Endless Things Read Free Page B

things his own world also did. Later on he would wonder if certain pages of it hadn't become entangled with his growing brain, so that he wouldn't always know what he had taken from it and what he had conceived himself. He could be haunted for days by a not-quite-recoverable image—a blackened obelisk, with palms and elephant; or find himself saying over and over to himself like a charm or a madman's rant a word that he seemed to have made up but surely hadn't ( Yggdrasil, Adocentyn ), and he would, sometimes, guess that that book was the source. Sometimes it was.
    Pierce never revealed that he'd known the answer to the question that defeated Axel.
    So he had had his own secrets and unsayable things, things out of which a double life is made, as his father's and his mother's lives were made of them. Sometimes laid deep like mines or bombs (he thought you'd have to explain this to young people nowadays, who didn't live such lives, probably) so that you had to proceed with care along your way, not come upon them unexpectedly or at the wrong time, at a juncture, and have them explode.
    Homo, viator in bivio , the Latin Church declared, offering to help. Man, voyager on forking paths. There's no provision, though, for going back , is there, back over the thrown Y switches of our lives, the ones that shot our little handcar off its straight way and onto the way we took instead, as in the silent comedies that Axel loved: no way to go back and fix the thing broken, or break the silence that later exploded. An infinite number of junctures lies between us and that crisis or crux, and passing back again across each one would generate by itself a further juncture, a double infinity, an infinitesimal calculus; you'd never get back to there, and if you could you'd never return again to here where you started from: and why would you need to go back in the first place except to learn how to go on from right here, to go on along the way you have to go?
    And yet we want always, always to go back. What if we could, we think, what if we could. We want to make our way back along those tracks, over every switch, to the single, consequential divide: there where we can see ourselves still standing, indecisive and hesitant, or cocksure and about to step off firmly in the wrong direction. We want to appear before ourselves—shockingly old, in strange clothes (though not so strange as we then imagined we would by now be wearing)—and clothed too in the authority of the uncanny. We want to take ourselves aside, in the single brief moment that would be allotted us, and give ourselves the one piece of advice, the one warning, the one straight steer that will put us on the correct road, the road we should take, the road we have a right to take, for it is truly ours.
    Then to make our way forward again, through all the new branching ways, to where we left from, which will not be the same place, but instead will be the place we ought to be, the course of our real lives.
    We plot and plan how we might help ourselves out of every little pitfall and pothole— not the checked suit, you dope; lose the checked suit —no that's idle, not worth the investment of longing, of rewriting. But oh if we could decide on just the one moment, the one critical moment, and we can; and if we could reduce the time asked for to the barest minimum, no big discourse but only the few minatory words that would change everything, the words that we could not have thought or said then. Marry her. Don't marry her . Surely if the time required were so little, and only the one instance asked for, and the need so obvious.
    When we come to cease fretting in this way, if we ever do cease, then at the same time we come to know, for sure, that we will die.
    Pierce Moffett had known times (more than one, each one canceling all the former ones) when his need to go and knock on his own door had been so great, the bleak longing for things not to have turned out as they had so intense, that he