An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (24 page)

As soon as I said that last word,
dead
, Ishmael stood up and left the room.

I followed him out, called after him down the hall. He paused and I caught up to him. “What's wrong?”

He turned around. He was crying. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I remembered my mother. Something about that conversation made me remember my mother.”

“You miss her?”

“Yes, I miss her.” He looked at me. “She died when I was ten.”

I walked back to class. The students were sitting quietly, an uncomfortable quiet.

“Your papers are due on Monday,” I said. “Please find me if you have any concerns or questions.” Everyone made their way, one by one, out of the room.

On Ishmael's desk, in the very center of his desk, with its strange luster, with its strange glow, was the pearl.

Olin was perched on a stool at the bar when I walked in, and seeing me, he stood up, a beer in each hand, and
walked over. “Daniel,” he said, “you arrive and I'm prepared.” He handed me my pint, put his hand on my shoulder, and guided me back to our favorite booth. The jukebox played continuously the blues with which the owner had filled it; he had covered up the coin slot with a piece of black electric tape. The old 78s spread out fanlike behind the glass. Robert Johnson in the air,
the blue light was my baby, and the red light was my mind
, and Olin unconsciously humming the tune.

“So, how's it going?”

“What?” I asked.

“It,” Olin said in a tone of mock doom.

“The novel?”

“It,” in the same voice, “yes, it.”

“I wake up and work on it pretty much every day. And every day I think about throwing it back in the trash.” I took a sip of beer. “The trouble is my father.”

“Fathers are always the trouble, Daniel. Isn't that true?”

“The trouble is I can't see through his eyes. The trouble is imagination. The trouble is me being me trying to be someone else, someone I knew but didn't know, the trouble is—well, the whole thing is the trouble. Me being me. That trouble.”

“Throw it out. Work on something sensible.”

“That might be the first time you've ever given me good advice, Olin.”

“Well, I was trying to tell a joke. Couldn't you hear the sarcasm?”

“It's so much your general tone I think I missed it.”

“You're afraid to imagine, Daniel. I've always known this about you. Not that you idolize facts. You're no material zealot. You're no
proofist
—that's what I call them. You're something else. Devoted to a god you won't let yourself believe in. The novel is a half-formed worship, the novice practicing and practicing because he's afraid to stop practicing and commit.” Olin had never spoken to me in actual judgment before. I felt taken aback. I drank more beer and looked aside. “Your father—”

“What do you know about my father? Why are you even talking about him?”

“I know what you've told me.”

“And that's it—that's nothing. My father—he—”

“Yes?”

I took another gulp of beer. I looked at Olin. “I don't know what to say next. I don't know what the next words are.” The next record mechanically slipped onto the player.
I don't know why I love you like I do, stormy weather . . .
“It's a blank page.”

“I'm sorry, Daniel. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“Please, don't worry. It's me, actually. I feel very on edge.” I picked up my beer surprised to find it was already empty. “Do you know a student named Ishmael?” I asked.

“No. And a name I would have remembered, I suspect.”

“He's in my class. We've become close.”

“That's good. Isn't it?” Olin's persona had been stripped of its delight in innuendo.

“Good? I suppose. I don't know. I feel—” I paused, not knowing how to admit to someone else what I could hardly admit to myself. “I think that I might be his father.”

Olin stared at me, eyes growing wider, slightly watering as if he were to break into tears, as if he were affected by the thought as much as I was, as if tears were the only appropriate response to something so impossible, so unimaginable; and then he broke into an uproar of laughter so violent he kept hitting his fist against the table, the candle's flame guttering inside its glass. “You kill me, Daniel. You really do. You kill me.”

P
EARL AND HER MOTHER SAT ON THE SHORE, LOOKING
out at the ocean where the white whale breached, drops of water sparkling in the sunlight, and looking down at the pages of the book. “It's our story,” Pearl said, turning a few pages back to show her mother an illustration where a young girl stole a black box off a dresser drawer's top. She turned the page and her mother read
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 . . .
but Pearl turned the page again before she could finish the sentence. Every time a page turned her mother thought the sky above them turned suddenly but briefly darker, as if a cloud had passed across the face of the sun—but there were no clouds in the sky. “And look.” Pearl said, turning a few more pages, “here we are.” And there sat Pearl and her mother together on the beach, heads bent down over a book. Her mother took the book from Pearl, and began turning over page after page, looking for where the story ended. A last page showed them on hands and knees, peering down into a pond, their reflections marked in a thin and shaky line.

Pearl's mother took her by the hand, pulled her to her feet, and they walked together into the forest that
edged the shore as far as they could see. There was no path, but they had no difficulty finding their way; not scared by Pearl and her mother, the birds kept singing. Pearl said, “And Mother, do you know, there are so many other stories in the book I looked at while I was waiting for you—a story about a girl who grew up with the faeries and they tricked her into jumping into a volcano, and—” A hummingbird whose long tail feathers curled into scrolls floated for an instant before them as if wondering what flowers were these that moved as they blossomed, and unable to solve the mystery, flew off and disappeared into a large bell-shaped flower.

“And Mother, there's a story, I saw the pictures, of a man on a sea voyage, and he stands at the front of the ship in a raging storm and his mouth is open like he's singing, and—” Her mother pulled two fruit from a low-hanging branch, and she and Pearl ate the fruit.

Then the thick woods began to clear. Then they stepped into the clearing.

There—shining water—was a pond.

Pearl and her mother walked to the edge of the pond.

Water bubbled in the middle, fed by a spring below. “Hello,” a voice said.

Pearl and her mother saw a man sitting near the water on the opposite side of the pond, sitting with his knees bent, a book propped up on his knees, a pen in his
hand. “Hello,” Pearl said, “Who are you?” “I am writing a poem about a volcano,” the man said, as if who he was were what he was doing. “I'll read it to you, if you want,” the man said, “O O O O O O O O O.”

“That man's not in the picture in the book,” Pearl whispered to her mother. Her mother only held Pearl's hand tighter, and they walked to the edge of the pond. They knelt down and peered into the water; they stared through their own faces staring back up at them. But beneath their faces, looking through the looking of their own eyes, Pearl and her mother began to see something—not simply the pond's fine silt bottom, but something below the silt, an image coming into form, as through a dust-coated window a dim figure outside can be seen approaching. “Look, Mother, look down there,” Pearl said, “it's a room, a schoolroom—Mother, look.” Her mother did look; she saw the room, too—the vision becoming clearer and clearer, the blur resolving into forms forming into students walking out of the room. Then only one man was left, his face unseen, though Pearl's mother felt she must know him, this stranger whose posture to her seemed familiar, as if she had known him in a life she had forgotten almost completely, so familiar her heart beat not faster but deeper, drumming in her chest. “Mother, Mother, look!—there it is, there is your pearl!—” and her mother saw it, too, a single pearl in the middle of a desk in the middle of a schoolroom and one man, head bent down, looking at it. Pearl put her hand in the water, as if to retrieve the
pearl, to return it to her mother, but the water parted around her hand, the water rippled, and the world beneath the surface disappeared, leaving Pearl and her mother again staring only at themselves, and then the surface grew agitated, the ripples grew into larger waves, and as they watched, the waves erased their faces, leaving only their eyes, and then the water closed their eyes, the water closed their eyes, and sitting up, all there was to see was each other.

I
STEPPED ON THE LETTERS WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR.
I picked them up, shuffled through them one by one, seeing my own name printed over and over again distinguished only by different fonts. It is reading one's name that gives one the feeling of being anonymous, I thought, peering at my name beneath the cellophane window of a phone bill, placing it behind the pile I'd already glanced through, when behind it I found a picture, a postcard, and reproduced on it—though a poor reproduction where colors bled outside of their form, a neon green edge to the woman's blue sleeve looking almost like an aura—was Gustave Moreau's
Orpheus
. A woman holds Orpheus's severed head and gazes down at it, save her eyes are closed. She stares at him through her closed eyes, which is how one sees memory. His eyes too are closed, which is how one sees when one is dead. They look at each other through closed eyes. The edge of the postcard was ragged, torn, as if it had been caught in between the teeth of two gears. I turned it over. A note taped to the back said,
This postcard got caught in a sorting machine and fell behind it. We found it while making repairs, and so are delivering it now. We apologize for the inconvenience
. I peeled the note off, transparent tape pulling up the thick paper's fibers. I had the sudden sensation of
peeling a bandage off a wound. Underneath the note, pressed deep into the paper in blue ballpoint, three stars darkly shined. I recognized them. They were mine. After so many years, years in which I thought Lydia had finally decided to forget me, worse years where I felt something worse happened, that she had gotten sick, been hurt; worse today when in the hall the boy I thought might be my son told me his mother had died long ago and walked away from me in tears. But she wasn't dead. But I wasn't forgotten. We still stared—across the entire distance—at each other, eyes not closed but open. The postcard had no words, only this constellation that told me again my own story, this story written above me in the stars, the stars Lydia named, and written down on the cream-colored sky of this card in dark blue ink, a note to say that in this world there exists this woman I loved, whom I love still, whom I failed, whom I sent away, who knows where in the vast sky to look up and find those three points of light that mark no others but us, those stars whose story we are. My hand shook. The stars shook in my hand. And then I glanced at the postmark's smudged red ink,
March 10
, but the year was smeared almost past recognition, so that I brought the card closer to my face, turned it from side to side to see if I could make out the impression of the numbers pressed into it, rubbed my finger over the surface, and then I saw it, or sensed it, not that I could make out the year in any undeniable way, but that my doubt grew definitive, made my senses more keen, proved to me
exactly what I refused to believe—the year read
19—
, eight years ago. I looked back over my shoulder, but no one was behind me. No one was behind me at all. And when I looked back at the card the stars seemed to me eyes that were closed, and that Lydia was peering at me through eyes she had borrowed, eyes that saw in delay, the eyes of the disappeared, just as the stars still seem to send out their light long after the spark that throws it has died.