Endless Things by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page B

hand reach in and find her there amid the long-ago litter, unremoved.
    * * * *
    He returned to Brooklyn and Park Slope, and to his father's house. Axel was still not there, and neither was the Chief; the young men who came and went and lay around gave him beer to drink and a spot on the couch before the big TV that had come to inhabit the corner. The Ayatollah's face and pisshole eyes, that seemed to hang on the screen like Emmanuel Goldstein's for a full two minutes’ hate.
    He got away as soon as he could to his old room, and to his bed, which felt as though it had been slept in by many, one at a time at least, he hoped. He slept, startled awake by the comings and goings of Renovators and Reclaimers; he dreamed that he had a dream about his father, who was lost and sick and in trouble, dead maybe and in Purgatory, asking for help, but Pierce couldn't answer somehow, nor ask what was the matter; and when he woke up he found himself on a cold hillside, the house and all Park Slope gone. Then he woke up.
    There was silence in the house so deep it might have been empty. Pierce scribbled a note for Axel (one of the silent sleepers must be him) and went carefully out through the darkened rooms. He collected his dreadful bags and carried them bumping the walls down to the street. Snow was falling thickly. It was nearly an hour before he could attract the attention of a gypsy cab, and still he stepped out at the airport way too early, unshowered, unbreakfasted, afraid.

 
    4
    The abbey bells rang Sext, the sixth hour of the day, high noon. Pierce lifted his head to listen. What is the meaning of the sixth hour, on what then do we meditate? At this hour Adam was made, at this hour he sinned; at the sixth hour Noah went in to the Ark and at the sixth hour came out again. At the sixth hour Christ was crucified, reversing Adam's sin. Every hour of the monk's day contains a part of the day-shaped history of the world.
    Through the universe, the human world, and the year, the stories recapitulate, reverse, return. Every Mass is the story of the making, loss, damnation, redemption, and remaking of the world, the Sacrifice at its center. Adam was born or conceived on the hill that would later be named Golgotha, the center of the world, beneath the Y of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, from whose wood the Cross would in time be made; and the letters of his name ADAM name the four directions in Greek: North, South, East and West. He was born on the Equinox, the same day the coming of Jesus was announced to Mary: Ave , said the angel to Mary that spring morning, reversing the damnation that sprang from Eva .
    Blessed circularity, never done. Even the End of the World was able to be repeated in the course of every turn of the heavens around earth—or rather of earth's spin around the sun, a shift of perspective that made no difference on earth really, though it had seemed once to be an utter upset of that same circularity. Of course the Christian story at its first appearance had been not an embodiment but an enemy of circularity, a one-way street from Creation through Cross to Conclusion, and for millions (he supposed it must be millions) it still was. For Pierce and others (millions too, he was sure, though maybe a vertical millions reaching back toward prehistory, rather than the horizontal millions going to church and mosque today) the simple straight story was uniquely repellent, repellent in a way no other could be; for him and his like, the whole history of the church (his church, this church) was nothing but a process by which its original one-way progression was tamed, and turned around like the Worm to bite its own tail or tale, which would otherwise be insupportable , impossible to assert or believe. On Good Friday in the abbey church, the perpetual light above the altar, always burning night and day, would be put out: God would die, the world grow cold. Everything would be over. On Easter Sunday it would be lit again,