He found himself doing things that, if he hadn’t had the excuse of absentmindedness, would have been simply without rational explanation: for example, he would stand and look around at the clutter in the attic, not with any idea of introducing order but merely taking in what was there; or opening closet doors in rooms that he himself did not ordinarily ever go into. Finally he spoke to his wife about it, for he wondered if she felt the same way.
“No,” she said.
“When you go to sleep at night you let go of the day completely?”
“Yes.”
As a rule, he fell asleep immediately and she had to read a while, and even after the light was out she turned and turned and sometimes he knew, even though she didn’t move, that she was not asleep yet. If he had taken longer to fall asleep would he also have been able to let go of the — but he knew in his heart that the answer was no, he wouldn’t. And even now when he felt that he was about to leave a large part of his life (and therefore a large part of himself) behind, he couldn’t accept it as inevitable and a part of growing old. What you do not accept you do not allow to happen, even if you have to have recourse to magic. And so one afternoon he set out, without a word to anybody, to find all the days and nights of his life. When he did not come home by dinnertime, his wife grew worried, telephoned to friends, and finally to the police, who referred her to the Missing Persons Bureau. A description of him — height, color of eyes, color of hair, clothing, scar on the back of his right hand, etc. — was broadcast on the local radio station and the state police were alerted. What began as a counting of days became a counting of weeks. Six months passed, and the family lawyer urged that, because of one financial problem and another, the man’s wife consider taking steps to have him pronounced legally dead. This she refused to do, and a year from the day he disappeared, he walked into the house, looking much older, and his first words were “I’m too tired to talk about it.” He made them a drink, and ate a good dinner, and went to bed at the usual time, without having asked a single question about her, about how she had managed without him, or offering a word of apology to her for the suffering he had caused her. He fell asleep immediately, as usual, and she put the light out.
I will never forgive him, she said to herself, as long as I live. And when he curled around her, she moved away from him without waking him and lay on the far side of the bed. And tried to go to sleep and couldn’t, and so when he spoke, even though it was hardly louder than a whisper, she heard what he said. What he said was “They’re all there. All the days and all the nights of our life. I don’t expect you to believe me,” he went on, “but —”
To his surprise she turned over and said, “I do believe you,” and so he was able to tell her about it.
“Think of it as being like a starry night, where every single star is itself a night with its own stars. Or like a book with pages you can turn, and that you can go back and read over again, and also skip ahead to see what’s coming. Only it isn’t a book. Or a starry night. Think of it as a house with an infinite number of rooms that you can wander through, one after another after another. And each room is a whole day from morning till evening, with everything that happened, and each day is connected to the one before and the one that comes after, like bars of music. Think of it as a string quartet. And as none of those things. And as nowhere. And right here. And right now.”
A tear ran down the side of her face and he knew it, in the dark, and took her in his arms. “The reason I didn’t miss you,” he said, “is that we were never separated. You were there. And the children. And this house. And the dog and the cats and the neighbors, and all our friends, and even what was happening yesterday when I wasn’t here. What I can’t describe is how it happened. I went out for a walk and left the road and cut across Ned Blackburn’s field, and suddenly the light seemed strange — and when I looked up, the sky wasn’t just air, it was of a brilliance that seemed to come from thousands and thousands of little mirrors and I felt lightheaded and my heart began to pound and —”
She waited for him to go on and when he didn’t, she thought he was trying to say something that was too difficult to put into words. And then she heard his soft regular breathing and realized he was asleep.
In the morning I will hear the rest of it, she thought, and fell asleep herself, much sooner than she usually did. But in the morning he didn’t remember a thing he had told her, and she had great trouble making him understand that he had ever been away.
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