Endless Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

thinking anything else either.
    "You okay?” she said then.
    "I don't know."
    "Then that's not okay."
    "You know when all this started?” he said.
    "All what?"
    "This thing I'm doing. Or actually not doing. It was a night on Tenth Street. The night of the student takeover at Barnabas College. Remember?"
    "I remember that day,” she said. “Listen. Will you send me what you've got? Maybe I can think about it."
    "Ægypt,” he said. “That was the day, or the night, I remembered. You were in bed. It was hot. I stood at the window."
    Come to bed she had said to him, stoned and sleepy; he wasn't sleepy, though the short night was all but gone. Earlier that day the little college where he taught had been taken over by young people (some not so young) demanding Paradise now, and other things; faculty, including Pierce, locked themselves in their offices till the students were ejected by police. Pierce, released and having returned to his railroad flat downtown, thought he could still taste tear gas in the midnight air. Anyway the neighborhood around was all alive and murmuring, as though on its way, a caravan drawn on toward the future from the past, going by him where he stood. And he knew that of course you had to be on their side, you had to be, but that he himself must go back, if he could, and he knew that he could. While the others went on, he would go back, to the city in the farthest east of that old land, the city Adocentyn.
    Dawn winds rising as night turned pale. It was there that it started; and if it wasn't there it was somewhere else, near there or far off, where? If it had no starting place, it could have no ending.
    "I'll do what I can,” he said.
    * * * *
    He got off the train again in Brooklyn, at Prospect Park, to walk the rest of the way; to see the arch at Grand Army Plaza, walk west to Park Slope past the Montauk Club, where his father used to point to the Venetian arches and brickwork, talk about Ruskin, and show him the frieze that displays the history of the Montauk Indians in terra-cotta. Terra-cotta. Pietre-dure. Gutta-percha. Cass Gilbert, the architect who designed the Woolworth Building, once lived in that pleasant brownstone, built by himself. He had stopped to greet Axel one day, one day long ago, an aged, aged man; Pierce was a boy in a gabardine suit with short pants, and was given a nickel with a bison on one side and an Indian, not a Montauk, on the other.
    Was it so? He had been plagued lately by false memories suddenly occurring to him, more vivid and sudden than the real thing, unless they were the real thing, rushing in to supplant the old memories, themselves now become false.
    His own old house. All through his childhood he had carried a key to this door, his latchkey (the only one he had ever referred to so). And then somewhere he had lost it and never replaced it. He went to press the bell's cracked black nipple—beside it the little typewritten card yellowed and faint with his own last name on it, the selfsame as ever—and then he noticed that the door was not fully shut.
    He pushed it open and stepped in. On the entranceway floor a mosaic of two dolphins chasing each other's tails. A thousand Brooklyn buildings had one like it; it had made Axel talk of Etruscans and Pompeii and the Baths of Caracalla, and Gravely the super had used to wash it and wax it often. It could hardly be seen now. Gravely was dead: the last time Pierce spoke to Axel, Axel had told him that. Pierce when he was a child had always been told to call him Mr. Gravely, as though the world probably wouldn't readily grant him that honor and Pierce must remember to.
    The door of Axel's apartment on the second floor stood open too.
    Hearing laughter inside, Pierce looked in, and the laughter ceased. Three guys, stretched at their ease on his father's ancient furniture, looked upon him; they certainly seemed at home, booted feet on the coffee table and beer bottles close at hand on the floor.
    "Hi,” Pierce