“Yes. I’m a cake hero. I’m making a mythic chocolate cake to fortify me as I journey to the world of the shades to seek advice from—”
“Olin,” I cut him off midsentence, “I have a favor to ask—a somewhat strange one.”
“Those are my favorites. The stranger, the better.”
“Could you meet at the Old Library at sunset?”
“It sounds like a Western. Is there a showdown? Student disagree with his grade? Department not big enough for the two of you? Or is it a Romance? You’re not—are you, Daniel?—trying to seduce me? Not again. I’ve told you, I’m devoted to my abstemious life, a life of ascetic restraint and monk-like contemplation. Well, what genre is it? Tell me, so I know how to dress.”
“The genre is Crime.”
“Wonderful!” I heard the ice clink in the glass as he took a sip. “I am dashing in black. Black flatters me.”
Olin was waiting for me on the steps when I arrived. The setting sun lit up a cloud that leaned over the whole sky like a pink sail pulling the earth into the harborless night. He was dressed all in black: black jeans and long-sleeved black T-shirt. He smiled as I walked up the steps; he put his hand on my shoulder and looked me keenly in the eye and smiled. I thought he’d make a joke, dispel the oddity of meeting like this with his wit that made light of anything burdened by mystery. But he didn’t. He only squeezed my shoulder twice, and arched his eyebrows over his eyes, which opened wide, a look of almost childish anticipation; but a look, too, of childish wisdom, as of seeing something for the first time, a spider gently tapping the back of the wasp entangled in its net.
We went inside. The heat of the dying day hung in the air, a stifling dry heat that lent an otherworldly quality to the moment, as if we had stepped into a new atmosphere of a ruined world whose sun had ravaged the planet. The bottom floor of the Old Library was used for storage now that the college had built the multiangled, titanium-sheathed monstrosity that is the new library. The dust was lit by the pink light leaking through the windows. Empty shelves leaned against each other, invalids in the sanatorium. White sheets covered large tables. A broken lamp splayed across the floor, its green glass shade in shards around it. We walked up the stairs to the room where rare books were still kept, the room in which the chair throws his yearly parties, a room still infused with that fading grandeur of the century past, a room still dressed in time. Pan leered down from the ceiling, the old god cast in plaster. Venus bright in the purpling dusk, the moon a rubble cup above it. The sky floated in front of the books behind the glass. I walked up to it and saw myself grow larger as I neared, the light in the room too dim to reflect anything more than a featureless shadow. Olin’s shadow followed behind mine. The green book sat on the shelf, absorbing what light remained into itself so that in the darkening room it seemed to dully glow. I put my hand against the glass, so strangely cool to the touch. I pulled on the small brass handle but the case was locked. Olin braced the shelf against the wall, putting his weight against the wooden frame. And when he had steadied himself, a human buttress aslant, I yanked the handle with all the strength I could muster; it felt at first as if nothing had happened, as if the lock had withstood the force exerted against it, as if my muscle and my will had no power over it, as if it were a substance other than metal and glass and wood, subject to other laws than my meager force; and then, the small lock burst apart, the inner mechanism springing open and scattering across the floor, the brass pins and springs caught in the fringe of the thick rug in the center of the dark floor.
I took the book off the shelf. The day’s heat had warmed the green leather; it was as hot as another hand in my hand, but denser. Perhaps it was because what I had just done was illicit, even wrong, that I felt as I did; but holding the dense, warm book in my hand I felt my senses not swoon but heighten, each gaining a specificity my mind could not decipher—I heard the crickets begin their song, and hearing it I heard the violins play that in this room had played so many months ago, in my mouth the taste of wine long ago swallowed, and in my hand Lydia’s hand, Lydia’s hair, the scent of her hair, the hail-crushed mangle of battered mint, her hair. I bit my lip. I heard my father’s footsteps in Olin’s footsteps as he walked across the floor, gathered the pieces from the broken lock, and carrying them back to the open shelf, put them in a neat pile in the gap left by the missing book. I walked to the doorway and looked back to see Olin wiping with a brilliant white cloth our fingerprints from the glass.
He looked over at me and waved. I thought I could see a sorrowful look on his face, but his face was hard to see in the night, now that night had filled the room.
I walked down the stairs and out into the night, clutching the book against my chest. I could feel my heart beat against it. I held it to me as a mother might hold a child to her breast as she fled a danger. But I was the danger I was fleeing. I was rescuing myself from myself. I held the little bound bundle, and hurried home through the ever-more-humid night.
CHAPTER 8
. . . 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. The faeries, given over to mirthful laughter in the least mirthful moments, don’t laugh as they watch the girl fall. They did love her. They had taken care of her since she was a baby, since they had stolen her into the faerie world. The faeries had woven into her hair the petals of the flowers in which they nightly slept. They whispered to her secrets they didn’t know they knew, deep secrets no one had told them—the holes in which the old gods slept in serpent shapes demanding sacrifice, the crushed root shaped into a baby that calmed the appetite of those vicious gods. They told her the most potent potion in the world could only be made from the venom of these snakes, but that no one had ever made it. It was a potion, the faeries told her, that brings the dead back to life. A dead flower touched with a drop will spring back to life, but it does not stay in full bloom; the petals close in on themselves and become a bud, and the bud withdraws into the stem on which it heavily hung, the leaves infold themselves in themselves, and the writhing stem shrinks back into a tendril, and the tendril to a seed that waits in the ground for the warm sun to spring it. A drop of this potion brings back life, but life must start again from the beginning. The same happens to a man or woman on whom the potion is dropped. But the man becomes a boy, becomes a baby; the woman becomes a girl, becomes a baby. They remember nothing of their lives, save what appears to them in dreams. A child will sometimes dream of being in love before she knows what love is; she’ll see a face in her dream and recognize it, a face she’s never seen. It’s all there, her whole life, the world of her life, beneath her memory. But the old life leaks through. The girl would listen to these stories the faeries told her and imagine that she had been a dead woman the faeries in their kindness had rescued. The faeries watched as the little girl they’d loved fell through the volcano and they could not laugh. The youngest of them (though faeries don’t know their age, can’t count years up, nor count numbers at all) cried just a few tears. A faerie’s tears—so rarely do they ever occur—are a mortal danger to the faerie crying, for the tears are wrung from their essence. A faerie can die from crying. But one tear only dims its life briefly. That single tear is a strange and magical substance. It is heavy, heavier than all the faeries in the world put together (which would weigh nothing). The tear this faerie cried as she watched the little girl fall fell off her cheek and fell down faster than the girl was falling. The tear fell down through the volcano’s heat and did not disappear. Just as the little girl was about to fall into the molten
rock at the volcano’s heart the faerie’s single tear fell on her. The tear fell into her open eye, and in an instant, she saw her whole life, saw herself being stolen from her house, saw herself in the leaf-boat on the magical river; she even saw her parents whose faces she could not before remember but now recognized and loved. She saw everything she had forgotten but which the faerie knew, for a tear is an intellectual thing, and to be cried for is to learn, to be cried for is to come to know. The faerie’s tear fell into the little girl’s eye and the little girl saw her own life. She plunged into the volcano’s heart, into the burning lava, but she did not burn. She only kept falling through the furnace of the world, where rocks formed, where jewels were born. She saw creatures who labored in the fire that no human child had ever seen before. And then, the fire was gone, and she found herself sitting on the edge of a perfectly still pond on whose surface the sun brightly glowed. It was noon. The water was so bright it hurt to look at it. The girl’s wet clothes were slowly drying in the sunlight. She stood up and thought about the faeries as a cloud covered the face of the sun and the pond reflected the cloud. She turned around and saw in the valley below her a house that she knew was her house. She know her mother and father waited inside as they had been waiting for so many years. And she decided it was time to walk home.
I closed the book and put it on my bedside table. I pulled the chain that turned off the light. I closed my eyes in the dark.
a man sitting by a circle but the circle is
a pond the man is sitting beside his head
is bent over and in
his lap is a book he bends over
crying as he reads what he reads looking
up saying lamentably “what shall
I do?” I am not there until he speaks
to me but he speaks and I am
there I am writing
a poem he says I am writing
a poem about a volcano it is a dream
already written the poem is
floating in the fire in the mouth
and the poet jumps into the mouth
the poet is the hero of this poem
but he burns up before he can read it
here I am writing my poem “what
shall I do?” he says lamentably he holds up
the page on which he’s written one line
this is the only line I can write
on the page he’s written one line
O O O O O O O O O
“you aren’t here with me are you?” he says
“you’re not even here with me I know I’m alone”
he bends his head over the page and cries
I know when I’m alone
I was crying when I woke up. Early morning summer’s light pale and blue. My pillow was a little wet.
I walked downstairs to my study; my father’s study. I looked at the dark shadow on the bookshelf where the green book would be. Missing and found at the same time.
I took the pages out of the trash can. I shuffled them back into order, tapping the edges of the pages flush with each other. I wiped the dust off the top page. An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky, and below that in red ink my own name, and below my name line after line of blank musical staff, empty music beneath my name, empty breath waiting for a note.
The morning began when I cleared my throat and the hermit thrush sang.
CHAPTER 9
“Pearl?”
She looked up.
The voice in the air was her mother’s voice, seeming as if it were spoken from a cloud. Pearl?—the voice from the cloud asked. And she answered—“Yes, I’m here.”
Pearl’s mother heard her daughter’s voice spoken as if from under the bed, but it sounded quieter, as if it were coming from far away. Her mother looked under the bed, and saw the heating duct’s hole. “Yes, I’m here” came out of the hole. Pearl’s mother thought her daughter was caught in the bowels of the house, searching for the pearl she had lost. Her mother inched under the bed, inched herself to the hole, and, surprised at how wide it was, bent her body down in it. “Pearl?” “Yes, I’m here.” And Pearl’s mother dropped herself in to find her.
Her mother fell down the hole, but it was filled with water; she could breathe without breathing; she had no sense of panic. A picture in a frame fell through the water as an oak leaf falls off a tree, shuttling gently back and forth as it descended, a picture of a woman holding an umbrella, pink cheeks, looking gently down so that her eyes could not be seen; a picture of herself. There, open in the ocean, swaying in the current, was the blue umbrella she had tossed away after a violent gale destroyed its handmade spokes. A paper scroll rolled in waves within the waves. A white whale swam in a circle around her, swam between the objects floating in the sea; his tail knocked a blossom off an apple tree. The bottom of the ocean glowed brightly, a fact Pearl’s mother found strange. She sank down toward the brightness as she watched a wedding dress—how could it be, but it was, her own—float up above her. Her head entered the brightness first, and she took a deep breath in the sun-filled air, felt sand under her feet, and walked up the shallows, the ocean wave silver at her heel, to shore.
“Pearl?”—she called out. “Pearl?—where are you?” “I’m here, Mother.” And there she was, sitting with her back against a palm tree at the edge where beach turned to forest.
Pearl held a green book in her hand. “I knew you’d come,” she said.
“I just read this story—” and Pearl held open a page on which an illustration showed a woman walking up from the ocean onto the beach, her arms held out, and a child standing up, waiting for her on the sand.
BOOK FOUR
FALL
CHAPTER 1
A CHILD’S FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD IS NOT HIS realization that adults are stronger but rather that he cannot make magic. I read again this sentence that I had copied out many weeks before on a scrap of paper and left on my desk, weighted down by a stone against the open window’s occasional breeze. I have spent many hours looking at it, pen in hand, nib unmoving on the page. Looked at it without comprehending it, seeing someone else’s words in my own handwriting, as if the scrap weren’t simply a reminder of a sentence that had sparked in me some dim recognition I wanted not to let go of, some thought in me silent and unknown, needing to be spoken by another to be perceived by me—those words written in my own hand like some mask worn inside the face instead of over it. Put on the mask of another’s words and speak them as my own. A child’s first experience of the world . . . is that he must make up a new language to speak about it, a magical language, in which every word creates the thing it names. Such a child might spend hours in his room, sitting in the dark closet, reciting words he made up and waiting to see if what he named appeared. This child might believe his words could change everything, that—just as asking in the night for a glass of water brought Father into his room carrying a glass of cold water—so calling out into the closeted air secret names might bring forth greater miracles, darkest words attached to the deepest wishes, desires speakable only in this language that exists for no one but this child who, at times, maybe only once, yes, just once, spoke one word over and over again with such force he felt the closet walls shake around him, felt the ground he was sitting on tremble, felt it quake as if the floor were about to tear apart and open beneath him, not to swallow him but to let out those he called for, to return them to him, those whose secret name he finally had discovered after so many years of trying, of failing, of searching for the secret syllables in the songs of birds or in the furious buzz of a hummingbird’s wings as it floats an instant before the flower before plunging itself in, and now he had found that word he knew existed, had heard it whispered in his ear when he found a nestling dead on the ground, this word he had spoken softly and then louder and louder until he felt his lungs ragged with the heat of yelling so that it could finally be heard; and when the ground did open there was no sound but only a blinding flash of light as he knew there would be, as h
e had expected but against which he could not keep his eyes open, and he felt as he knew he would arms around him, for he had called for these arms into the air; but then his eyes adjusted, and the arms around him weren’t the right arms; they were his father’s arms around him, holding him tightly against his own shaking to stop him shaking, pressing thumbs against his eyes to stop them crying, saying calm, calm, it’s O.K., calm, calm, stroking his hair, soothing this boy whose open eyes seemed not to see anything, or to see everything at once, which is its own form of blindness; his father who picked him up in his arms, the strength of those arms against which the boy felt all his weight relax, his whole body in his father’s arms. Such a child would, if there were such a child, if such a child had ever been . . .
There is, I thought, staring down still at the scrap, the terrible trouble of a life that is not your own. That’s trouble enough. This always ever being oneself—myself. This endless self-taste that ends only when I end, as if my whole body were a tongue walking through the world, not just tasting what collided against it, but tasting itself taste, every sensation the inevitable proof of myself still being me. The classroom a stage in which I perform myself. The nagging rumor in dreams that every figure, not merely the younger self who wanders still through the mental woods watching the long-tailed blue birds snatch dragonflies from out the air, youth who looking down sees he’s walking not through the fallen leaves of the deciduous trees but through the ash of the burnt forest, youth who wakes up as me to realize that even the ash is him, is myself.
It is the worm at the tongue’s root—myself—that withers the words into dry silence when the topic shifts, when what asks for words is beyond me. Blank space of empty page, Sibyl’s open hand—
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