An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (10 page)

There were two of every living thing. The man and the woman lived in the green world, eating from the tree, and another person lived inside the woman. She knew another person lived inside her, but could not tell the man; there were no words to speak, and nothing could be known. So the woman left the man and he watched her leave; she walked to the shore and walked into the sea and sunk down to the seabed where she read the words printed in the sand
.

When the woman read the word “breathe” she tried to take a breath but could not; the air was far above her. She tried to swim up to the air but she could not, and when she could swim no more, she fell into the chasm where the white whale had fallen
.

She fell into the whale's open mouth; and the baby was inside her
.

There is more, Daniel—but enough—this is the story you should know—

Love
,

Father's letters grew less frequent but more wild. He wrote to me as if he were telling himself secrets—

Dear Daniel
,

You are another me and that makes everything harder and easier. The men here won't talk to me. They go about their work, and it's through their work they know the world. They each own a “sea eye.” They read the ocean's surface and they read the clouds on the horizon. I eat at night with the captain, who smiles cordially as he pours me some wine but he eyes me suspiciously. I have no sea eye. A deckhand found me last night on the prow in a gale wind chanting into the storm, chanting the myth. He turned me around but I was as if in a trance and I didn't see him but kept on in my song and so he left me there in the danger hoping I'd blow away. I know of it only because I hear the whispers. There are no secrets on a ship—everything will out
.

There are words for the wind that can calm it, and there are words to force it to such violence it breaks a bird in flight in half—not
words,
one word said differently in the song
.

It's dangerous to speak
.

Underneath the words on the scroll are a series of lines I've never understood. They don't modify the words above them, nor is the line consistent—thicker in places, thinner in others, as is a calligraphic line. It is written in a different ink, I think by a different hand—as if, as if the old Jesuit's helper had brought the scroll to someone, shaman or wise man or healer or singer, and that man added in these lines to correct or finish the scribe's work. But last night in the gale I understood. Singing into the wind the gale spoke underneath my words, a drone against
which the myth's song could be heard. The song is double-voiced, can only be sung truly by two people. One must sing the unvarying drone, the ground against which the song itself with its words creates what it creates, opens what it opens. A song cannot be sung against absolute silence, a different kind of silence must be created, a silence that isn't silence, a nothing that
is
instead of a nothing that is not
.

I left, Daniel—and I'm sorry for it—but I left because I need help with some difficult points in the song, places where it seems a word must be sung twice in the same instant, sung in such a way where a word means itself and its opposite at once, as light in the song also means darkness, as the word for sun also includes the light of the moon
.

So I am sailing to the island, the old island, center of the world
.

There is one singer left, Daniel—only one person alive who can sing this song. He came to me in a dream and told me he was dying. Such people can do such things. In my dream he said he has heard me singing this song. He told me he must teach me what is unwritten in the words. He called to me in a dream, and because of this dream I left you. He told me he was dying. He told me time is short. He showed me a map. A tiny island in or near the Galapagos, those islands sailors for centuries would stop at to carry a tortoise away for dinner. Those islands where, when a sailor died while carrying a tortoise, died from heat or exhaustion or sickness, he was lucky enough to be buried on land so he still has a body to be mourned
.

I also sound crazy to myself, when I am someone named Allan listening to myself—but I'm not Allan anymore. Not
only. I'm someone anonymous. A singer. A singer is no one and then being no one becomes a kind of everyone. I'm a better father anonymous than I am with a name—

Love
,

Father never spoke to me when I was a child as he spoke to me in his letters. When I would stand in the doorway of the study while he worked he looked at me as if I were only a child—the child that I was—and too young to be initiated into his thoughts. He would look up at me with a kind of pity. In the letters his voice was different. He knew they wouldn't only be read by the young boy I then was, but also by the adolescent I wasn't yet, and the young man, and the adult, and sad middle-aged me sitting in the night sheen trying not to cry.

Grandma Clarel would read the letters, too. She knew where I kept them in my room. I didn't hide them, nor did I mind. I wanted company inside their strangeness. She read them sitting on the edge of my bed; I would find her when I came home from school, dabbing a wadded-up tissue to her eye, sniffling loudly, and saying to herself
oh no, oh my
in rapid succession, and when she saw me, she would say
Daniel, you're home, you're home, so early too! Coffee, coffee, it's time for coffee and a snack
, as if singing a song to a tune ever present in her head, and, stuffing the tissue up the end of her sleeve, would smile broadly as if to hide from me her worry, as if I hadn't seen her crying, as if I couldn't see her eyes, her slightly disheveled hair whose strands escaped the bun she kept
it in, and seeing that I saw the letter in her hand, would look at me and say
oh this, I was neatening up and it fell to the ground. Come, come with me
—pausing briefly—
Your father is having quite a trip, isn't he?—

Dear Daniel
,

The woman in the chasm in the whale's broken mouth—she is not alive but she is not dead. She is waiting with her child inside her. There are other stories you'll learn. Orpheus descended into the underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice. He sang a song the darkness itself loved and it parted veillike in front of him. Eurydice followed him, would follow him as long as he sang, as long as his fingers struck the notes, as long as he didn't look back to see if she was following. But he did look back and she was swallowed back into the night, the night that isn't the opposite of day, the other night
.

I'm scared I will look back too—when the time comes—Love
,

The letters grew shorter. He stopped writing our last name on the envelopes; they simply said—

Son, my Son
,

Do you know how much of the world is real? All of it is
.

It is dangerous to speak and it is dangerous not to speak
.

Beneath the song other songs exist;

beneath the myth other myths
.

The chasm-world is open
.

Songs are doors. Singers betray thresholds
.

Death is a chasm under life. The song sings it open.

Dark ink on white page.

Opposites embrace when they collide.

The song is a form of life that does not deny death.

Dreams do not teach us to sing but show us there is a song.

The song is a form of death that does not deny life.

Every singer is also sung.

Love
,

Father's last letter regained a clarity I thought wholly abandoned—at least, it began so—

Dear Son
,

The ship will leave me on the island tomorrow. It will sail away and leave me here. You might receive no letters from me for some time, and I want you not to worry. I will be with the old singer, learning. And when I've learned—

(and here his handwriting changed, lost the canny precision of his cursive hand, closed letters remaining open, a lower case
e
whose line never crossed fully into its semicircle, an
o
incomplete)

I will arrive in

your dream and tell you—and I won't be alone—

Love
,

I
PUT THE LETTERS AWAY AND WENT TO BED. OLD WATER
in the water glass on the bedside table. I could taste time in the water when I drank it, stale metal in my mouth. I left the window open even though the spring night was cold. The house empty save for me, would the night breeze increase its absence?
Lydia
was a name I said to myself in the silence of my head. Stale metal in the head.

        
father sits in my bed reading

        
the book I am reading

        
is the book I am writing mysteriously bound

        
it's about me he says

        
his eyes are pale he says come with me

        
father walks outside the house and out

        
across the lawn he peers in at the window

        
the study has a lamp lit on the desk

        
the moth thinks it is a moon

        
he says the study is mine it's about me

        
he says follow me his feet remove the dew

        
from the grass from every blade of grass

        
the dew wets the cement under his feet as he walks

        
I walk behind him

        
he isn't singing but there is a song

        
in the apple tree in blossom on the rise

        
my father points at himself he is sitting

        
in the midst of the blossoms singing all alone

        
and when he sees me my father

        
stops his song and says

        
both of them say my fathers both say

        
I looked back and I failed