“I can’t read,” I said.
He absorbed this for a two-count. “You got a disability?”
“Not that I know of. My daddy wasn’t too big on school. I can sign my name, I can add and subtract. That’s about it.”
“You want to learn, I’ll teach you.”
“I reckon not. I gone this long without, it don’t seem all that important now.”
“I won’t push it,” Bobby said. “But you’d be smart to take me up on the offer. Time can move pretty slow around here.”
The first grown-up book I read start to finish was a taped-together paperback entitled Sweet Wild Pussy. It had nothing to do with cats, nor do I believe it possessed much in the way of literary value, unless you were to count being made incredibly horny as an artistic achievement. Bobby had given it to me because the words were simple, and I felt accomplished on finishing it—the result of months of study. Still and all, I wish he had loaned me something else to begin with. Being the first thing I read, it exerted an undue influence on me for a while, and I found myself thinking overly much about “love ponies ridden hard” and “squeezable passion mounds.” Eventually I got around to reading the red notebook that Bobby had pushed on me during our first meeting. It had been found on a train that had returned from Yonder’s Wall and was purportedly the diary of a man named Harley Janks whom no one remembered. Harley claimed to have ridden straight from the world, past Yonder and on into the mountains. He said that beyond the mountains lay a world that was hellish hard to live in, populated by all manner of nasty critters; but there was a big settlement there and folks were carving out a place for themselves, working to bring order out of chaos. Most people who had read the notebook considered it a hoax. Harley was not a terribly articulate man, and his descriptions of life over Yonder’s Wall were pretty thin. However, Bobby thought the notebook went a ways toward proving his theory that Yonder was part of a computer game, and that the world Harley described was simply the next level.
Time, as Bobby had said, did move slowly at the settlement. I came to view my life there as a kind of penance for my sins, a retreat during which I was forced to meditate upon the damage I had caused, the waste and delusion of almost my every waking hour. And maybe, I thought, that meditation was a measure of Yonder’s purpose. Though the actual nature of the place continued to elude me, I realized that Bobby was right—nothing about it made sense, at least in terms of a reality that I could comprehend. I noticed all manner of peculiarities. Like for example, no one ever got pregnant, and when someone died, which happened twice during those first months, sooner or later somebody new would arrive on a train. It wasn’t always a one-for-one exchange, yet from what I could tell the population had remained stable since forever. But if you strung all the peculiar things together, all you wound up with was a string of peculiar things that didn’t belong together. I kept going back to what Pieczynski had said—“Why should creation be all one way?” And then I’d think how it would he for a caveman whose task it was to explain the operation of the universe judging by what he knew of the world. That was how I understood our position. We were trying to comprehend the universe from information we’d gathered while living in a humongous tree for a few months or a few years, whereas it had taken folks thousands of years to come up with the theories of creation found in some of Bobby’s books. A theory, as I saw it, was a kind of net that held all the facts you knew. Back in the Stone Age, they’d only had a few basic facts and so the nets they used had been basic; but as the centuries went by and more facts came to light, the mesh of the nets necessary to contain them had grown finer and finer, and things still fell through the gaps. My feeling was they’d never come up with the perfect net, and we’d never know for sure what was going on, no matter how advanced we proclaimed ourselves to be. Maybe, I thought, first impressions were the most accurate. Maybe the old world had been created by a god, and this one was populated by the dead. It didn’t make life any easier to hang your hat on those notions, but it did allow you to focus on the matter at hand.
While learning to read, I naturally spent a lot of time with Bobby. People were always stopping by his room and telling him about something they’d seen, which he would then write down in a notebook, and he introduced me to all of them. But I never struck up any friendships, and once I started reading on my own, Bobby and I stopped hanging out. Looking back, I can see that he wasn’t all that interested in me—at least no more than he was interested in anyone else—and the main reason he taught me was to fill his time. That was how things were with everyone in Yonder. You might have a friend or two, but otherwise you left everyone else to their own devices. After the first week, I hardly ever ran into Pieczynski anymore. People I’d known on the rails, and there were twelve of them, men I’d ridden with like Shaky Jake, Diamond Dave, Dogman Tony…they acknowledged me in passing and then went on with their oddly monastic reclaimed lives. Even Stupid kept his distance. Once every so often he’d wander up and snoot at my hand to get petted, but he had become part of the pack and spent the bulk of his day associating with his four-legged associates. For my own part, I didn’t have much interest in anybody, either. It was like whatever portion of my brain was in charge of curiosity had been turned down to dim. The only constant in my life were occasional visits from Annie Ware. She never stayed long and rarely showed me anything other than a businesslike face. I guessed she was filling her time by checking up on me. I was always glad to see her. Glad all over, so to speak. But I didn’t enjoy the visits much because I assumed that I had done something bad to her—I had no idea what it could have been, but I imagined the worst and felt confused and remorseful whenever she came around.
For more than six months my life was occupied by menial chores, and by studying and reading. The two favorite books I read were Gulliver’s Travels and Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels, which was a travel book published a half-century before. It was full of black-and-white photographs of the pyramids and South Pacific islands and the Himalayas. When I compared them to mental snapshots of the switchyard in Topeka and tramps sleeping among piles of cow crap in a Missoula cattle pen and various hobo jungles, I wished now I’d done some real traveling back in the world instead of just riding the freights and drinking my liver stiff. Thinking what I could have seen, a world of blue sky and ice from twenty-nine thousand feet up or tropical fish swarming like live jewels in aquamarine water, it stirred me up, and I would go off exploring throughout the tree, climbing rope ladders from floor to floor, peeking into chambers where ex-hobos were engaged in mending shirts or decorating their cells, and ex-punk riders were playing chess on a makeshift board. The atmosphere reminded me of this idiot farm a Seattle judge sent me to when I was so fucked up they couldn’t tell if I was sane or not, a place where you sat around all day whacked on thorazine instead of jungleberries and smeared finger-paint all over yourself. Even though this state of affairs was preferable to the lives most of the residents had led prior to crossing the dimensional divide or the River Styx or whatever border it was that we had crossed, I just didn’t understand being satisfied with it.
One morning about an hour before sunup—if it was a sun that rose each morning and not, as Bobby theorized, an illusion produced by the software into which our essences had been transformed—I rolled out early and waited for the fishermen and the hunting parties to set out, and when I spotted Euliss Brooks, the best fisherman in Yonder, a rickety-looking, stiff-gaited, white-bearded black man with three rods on his right shoulder, carrying a net and a bait bucket, I fell in behind him, as did a handful of dogs. He glanced at me over his shoulder, but didn’t say anything and kept walking. I followed him along a path that cut inland for a mile, then angled back toward the river, rejoining it at a point where the banks widened and lifted into steep cliffs of pocked grayish black limestone, forming a cup-shaped gorge that shadowed the green water, and the perfumey heat of the jungle gave way to a profound freshness, like the smell of spring water in an old well. Birds were always circling overhead, their simple shapes like crosses against the high blue backdrop, then diving down to settle in the spiky-leaved trees that fringed the cliffs.