An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (21 page)

An autumn chill in the late August air—I remember it. Stars pricking through the old chaos. We lay with our backs on a hill. Lydia making order out of the disorder. Drawing the lines between the stars and telling me the names.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?”

I thought she was talking about the stars. “Yes,” I said.

“All these points punctuating the sky against which we feel our smallness, this smallness we have always felt, this smallness.” Her sentences seemed to run on in an ecstatic grammar. “And so people drew lines between the stars, found shapes and filled those shapes with stories.” She sounded caught in reverie. “The stories mapped out the sky and explained it and then the reverse happened and the sky explained us. We named the stars and now they name us. Tell us the stories we've forgotten. It's beautiful. It
is
beautiful. Against all the nothingness we have always felt we fill in the tales that add up to . . . something, to somethingness. And these stars, they mark their flat shape in the sky only because the eye can't see their depth. The stars so infinitely away from each other, so that the lines that tell the stories reach back across light years and knot together onto one page wholly different books of time and distance. They knot together different worlds. The sky is—it's this novel above us. All written on a single page. It's this poem. There's Lyra”—pointing up at a group of stars I could
not honestly discern, moving her arm in a diamond shape that mimicked the constellation—“Orpheus's lyre.”

I gazed in the direction she pointed. Shapeless cluster of light. “Orpheus saw Tantalus in the underworld. Standing in a flood but no drop would enter his mouth to drink. An apple near his lip that would always withdraw. Orpheus saw him, and he played a song on his lyre that stilled the water and apple, and Tantalus drank and ate.”

“Of course he did.” She placed my hand underneath her shirt. The warmth of her belly. I moved my hand down under the waistband of her underwear where the first curled strands of hair marked the intimate geography. She ran her hand carelessly up and down my arm. “Desire and song. Song and desire,” she said it as if she were reciting the primal elements, invoking the oldest gods.

Then Lydia leaned up quickly on her elbow and pointed up. “Look!”

And a dozen green fuses lit themselves in the sky and fell through the lyre, striking the strings whose music we could see but could not hear.

Clink of plate in porcelain sink. Shush of water rinsing off crumbs.

Walking in the October night. Windy but sparse clouds. The leaves blowing across the ground.

“Do you remember your mother at all?” Lydia asked.

A gust blew leaves against my legs, and then died, covering the path. “There's only one memory that feels certain.” The image filled my eye. “I remember being in the kitchen. My mother's back was to me. She was doing the dishes. I don't remember her face. I only remember her taking both hands out of the sink and flicking the water off of them—but the motion was strange, she moved both hands in the same direction, at the same time, a rhythm or a dance, or as if she were signaling something coming toward her to move over so they wouldn't collide.” Another gust cleared the path. I could hear the leaves rolling away on their thin, dead edges. “I don't remember her face. My grandma used to tell me I had her eyes. I would sometimes stare at my face in the mirror and try to find her in it. But I only remember her flicking the water off her hands, a memory that keeps repeating in my mind when I remember it, as if she's going to do it forever.”

Lydia took my hand.

“Those three stars,” pointing. “Do you see them?”

I looked up where she was pointing and saw dozens, some so faint I wasn't sure I was seeing them at all. “Yes,” I said.

“Those will be ours.” She spoke as if she had finally found the answer to a question that had long been troubling her. “That's our constellation. It marks our story.”

Wandered through the rooms gathering what I needed for the day. Flicking off the kitchen light. Stepping unconsciously over the creaky board in the old floor.

In the old world, in the ancient world, when people died they knew they were in the underworld because they found themselves repeating the same gesture over and over again: running water through a sieve, rolling a rock uphill, flicking from fingers the soapy water.

I gathered what I needed. Flicked off the kitchen light. Stepped over the creaky board in the old floor.

I gathered what I needed. Flicked off the lights. Stepped over the creaky board.

I went to my office to get my books.

I went to my office to get my books.

My father leaned against the window repeating what sounded like
and
over and over again, each time in a lower tone, until the word felt like a pressure in the air vibrating in the ear, and then the window began to rattle, louder and louder, the one loose pane buzzing as loudly as a bee in a flower, louder, a bee mistaking an ear for a flower, and gathering within it all the heard words for its pollen, only to fly back and feed the hive on song; and then the buzzing ceases, but even in silence seems to continue—not a sound but a motion, almost atomic—and Father turned around to see me,
and the way he looked at me, as if I were an entire world still undiscovered.

Picking up my pen from the desk. Silver poplar yellowing outside the window.

My father leaned against the window whispering to himself his wife's name,
Maria, Maria, Maria
, each time more quietly, until only breath. Then even breath was silence.

He turned around to see me, and the look in his face, in his eyes, as if I were a world lost to him forever.

Wandered through the house to find what I'd forgotten. What I'd forgotten stayed forgotten. I never could find it as I walked back through. I always had the feeling something was missing, but nothing was ever missing. I stood by the dining room table, tips of fingers of both hands tense against it, eyes closed, as if channeling spirits, as if leading a séance at which no one else arrived.