And then comes his final visit to the cottage. He is an old man. He would like to see the place one last time. He has spent his declining years doing what he pleases, attended to by people he has hired. His medical care is the best money can buy, and he has been diagnosed with the disease that will kill him. Business has satisfied him, delighted him, even. Everyone he knows, he knows from the world of his work. There have been times when he wished he understood what happened to his family—times when, in dreams, perhaps, or in moments of quiet and calm—he has endured some feeling, some dark sensation, informing him that he was to blame. But these feelings have been few. Richard has put his family behind him, as they have probably done to him.
Still, his desire to see the cottage once more is an acknowledgement that they did mean something to him, and that there is a category of endeavor in which he has been a failure. He does not expect any kind of epiphany; he wants only to see. He wants to see what has changed. So he tells his chief assistant to drive him there, to the old substation, and to let him climb the hill to the cottage.
The substation is entirely gone now—the building, the trailer, the foundation, even the rusted pipes are gone. Instead the hillside is covered with identical white houses, some kind of suburban development, though there is no city near this place, nowhere for the houses’ inhabitants to work. The streets are neat and even and climb the hill in gentle switchbacks; they have names like Woodland and Tiger Lily and Knotty Pine.
Richard has brought his cane. His doctor told him not to depend on it for walking, but it doesn’t matter now—he won’t be walking for much longer. He begins to climb, and as he passes the neat white houses with their paved driveways and fenced yards, he realizes that they have not yet been occupied, that this development is new, built on spec, a work in progress. And the higher he climbs, the smaller these houses become, as if they are a natural phenomenon, responding to the thinness of the air. When he is halfway to the top, the houses are the size of sheds, and then doghouses, and when he is nearly there, they have become dollhouses, miniature houses at the end of miniature sidewalks lining this beautifully paved, full-size street.
He is excited and terrified. His heart thumps and his lungs burn with the crisp air, and he knows that he will never feel this alive again.
The cottage is there, right where it’s supposed to be. And it looks as it did the first time, with two stories, and windows, and an oak tree. Except that the walls are gone—or rather they have decayed. It appears that they were made of fabric all along, some kind of canvas, or perhaps it was paper, a paper house, in the Japanese style. Scraps are hanging from the bare beams and flapping in a breeze. Richard walks in through the empty front door frame and stands there, looking up through the roofless roof into the empty sky. The tattered walls flutter all around him.
He tries to remember, but he can’t. It isn’t as though he’s reaching for these elusive memories; it’s as though nothing ever happened here to remember. Everything is colorless and odorless, scraped clean by the wind and the rain. He is filled with a deep sense of satisfaction, a deep calm.
And the most extraordinary thing, now, is not the cottage itself but the land beyond it. Because the land has been replaced—the hillside filled in, and built up, and planted with grass and wildflowers. Indeed, the cottage is no longer at the top of the hill. The hill continues upward, more gently now, and it is lushly meadowed. A path runs away from the cottage up through the meadow, as far as the eye can see. There is a fence up ahead, and a stile to climb over, but the path continues beyond it, into the meadow, without end.
Richard lingers in the cottage for a few minutes more. He has lost his cane, but he feels good enough to walk without it. He turns and looks down at the houses he has passed, the empty houses, foreshortened now with distance so that all of them appear about the same size, the dollhouses and doghouses and sheds and full-size houses, as though they are cardboard cutouts lined up at the back of a makeshift stage where his children are putting on a play. And down below that, tiny now, much like a toy, his big black car, and the assistant waiting for him behind the wheel, his newspaper spread out on the dash.
Richard turns his back on all that, and faces the meadow, and steps out of the cottage through the back wall, the tattered wall that caresses him and gently ushers him into the grass beyond. He begins to climb toward the stile and is treated with the most satisfying feeling, as though the path were made just for him, mowed and graveled for him by a crew of workers, all of them careful not to walk its length as they worked, so as to save that singular experience for him, so that he could be the first. There is new strength in his step, strength to carry him all the way. The air is fresh and scented by the grass, and the fence and the stile are close up ahead, and beyond that is more, something that is his alone, and very soon now he will be there.