I know that I ended a class with these exact words. It is recorded in Book III, Chapter VI on page 147 of the manuscript.
CHAPTER 8
M OTHER DIED IN CHILDBIRTH. SHE HAD BEEN CONFINED TO her bed for months; I found her fingerprint in the dusting of talc on her boudoir’s cluttered surface; I bent my face low and blew the dust away. She was my mother who died in childbirth. Altering the sentence cannot alter the fact. I found her fingerprint in the dust and blew it with my breath away; I did this when she was still alive. It was then I was a child.
I don’t remember much, which is why my memory is so accurate: one cast-iron pinecone on the metal chain clicked upward while the other clicked down so I knew the minutes were passing even when the bird didn’t—springing out her house’s door—sing. I remember the dark rooms of the house lit up by lantern light, a yellow light that warmed the darkness, revealed the darkness, more than it countered it, removed it; but we owned no lanterns. My father read a book. When Mother screamed from upstairs and Father went up to listen through the door, I walked over to his desk. Spine-cracked, the book lay flat. He had underlined one sentence on the page, underlined it over and over again—“It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist”—with such repetitive force he had cut through the page with the pen’s nib and crossed out a sentence on the page below. I don’t remember reading the sentence; I couldn’t read then. I remember turning the page over, and seeing underneath the dark line cut precisely through the words, severing them in half, “It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing” —but I couldn’t yet read.
My father came back and looked at me; I was sitting at his desk, looking at the book he had just been reading, holding his pen in my hand. For many years I have tried to write a description of his face; once, in the back of a car driving through the countryside, being chauffeured to the estate of a wealthy patron of the college, and seeing three trees on the roadside, trees through which the wind was blowing and knocking from within them their cottony seed, I saw once again my father’s face, saw him looking at me, and, taking out my journal from my case, tried to draw what I had always failed to describe; it was a likeness I was pleased with until, the car hitting a rut in the road, I drew a line through his eye. His was a face that could not be described; there was a line between his eyes that cut through them. He looked at me as if I were him. “You know it already. Your mother has died.” My father, he was not an unfeeling man; he spoke with no emotion. I can hear his voice now. Emotion—it stops when it enters grief’s true realm. The bird sang out the hour.
I had a little sister and no mother; my father had a daughter and no wife. My sister was not well. The doctor handed her to my father and said she did not have long to live, that my father should name her, but he wouldn’t. He said he wouldn’t give her a name. He simply took her from the doctor—a man who seemed to me to disappear at that very instant, as if in being in such proximity to death and life made him less than material, subject to laws other than natural laws—and began pacing through the house, through the long hours left in the night, until the morning grayed the sky into vision, humming some tune that is no song, and I followed him, humming the same tuneless notes, echoing his steps with my steps, running my fingers along the walls of the house until, the sun breaking the horizon’s line, he stopped his dark song, stopped his wandering, and said, “It’s done.”
It was my sister.
CHAPTER 9
THE BOX WAS EMPTY.
The girl put the empty box back on her mother’s dresser and went back to her room. She got down on her stomach and inched under the bed; her legs stuck out.
The girl thought about the pearl in the duct. She could see it in her mind, patient in the dark, a little world around which the hot wind blows. She could be as patient as the pearl; she was a pearl herself; her mother called her “my little pearl”; her name was Pearl. On her stomach, under the bed, blanket’s bright fringe dimming the light, the girl knew what it was the pearl felt like.
She knew that the metal grating led downward into the house; she could picture it. She could see the duct slope downward and expand, she saw the duct beneath the house was larger than the house, widening into the earth beneath the foundation, opening into the inner ocean, the ocean inside the world where the islands are still uncharted, where there was no map, where the stone faces stood sentry looking for ships, statues whose eyes were pearls; she could see the pearl in the sea, falling down in the water, swayed only slightly by the current as it blew. She saw it falling, saw on the ocean’s bed the oyster with unhinged mouth open, awaiting the pearl’s return. Pearl was in the ocean too: blanket’s blue fringe sealike swaying surrounding her. It was nice to drown; necessary. Then she could hear the voices. The voices in the water. One of the voices was her mother’s.
It came up through the ductwork, her mother’s voice in the kitchen. She was talking but no one was there with her. It was the old story, the story her mother told: The giant took out his heart and buried it. Her mother’s voice told her the story from the ocean’s bed where in the water all the stories tell themselves over and over again. Pearl fell with the pearl, lullaby of her mother’s voice. The box was empty, but it was empty in another world, a world in which the night sky was starless as was the inside of the box, night’s black velvet. That was a world in which everyone was asleep. That was the world everyone slept in, the world before the turbulent dreams began.
Mother’s voice stopped speaking before Pearl heard it stop. In her dream her mother’s voice was the ocean. The long current was the pull on her legs, it was the current, until the ocean stopped being the ocean, when the blue water became again the blue fringe, when she woke up. Her mother pulled her out from under the bed.
Pearl turned around and looked up. Her mother was holding in her hand the box, lid open.
The box was empty.
BOOK TWO
SPRING
CHAPTER 1
THE FURNACE SHUTTING OFF SOUNDS LIKE A WAVE RUSHING under itself as it draws back into the ocean. That sound, which leads to its own absence, woke me up before the alarm went off. Spring morning, window a crack open, gray-blue light limning the horizon that isn’t, after all, so far away. Dreams about the weather. Drops of rain like pearls on rose leaves, last year’s old buds withered, like burnt-out suns above them, unable to evaporate the dew. Then the silence in the house wasn’t silence anymore: wood’s small cracks and creaks, the sound from the first floor as of a squeaky hinge. Then the alarm’s click before the radio’s voice kicks on. A poet, the reporter reports, studying volcanoes for a new book, disappeared on a small island in Japan. He left the island’s only inn early in the morning, a day-pack and a walking stick his only equipment. The volcano wasn’t large, though it is active. Police found his footprints at the trailhead, but soon lost them in the heavy forest. The path leads to the crater, where noxious fumes leak out of the mouth. Investigators are certain the poet did not fall into the volcano. There is no explanation for their certainty. A steeper path on the mountain’s back has yet to be explored. Night came on before the searchers could conclude their search. The steep path leads from the edge of the bed, down the stairs, to the study where the same pages wait, some full of words, some empty. The story has lost its order, the story I am writing, this story of my life. Emerson thought the mind’s nature was volcanic; my father was the first person to tell me this. A rock falls into the eye and becomes molten in the mind and memory cools it back into the rock first seen. It alters when it reemerges, but one cannot tell the difference. It looks the same, but we are imagining it. Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one’s life, mountains’ forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one’s own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back
through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded sometime must feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms. White hills of pages, there you are—on the flat desk. And only when I sit down do I notice a black beetle upside down, rowing his legs against the air. Then I knew the poet fell into the volcano’s crater, despite the investigator’s assurance. There is nowhere else to fall.
CHAPTER 2
BLANK PAGES . . . IN THEM, AS A WATERMARK SEEN WHEN held up to the window’s light, hides the Delphic oracle, Gnothi Seauton, save it isn’t the window’s light that makes the command visible. Certain scenes the book prescribes for itself, a kind of fate. Critics disdain the “episodic” but it is an ancient decree the writer, when honest, is helpless to deny. Two sentences and the morning’s writing feels done; and those words not even fictive, not furthering the plot, what of plot there is—criticism masking cryptic doubts. What more there is to write is hidden in what is already written, those pages already filled that, facedown on the desk, are as blank as the unwritten pages awaiting the next words.
The hour stretched out before me, longer than itself.
Essays to grade sat in a folder in my bag; notes to review before teaching; it all whispers and waits on the edge where time becomes time again, when memory returns to its confines as a debtor returns to prison; the obligatory day is the turnkey, locking memory away.
My father’s name was Allan; my mother’s name was Maria. These are facts I keep to myself. I think of them as Father and Mother; those are the names by which they live in me, names that are not names at all, simply these earthly types the gravestones mark: father, wife. Allan was a man who died after destroying his career in crazed pursuit of translating a holy text; Father was the man who on his deathbed forgot my name, the name he gave me, and who said, looking at me directly, “You’ve been a good son.” The leaves of the poplar clicked against the window as they did then, a gentle coaxing to pay attention not too closely. The white underside of the poplar leaves—
Father didn’t want a funeral, but his mother-in-law refused him; she already thought he was deranged. She arrived by train, carrying in both hands ponderously in front of her a portmanteau stitched together from an old tapestry: a red bird with a flame-like tail perched on a water bowl in the middle of a flower garden, and curving from underneath the bag, slightly frayed, a sundial complete with shadow; the time was two o’clock.
“Take this, Daniel,” she said, handing it to me, a bag I couldn’t lift by myself. All my family save my aunt called me Danny; but my grandmother believed in the propriety of the speaking of proper names as much as she betrayed that propriety in her actions. I dragged her bag after me as I followed her down the hall. “Allan, Allan,” she sang out, almost as if singing a song to coax a child from his hiding spot. “Allan . . .” Her voice wandered through the house ahead of her, spreading out through the rooms she had yet to bodily enter, filling in every empty space with her overabundant self. I silently dragged time down the hall after her. “Allan, I’m here, I’m here to help.” Stopping to look down at me, “Now, go along and get me a cup of lemon tea, my feet are killing me, from travel, you know this about me,” and as if she hadn’t been speaking to me at all, picking up her address to my father mid-sentence, “Allan, travel wrecks my nerves. I feel faint, Allan. Allan, I feel—” and then she stopped talking. Not because Father had emerged from his study, but because she saw, in the middle of the living room, the fire in embers behind them, the two coffins.
“We don’t have any tea.” Father had appeared.
“No, you don’t,” she said in a voice of deep concern, and, hearing me inch up behind her with her massive bag, sat down upon it, giving me only a moment to escape being sat upon myself, and started crying, not loudly, but silently, the most quiet I ever remember her being. She cried and looked at the coffins. Minutes passed. Father wandered back to his office, back to his desk, the scroll open on it, window open despite October’s chill.
She looked at me blankly. “It’s so small.”
I looked at the dark box in which my sister lay. “She is small,” I said, and put my arm on her knee, and stood beside her while she cried. Everything was so quiet. I could hear my father’s pen scratch the page from his study down the hall.
There was also the scratch from my own pen, sitting there at my desk, which was his desk then. There in the blank pages hid the old oracle, know thyself, impossible decree. It was Aunt Leonie who, sickly on her bed when we visited in the summer, drank lemon tea and ate cookies, asking after the gossip of the town. But Aunt Leonie is not my aunt, just a character in another book whom I want to be a character in mine. My grandmother was Clarel; she drank instant coffee; she was grief-struck by her daughter’s death—the word, I think, is siderated. The muses, I thought as I put the written pages on a pile and put the pile away, tell lies as if they were the truth, and tell the truth when they like. Memory is the mother of the muses.
As I grabbed my bag to go to work I thought about Clarel’s bag, a bag as large as I was at the time, a bag I could have curled up within and gone to sleep—it would be as if I had never been born. I thought about the bag, and what the bag implied; that somewhere, at an angle almost discernible, there sat in the sky a bright sun, a sun that never moved, whose light cast down on the garden also grew a shadow on the sundial. It was two o’clock. And written on the sundial, in letters finer than the thread could show, were these words: The Hour Knows / What Shadows Show.
CHAPTER 3
THE DEW ON THE GRASS, SOMEONE HAD WALKED ACROSS it, footprints that looked like shadows. His path marked by the dew being removed with each step became the dew-wet marks that darkened the cement, each step less distinct as the wet soles dried, soon just a circle-of-heel behind a circle-of-toe, and then only the toe, fainter in the middle so that the print seemed cloven, as of a deer, and then smaller, a goat—the old god Pan leaping back into the trees whose leaves his pipes had coaxed into unfurling. The man walked away into nothing—the same direction I was walking in—another self who had watched me through the window as I wrote, a previous self, some alternate version, or someone not yet to be, the impossible self who could have been, who is and isn’t at once, not troubled by memory by writing memory down, the dew on the grass, those pearls of dew he stepped through, the only evidence he exists outside of me. A thought leaves no print; leaves only the print of word in ink on page. A footprint so mocking as it disappears; you follow what cannot be followed, it says. My own absence wandered out ahead of me walking, thinking the thoughts I’d forgotten to think or cannot think—that the morning’s writing had cast me out ahead of myself and that I was impossibly, unexpectedly late, following myself to work, under the tree-lined walkway, where the leaves had only recently unfolded from their buds.
The path went by the statelier houses on the outskirts of the college, keeping a respectful distance; the grandeur could be seen, but not the lives inside it. In the early morning, earlier than this hour, a light in a bedroom window would sometimes switch on, a yellow square in the dawn. Sometimes I could see the shadow of a woman in the yellow square. I often walked the same path as a child, by myself, or with my father as he walked to school, reciting to me the lecture he soon would recite to his students, looking at the notes written in his Victorian hand on the yellowing square of notebook paper, forgetting the young boy walking beside him wasn’t a student, “The rose must be told it is sick, O rose, thou art sick!, it doesn’t know it for itself. The worm that loves it, whose secret love destroys it, flies in the storm in the dark. The worm is winged, a fact which we seldom imagine and must not forget. It is easy to hate the worm, but the worm, more than the rose, is who we identify with. Students (and here he’d look up, as if expecting to see his class, and
seeing only the apple tree in bloom on the rise, and then looking down at me looking up at him, would lower his voice, and continue), the worm is invisible, it flies in the dark, it cannot be seen, its love is secret, and it finds in the rose her bed of crimson joy. That bed is deep in her heart. The heart is a crimson bed, the place of consummation both erotic and spiritual. The rose does not know it’s sick; the poet must tell her. The poet must tell the rose that in her there lives a worm, a worm that loves her, and that its love will kill her. The poet must tell her, as the professor must tell you, the worm is in you, it does not kill from hate, but destroys in love, it was inside her, no one told her, it—” and then Father stopped, the apple tree was before us, and he looked up into it, the pale-pink almost-white blossoms filling the entire canopy, the pale petals all the paler against the dark branch, and some petals falling, as if the tree were a cloud, pale little petals, as pale as faces in winter. “Remind me, Daniel, of this apple tree tonight. I need to think about it more—for the translation.” He looked sad. We kept walking, but the lecture was over.
Father left me at the door to Trillbyrne Hall, the building in which the English department had been housed since the college’s founding. The architecture was neoclassical, but with certain eccentric touches: chimera as caryatid, and atop the cupola, a windvane in the shape of a whale, the letter S carved out of the iron for an eye. Every direction the whale looked was south—a whale is always diving down. I remember walking back along the path, thinking about the rose, the sick rose. I cried as I walked. And when I got home, I wrote on the little notepad kept by the phone in the front hall, Remember the Apple Tree in a child’s blocky script. Then I went into my father’s office, pulled my favorite book from the shelf, the book I was not allowed to read, and sat in the cave under his desk reading: The faeries sleep inside flowers. They sleep all day and all day the buds are closed. But at night the blossoms open, and the queen of the faeries scratches a line in the earth where a river will flow. The river flows to a house where a woman is soon to give birth. The faeries secrete themselves into the room; no one sees them because they hide in people’s shadows. It is hard for them to stay so still in the shadows; staying still takes all their effort. The faeries wait to steal the baby, to put her in the boat made of leaves, to carry her to the faerie land, where she too will sleep in flowers—for faeries want nothing more than to raise a human child for themselves. And when the child is grown, when she can walk and talk and think, when she begins to suspect the faeries are faeries, that she has been stolen; just before she asks who her mother and father are, where they are, the faeries take her on a long journey to the volcano that marks the center of their world; the queen commands them to do this. They walk beside the child as she walks to the crater’s mouth. The faeries say they must all jump in, that the volcano is a doorway into another world, the world in which the child’s mother and father live, waiting for their child to return. The faeries say they found her as a baby on the lip of the volcano’s mouth and rescued her; they say they’ve been through the volcano many times. And when the girl jumps in the faeries jump with her, fall with her until the heat becomes too great, and then they unfold their wings, and the girl looks up at them as she falls, floating in the hot air . . .
An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky Page 3