An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (19 page)

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.

. . . 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.

“
P
earl?”

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.