My father returned but he never came home. There was a shipwreck in his face.
Grandma Clarel cried whenever she looked at him, and he asked her to leave. How old was I? I can’t remember. I see myself sitting on her lap, my head buried in her shoulder, not crying, only breathing as gently as I could, as if I could learn to be so calm she would unknowingly carry me away with her, and I see myself as I am now, half-hearted professor, holding her hand at the kitchen table long after she has died, as if I had grown up at that table, had never left it, had never let her go, as if the kettle on the stove were just beginning to heat, and the water sounded like a tiny tympanum beat inside it, building to a crescendo that would never come.
But Grandma Clarel did leave. She bent down to me and said, “You have your mother’s eyes.” And then she hiccuped a small sob, stood up, met my father’s gaze, who stood sallow and gaunt behind me, his hand on my shoulder as if I were the anchor holding him still, his hand clenched there like a hook, and said, “Allan, please ask me to come back if you need any help.” I’d never heard her speak like that, with such precise tact. It made me cry to see how careful she was being; I felt that she was afraid for me. “We’ll be fine, Clarel,” my father said, not coldly, but with his now-continual lack of emotion. And as she stood on the porch, her giant portmanteau beside her, my father didn’t turn around or turn me around, but, keeping his hand on my shoulder, pulled me backwards as he stepped into the house, keeping his eye on Grandma Clarel all the while, as if he were pulling me down into the darkness of the house as into a chasm, as if we were sinking and Grandma Clarel were the witness, and the door closing closed over us instead of in front of us.
I put the pen down. I read the scrap. I read the page I’d written.
Father never spoke about his journey. When he returned he no longer had the scroll. He never sat in his study at his desk singing out the strange words. He had killed the music in himself, or it had been killed. At night he would sometimes wake from terrible dreams, still asleep though his eyes were open. One night he stumbled hurriedly through the halls, his arms brushing the walls, chanting No, No, No, over and over again, his penis hanging out of his pajama’s fly, swinging back and forth as he jaggedly ran, and then, when he stopped running, when he stood still, when he stopped saying No and was silent, pointing obscenely at the ground.
I read the page I’d written. I read the scrap. I put the pen down, thinking.
Safe, if slightly horrible, if somewhat weak, to write what I know. I have been witness to every page I’ve written, an open-eyed fact within the page and outside it, my being both character and writer at once. It is a simple drama that has no plot. Self gazing at self, dredging from dim memories crystalline moments—the angle of light on a pane of glass, the smell of sherry on breath—imagination wearing memory’s mask to rescue clarity from dim suspicion. I was, therefore I think. But it’s not enough. The endless detail of a half-forgotten day, details that could fill hundreds of pages and still describe nothing certainly, nothing actually—and why, now, do I see the pucker of Lydia’s breast when she takes off her shirt in the early autumn chill . . . details to distract the mind from its own impotence. But life is elsewhere. Lurking at the boundary, where experience reaches its hazy edge across which it becomes something else, something known only by leaping into the unknown, where a monster sits, demonstrating patience. What must be said I will not say. I will not say because I cannot see. I need eyes that aren’t my own. I need eyes that see by their own light. Imaginary eyes.
I looked at the scrap. I didn’t read the page I’d written. I turned it over and put it on the pile. Beneath it another blank page marred by no word.
I looked at the pen. I picked up the scrap. I read it . . . he cannot make magic. I crumpled it up and threw it away.
I looked down at the blank page. The blank page is a form of light, lit by the eye as it tries to see itself see. The blank page is the eye’s light.
CHAPTER 2
MEMORY CONJURES ABSENCE INTO PRESENCE. PAST scenes, none complete, fill the eye from behind—the eye also opens backward, pupil dilated wide in the mind’s dark. Then the body moves by habit, the mind giving motion over to the muscles. I knew it was time to clean up the breakfast dishes and gather books and notes together and leave for school. I stood up from the chair and noticed, before my hand grabbed it, the dark crumbs of toast on the plate like stars across a porcelain sky—stars in reverse.
Lydia put her clothes back on in the night. I watched her with some concern and some amusement from the bed, naked under the thin sheet. She buttoned her jeans, pulled her hair back and looped a band around it, and said, “Get dressed.”
“Dressed? It’s almost,” looking at the clock’s spectral numbers, “two in the morning. I’m just going to lay here in my state of blissful post-bliss and daze into unconsciousness.”
“Nope. Not tonight, Lothario.” She yanked the sheet off of me and I instinctively covered myself as if in sudden shame. She picked up my clothes from off the floor and threw them on the bed. “Tonight’s the Perseids. We’re going to go watch the sky fall down.”
An autumn chill in the late August air—I remember it. Stars pricking through the old chaos. We lay with our backs on a hill. Lydia making order out of the disorder. Drawing the lines between the stars and telling me the names.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
I thought she was talking about the stars. “Yes,” I said.
“All these points punctuating the sky against which we feel our smallness, this smallness we have always felt, this smallness.” Her sentences seemed to run on in an ecstatic grammar. “And so people drew lines between the stars, found shapes and filled those shapes with stories.” She sounded caught in reverie. “The stories mapped out the sky and explained it and then the reverse happened and the sky explained us. We named the stars and now they name us. Tell us the stories we’ve forgotten. It’s beautiful. It is beautiful. Against all the nothingness we have always felt we fill in the tales that add up to . . . something, to somethingness. And these stars, they mark their flat shape in the sky only because the eye can’t see their depth. The stars so infinitely away from each other, so that the lines that tell the stories reach back across light years and knot together onto one page wholly different books of time and distance. They knot together different worlds. The sky is—it’s this novel above us. All written on a single page. It’s this poem. There’s Lyra”—pointing up at a group of stars I could not honestly discern, moving her arm in a diamond shape that mimicked the constellation—“Orpheus’s lyre.”
I gazed in the direction she pointed. Shapeless cluster of light. “Orpheus saw Tantalus in the underworld. Standing in a flood but no drop would enter his mouth to drink. An apple near his lip that would always withdraw. Orpheus saw him, and he played a song on his lyre that stilled the water and apple, and Tantalus drank and ate.”
“Of course he did.” She placed my hand underneath her shirt. The warmth of her belly. I moved my hand down under the waistband of her underwear where the first curled strands of hair marked the intimate geography. She ran her hand carelessly up and down my arm. “Desire and song. Song and desire,” she said it as if she were reciting the primal elements, invoking the oldest gods.
Then Lydia leaned up quickly on her elbow and pointed up. “Look!”
And a dozen green fuses lit themselves in the sky and fell through the lyre, striking the strings whose music we could see but could not hear.
Clink of plate in porcelain sink. Shush of water rinsing off crumbs.
Walking in the October night. Windy but sparse clouds. The leaves blowing across the ground.
“Do you remember your mother at all?” Lydia asked.
A gust blew leaves against my legs, and then died, covering the path. “There’s only one memory that feels certain.” The image filled my eye. “I remember being in the kitchen. My mother’s back was to me. She was doing the dishes. I don’t remember her face. I o
nly remember her taking both hands out of the sink and flicking the water off of them—but the motion was strange, she moved both hands in the same direction, at the same time, a rhythm or a dance, or as if she were signaling something coming toward her to move over so they wouldn’t collide.” Another gust cleared the path. I could hear the leaves rolling away on their thin, dead edges. “I don’t remember her face. My grandma used to tell me I had her eyes. I would sometimes stare at my face in the mirror and try to find her in it. But I only remember her flicking the water off her hands, a memory that keeps repeating in my mind when I remember it, as if she’s going to do it forever.”
Lydia took my hand.
“Those three stars,” pointing. “Do you see them?”
I looked up where she was pointing and saw dozens, some so faint I wasn’t sure I was seeing them at all. “Yes,” I said.
“Those will be ours.” She spoke as if she had finally found the answer to a question that had long been troubling her. “That’s our constellation. It marks our story.”
Wandered through the rooms gathering what I needed for the day. Flicking off the kitchen light. Stepping unconsciously over the creaky board in the old floor.
In the old world, in the ancient world, when people died they knew they were in the underworld because they found themselves repeating the same gesture over and over again: running water through a sieve, rolling a rock uphill, flicking from fingers the soapy water.
I gathered what I needed. Flicked off the kitchen light. Stepped over the creaky board in the old floor.
I gathered what I needed. Flicked off the lights. Stepped over the creaky board.
I went to my office to get my books.
I went to my office to get my books.
My father leaned against the window repeating what sounded like and over and over again, each time in a lower tone, until the word felt like a pressure in the air vibrating in the ear, and then the window began to rattle, louder and louder, the one loose pane buzzing as loudly as a bee in a flower, louder, a bee mistaking an ear for a flower, and gathering within it all the heard words for its pollen, only to fly back and feed the hive on song; and then the buzzing ceases, but even in silence seems to continue—not a sound but a motion, almost atomic—and Father turned around to see me, and the way he looked at me, as if I were an entire world still undiscovered.
Picking up my pen from the desk. Silver poplar yellowing outside the window.
My father leaned against the window whispering to himself his wife’s name, Maria, Maria, Maria, each time more quietly, until only breath. Then even breath was silence.
He turned around to see me, and the look in his face, in his eyes, as if I were a world lost to him forever.
Wandered through the house to find what I’d forgotten. What I’d forgotten stayed forgotten. I never could find it as I walked back through. I always had the feeling something was missing, but nothing was ever missing. I stood by the dining room table, tips of fingers of both hands tense against it, eyes closed, as if channeling spirits, as if leading a séance at which no one else arrived.
Lydia at night at the dining room table, papers and books spread around her. She leaned her face against one hand and—as if the other hand did not belong to her—watching as her pencil marked the circumference of a circle over and over again, never following the line perfectly, so that the first definite edge grew blurrier, more complex, as if the orbit were wobbling.
I saw that the floor was littered with dozens of such pages.
She didn’t look at me as she spoke. “It’s a terrible knot.”
“What is?”
“All of it is a terrible knot.”
“You’ll untie it,” I said.
She laid her pencil down on the page. “No,” she said, “the secret isn’t to solve it. The secret is to pull it tighter.”
Picking up the keys from the glass dish, cheap trinket won years ago, seaside town at dusk, houses’ windows lit up yellow but printed so poorly on the glass the little yellow squares were off-center, and the yellow light seemed to be burning gently through the inside of all the houses in town. The mistaken stars stamped in the sky. Picking up the keys, picking up the spare change.
For many years, after Lydia left me, for many years, always in March, a postcard would arrive in the mail. The pictures on the postcards stick in my mind: a pond the small type on the underside says is Walden Pond, a hummingbird in front of a flower, a page from the first edition of Emerson’s essay—in which underlined in red ink (and this pressed into the card, marked by the sender) We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. “You will not remember,” he seems to say, “and you will not expect.”—, Greek vase on which Hermes forever is stealing Apollo’s sacred cattle, a violin in a glass case, a handmade butterfly made of gold, a lithograph of a whaling ship with a whale breaching over it, Pan playing the flute, and an antique mirror in whose convex surface no one appeared. For nine years a postcard would arrive, this was always in March. Nothing was written on them save my address in a nondescript, blocky hand. But pressed into each one were three marks, three stars, handwritten asterisks, in the same configuration each time.
Every year, in March, someone sent me a constellation. The constellation was mine. The card I knew came from Lydia.
And then, one year, the postcards stopped.
Sometimes at night I would walk outside to try and find those stars. But the night was a book I could not read. There was no one to translate the stars. One of those stories was my story, but I didn’t know which one. My story was above me, not mine. I looked up and the light-pierced dark unscrolled dumb always above dumb me.
The door closed behind me.
I mean to say, I closed the door behind me.
I closed the door behind me, and I left.
CHAPTER 3
SOMETIMES I THOUGHT I COULD HEAR IT, THE EARTH rolling in its rut. But it was always just the wind crushing the leaves—I mean, blowing through them.
It was a windy day.
Sometimes I thought I could see it, the wind blowing over the land, the ferocious body of the wind larger than the earth it shook.
But it wasn’t the earth that was shaking.
But it wasn’t the wind I could see.
I found a note taped to my office door. Stopped by to discuss paper. See you in class. Ishmael. I’d forgotten we’d made an appointment. I opened the door, peeled off the note. Ishmael’s handwriting looked strangely elongated, letters distended as if stretched past the limit of their elasticity. His script was like he was, trying to express more than the limit could hold. In class he seemed at times painfully inward, each sentence spoken by another student a blow that bruised him. Other times he spoke with an eloquence that seemed to surprise him, almost to control him, a brilliance he could not reconstruct later without the leaping antilogic of intuitive realization. We would often talk after class, walking down the hall together. Ishmael stepped very lightly—when he was silent it was if he wasn’t there beside me, there and not there at the same time. He’d sit down in the chair across from me, gaze distractedly out the window, glance at the titles of books on the shelves, look at the floor, as if by looking from side to side he could find a way to reconstruct those thoughts in full whose vestiges glittered in his mind. He would at such times have the ravaged look of a man less complete than the ideas he contained—a look not quite of despair, but of a certain kind of helplessness made palpable only by virtue of the inaccessible secret, a kind of power, whose intricate knot kept tying itself tighter within him; one that he could witness, feel within him, but that he could not untie himself. He was a strange boy, a wonderful one; in some ways, I felt I loved him, a feeling that frightened me, that made me frightened of him. I folded the note up along the crease he’d pressed into it, and then folded it in half again, and then again, until it could no longer be folded, and, half-mindedly, slipped i
t in my pocket.
A novel, I thought, even a short story—taking books and notes out of my bag and placing them neatly on my desk—fills itself with sentences that do the mundane work. I walked down the hallway because a character I call “I” must walk down the hallway to get to a room where something must occur or be found; I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked down the hall to the study. Setting the scene, adding a detail—the spring night was cold; a flash of sunlight on leaf. These sentences that trigger the imagination’s base, unspoken-of need for logic, for the everyday; these sentences that contain no thought, no realization, that move the reader’s mind down the hall with a hot cup of coffee warming his or her hand, this trick of words that conjures memory in the nerves, thoughtless sentences whose only effort is to make what does not exist seem actual. It leaves, I thought, noticing four dead flies on the windowsill and brushing them into my hand, a bad taste in my mouth. I threw the flies away. The air of the room had a scent I had never noticed before, and if the odor was new or if I hadn’t in all the years I’ve worked in this office been sensitive enough to discern it, I couldn’t say; it smelled like an old book just opened. Absurdly, the image came to mind of the whole of Trillbyrne Hall being one page in a giant pop-up book, and as I puttered around my office, arranging my books, arranging my notes, looking out the window in my continual abstraction—I mean distraction—I did so only because a child somewhere past the horizon of my meager realization pulled the paper tab with the arrow pointing down. I wish there were a way to put my thoughts away. But that is the nature of distraction—and distracted is what I am—that it teaches thought to evade capture by flinging it always into the speed of its own momentum. In the middle of one pane of glass I saw a handprint that must be my own. Seeing it stopped my mind’s wandering. I thought, There’s work to do. I thought, I’m at work.
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