An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky

by Dan Beachy-Quick

  “Virgil points me this way,” I said, as we made our way through the crowd. A little girl with glasses stood still and cried, her lenses lit blue by the neon lights above her so her eyes couldn’t be seen, just the blue trails of her tears streaking down her face. A woman ran to her, bent down, hugged her, and then smacked her behind. “Don’t wander off like that! It’s dangerous here! There are strange people!” and as she said this she glanced my way, as if I were the threat.

  When we reached the booth I handed the man the tickets. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves torn off, a large gold necklace with a cross, and the long strands of his mullet kept getting caught in the whiskers of his unshaven face; with a surprisingly feminine motion, he kept pushing the hair back. “You sure don’ look like you can win this lady a prize. Let me give you some advice, Boss, jus’ a little advice. Look close and you’ll see some of these plates ain’t made so well. Jus’ aim for ’em.”

  I took the first hard rubber ball, spotted a light blue plate in the back corner, wound up, and threw the ball hard, smacking it in the middle, and feeling an absurd pride as it smashed into hundreds of smithereens. Lydia squealed in joy. She jumped up and down clapping her hands.

  “You might be impressin’ your lady there, but you ain’t impressin’ me, Boss.” He brushed some hair back off his face, an amused glint in his eye. “You gotta hit two out of three. Now looky there, that plate has a crack in it, that one right over there.” But I’d spotted another blue plate in the opposite corner of the booth, drew my arm back, and threw it as hard as I could. But my aim was off, and the ball smacked into a large pink teddy bear with a heart emblazoned on its stomach, knocking it off the wall, a little puff of dust in the air after it fell. “Whoa, Boss! Whoa! Rein it in, Boss!” He squinted at me. “You sure don’t take any advice, do you? You gotta do it your own way, don’t you? You’re strongheaded,” and leaning out to see Lydia, “You got yourself a stubborn one here. You best watch out for this one. He’s gonna hurt you. He’s made of metal, this one is. He’s made of stone.”

  Lydia put her hand on my shoulder, stood up on her toes, and whispered in my ear, “Let’s go.”

  The carnival man heard her say it. “Boss, I hate to say it. I hate to tell this to you. But she don’t think you can do it. She lost her confidence in you. She likes you and all. That’s plain to see. But she thinks you’re kind of—well, kind of weak. Can’t follow through. She likes you and all. But, you know—she’s got her doubts, she does. I see it in her eyes.”

  “Let’s go, Daniel.”

  I threw the last ball up in the air and caught it as it fell back down, and in one fluid motion, drew my arm back, and sped the ball to the plate I’d just missed. The ball struck the plate’s edge. It didn’t break, didn’t shatter. It spun on its stand like a flicked coin, wobbled as it lost its speed, and fell off the platform, shattering against the ground.

  “I think, Boss,” I said, looking at the man running the booth, “that this weak-armed man has won the lady a prize.”

  As we walked back through the crowd on the boardwalk Lydia examined her prize. She had picked a commemorative plate on which the town’s portrait had been printed. It was dusk. The lights were coming on in the buildings. The Ferris wheel’s lights were lit up in yellows and oranges and reds. The stars were coming out. Lydia kept gazing down at it. “It’s not real,” she said. “They aren’t real.” Her voice was sad.

  “What’s not real?”

  “The stars. They’re not real. They don’t correspond. Someone just added in some dots.”

  There was a note of devastation in her voice. I didn’t know what to do, what to say.

  “It’s only a plate.” I knew it was the wrong thing to say even as I said it. But before Lydia could react, a siren broke the crowd apart. An ambulance drove down the middle of the boardwalk, a fish swimming upstream. It stopped by the ticket booth, and then we saw him, the man who had sold us the tickets, face down on the ground. A pudgy boy was crying. “He just fell over! He just fell over!” he kept saying to the paramedic. “He just fell over! It’s not my fault!” An accordion roll of tickets dangled from his hand. “I didn’t do anything! He just fell over!”

  “He was just alive,” Lydia said.

  And before I could respond, she clutched her stomach, ran over to the side of the walk, bent over, and threw up.

  “Lydia—” I helped her stand up. I put my arm around her, and walked her back to the hotel—the plate on which the stars were not stars held loosely in both her hands.

  The minute hand clicked into place; I could hear it. I looked up from the page on which memory had printed itself in images over the words beneath it. 2:00. Class had already started. I grabbed my book and set off down the hall. Minute hands, hour hands, the hands of the clock, I thought as I walked quickly down the hall to the stairs. Minute hands, hour hands, the hands of the clock. We give time human hands. We give time open hands into which we fall. Comfortless comfort. I walked down the stairs deeper into memory.

  The fluorescent bulb’s medicinal light cut an angle across the carpet. Lydia left the bathroom door open, splashing cold water on her face, leaning down and drinking water straight from the faucet, and after rinsing her mouth spitting it out again. When she stepped out into the room dark circles under her eyes made her look more tired than I had ever seen her. She reached behind her and flicked the light off. Then the room was dark save for the light coming through the window, a pale light, the full moon’s light, toward which Lydia walked, resting her forehead against the cool pane.

  “Are you feeling better?” I asked, standing next to her, putting my arm on her shoulder.

  “Look at that,” she said, staring out the window, looking down the cliffside on which the hotel was perched, down to the ocean. “Look at the moonlight on the kelp bed.” The moon’s light, paler than pale, whiter than white, reflected on the water, whose surface rolled as matter rolls, thickened by the bed of kelp, a sodden blanket disintegrating in the ocean in which it had been abandoned, a body. The moonlight spread out on the surface, and as the kelp rolled with the ocean’s rolling, would distend, would widen, would break into two bodies that merged in the next instant back into one. The moon looked like the ghost of the moon.

  “You feeling better?”

  “Yes . . .,” she kept her head against the glass, “no . . . ,” watching the moon’s reflected permutations endlessly undulate. “There’s something I need to tell you, Daniel. I feel bad that I haven’t told you.”

  I had this sudden fear that she was dying. I thought the moon was telling me that Lydia was dying and I couldn’t look at it anymore. I went to the bed and sat down, but Lydia stayed at the window, as if watching the reflection of the moon’s reflected light to find the words to say what she must say. “You’re sick, aren’t you? Don’t tell me you’re sick, please.” I said these words to her as a child might say them.

  “I’m not sick.” A long time she looked down at the moon on the sea’s imperfect mirror. In a strange voice, a voice distracted but enchanted, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the moon. But now I see it.” Silence. “I’m not sick, Daniel. I’m pregnant.” And at the last word she turned around to see me sitting on the bed looking at the floor.

  “You are . . . are you sure?”

  “I am.”

  Just those two words, those ancient words, sourceless or source of themselves, affirmative of everything, of person and place, of mind and matter, those most intimate words I have been at times in my life afraid to utter to myself lest they prove to be true or untrue, those words, two syllables, they broke open in me all that is their opposite, all those who could say I am but now cannot; those two syllables opened up in me that space in which no syllables could be spoken, that airless world where the moon is just another pearl lost in a box, the breathless moon, the lightless moon, the moon that steals for itself what looks like light, mirror made of stone that lights up no face but its own; I stared at that moon in me
, that moon whose light lights nothing, that nothing in me where my mother and my sister fell when I was but a child, that dark nothing, darker than the night ocean’s depths, that other night the sun never brightens into which my father ventured as if venturing into me and returned from nothing with nothing as his reward. Lydia’s I am, those simple words expressing the impossible fact not only of being alive but of carrying life within her—they spoke to me only of life’s opposite, as if the third syllable following the first two was a syllable in reverse, a not so deeply not, so truly negative, its existence annulled its own utterance.

  “I am not a father. I can’t be.”

  “You can, Daniel.”

  “I’ve told you. I can’t bring someone into this world only to leave it. Or be left.”

  “Daniel, life is—”

  “Short, uncertain—and its opposite endless.”

  “Daniel—”

  “No.” I looked quickly up at her. She had a face that was hers. Lydia’s. The moon had no face behind her, lower on the horizon. “No. No.”

  Lydia looked at me. I stared into the dark circles in the center of her eyes, those holes into which light pours. Mind and malady. She looked at me. And wordlessly, she took her bag from off the floor, took her keys from the wardrobe’s top, and left.

  I sat there in the silence she left behind. I’m still sitting there—where I let the woman I love disappear. I stood up. I pulled from my pocket the two tickets never spent and put them on the bedside table; I took the watch from my pocket. The fox upside down—falling through the grass in which it slept—unaware that it was falling.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE AWFUL INTIMACY OF THE CLASSROOM WEIGHED DOWN on me and I felt myself blushing too—all the needless exposure, speaking about what I think to people I don’t know. I stammered out, “I’m not your professor,” which brought uncomfortable laughter from most of the class, “but for today I’ll have to do.” I looked down at my hand somehow surprised to see a book in it, and, horrified that I could not gather myself into my professorial façade, blushed all the more deeply as I walked behind the desk, put the book on it, turned it in a half circle so it wouldn’t be upside down, and sat in the chair. A screech rose above the murmuring voices as I inched my chair closer to the desk.

  “I’m sorry to be late.” I surveyed the students, most of whom were looking down at their desks or at their hands as if scrutinizing the palimpsest graffiti or their palms’ lines for a prophecy that would see them through the next hour of their lives. One young man looked directly at me, though. He had gray eyes. He held his right hand heavily on the cover of his copy of Moby-Dick as if protecting it from whatever I might say. He looked quite pale. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked him.

  “Just waiting to begin.” He said this with an edge of recrimination in his voice that made the girl sitting next to him ruefully smile. “I feel fine.”

  “Yes, well—let’s begin. Open your books.” Hundreds of pages being thumbed through to find the final chapters sounded like so many sighs. “Obviously, I haven’t been privy to your previous conversations, nor to what approach your professor has guided you through to this”—looking down at the novel still closed before me—“whale of a book, or book of a whale”—tugging on my collar and then opening the book to the last fifty pages—“but I think I have a great privilege today,” I looked up, “to talk about the end of my favorite book ever written—this awful, full-of-awe, end.”

  “We’ve taken a historical approach,” a girl offered.

  “Historical?”

  “Biography, cultural context, reviews—you know, history.” She said the word with a slight revulsion directed either at my own possible stupidity or at the word itself.

  “I understand the term. My approach,” taking a deep breath before the confession began, “is different. I’d simply like to talk about the book.”

  Another voice, faceless, from the back of the room. “Are you going to take attendance? I need to be here today to get credit for this course. My name is—”

  “Please, stop. Don’t tell me your name. We’re going to be anonymous today. You don’t get to know my name—and if you know it, please erase it from your head—and I don’t get to know your names. I’ve marked everyone present already. You get to be ‘you’ when I ask you a question; you get to be ‘I’ when you answer. The same goes for me. We don’t have to spend time trying to impress each other, or trying to be smart. You don’t need to like me; I don’t need to be impressed by you. We’re free to say what we think.”

  The uncomfortable silence broken: “I think this is the worst book I’ve ever read. It’s so boring.” The young man who spoke seemed plainly proud of his honesty. His eyes peered out from the shade beneath his white baseball cap’s filthy rim.

  The class seemed to hold its breath, as if their peer had decided to test my own invitation to speak freely one’s mind. “That’s meaningless,” I said, “without knowing what books you do like.” I paused. “Even then, and forgive me for being so frank, but to find a book boring speaks, perhaps, to a lack of inner resources. Even boring books aren’t boring. The people who read them are.” I couldn’t believe I said the words even as I said them.

  The boy scowled at me. “It’s irresponsible. It’s crazy. It lets its plot dwindle to nothing so it can talk about how to chop up whales.” And then, pausing before pushing further, “And the people who like it—they’re the same. Irresponsible and crazy.”

  “Actually, they unwind the whale—like a scroll—before they chop it up. To just chop it up would be irresponsible. So much of the whale would be lost in the process.” The boy with the gray eyes continued. “And I—I love those chapters.”

  “Of course you do” the scowler scowled. “You’re—” and searching some seconds for the right word, spat it out: “predisposed.”

  “You just want to read a book where you get to turn the pages as quickly as you can.” The gray-eyed boy didn’t seem flustered; he seemed happy to settle into a conflict long overdue. “You want to be entertained.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to enjoy the books I read. Call me crazy.”

  “If you were crazy, you wouldn’t need to enjoy something to think it mattered. You should work on being crazy. Everything is interesting to the crazy.”

  “Like Ahab?” Venom-voiced. “He killed his whole crew to chase a whale. He wasn’t interested in everything. He didn’t care about anyone.”

  The gray-eyed boy had a curious look on his face. “Ahab doesn’t read books.”

  “What kind of answer is that?” The boy was furious, and visibly attempted to calm himself down. “What kind of answer is that? Ahab isn’t real. Just like this class. Just like you. Not real.”

  The gray-eyed boy turned around and looked to the front of the class. “That’s why you’re no good at this—reading. You think you’re smart, maybe you are. Who cares, though? Being smart doesn’t help. You don’t think anything’s real that isn’t real to you. All those chapters you hate, all that information about killing whales and processing them, they’re beautiful. They’re more dramatic than Ahab’s chase. They make everything real. They make us part of it. They make it real to us and they make us real to it. You know why you want to be entertained?”

  Disgustedly, “Why?”

  “Because you have no imagination.”

  “Fuck you.” And the boy stood up from his desk, slung his backpack over one shoulder, grabbed his book, and said, “I’m done with this class and your pretentious . . . all your pretentious shit.” He dumped his copy of Moby-Dick in the trash can beside the door—one loud metallic thud rang out in the shocked silent room—and left.

  Everyone in the class stared at me, save for the gray-eyed boy. He gazed out the window, watching the angry student cross the lawn at a clip, kicking off the head of a dead dandelion. I saw him do it; I looked out the window, too—looking aside so as to think for a moment, not to dispel the palpable tension in the class, but to feel it long
er, this sense of open and wild expectation unclouded by each student knowing what word must come next, what point must be established, reaching a conclusion, getting to say what it is something “means”; the only sense was that something must happen, would happen.

  I stood up and walked to the window. I didn’t turn around, but I could feel the eyes of the class follow me, so that to see me was also to look out the window. Their classmate small in the distance had almost disappeared from sight. “There he goes,” I said, “another orphan.” It could have been a joke, but I didn’t mean it as a joke, nor did I say it as one. And without turning around, “Since I’m anonymous, and you all are anonymous, I think I’ll make a small confession. I hate to lecture, and I’m tired of teaching—and I think I’ll give it up. I didn’t even prepare to teach all of you today. I’ve read this book more times than I can count, and I thought ‘why prepare?’ So I didn’t. It makes one weary, you know? Thinking about what you think. Whether each one of you, or even just one of you, leaves a class—even a class I’m teaching—feeling ‘fortified by education’—well, it’s shameful to say (but I don’t feel ashamed), but I don’t think I care.” If I couldn’t see the class in the window’s reflection, I would have thought the room empty. “What’s-his-name, the one present in the attendance checklist alone, he kicked a dandelion head as he stormed across the lawn. A funny thing to notice, isn’t it? I saw the cloud-puff of seeds when he did it. He kicked it in anger, anger at one of us, maybe at many of us, maybe at me, yes, but also at the book we haven’t even yet talked about. That’s fine. I feel angry, too. I don’t know why I’m angry. This book—it isn’t rational, it isn’t reasonable, it incites emotion. Maybe his anger is a legitimate interpretation. I don’t know. I do know that he kicked the weed—I witnessed it—and now despite him and his fury the seeds will float delicately, even beautifully, through the air (it’s happening right now, even as I speak) and will eventually settle, and some will die, and some will take root, and some will grow and flower and go to seed again, and one of these, maybe more, maybe none, a child will pluck off its stem, and before blowing all the seeds away, that child will make a wish. Isn’t it good your fellow classmate got so angry? Now a wish will come true.” I turned around, somewhat surprised at the childish angle of my thought. “So, I’ll make a wish, too. I’ll be the child who makes a wish, and you can be the angels or monsters or fates or gods who grant it. Like every real wish, mine is a question, not a demand. I wish to know what you think about Ahab, what you think about Ishmael, and what happens to these two men, very different men but also much the same, at novel’s end—which, I hopefully assume, all of you have read for today.”