And he also remembered how, near the bitter end of what began at that party with that motion of his soul or head, he lay in his small house beside the same river, and Rose Ryder was with him. The hour must have been Matins, he thought: the hour of Judgment, and the hour of the perishing of the world. They were not sleeping but talking, and the subject was biblical inerrancy. Pierce had for some weeks been spending a lot of his actually pretty substantial erudition, wide if shallow, in resolving for her sake a few of the chasms between the Word and the world, at the same time as he tried to tease her into laughing off the whole stupid thing and returning into his orbit once again, and she did laugh, often enough, at his act. So this night she had said something (this was delicate archaeology, recreating that ancient black predawn, from here where he now sat in the sun) something about evolution and the evidence for it, which he said was of course indisputable, please. And she had, what, she had demurred, or said it wasn't the point anyway. And he said Don't worry, the question could be easily resolved and nothing lost, not God's omnipotence or the Bible story or the millions of years of bones and fossils, and he knew how.
How?
Well, he'd said, it's like Adam's navel.
An old trick question, very old, medieval maybe. When we get to Heaven how will we be able to know which man there is Adam? We will because he'll be the one without a navel. Because he was never attached to an umbilical cord. He had no mother, came from no womb, had no history. So there it was. But no, of course he did have a history: his own grown body was a history, and so were the plants and the animals around him, the slow-forming stars he saw in the sky. The answer is (Pierce with raised forefinger explicated this) that there is no time for God, no past-present-future, he can bring the universe into existence at any moment of its history: the universe comes to be at the moment when God wills it to be, with all its previous millennia intact. Do you see? he'd said to Rose. It never existed before that moment, and after that moment it always did. And on the sixth day he makes a man of dust, and breathes life into him: and hair has already grown on his head, and teeth in his mouth, and a beard on his face, and he has a navel on his stomach, from his nonexistent life as a fetus, his ontogeny that never happened recapitulating a phylogeny ditto.
See how useful, how neat? That whole evolution problem rendered moot, do you see? It's all okay; it's not Mere Chance. If God chose, he could take six days to do it all in, which is what the Bible says, what Rose in the bed beside him then was committed to believing. But of course, if you like, you can think he chose to create it all, all its starry depths in all their cosmic evolution, in a single moment: say, just in that moment when Adam opens his eyes to perceive it.
She was impressed. He thought she was. He remembered that she had been. He'd left aside the question of who, just at that moment when the lamp was lit in Adam's head, was creating whom. But he couldn't refrain from pointing out that if you didn't accept the Bible chronology, and had none in particular to replace it with, then you had no way of saying what moment God would choose in which to bring the universe into being. It could be any one; a billion years ago, or just now. Right now, this moment, he'd said, and he sat up and stretched out his arms and closed his eyes: just now, as I open my eyes. All time and history, all my own history too, right up to the very memory I have of just now closing my eyes—it all never existed before, and would all, right now, come into being.
Now. And he opened his eyes on her.
She was on her elbow, looking at him, bare, lost to him; and his cold bedroom was around them; and a huge grief or pity (but for whom?) had seized his throat; and he had begun helplessly to weep, sobbing as she looked on in amazement.
Pierce felt in his body the bell claps of noon, each one stepping upon the trailing tail of the previous one, until no more came, and the twelfth sang alone and died away.
He thought how, in one way if only in one way, Rose and Charis were alike. He thought that neither had ever loved any man, not in the times when he had known them, nor before. Charis had surely known this; but like a person color-blind from birth she probably hadn't regretted it very much, and had gone on (still went on, maybe) secretly believing that others had fooled themselves into thinking a valuable and useful facet of the world—color, love (or Love)—supposedly existed but didn't really. Emperor's new clothes. He hadn't seen her or heard of Charis for a dozen years or more, and wondered sometimes what deal she had struck, if she had, for what she needed, whatever it was.
Sometimes, though, he could perceive Rose, not as she had been, as he had known her, but as she might be now. He would sometimes see with startling suddenness, as in a showstone or a confirming dream, how she lived with them still, her Bible cult, the Powerhouse; getting along, dealing with its hierarchies and its powers as she had always dealt with the world—by indirection, conditional assent, abstraction of her spirit from things she couldn't get her body out of, willingness too to try to live up to others’ standards, at least until she saw no path there for herself and her nature. It must be the case that, in any cult not murderous or psychotic, life eventually settles down and becomes like life anywhere, livings still to get, dishes to wash, rubs and hurts to assuage or nurse in secret. Self-regard to maintain by cunning or other means. Lies to tell. Of course.
It was likely she had never been truly subject to them even back then. The God or godliness she wanted to get for herself was only a new good offered to her to pursue, not really different from health or wealth. It was only he who thought she had laid a way out of the world; only he who ever really believed or feared there was such a way. Following the path that he had made or found through her body he had come himself to be within their unreal heaven and hell, under the rule of their god and his prophets, an enchantment he had not known could happen to a human of his time and place, though common enough (he knew by report) in other times and places. It was there, in that false world, that his spirit had resided while his body walked the Old World searching for the thing lost, in his bad shoes and his overcoat from which the lining had begun to droop. Under his arm that mad guidebook of Kraft's, and the new little red notebook, made in China—still with him here, its pages foxed with London rain and Roman wine—and an umbrella for the endless drizzle, one of a series of umbrellas that he bought and lost as he went, one at almost every pensione, on every train.
Boney Rasmussen was already dead when Pierce set out that winter to find the Elixir to make him better. So there was no one on whose behalf he could have sought it but his own. In fact, as he knew very well even then, there is no other living person for whom it can be sought: though it can only be found, if it's found, for everyone.
What he hadn't known, and would never learn later, was that by then the thing lost had already been found. It had been found by him and others, and redeemed from the place where it was hidden and at threat, and restored to the place it should possess; and this event had stopped the decline of the whole world toward dissolution, toward frozen inanition and repetition such as Pierce had experienced in the cold halls and hot rooms of Rose. The world—"the world,” all this, day and night, self and others, things and other things, inside and out—had been coasting to a stop, and just in time had been put back in a forward gear again. And then it could continue, and would, until all traces of that moment of redemption were erased from all hearts and memories (But you remember it, don't you? Night, and the woods, and the lights put out, and one light restored?). New-wakened Adam would then open his eyes again, the beautiful circle would close, and roll on forever into the future and the past at once.