teachers, what he had really sought for in those pieces of past time that he had picked over and examined with such diligence and attention was confirmation of what he longed to know for sure: that things do not have to be the way they are.

  The last wish: the only wish, in fact. That things could be, not as they are, but some different way instead. Not better, really, or not better in all ways; a little larger maybe, more full of this and that, but mostly just different. New. That I, Pierce Moffett, could know that it had once been as it was and is that way no longer, that I could know it to have once been remade and so able to be remade again, all new, all other. Then perhaps this grief would at last be lifted from my heart.

  “Oh look,” said the woman in the front seat. “Oh look there’s one.”

  The mist had risen, and the sky was clear behind it; the balloon was hanging in the air, not far away, where it had not been before, insolent in its improbability—an unreal blue globe with an orange stripe, a white star, and a wicker basket full of folks. The Python took a sweeping turn, and every head within it but the driver’s turned to look back at the balloon, which seemed to look godlike down on them. Deus ex machina. A jet of flame arose within it, making a noise like a dragon’s long exhalation, and it mounted smoothly up the clearing sky. Day had come.

  * * *

  Skytop Farm really was once a farm; then it was a summer camp for years, and is now a closed camp. Its central lodge is opened only occasionally now, for a game supper, a balloon festival. The lodge is at the top of a long varicolored blanket of meadows spread over the knees of Mount Merrow, and sees a wide circle of the Faraways.

  The parking lot was already filling when the troop from the Jambs arrived; Beau had to leave the Python far from the flying field. Passing through the lot Pierce noticed Spofford’s truck, and a little red Asp that looked a lot like the car he had seen Mike Mucho and his ex-wife struggle with.

  “Some folks we know here,” he said to Beau.

  “Oh yes,” Beau said. “Oh you bet.”

  A hot day was succeeding the cold dawn. The æronauts—who had slept here all night in tents and campers or tucked within their special ballooner’s trucks—were up and about, sipping coffee at refreshment wagons,
zipping up their coveralls, checking their gear. Some had already got aloft; others’ balloons were beginning to sprout from the grass, tumescent and slowly erecting. A whole field of balloons was comically heart-lifting, lighter than air, and made the child who tugged at Pierce’s hand leap up in imitation, and laugh exultantly. Pierce laughed too, unable not to, when just then another one of them left the earth, not suddenly but calmly, and ambled outward in the air over the meadow.

  “Thought I’d see you here,” said someone at his elbow as he gaped.

  “Spofford,” Pierce said. “I saw your truck. Hey where have you been?”

  “Around,” Spofford said mildly.

  “Well hell,” Pierce said. “Hell. You might visit.”

  “Hey, likewise,” Spofford said. “I’m usually up at the place.”

  “You forget I don’t drive,” Pierce said.

  “Oh yes,” Spofford said, grinning even more broadly at Pierce, as though still relishing a trick he had played on Pierce some time ago. He held out to Pierce a book he had had behind his back. “I brought this along,” he said, “on the chance you’d be here. You left it last year.”

  It was the Soledades of de Góngora, the twisted pastorals Pierce had never retrieved from Spofford’s cabin. He took the book from Spofford. A rich chain of past moments was forged within him, link by link, and he remembered how he came to be here now. “Thanks,” he said.

  “I looked into it,” Spofford said. “Interesting, but tough.”

  “Well,” Pierce said. “They’re not really meant to be read, I mean I mean …”

  “One of those shepherds,” Spofford said, “used to be a soldier.”

  “Yes?”

  Spofford took the book back from Pierce and opened it. “‘When I, who now wear homespun, went in steel.’ Do I guess right?”

  “I guess.”

  “He fought once in a battle, on this same mountain he guides the shipwrecked guy over. Right? Once a long time before. See:

  ‘Round the bare stones of these dejected heaps

  Now pitying ivy creeps:

  Time, which heals every woe,

  On ruins green endearments can bestow.’”

  He gave the book back. “Interesting,” he said. His eyes narrowed in the sunlight, looking out over the Faraways. “I remember how quick the jungle came back.”

  “Hm.” Pierce tucked the book under his arm, shamed somewhat, shamed that his old pupil could find true matter in the written word, however much the writer might have preferred it not to be sought there.

  They walked together through the crowds at the perimeter of the field, upon which now most of the balloons had been at least unfurled and laid out, a heraldry of checks, bars, chevrons, and targets in savagely gaudy colors, like knights’ tents pitched on a jousting field—enormous, though, tent flag and charger all in one.

  “It’s a funny thing,” Pierce said. He waved to a dark-haired man in tailored shorts who had waved to him, a lawyer he thought, whom he had met playing croquet. “When I first moved up here, I was afraid there wouldn’t be many people to know. I thought I’d be making regular trips back to the city, for, for …”

  “Sparkin’.”

  “Entertainment. I haven’t though. And now I’m getting introduced around, and really there are lots of people. Good people too. Interesting. I’ve met more and more. I was surprised.”

  “Yep.” Spofford raised a brown hand himself, and nodded a greeting to someone.

  “But,” Pierce said. “Look now. This field is filling up with people I’ve already met, or seen at least. The same ones. I must have been introduced to oh a fifth of these people. A lot of the others I know by sight.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll run out soon. They aren’t endless like the city. I’ll come to the end of them.”

  “Ha,” said Spofford. “Wait’ll you’ve been married to one or two, and had kids by another; and your kids’ mother is the lover of your ex-wife’s old husband, et cetera. Then you’ve come to the end of them. And it’s time to move on.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well they just don’t leave you a lot of room to maneuver,” Spofford said. “They think they know all about you, and what they’ve decided you are, that’s what you gotta be. Small town, y’know?”

  Pierce supposed he did know. He had grown up in a town in most ways far smaller than any in these parts, smaller because more remote in time and space from Possibility. There, character really had been fate. The town drunk, the flinty mine-owner and his degenerate son, the hypocrite preacher and the kindly doc. And the simple moral tales acted out by this brief cast over and over, as in a movie. Continuous showings.

  It didn’t seem to him, though, on this morning in the Faraways, such an unfortunate thing, that kind of small-town determinism. True, he had himself clambered out of it as fast as he could and into the Great World seeking growing-room and air to breathe; but he had in fact languished in the city, not growing but shrinking over time into a strange form of invisibility. Almost no one that he’d known there knew anyone else he had known, and so to each new acquaintance Pierce was able to present a separate and partial character, an ad hoc personality specially adapted to the circumstances (bar, bookstore, Brooklyn) but too flimsy to support more than a single other person at close range, or two at the most. Freedom of a kind, that changeful dandy’s life, but thin, thin.

  Things would be different now. He had long lived solitary as a pinball, despite all the collisions of so-called love, but now maybe real connections might begin to be made. Maybe. Of what kind, though, he couldn’t really know; for they would not be entirely his doing. Whomever he would become for these people over time, whatever sort of exemplum their communal comedy required and that he could plausibly embody, they would participate in deciding on.

  A part to play. Okay. All right.

  “There,” he said to Spofford, “just for an instance of what I’m talking about, is Mike Mucho, right, standing next to the basket of that balloon.”

  Spofford glanced that way. “Right,” he said.

  “Now I haven’t met him, exactly, but I know him. He’s a fixture.” And someone with whom Pierce was, in more than one way, already connected. QED. A warmth, weirdly fraternal, arose in his bosom. “And see there with him is his wife, Rosie.”

  Spofford’s head snapped quickly from Pierce to the black balloon far off, and back to Pierce. “No it isn’t,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “It must be the other one, then,” Pierce said. “It sure does look a lot like his wife.”

  “It doesn’t,” Spofford said. “Not a bit.”

  Well, she was a ways away, and allowance had to be made, Pierce thought, for the eyes of love. She sure looked like Rosie Mucho to him.

  “Her name,” Spofford said, “is Ryder. Rose Ryder.”

  Ryder was Rose too? A popular name around these parts; that made three he knew of already. Roses were thick on the ground.

  “She and I,” Spofford said, “had a brief thing a while back. A good while back. And now look.”

  Rose Ryder was being helped into the basket by Mike.

  “You see what I mean?” Spofford said, clasping his hands behind him, and turning away. “You see what I mean.”

  It might be, Pierce thought, that Mike Mucho was another like himself: one girl for him, the same girl in different guises, under different names—or in Mike’s case nearly the same name. “And here again,” he said, pointing the other way, down the meadow. “Another instance.”

  “Yep,” Spofford said.

  “That woman is my new boss,” Pierce said, “and her name too is Rosie.”

  “Rosalind,” said Spofford. “I heard about this. You working for the Foundation.”

  “You did?” Rosie Rasmussen waved to the two of them; she was following a child of two or three, who seemed to be in a tearing hurry. “You know her, I guess.”

  “Yes,” Spofford said. “I introdu
ced you two. Didn’t I? Maybe not as such.” He began to turn his head toward the black balloon up on the flying field behind him, but then seemed to think better of it. “I know I’ve talked about her to you. My plans and all. Rosie. Rosie Mucho.”

  He struck out down the meadow toward where the golden-haired child toiled upward. Pierce did not follow. His head too turned partway toward the Rose behind him, Ryder; and then thought better of it, and turned again to the Rosie before him.

  “She’s a little nutso,” Rosie said to Spofford.

  They had taken hold of Sam together, Sam having tripped in the grasping weeds knee high to her and surrendered to despair. “Daddy’s not going without you, kid,” Rosie said to her. “Don’t worry.”

  Spofford, grinning, hoisted weeping Sam to his shoulders, from where she still reached out histrionically toward her distant father.

  “Going for a balloon ride, huh, Sam?” Spofford asked.

  “It’s amazing to me,” Rosie said. “She can’t think about anything else. I’d be scared shitless.”

  Spofford laughed aloud, and the boom of it stilled Sam on his shoulders. “Hey,” he said then. “I’m sorry about the game.”

  “Yeah, well.” Pierce Moffett, solemn on the hillside, raised a hand to her. “So what was this big scheme?” she said. “You said you had a scheme.”

  “It’s about sheep,” Spofford said. “I’ll tell you later. I talked to Boney. He likes it.”

  Pierce, hands in his pockets when she reached him, staring oddly at her, looked even more stunned than he had the other day. “Hi,” she said. “You never met my daughter Sam, did you? Samantha. Say hi, kid, aw don’t start crying again.”

  Pierce stared up, at Sam aboard Spofford. Maybe stunned was his usual mode or mood: he looked like he had just awakened in a strange bed, and was wondering how he had got there. A pleasant bed, a strange room. It was appealing, sort of. “So,” she said. “We’re going back tomorrow? To old Kraft’s?”

  Pierce only went on studying her, as though deaf; at last he said, “Yes. Yes. If I can.”