more dead. There would come a day when there would be no more to die, and she would be alone.
With one bare foot she pushed the paper at her feet around so that it was upside down. The Up Passage Year now a slope to
a valley, the high hill a slough. What the fuck difference did it or could it make. It had died too.
Pierce (who had—maybe not seriously, she couldn’t tell—offered to help her make Mike’s Climacterics scheme into a book, a
self-help book, or a proposal for one) had asked her why a curve, how boring, how two-dimensional, why not a spiral, up which
we go as though climbing amountain; every seven years arriving at the same places or stages, only one turn higher, all different.
Why higher? She hadn’t asked it of him then, but asked it now. Why higher?
Why climbing?
The electric clock humming on the table hadn’t died, it alone remained alive, and by it Rose could see she was late, late.
The thought of the drive up around the mountain to The Woods was paralyzing, in spite of all she had hoped from it, this day,
this chance. She tried to make herself feel the urgency, getting later, all the while thinking it would be a good day to get
lost, drive upstate, find a mall she’d never been in. Get her hair cut. Thinking of this, imagining herself doing this, felt
like diving or sliding down that slide, Down Passage Year, no bottom in sight; and for some time longer she didn’t stir.
Meanwhile the mist had lifted from the Blackbury, a blanket withdrawn; and in his little yellow house by the riverbank, somewhat
hidden and lairlike amid the flame-tipped sumacs, Pierce was hard at his morning’s work. Someone snooping would have heard
from outside the arrhythmic tapping of the electric typewriter he had rolled out onto the porch; the squeaking of the kitchen
chair he sat in too, when he paused for thought or rest.
He’d begun with an anecdote.
One morning just after Christmas in the year 1666, the well-known Dutch physician and scientist Johann Friedrich Schweitzer,
known as Helvetius, had a visitor—a small beardless man in plain clothes with an accent that made Helvetius think he might
be from Scotland. It was a snowy day, and the stranger came in without wiping his boots. He had read, he said, in Helvetius’s
treatises that he was a skeptic concerning alchemical transmutation, and Helvetius admitted he had never seen it work. The
stranger showed him a “neat ivory box, and out of it took three ponderous lumps of the Stone, each about the size of a walnut.”
He could not, he said, give Helvetius any; but he allowed him to handle one piece, and Helvetius managed to scrape off a bit
while the stranger talked of the powers of his stone, and how he had come by it. When the man departed, promising to come
again, Helvetius collected the matter of the stone from under his nail, and later experimented with it, following hints in
the stranger’s conversation. No luck. When the stranger reappeared, he gave Helvetius, after some hesitation, a piece of his
stone as big as a turnip seed; when Helvetius worried it wouldn’t be enough, the stranger took it back, broke it in half,
and gave him only half, “wrapped up neatly in blue paper”: that would, he said, be sufficient. And indeed, late that night
Helvetius’s wife—who was a studentof the Art—persuaded him to try it, and together they transmuted with it a half ounce of lead to gold, which turned out when
Helvetius had it assayed to be extremely pure.
With the next carriage return, Pierce’s sheet extruded from the machine, toast from a toaster, nicely done, and he inserted
another. A fast and tidy penman, Pierce had never learned to type, it was like chopping wood the way he did it, banging down
each key in turn with a strong forefinger, tongue between his teeth, he would fall back exhausted by noon having covered no
more than four or five sheets.
For working Pierce affected a vast old dressing gown
With one bare foot she pushed the paper at her feet around so that it was upside down. The Up Passage Year now a slope to
a valley, the high hill a slough. What the fuck difference did it or could it make. It had died too.
Pierce (who had—maybe not seriously, she couldn’t tell—offered to help her make Mike’s Climacterics scheme into a book, a
self-help book, or a proposal for one) had asked her why a curve, how boring, how two-dimensional, why not a spiral, up which
we go as though climbing amountain; every seven years arriving at the same places or stages, only one turn higher, all different.
Why higher? She hadn’t asked it of him then, but asked it now. Why higher?
Why climbing?
The electric clock humming on the table hadn’t died, it alone remained alive, and by it Rose could see she was late, late.
The thought of the drive up around the mountain to The Woods was paralyzing, in spite of all she had hoped from it, this day,
this chance. She tried to make herself feel the urgency, getting later, all the while thinking it would be a good day to get
lost, drive upstate, find a mall she’d never been in. Get her hair cut. Thinking of this, imagining herself doing this, felt
like diving or sliding down that slide, Down Passage Year, no bottom in sight; and for some time longer she didn’t stir.
Meanwhile the mist had lifted from the Blackbury, a blanket withdrawn; and in his little yellow house by the riverbank, somewhat
hidden and lairlike amid the flame-tipped sumacs, Pierce was hard at his morning’s work. Someone snooping would have heard
from outside the arrhythmic tapping of the electric typewriter he had rolled out onto the porch; the squeaking of the kitchen
chair he sat in too, when he paused for thought or rest.
He’d begun with an anecdote.
One morning just after Christmas in the year 1666, the well-known Dutch physician and scientist Johann Friedrich Schweitzer,
known as Helvetius, had a visitor—a small beardless man in plain clothes with an accent that made Helvetius think he might
be from Scotland. It was a snowy day, and the stranger came in without wiping his boots. He had read, he said, in Helvetius’s
treatises that he was a skeptic concerning alchemical transmutation, and Helvetius admitted he had never seen it work. The
stranger showed him a “neat ivory box, and out of it took three ponderous lumps of the Stone, each about the size of a walnut.”
He could not, he said, give Helvetius any; but he allowed him to handle one piece, and Helvetius managed to scrape off a bit
while the stranger talked of the powers of his stone, and how he had come by it. When the man departed, promising to come
again, Helvetius collected the matter of the stone from under his nail, and later experimented with it, following hints in
the stranger’s conversation. No luck. When the stranger reappeared, he gave Helvetius, after some hesitation, a piece of his
stone as big as a turnip seed; when Helvetius worried it wouldn’t be enough, the stranger took it back, broke it in half,
and gave him only half, “wrapped up neatly in blue paper”: that would, he said, be sufficient. And indeed, late that night
Helvetius’s wife—who was a studentof the Art—persuaded him to try it, and together they transmuted with it a half ounce of lead to gold, which turned out when
Helvetius had it assayed to be extremely pure.
With the next carriage return, Pierce’s sheet extruded from the machine, toast from a toaster, nicely done, and he inserted
another. A fast and tidy penman, Pierce had never learned to type, it was like chopping wood the way he did it, banging down
each key in turn with a strong forefinger, tongue between his teeth, he would fall back exhausted by noon having covered no
more than four or five sheets.
For working Pierce affected a vast old dressing gown
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