The breeze blew the lilac’s scent away from me; I was no longer within it; and with the fragrance, the memory left too. My book bag heavy in my hand. I was—as usual—late for class.
CHAPTER 5
THE PEARL FELL THROUGH THE WATER.
Pearl lay on her bed, awake but dreaming. Mother had said she could not leave her room, would have no dinner, would put herself to bed.
It was the vernal equinox, though Pearl did not know this. The day was divided exactly in half: half light and half dark. She lay on the blue square of her bed, on top of the covers, watching the light change; her thoughts were below the sea. The pearl was falling through the water.
The white whale watched as it fell in front of its eye. And Pearl saw so many things, so many more things than the pearl that had fallen through the grating into the ocean underneath the house. A picture in a frame fell through the water as an oak leaf falls off a tree, shuttling gently back and forth as it descends, a picture of a woman holding a blue umbrella, pink cheeks, looking gently down so that her eyes could not be seen; a woman who looks like her mother. Pearl remembered her mother’s blue umbrella, remembered her mother opening it over her head when the rain started to fall, and how it looked to Pearl as if her mother were opening a clear blue sky underneath the dark one, a sky in which no storm could occur. And there it was!—the blue umbrella open, open in the water, falling so much slower than the pearl and the picture. Bubbles rose while objects fell; little circles of breath that no one breathed, or who breathed them?—she did not know. The white whale swam among them all, a cord tangled around its giant body. An apple tree in blossom. How did it fall in the ocean?
Pearl stared at the ceiling, now gently lighter than the dark-filling room. She stared up into the blank wall and saw the tree falling through the water, so peaceful a motion, each blossom attached, nothing lost, swaying as the current moved through it as it would have moved in the wind; it looked like a wedding dress falling through the air. Pearl watched the white whale open its mouth. It was larger than her bedroom; it was, she thought, the size of her house. A little girl could live her whole life in a mouth like that, making a bed in the papery billows, breathing the air it breathed, the room lit by a candle in its head, burning on the whale’s own oil. She would be inside it as it swam among all the lost objects. She would sleep when it slept, whose only bed is the ocean’s bed, scratching words in its skin as it rolls in its dreams around. She could see it. The white whale opening its mouth.
It was then that Pearl understood what she must do. She thought she could hear her mother crying in her bedroom; but her mother wasn’t crying. Pearl knew she must retrieve what she lost and give it back to her mother. She must dive into the ocean, the ocean under the bed.
She crawled under the bed, lifted the grating off the duct. It was a much larger hole than she thought it would be.
Pearl fell into the water.
CHAPTER 6
“DANIEL, YOU’RE QUITE LATE FOR YOUR OFFICE HOURS. They are written quite plainly on this card.” The chair leaned closer to the card tacked onto my door, as if to see it in a new regard that might mitigate or regird his ire. “Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.” Looking down at his watch. “And it’s almost 10:00.”
“You’re right. I apologize. I’m not in the habit of being late. I somewhat lost track of time this morning.” He nodded once, curtly, almost martially, and started to turn around. Slightly under my breath, realizing I shouldn’t say it even as I did, “Students never come to office hours anyway.”
“And why, Daniel, do you think that is?” He pivoted on one foot a half circle to face me again, his wiry eyebrows raised above his eyeglasses like two crescent moons, covered in moss or dust, over the planetary sheen of his eyeglass lenses.
“Students have changed. They are, well—disgustingly self-sufficient.”
“No, Daniel, you have changed.” He waited for my reaction, an atmosphere of tension he conjured in the hallway to see if I would cry or confess or storm away in insult and anger. I stood there, book bag in hand, and, sighing, leaned against the doorframe. An instructor hurried by, looking down at the ground, her heels’ knocking echoing behind her.
“How have I changed?”
“Have you read your evaluations lately?” A dumbfounded stare. “Well, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“What used to be glowing praise about your enthusiasm, your love, your infectious way of convincing students to care about what they read, of getting them to think, have all changed their tenor to concerns about your disinterest, your apparent boredom, and so on. You used to inspire, and now you,” looking flustered, stammering, “you—you expire. You, you—read from notes.” His attempt to upset me had only upset himself. He looked on the verge of tears. He started to lift one hand to put it on my shoulder, and then, thinking better of it, put it in the pocket of his jacket, and continued down the hallway, farther away from his own office, shaking his head as he went.
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” I called out down the hall after him. And without turning around, he took his hand from his pocket and waved the back of it at me three times before plunging it again out of sight.
I went into my office and closed the door. My desk I kept perfectly clear. Books on the shelves in alphabetic order. No photos on the walls; only a clock whose minute hand vibrated when it clicked into place. A window overlooked the green where students hurried between classes, where the old oak with the obtuse burl grew more grotesque by the decade. A dead fly on the windowsill; I picked it up carefully by the tip of one wing; its forelegs pressed together as if in anticipation or prayer; I dropped it in the wastepaper basket. As if I needed a reminder, I thought. To inspire one must be inspired. I had been and now . . . it was, or I was, or both were, changed. Not that the books I taught had fallen in my love or regard for them. The opposite. I loved them as much as I ever had, maybe more; I just felt incapable of being loved by them in return. Somehow I had made myself unworthy of the words, those others’ words—words that had put in my mind worlds, a careful disorder I lived within and out from which I looked at my students and invited them in. The classroom is its own peculiar cosmos, built not of natural laws, but of laws of attention—sympathetic chords that the teacher plucks in himself so as to secretly force the same note to vibrate in his student. How does one learn?—that is an awful, unanswerable question. I wanted my students to suffer a confusion that clarified, to leave the classroom unable to explain even to themselves what had just occurred over the previous two hours, as if, once one stepped back out the threshold of the classroom’s door the spell had been broken, one had unwittingly drunk from the river Lethe by stepping over it, invisible though it may be, and the distinct memory of the discussion, what the discussion brought light to, slowly disappeared in content even as it remained in form, an empty form whose emptiness was the only reminder that it had once been full, world-full, thought-full, but a few minutes ago. Knowledge was this absence of knowing—that is what I taught, thought. But how could I have suspected I would become my own philosophy? That from within emptiness I would have only emptiness to offer? To speak about pages as if they were still blank, to hold them up and say, See, do you see—say it if you do—that underneath these words the page is blank? The words disguise that blankness as meaning in order to secretly imbed the blankness in you. Words speak around a silent heart. A word is a giant who buries his heart in silence where it can never be found, and in the silence it pulses, not a sound, but sound’s opposite, a blank deafness of muteness inside a simpler quiet, the mind’s quiet when it seems to say to itself, I’m ready to think, and then waits for thought to begin. Blank faces, they all look at you, little planets above the flat plane of their desks. It isn’t a look of expectation, not of hope, not of yearning—it is a look of fact, the fact of itself. The eye is a dark tunnel behind which mysterious processes occur—distraction and judgment. Behind the eye is the clear pool Narcissus stares into and drown
s; but so too is Echo’s echo chamber, all the words others speak to us rebounding against the skull only to be spoken back. The world is the condition of asking others to love you by using their own words to convince them to do so. Infinite repeat. Day after day of walking from my office, walking down the hall, down the stairs, to the classroom where students were still assembling, the dark wainscoting adhering to the wall, waiting for them to sit, for chatter to subside, not a silence of patience, but the old chaos in whose silence alone meaning could occur; saying over and over again, countless times, let’s open our books, let’s open our books, the sound of the pages being thumbed through, let’s open our books, specifying a page, a specific word, the breath in a sentence one comma requires you to take, let’s open our books. It is a form of enchantment. Professor as conjure-man, professor as initiate, professor as medicine man, professor as holy fool, shaking the book as a shaman shakes the rattle, beating the book as the shaman beats the drum—but it ends. It does not end well. The hand drops from its power, or the power drops from it the hand.
I try to not let myself feel how it is I feel.
I try not to remember; I write so I don’t need to remember—let the pages live that life.
But I fail.
The dead fly I’d thrown in the trash bin rattled weakly against the metal, not dead at all. The metal amplified the sound, a buzzing that didn’t fill the room but annoyed the ear, the flightless wings trying to fly. I don’t know why, I don’t know why it must be so, all of it—that it is as it is, has been as it has been, my life; my life’s transparent wing. I looked out the window at the oak, blue storm-light darkening the sky, and I thought, I can’t bear it.
No, I said it to myself differently. I said, It can’t be borne.
I left my office, locking the door behind me. I told the secretary that I felt ill, and needed to cancel class; would she please be so kind as to tape a note to the classroom door? Thank you. I left Trillbyrne Hall and walked across the green, across the campus to the old chapel to the north, the chapel with the cemetery behind it, the headstones of old professors, some so old the marble lettering’s sharp cuts had eroded away into faint impressions, names returning to nothing. My father’s headstone was among them. So was my mother’s. So was my baby sister’s. My whole family in the ground behind the chapel where the devotional bells marked the hours, and the stones mutely absorbed them, counting time a lesser fact than time’s end. All the ringing stops.
I didn’t kneel down. I didn’t break into tears. No memories flooded my mind. I read the stones—father, wife, child (with a lamb on the stone’s curved top)—over and over again until the words ceased to be words, ceased to give a name to that which has no name, to those who have no names, ceased to insist that it can be spoken of, the world, and the people in it, those we love, who gave us life and for whom we lived. I know what it is: a stone in orbit. The sun is a golden bell. I could see it up there, behind the clouds, a perfect circle. A perfect circle—
“Father,” I said, “remember the apple tree.”
CHAPTER 7
I WENT HOME. MY MOTHER WAS HANGING ON THE WALL; I looked at her and in my strange distraction the image turned a corner in my mind’s labyrinth, and for a moment a thought of the Furies put the Furies in my eye, sitting on a grassy knoll catching their breath; and then I looked away. I went into the study and pulled out the novel again—the hundreds of pages held together by rubber bands, the first pages written on my father’s musical sheets, then a thick cream watermarked vellum, then thin newsprint and more gray, and so on, as if the book’s progress could be measured in geological strata, sedimentary layer upon layer, pressure pushing the book into form. The first pages weighed heavy on the last, a fossilizing pressure. Written by hand, over the scales of the musical staff so that the lines cut through the letters, the title: An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky. I read the last sentence written, It was my sister—words written just that morning, but which felt an age ago. I have no memory of her. I picture a baby with her mouth open, but I’m only imagining it. Or I see her milky-blue eyes looking up as if into the other world from which she was just pulled and back to which she must soon return—the look of nostalgia. But I’m making it up. Father wandered through the halls holding her as she died, as his wife lay dead in their bedroom, but he never bent down to let me see her. I heard her breathe, and I heard her cry; I heard when breathing and crying ended. I turned the page back over. Blank. I looked at the thick volume of all those handwritten pages, of all those thousands of words, each one of them containing a little breath. I thought the pages held their breath, that this was the meaning of a book—that it was holding its breath for as long as it could. It was afraid it might drown. I pushed the breath aside on the desk, and pulled from a drawer a sheaf of letters I’ve read and reread, read and reread, for what feels like my whole life. My whole life spent holding my breath—
Call me Daniel. I have a gift I keep to myself, the gift of self-abandon. It is the orphan’s lesson if he can learn it—not to feel abandoned, but to continue his abandonment past the bounds of where the loss should end, parent’s death that prefigures one’s own. Fate is everywhere speaking; it does not call you by name; it tells you to name yourself. Call me Daniel. It is the name my father called me, and it is the name I call myself. It is as real as any name; it works just as well. Call it out to me as I walk down the street and I will turn around, smile or wave, perhaps even walk over to you to chat or reminisce. I have trained myself to do exactly this, as I know you’ve also trained yourself. “Daniel”—and I turn around and say yes quizzically but warmly; I look up and recognize you because you recognized me, whoever it is you are, who knows what it is you know of me. The Furies pursue names through the desert places, the guilt on the names, repeating the names between each other, Daniel, Daniel, Allan, Allan to incite each other to volcanic anger, spitting the names out ahead of themselves to run all the faster, Allan, Allan, pursuing the guilty names. A writer (I’ve learned to make no mistake about it) is a lesser Fury—writing down the names while a moth climbs back up the leg of the chair it fell from—not accusing someone else of his guilt, of her misdeeds, but participating in the guilt, recreating it so as to relive it, to share it, not to judge it; the only accusation says in its fated tongue you were there without me, but now I am there with you, faulty and necessary witness, fictional but true, here I am with you, Father, Father, call me—
Dear Daniel,
I am in my stateroom on the only boat that would take me as a passenger. If I didn’t have money to offer, where would I be? The captain doesn’t trust me, nor do the men.
I won’t say sorry because I know you understand. I know you will understand. These letters will help you understand.
It is hard to write on the desk as the boat rocks on the waves. I hope you’ll be able to read all the words. I’ve discovered many new aspects of the scroll since your mother died. Her death has helped me as a translator. I hope that doesn’t sound callous to you. It made me understand something about this language I could not understand before. Maria, her name, when she was alive, I could speak it and she would come. Now I can say Maria and mean her exactly, but because she cannot hear me, she cannot come. The same word still calls out, even into death—Maria. This is one of the scroll’s lessons. Living makes us think that every word ends at the thing it names, but it isn’t true. Things live in the middle of their names to distract us from all a word says that is not discernible. We’ve learned to stop at what is at hand and be satisfied, a child asking for a bauble. But death removes from us what we love, and then the word pushes out past its normal limit, drops its reference from itself, and its sense turns into a singing in which a word ceases to mean any one thing, a singing that opens up abstraction, the interstitial connection between forms—the way an apple seed is also the apple tree is also the apple blossom is also the apple fruit, but more, the way it is also the pollinating wind, also the bees, also the child that, plucking a fruit from the bran
ch, bites into it. “Apple” is a word in the myth. I’ve spent the morning translating it. It cannot be written down, for writing stills it—a kind of death. It must be held in the mind in all its singing complexity. Then the word contains in it all its history, every utterance is in each utterance, a line that stretches back to the first time it was spoken. The word is a realm that includes us all. The mythic word, the ur-word, spoken unknowingly by the fruit vendor on the street, by mothers and daughters, it reaches back to that first saying, when to name something was to create it. A dictionary—no one teaches us this—is a book of ontology. But a spoken word springs forward, too. To say apple predicts the countless times the word will be said again, forges the connections that do not yet exist, a man not yet born giving an apple to the woman he loves but she also does not yet exist; to say apple includes them. A word—and this is why your mother’s death has opened me to my work—has nothing to do with time. We infect our language with our own mortality. But the word is outside of time, and refuses to do time’s work. Some poets know this. “But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.” A word is a small thing in the world, Daniel, but it contains the world. To learn how to speak is to learn how to be in the world—not in the day, but the world past the limits of the day, the old world that doesn’t exist in time, the world in which nothing has been lost, the heroic world of monsters and gods. The singer’s world.
The myth on the scroll, it is a song of that unending, that never-yet-begun, world. To sing it opens it up. The mouth is a kind of door, or maybe the entrance to a cave. Plato’s cave—where in the mind a word throws a shadow on the wall. To sing the words turns us around, and we step out of our own mouths into the real world, and the words that tricked us into seeing a world that didn’t exist are the same words we use to describe the world that does.
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