SIXTH FACET

Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. That’s what time is like.

I know that at my center now is the time I was not there and Dr. Boots was. That’s the kiss. The letter came, not then, but in the first step I took away: when I returned, as though new-born, to the place I had always lived: Rush and this world. Yet Boots is there, at the center; sometimes, in a moment that makes my heart beat slow and hard, or a dream shatter, or a present moment fall to bits, I can remember—taste, more nearly—what it was to have been Boots. I think that if I had lived on at Service City, and every year repeated that kiss, I would have come to be as much Boots as myself, to share Rush with Boots—as all the List shared themselves with her. And even as it was I knew, as I sat on the pier waiting for the raft to return, that I would carry Boots forever.

I say waited: I did for a moment try waiting, but couldn’t for long; I became instead a pier man, who waited for nothing. I had no meanwhile.

“Can someone pole?” Zhinsinura said to some others who sat there with me. “He can’t.”

Slipping through the brown current the raft came to the pier; it struck, wet wood on stone, and swung about. The two on board stood up with its motion and looked at me from beneath their wide hats; one flung a white rope to me, and I stared at it where it lay without taking it. I heard them laugh, and I laughed too, but then forgot why in the task of watching the long poles laid up with a great wood sound. I sighed a huge sigh, as though I had just done sobbing; a sigh for the vast richness of it all.

They put me on the boat, and Zhinsinura came on; and the turning of it upstream turned the world in my eyes dizzyingly.

I suppose it was they, the two in the boat, who brought Zhinsinura the news about Once a Day. I think I can remember them talking with her, and they all three turning to look at me. If I heard them say her name, I could not then build a house large enough to hold it; and watched instead the ripple of the water by the boat, the sun’s countless bright eyes in the leaves overhead. I couldn’t have known, wouldn’t have guessed, that to be absent for a time, to be for a time inhabited by a creature simpler, less confused, more simply wise than I, could so alter me, could so alter the world that I am made of: but with growing joy I learned. I learned, as the raft moved and I slid through the day, as the day slid through me, to let the task be master: which is only not to choose to do anything but what has chosen me to be done. Without any suffering every cat knows how, every living thing but man, who must learn it. Letting the task be master is a hard task for men, hardest of all for the angel’s children, however distantly descended. But it could be learned: learned is the only way it could be learned, for I am a man. Far away and long ago the angels struggled in great anguish with the world, struggled unceasingly; but I would learn, yes, in the long engine summer of the world I would learn to live with it, I would. It was after all so simple, so harrowingly simple. I felt my sweet taskmasters multiply, and from my eyes the salt tears fell, even as they do now from yours.

Zhinsinura crossed the raft and sat by me. Unable to speak to express my gratitude to her, I only laid my head in her lap. She stroked my hair. “Once a Day,” she said, “has gone this morning with some who are gone trading, to the west. She wasn’t chosen to go; she chose herself. She said to Houd: I won’t return until Rush is gone, and gone for good.”

Doubly and for good. There are houses outside houses over time, far, far harder to live in than the million small ones within them; just then I was enjoying a little one about the intersecting ripples of the water skiers in the river shallows.

“If I had known this,” Zhinsinura said, and then no more; for what is there to say? Then: “Rush,” she said, “you must stay as long as you have to; but we want her to come home, sometime.”

How wise of-her to say it to him then! For I was light, and she knew it; and though I felt for sure a distant dark house begin to assemble itself around all I did, I was light then, and watched the water skiers. I sighed, and perhaps it was for a vast and hopeless burden in this way lifted from Rush’s back, and from Once a Day’s back too. I thought, content, how sad it would be never to be able to go home again. I think I slept.

I’m very tired, now, angel. I have to rest.

Rest.

Take out your crystal, there’s nothing, nothing more to tell.

Only the end. That won’t be long.

The moon has risen. It’s crescent now. It was full when I chose to come here. Is that how long I’ve been here?

No. Longer.

The clouds are thick. I suppose, below, they can’t see the moon.… Oh, angel, take it out, stop, I can’t any more.