An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (11 page)

I woke before the alarm and heard the alarm click before the radio's voice began speaking. Investigators believe the poet fell off a cliff on the backside of the volcano. They cannot find his body. Investigators report they found the poet's footprints near the crater of the volcano. They think he had injured his leg; that he had
weakened. At the cliff's edge the footprints disappear. No one could survive the fall. Further search has been canceled. I clicked the radio off and in the half darkness went to the study. I pulled out the novel and put it on the desk. I picked it up again. Its heft is some form of life that is also my own. The night's dream indelible in my mind.

I looked back and I failed.

Page's poor memory whose poverty is its perfection.

I stood up, novel in hand, and dropped it in the trash bin. It landed with a metallic thud, a single drumbeat, and then all was silent.

I walked out of the office. I walked out of the house. I walked through the dew-wet grass to the window. I stared in at the study, at the desk, where every morning for many years I sat and wrote. I stared into the room at my absence. I was the one who was missing.

I
T RANG YEARS AGO THE PHONE THAT WOKE ME.
I'D gone to bed early, strangely exhausted. It was Lydia. “Did I wake you?” I tried to brighten my voice, but sleep was there, occupying it. Lydia's voice in my ear, but her body far away. “I read your novel. I wanted to call and tell you.” Her voice spoke outside of time, articulate air.

“Thank you.”

“I did wake you. I'm sorry. I just wanted to thank you—”

I spoke thickly through sleep's fog, a kind of amnesiac veil through which I could almost remember myself and almost remember Lydia, a fog wakefulness burned steadily but not quickly away, so that every word I spoke came from a person different than myself, more intimate because more strange, as if I hadn't yet had time to fully assemble myself, and the words leaked out of the gaps as the rosebush peeks through the fog's tatters as morning's heat gathers. “No, I'm awake. I was just thinking about the night.”

“Thinking about the night?”

“Thinking in the night, I mean.”

Lydia laughed. “Well, I'm sorry to end your thoughts.”

“Don't be. Thinking was getting me nowhere. I was thinking the moon was an eye that blinks. It takes
twenty-eight days for the eye to blink. The full moon is when everything is seen. The stars are the shapes the moon thinks.”

“It sounds like something from your novel.”

“I know. Everything does—it's a bit of a problem. The novel is just one long dream that doesn't know it's a dream. But that's only the first part. I think it will be long, long and sprawling and disorderly, tying time in a knot.”

“A Gordian knot?”

“A wedding knot.”

“The marriage of time? Whom does time marry?”

“Time marries Timelessness. It's a marriage on the rocks.”

“I did wake you up, didn't I?”

“Yes, I'm glad you did. Dreaming about the moon gives me headaches. Why don't you come over?”

“Are you sure? It's almost going to be late.”

“The warm milk cocktail has worn off, and my eight p.m. nap has rejuvenated me.”

“
O.K
. I will.” Lydia hung up the phone, decisive.

I kissed Lydia at the door, her slight blush in the porch-light. I had never kissed her before, not held her or her hand any of the times we had met for coffee or dinner after meeting at Olin's. The crickets chirped. The firefly's luminescent green flash in zigzag behind her and a heartbeat later a green flash in the lengthening grass. The moon squinted down, the only witness. Clouds, a cautious curtain, began to close. The night
filled with a privacy that included us. The crickets sang a song that marked a boundary we were inside of; it was about us. I kissed her once more, on the cheek. “Please, come in.”

Lydia stepped into the hallway. “Is that your mother in this picture?”

“It is.”

Lydia reached into her purse and pulled out the manuscript I'd given her, thirty pages pinched together by a paperclip bent slightly out of shape. The first pages written on my father's sheets for musical notation; in the dim light I could make out the title written in red. Lydia held the pages up so that they spread out like a bouquet, gently rolling her wrist back and forth as she looked longer at my mother's photograph, so that the pages, like a peacock's tail folding and unfolding, kept fanning from side to side, not the blue eyespots of the peacock's feather when fully open, but her eyes, dark brown eyes, now looking at me as the pages' thin lines crossed them. “It's just as you describe,” she said, handing me the pages.

“You're the first person I've shown it to,” I said as we walked through the hall to the living room, a small fire in the fireplace.

“You haven't shown it to Olin?”

“No. He has a remarkable disdain for contemporary fiction. He thinks death is the first qualification for being able to write. He thinks it's only good taste to give up life before picking up the pen. Mostly, I agree. But here I am, tawdry in the work.”

“I don't know if I should ask this, but—is it true?” She sat down.

“Yes.” I paused. “No”

Lydia looked at me. “Are you sure you're awake?”

“Yes and no. It's hard to tell.”

“Did your father translate a myth?”

“He tried. I don't think he felt that he ever managed it fully.”

“Did your mother die? And your sister, too?

“Yes. That's true.”

“You're writing an autobiography?”

“I don't think so. I'm not sure, to tell you the truth.”

I brushed my hand against her wrist. “It's a novel, I think, about the fiction of the self.”

She looked at me as if disappointed that I could say such a thing. “Is the self a fiction?”

“It seems to become one.” I pointed vaguely at the pages on the small table separating both our chairs. “I began to write it after our dinner at Olin's. What you said—about worlds next to worlds, worlds within worlds—it reminded me of my father. It sounded like something he would say, or would have said.” It almost sounded like nothing at all, just a vibration in the night, the thunder, so far away.

“Is a planet not yet found a fiction?” Lydia seemed flustered or frustrated. She kept clicking the nail of her thumb against the nail of her middle finger, a pensive, half-angry sound. “Is a galaxy past our vision a fiction? A black hole? Dark matter?”

“I'm not sure,” I said, taken somewhat aback.

“A theory isn't a fiction. It's a hazardous guess at what's real without the comfort of a fact to say so.”

“The self is dark matter?”

“That's not what I'm saying.”

“The self is a black hole?”

“No—that's not what I mean; that's not what I mean at all.” She looked down at her hands as if they weren't her hands, watching them as she would watch two animals weary in the yard. And then, she turned to me, and picking up the pages I'd written, said “This is the dark matter of the self. Words whose weight holds you together. It's not a fiction if you're really at work on it. It's a theory, an experiment. It will prove you to yourself or nothing will. It's these pages that are the telescope looking inside itself, the contemplation of the mirror where the distant light comes to focus, a question not about
what
is being seen, but a question of
how
it is being seen.” She put the pages down. “When I decide I might love someone, when I come over in the night to make love to him, I want him to mean himself when he says
I
. When he tells me he loves me, when he says
I love you
, that can't be a fiction.” She stood up. She stood in front of me. She slowly undid the buttons of her shirt. “Do you love me?”

The heaviness in the air before the storm. Lightning-flash lit up a cloud from within itself, a paper lantern.

“I love you.” I felt the question in my voice.

Lydia pushed her shirt from off her shoulders and let it fall to the rug.

P
EARL FELL THROUGH THE WATER.

Pearl let out her breath in little bubbles that rose above her as she watched. She had no end of breath; she did not panic.

The ocean, Pearl thought, is empty but full, like the empty sky that is full with air. She closed her eyes and remembered the air, remembered as she held her breath; she felt no need to breathe. She fell through the water remembering the shadows of cottonwood fluff on the sidewalk, remembered looking up and seeing the seeds floating in the air, so light they didn't seem to fall; she remembered seeing the small shadows of the cottonwood seeds on the sidewalk darkened by a larger shadow in which the tree disappeared, remembered looking up and seeing clouds. She stood in their shadows and remembered that the clouds took shapes.

A mouse with its front paws pressed together; a fox curved within the curl of its tail; a polar bear scratching its back against a tree; a horse growing wings; an owl hunting; a whale whose tail grew dark as it descended, that grew brilliantly white as it arched back over its body, flukes spreading out. Pearl remembered that when the white whale widened it darkened, too; she remembered when it swam overhead. The whale's thoughts
rumbled through the world and then the rain began to fall, it shook from its body all the water as it breached over the earth—rain falling in pellets that knocked the cottonwood seeds from the air. Pearl remembered that the whale dove back into itself; it was its own element, its own ocean. It dove into itself and began to disappear: owl folding its wings against its body; horse nestling into the invisible grass; bear hiding its head beneath its paws; fox curling its tail tighter around its body until it becomes the mouse scurrying into itself instead of a hole. Then the sky was calm and blue. The sun dried the ground. The sun a perfect pearl falling across the sky. Pearl remembered seeing the cottonwood seeds in shadow and then looking up to see them floating again in the air.

Pearl's mother wandered through the house, rubbing the hem of her dress between her thumb and finger as she walked. When she sat down she rubbed the cuff of her sleeve; she ran her hand unconsciously along the table's edge; she rubbed her leg against the chair's leg. Everything has an edge, she thought, except what is round. She thought about the lost pearl and then she thought about Pearl, and in her distraction the two thoughts slowly merged: Pearl looking at her from her bedroom and those were pearls that were eyes, the sun on the pearls that were Pearl's eyes, a shadow on the face of the pearl that was Pearl's face, the pearlescent sheen of a ghost and the ghost had Pearl's shape. And when the two thoughts had fully merged, when the lost pearl
and her daughter were a single thought, her mother stifled a cry; she felt some space, ocean-wide, ocean-deep, open within her, and she felt as if she were drowning in herself. She could not escape. The moon was above her in the night, a pearl in the starless dark, a single pearl in the night's black box, the night that has an edge it hides from our eyes, the night that is dark so that its edge will not show. But sometimes the moon falls off the edge; when a child pulls it from its box, the moon will sometimes fall off the edge—and as Pearl's mother thought this thought, the moon went out, the moon above the ocean in which she floated went out, not gradually growing smaller, not dimming into nothing, just blinking off, gone.