An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (18 page)

I stood with my head against the windowpane, eyes closed, and stayed silent. After a few minutes I heard the students leaving, one by one. And when I thought the room was empty, I opened my eyes, looked briefly outside at the green, green grass, and turned around. I thought I would be alone, but I wasn't. The gray-eyed boy still sat in his desk, looking at me.

“Thank you for this class,” he said.

“I don't know if I'd thank me for it.” I said.

He looked directly at me, not affected by my own exhausted awkwardness. “No,” he said. “Thank you.” He didn't speak for a while, only looked at me in a way few people ever looked at me. He looked at me—the thought suddenly occurred to me, the concise nature of all the acute strangeness gathering around this boy all afternoon—as I looked at myself. He had—I thought with confusion bordering on horror—my own eyes. “What are you teaching in the fall?” he asked.

“A new class. It's called Wonderful Investigations.”

“Good. I'll sign up.”

Gathering myself, I said, “Then tell me your name. I'll keep lookout.”

“Call me Ishmael,” he said.

I laughed.

“No, really,” he said. “My name is Ishmael.”

I
WALKED HOME PAST THE APPLE TREES' ABSENCE, PAST
the flowers missing yearly, past the vanished scent that would step bodily out the leaves when the wind blew; I walked past the branchless, fruitless, branches and fruit. I walked past everything that was missing, thinking about the angry student stomping off through the grass, watching him disappear through the classroom window. I could still hear the sound of the novel hitting the trash can's metal bottom, like a dull hammer's thud when the nail is already deep in the wood; that book now sat next to mine in my bag. I had pulled it out, leafed through it. The student said he hated the book, but almost every page contained an underlined sentence, often more than one, and in a restrained and neat hand, questions filled the margins. A blue line so straight it must have been made with a ruler underscored
That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child
, after which an arrow cut from sentence's end back through the underlined words, to a passage above,
and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased
myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence
. In the margin he precisely wrote
the monster's skin; or the impossible magnifying glass
. The page dissects the monster, and the monster magnifies the page; the monster forces us not to flee but to pay attention. I thought about the pages of my own novel, splayed around the circle of the trash can's edge, looking as if they were forever being sucked down into a whirlpool; but the whirlpool didn't whirl, it just collected dust; at the center of it, I thought, the monster lives. Every father is a monster.

One cannot run away from what one thinks. It follows. From it there is no escape. The minotaur in the labyrinth lives in the center whorl of the thumb's print, of every finger's print that leaves its guilty stain on everything touched, its inky stain on the page; it lives in the center of guilt but is not guilty itself, the monster; no, I am always the guilty one; haunted by ghosts I ask to haunt me, hearing laughter in the wind, laughter in the wind in the trees, eating toast in the kitchen in the dark, dry burnt toast, and finding the crumbs in the morning tracing my path across the floor. My father left me. I wrote him into pages and threw the pages away so I could leave him. Pathetic. The monster says one word in a thousand voices: source. At the beginning, there is a monster. He cannot be killed by killing him, cannot die by being dead. To invoke him, say “I.” Look in the mirror and say “I” over and over again until your own face goes blurry, say “I” until your eyes fail, and say it still until “I” fails, until it means nothing, until it is a syllable
as meaningless as the waterdrop dripping from the faucet. Then you'll see him. Then the fingerprint's whorl becomes a noose around the monster's neck; but the same noose is around my neck. I am the other. Poets sing it, but it isn't a song. There is no
Song of Myself
. There is only a hiss, I can hear it now hissing in me, as of lips straining not to let go the last taken breath. Lydia said she'd heard it, the hissing edge of the world, the hissing static of the edge. It's every lost voice speaking at once.

Though I never lock it, I put the key into the front door's knob and turned it. All this useless chatter with myself, I thought, sick of myself talking to myself, of the endless repetition of the same thoughts accusing each other of impotence. I pushed hard on the door, but it didn't budge; I pushed harder and harder, shaking the door by the knob until the glass rattled, pounding the door with my fist, knocking my knuckles against it again and again until the skin felt raw and bleeding over the bone; knocking as if inside the house there might be someone living in it to let me in, someone deeply, irretrievably asleep. I'd locked myself out. I sat down on my knees on the stoop, looking at the door all the people I'd ever loved had walked through countless times, looking at the knob their hands had clasped; I leaned my head against the wood and cried. I couldn't help it. I'd locked myself out; and I'd locked myself in. I was a book on a shelf locked behind the glass watching people pass, watching Lydia pass, and stop, and peer in to read the titles, Lydia pregnant with my child—. I leaned my head
against the door and cried, the house rising out from my forehead like some projection of my innermost thoughts, my intimate thoughts, my home thoughts in which I could live with those I love—the more-than-real house that confuses the head and heart into one pulsing room, that nervous house where the mother and sister I lost to death still live, still go about their lives, missing me without knowing what me they're missing. That was the house whose door I locked against myself; that was the door against which I leaned my head and cried.

I sat back and looked at the knob, the key like a knife stuck in a stone. I reached up and turned it. I stood up. I took out the key and put it in my pocket. I grasped the knob and opened the door, which swung smooth on its hinges. I walked into the cooler air. My mother's picture hung on the wall. I put my finger to her face and touched her, and a moist fingerprint remained when I took my hand away, slowly evaporating as I watched. My mother sat in the middle of my own face—my face reflected in the picture's glass. I couldn't have guessed it—that I must choose, must daily make a choice. That I must pull myself off the shelf and open myself up to be read. That I was the green book filled with wonders, the forbidden book not truly forbidden, the vanished green book—that was me, and I was missing, had been missing, from my own life, for years. The thought struck me as absurdly dramatic, the sort of epiphanic moment I might come across in a novel and put the book down in jaded dismay.

I called Olin.

“Hello?” He answered on the fourth ring. I could hear a scraping sound in the background. “Hello?,” he added a second time, hastily.

“It's Daniel.” My voice sounded to my own ears strained by the emotion I had tried to calm down before calling. “I haven't called at a bad time?”

“Oh, Daniel, hello. I thought you were calling to offer me a deal on having my air ducts cleaned or extending my car warranty. They always call when I'm in the kitchen.”

“Are you cooking?”

“I'm right now stirring the chocolate as it melts. Trying to keep it from burning. A hero's labor.”

“Well, it's good you're a hero, then.” It felt hard to joke, releasing a pressure in me I did not want to ease.

“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.