I know, Hurd Hope Welkin wrote in his “Little Sermons on Several Subjects,” I know now there is truly no Up, no Down; there is no Right, no Wrong, no Male, no Female, no Jew, no Gentile; there is not Light, nor Darkness, not Higher, nor Lower; there is not is, there is not is not; there is not Life, not Death. But there surely is suffering, and joy; pain, and surcease of pain. And from these come again all the others: for men must work and women must weep, and if we are to relieve the one and console the other we must have cunning and wisdom. For this the Serpent gives us to eat of the tree of Knowledge, and we do eat, and then we turn to our labors.

Pierce and Roo, Mary and Vita, Sam and Rosie Rasmussen, Brent Spofford, Val, Axel Moffett, all awoke within minutes of one another to find that the morning was not sunny as it had been the day before but that April silver-gray that pales and lightens the saturated greens and the violets and casts an unplaceable shine or glitter over what's looked at, or just away from what's looked at, like a secret smile.

While Roo fed the girls Pierce carried a mug of coffee up to his father's room on the third floor; if he was left to himself he might putter and daydream for a long while, and today was a day to get going.

"Axel?"

"Come in, come in. Entrez."

When the door opened, though, he seemed startled to see his son. Pierce wondered whom he expected: it could be one of a number of people lately; people only Axel could see had been visiting. Axel was still in his ancient gray pajamas, which gave Roo the creeps, like cerements: as though one of her patients had moved into her own house, in an upstairs room, and taken to walking around. Sometimes through the house; sometimes in the middle of the night. Just what I need to come home to, she'd said or shouted at Pierce one bad night. Another sick old man.

And yet it was also Roo who, when Axel had called in despair a year before, had said or shouted in fury that of course Pierce had to take him in, of course there wasn't any damn thing he could do otherwise, didn't he see that, what was he going to do, tell him no? Pierce with his hand over the phone, caught between her rageful certainty and Axel's faraway tears. The building in Brooklyn was gone, taken by the bank. The Chief dead, the Renovators dispersed, bills Axel had no idea were accumulating falling suddenly due; judgments, liens, seizures. When? Almost a year had passed since then, Axel said. Axel had been on the street. Nothing, he kept saying. Nothing. Nothing.

"So I talked to the doctor yesterday,” Pierce said. “She got the reports back on the tests and everything. Do you want to go talk to her? I can make an appointment."

"It's senility, isn't it,” Axel said. “Second childhood. Sans eyes sans teeth sans taste sans everything. Mewling and puking, plucking at the coverlets."

"No,” Pierce said. “Or not exactly."

"You can say it, son,” Axel said with great compassion. “You can say it to me. Don't be afraid."

"Well,” Pierce said. “If senility means Alzheimer's disease, you apparently don't have that."

"Ah.” He seemed uncomforted.

"There are some other possibilities. You might have Lewy's bodies."

"What?"

"Lewy's bodies. It's a form of brain damage or disease.” What the doctor had called it was dementia with Lewy's bodies. “The ‘bodies’ are these deposits of some kind in the brain."

"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.