An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (2 page)

“Should we break it?” he asked. “I brought a little hammer for just such an occasion.”

“Yes. Break it,” I said.

Olin made as if he were heaving a sledgehammer up from the ground, staggered back with its impossible weight, and then brought it crashing through the glass case. “There,” he said. “It's yours.” Flourishing his hands outward, the master of an abundant house.

“Thank you, Olin.”

We walked off to get a drink; the music ended, the tinkling applause, I like to think, sounded a little like glass falling from its frame to the ground.

A
SINGLE GRAIN OF SAND.

In the oyster's mouth—whose whole body is mouth—it becomes a pearl. The bivalve's irritant becomes the lady's jewel.

It is a little world, smooth and round. It can be strung on a thread that, worn against the throat, warms to a blood-heat. It can be set on the golden throne of a ring's setting—a surface milky white, lustrous, but giving back no reflection to the one who brings her hand close to another's face, one who asks to see the ring, and nearing it, sees his own face in silhouette, a shadow slightly distended across the curved surface. It can be kept loose, in a wooden box with a brass clasp, a box lined with black velvet, a mirror on the lid's underside—not unlike the nacre in which it was formed—and a child who plays at “mother,” who furtively sneaks into Mother's room, removes with nervous hand the box from the dresser on which it lay, catching a glimpse of herself as she does so in the wardrobe's glass, then running out of the bedroom, down the hall, the pearl crashing against the box's wall, marking the rhythm of her hurried pace.

When she opens the box she sees herself; then she sees the luminescent world against the plush black. A stolen world glows brighter against the night, the night
in the box. She picks it up. It weighs almost nothing; isn't cool to the touch, nor warm—it feels as if it has no temperature at all, a sort of absence in the hand. She rolls it around in her palm, mesmerized, the pearl caught briefly in its orbit by the lines in her palm, in which a palmist would read the future: it will be thrown up in the air, love and life, and transformed as it falls. And as if hearing the seer's prediction—this seer who does not exist, or doesn't exist yet—the little girl picks up the pearl between two fingers, picks up her mother's pearl saved for the day when she has enough for a bracelet—and tosses it into the air. The girl meant to catch it, but didn't. It hit the side of her hand and bounced away, fell onto the ground, and rolled across the floor with a noise that sounded like a pencil drawing a dark line on a page, rolled underneath the girl's bed, through the quilt's tassels that brushed against the floor, the pearl rolled through that loose veil into the darkness under the bed, disappeared to the girl's eyes, and then, she heard it as it happened, rolled into the heating register and fell in, one tiny metallic clank revealing its fate. The girl sat up; she had been peering under the bed; she didn't cry, but felt on the verge of tears; she didn't know why, she didn't know how to explain it to herself, but she felt proud.

There is no end of detail to things that don't exist. This pearl?—it had a little mark, a scar almost, like a birthmark, that the jeweler would have drilled through when the time came to pierce through the flaw to make the object flawless. The mother, when she toyed with the pearl, something
she did not do often, would unconsciously rub her thumb against that slightest scar, caught in some reverie, some daydream, about her past—a series of thoughts with no connection—she remembered being a little girl with a sore throat, and that her father brought to her bed a cup full of shaved ice about which she thought, when she held it, that the cold rose above the rim as steam rises above a mug of tea, but opposite, and invisible; the mother thought she could see such things. The day of the total eclipse when the silver poplar's shadow turned into flame, and the disappointment after, when the flame was only shadow again—she remembered these things, holding the pearl in her fingers, rubbing the scar with her thumb. There is no end of detail in that world that doesn't exist; it is in this world where detail is a limited resource, this world in which I live. There is a line across which the fact wanders and becomes imaginary, but like the equator, it is an imaginary line—one crosses it and knows something is awry only when the stars rise at night in ludicrous combinations. One remembers how the stars should look, though it is impossible to describe to anyone else—to one's wife: that the bluish star should be closer to the triangle in which two points are more or less reddish (and then pointing), see?, there by the moon! There is a blurry edge, a blurry end, to detail in this world—the ragged moon.

I have a memory, certain memories, in my head. I don't trust them but I need them. When I close my eyes I can call them to mind, a world that unfolds in the darkness
of my head, a world my head contains, in which I watch myself inside myself, in which I can even see my own face, eerie mirror of thinking backwards through time. I see myself standing in the door to my father's study, leaning against the jamb; he doesn't know I'm there; he has a scroll and a book open on his desk; the scroll, which he looks at often, his eyes opening wide or narrowing in wonder or in scrutiny, and then he writes in the other book open on his desk; the sound of his writing, of pen on page, I cannot see it, but in my memory I see that sound in lines swirling up from the paper, multiplying as he writes, cocooning him in his own work until I cannot see my father at all, only gray lines moving by their own volition, slowly stilling into form, and my father some strange pupa within the inky silk, becoming something I don't know.

I see I've crossed the equator again. A pearl is made of consecutive layers of nacre, and if one had the patience, and the right tool, one could remove layer after layer—this process might take years—remove the beautiful sheen, ignore the nacre, and find in the very center that irritant in the mouth that caused the unconscious reflex to begin, the helpless instinct that makes of small pain subtle beauty. I would find—

A single grain of sand.

A
SMALL GROUP OF FACULTY MILLED IN FRONT OF THE
table where the red wine bottles were placed in two diagonal rows, and the white in a square formation, three by three; it looked as if the Pinot Noir were trying to outflank the Chardonnay; I didn't doubt a professor arranged it so as some inside joke perhaps only he would understand, a reenactment of a battle from the Wars of the Roses. Olin and I sifted through the loose crowd. Olin drank white and I drank red; we went to our respective sides. In a voice loud enough to be overheard Olin said, “Tell me again about how you met your wife. It was a cocktail party, yes?”

Uncomfortably, “Yes.”

“And when you asked her name, she said what? No, no. You said, ‘And what may I call you?'”

“And she said, ‘Call me Ishmael.'” I said this with somewhat less enthusiasm than Olin would have liked.

“Call me Ishmael! That's love at first sight for you isn't it, Daniel? She really knew how to get her grapples into ye!” He leered at me cockeyed, one eyebrow raised, one eye squinted shut, mouth crookedly ajar as if he were about to spit into a spittoon. The faculty around us seemed bemused by the performance, recent hires who still flocked together, and most of whom I didn't know save by a dim recognition of face.

I have no wife. Olin enjoys, though, sowing the minds of new faculty with blatantly false facts; he hopes to be in near proximity when the truth comes out; in the office when the new rhetoric teacher asks the secretary just what it is my wife does, and the secretary sympathetically, if still curtly, responds, “Daniel? He isn't married.” And to the skeptical look in response: “Ask H.R.” Olin relishes that moment—he's spoken to me drunkenly about it—when he can see in another's face the instant, save it is an instant that is gradual, as if recognition inside a moment expands the moment past its brief boundaries, the slight tensing of the eyes, the senseless reflex of scrutiny that finds itself investigating a blank wall (the other's face), the brow drawing back and lifting the eyes into a look of bewilderment; and Olin's favorite, the slight flush of the cheek. It is, as he's explained often to me, the way in which knowledge should come. It is the template of knowledge, the archetype, that it comes with shame, and reveals nothing at all. When asked what his pedagogy is by a precocious student, deciding whether or not to take his course on “Information and Deformation,” Olin calmly replied, “To fill your mind with dust.”

Olin and I sat down in the leather chairs, brass studs lining the arm's curve, ornament but still somehow cruel, whose legs ended in wolf's paws. “What book were you staring at, Daniel?”

“A book I read as a child; one my father said I shouldn't.”

“Forbidden fruit, yes. The very best reading a young lad can do.”

“I did love it. At night in bed I'd think about the stories. And I'd get scared. But fear made me think more thickly, more fully, so that as I retold the story to myself my mind replayed it. I lost sense of what was real and not real.”

“A worthless division.”

“Well, maybe. Maybe a necessary one.” I paused, just an instant, but one in which the years closed the distance they keep separate. “The room I slept in became alive.” I felt embarrassed, but couldn't stop myself, seeing before me what I thought was gone. “I could feel, well—I knew there was a soul in everything, that everything kept making a choice to continue to exist, and welcomed into the world many things that didn't exist but that I could see, a clock that said
now
instead of
tick
or
tock
, other things that spoke to me, that lay next to me, a woman once, she sat on my chest, she was naked, and she told me my future.”

“Something similar happened to me last night.”

“I'm sure, Olin, it did.”

“And what was your future?”

“That I'd be blessed with the chance to know you. ‘One day,'” she said, “‘you will know Olin.'”

“When I was a boy I could not fall asleep without my mother kissing me. I tormented her with my neediness. But without her kiss, or the extended luxury of her reading me a story, without her presence once again
coming into my darkening room, where the magic lantern spun and cast the image of a hunter hunting a wolf that in turning become the wolf hunting the hunter on the walls, I could not risk sleep that, even then, more so than now, I knew was like death. I didn't like to dream. To nightly be given a new world only to find it taken away every morning—a world like our own, sometimes less so, in which those I loved, my mother even, became the monsters they hid inside themselves all day. A fearful thing, yes? It's why I've chosen a healthy insomnia as an adult,” his tone ironic but his face hollow, “to avoid sleep as I can, now that my mother is asleep for good.”

“The magic lantern . . . you sound as if you grew up in the last century.”

“I did.” Olin's wit was remarkably dry, to the point at which even I, his good friend, couldn't always tell when he was kidding. He sat in his chair looking at me with some snide innocence, the look of a person who cares that you believe what he is saying so that he can believe it himself.

“I remember when we had to share a room once at a conference. You were asleep in an instant.”

“All a ruse. I wanted to protect you from suffering through a night in which I'd ask you to call me Little Olin and tuck me in. Do you know how hard it is to willfully snore lightly for eight hours? It's murder on the nervous system. I woke up exhausted.”