An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (26 page)

I woke to the alarm. Pirates off the Barbary Coast.

I walked downstairs. I made my cup of coffee. I went to the study. I had turned the postcard over so I could not see those stars. There was the severed poet's head. It was turned away—of course, this was coincidence—from the stack of pages next to it. I thought to myself,
It's done
. Something was missing, I could feel it but I couldn't name it. There sat the green book on its shelf. I walked to the window and stared out. Almost all the
leaves had fallen from the poplar, pale yellow pocked with brown spots. A fox ran across the yard in the sickly morning light. It kept looking back behind it even as it sped forward, pursued even though nothing chased it. At least, nothing I could see. I heard a ticking from my desk, and, opening the drawer, next to the letter opener, the old pocket watch Lydia bought me, the watch that had never worked, that never would work, was ticking, but no hands moved. I picked it up and the ticking stopped.

Time passed.

Some amount of time. It always passes. Nothing need mark it. It need not be counted.

Time passes. It passed.

I moved inside of it, time, as it passed. I got dressed. I rubbed the pomade into my hands, sandalwood a scent in the air, and put my hands through my hair. I gathered my books and papers. I took the green book from its shelf and put it in my bag. I closed the door behind me and left for school. I walked down the path I always walked down, the path I'm always walking down, always.

I looked behind me. There it was, as it always was. Nothing following me.

Ishmael was waiting for me by my office door. “Hello, Professor.”

Seeing him there, seeing in his face his patience and his expectation—it felt like a hammer pressing down on my chest. I saw him and felt in me the weight of all I should ask him but could not, would not ask, about his mother, about what happened to her, how she died—I wanted to ask if his mother ever discovered her world, her other worlds, the math that proved it, or if he found her too at times at the dinner table drawing circles one on top of another in reverie or mindless repetition—about his childhood, about what he knew of his father, what he knew about me.
Me.
That one syllable struck my mind as a hammer strikes stained glass. Once again—I feared it because I felt so certain of it—I was making up the story I wanted to be true, refusing to let shatter what in my life had already shattered. I looked at Ishmael. I felt him to be a wonderful young man. I took pride in him. I would be proud to have him as a son. And his eyes, that look in his eyes, as in my own eyes—that proved enough for me to put him to work in my imagination gluing the shards back together, one by one, until the picture again was whole in its panels: a man and a woman and a child through which the light gains color as it shines. I need to put that world away, I thought. I need to bury the dead. But I only turned the key in the lock, opened my office door, and said, “Come in, Ishmael. And please, don't call me Professor; it makes me feel older than I am.
Professor
—it's a word that conjures pontificating shades. Daniel is just fine.”

Ishmael sat down while I emptied my bag of books and notes. I pulled out the green book and held it for a moment, felt again how it seemed denser than it should be, weighed somehow more than it should, but also felt how the stories inside it had filled my young head with fantasies that had not yet released me from the magic lantern spinning its light and shadows onto the wall in my mind. Worlds that weighed nothing at all. I put the book on the desk between us.

“What is it?” Ishmael asked, looking down at the book.

“An old book I read as a child.
Wonders and Tales
. I borrowed it from the Old Library a number of months ago, and realized I should return it. It is a book, I think, of some value.” I paused, and clarified. “Monetary value.” I picked up the book. “Why don't we return it now? Would you mind joining me? Can we talk about your concerns as we walk?”

“Sure,” Ishmael said. We stood up together and walked out the door. “Do you need to close it?” Ishmael asked, noticing I hadn't pulled the door closed behind us.

“No. Maybe I'll get lucky and someone will steal everything.” I heard myself as Ishmael must hear me. “I'm sorry. I'm sounding rather jaded today.” We walked down the stairs and out the heavy wooden doors of Trillbyrne Hall. “What did you want to talk about?”

Ishmael hesitated. “Well, um—the paper, I guess. I still don't know what to write about. I have lots of thoughts, really. I've taken notes. I've written ideas on
little cards. I've pinned the cards to my wall and drawn lines between them to see how they connect. But I can always see they could make another shape, you know? That it's arbitrary. That I'm just forcing them into something I recognize but there isn't any inherent connection. I'm just playing—”

“You're drawing lines between the stars—consideration, constellation—”

“Yes. I guess. But it's awful, and I can't write a thing.”

We walked across the lawn, kicking leaves with every step; a raucous, mournful sound. Discord of trespass. Ishmael slowed his pace, looking down at the leaves as he kicked them. “But I actually came by to apologize for my behavior in yesterday's class.” He stopped walking and looked at me. “I get emotional sometimes . . . when something makes me remember my mom.”

The dead don't stay buried, I thought. Stone's weight of the green book in my hand. “Tell me about her,” I said. It felt to me as if the words had uttered themselves, as if I had withdrawn and taken a seat deep within myself, to listen without the questionable problem of me always being myself.

“She was a weaver.”

“Was she?” in too quick a response, both horrified and horrifically relieved that all my thoughts were wrong. That this boy was my student, nothing more. It released something in me. Some rope or chain or thread or string I'd been gripping tightly—so tightly I didn't know I was doing it—came loose, or my hand of its own
tiredness unclenched. But what that line attached to did not fall when I let it go, it rose, I felt it rise above me, the life that had almost been mine, I felt it rise above me as I felt myself fall, no real falling, a worse one, as if gravity became suddenly more than a natural law and became instead a spiritual one. I mean to say something in me fell, and what fell in me was me.

“Well, she became a weaver. She had been a physicist. An astronomer. She studied other worlds, the possibility of other worlds.”

“No—” I heard my voice speak itself.

“Yes,” Ishmael said. He looked at me with surprise, almost amusement, at the vehemence of my reaction. “She told me that in the end they were the same thing—weaving and worlds. I don't think I yet understand what she meant. My favorite memories of her are sitting on the floor by her as she threw the shuttle across the warp and pushed the weft together. You wouldn't think it, but it's a deafening noise. A kind of music, like—” we started walking again, “like feet stepping through leaves. Hours would pass. It would hypnotize me—it really would—watching her take a single thread of a single color and make it into a pattern—”

“Into a world—”

“Yes. I guess that's right, Professor. I mean, Daniel. A world.” The Old Library loomed, its tower seeming to lean over us, either to collapse us in its rubble, or to shepherd us inside. “She would have liked to hear you say that. She would have liked you, I think.”

“How—” I felt the color drain from my face, felt ashen, “How did she die?”

“Cancer.”

“I'm sorry, Ishmael.” I put my hand on his shoulder. I had never touched him before. He felt my hand shaking.

“Are you
O.K
., Daniel?”

I turned my head away so that I wouldn't cry. Seeing him would make me cry. But I kept my hand on his shoulder. “So it's your father that raised you?”

“No—.” Ishmael's voice grew dim. “I don't know who my father is. My mother said he was a writer. I never felt I could ask.”

“You are an orphan.”

“I am. I guess so.” He frowned; his chin quivered.

“I'm sorry, Ishmael.” I said, and looked at him as I spoke. I took my hand from his shoulder. “I'm sorry.”

“It's not your fault, Professor.”

Ishmael walked up the steps and opened the doors, and I followed him, and we both went in.

The bottom floor had not changed since Olin and I stole in those months before. The bookshelves like cripples leaning against each other, pausing on the long walk home. Sheets gathering the dust that should fall on the unused tables. The broken lamp. We started up the stairs. The green book grew heavier and heavier in my hand, gathering gravity inside itself, a dense star.

“There's a story I remember, Ishmael. I read it in this book when I was a boy.” I gave him the book to carry.
“There was once was an old woman, a magical woman, who could sing songs, and everything she sang about came true. When she was hungry, she sang a song of carrots and potatoes growing in the ground, of harvesting them, of cooking them in the pot, and at the end of the song there would be a bowl of soup steaming on her table. People in the town knew of her power, and she was not selfish. When a child was born blind the parents would bring the baby to her, and she would sing her a new pair of eyes. When the drought came she would sing rain and it would rain. She was a very old lady, and near the end of her life. She decided, when one day she was singing her house clean, hearing how hoarse her voice sounded, that she wanted to live her life over again. So she sang. She sang herself back through her own life, reversing it, sang her own grown children back into infants, back into nothing. She sang her husband out of the grave and back into the beauty of his youth; she sang herself young with him.” We had come to the landing, and walked into the Old Library. Ishmael gazed around, looked at the books locked behind their glass cases, looked at the plaster ornaments circling the ceiling, looked up at Pan looking down. “She sang herself back into her own childhood; she sang the apple orchard in blossom. She sang herself back to a baby, back to a time when she had no song of her own, but could only hear the song in the air that spoke its ongoing tune. But she forgot something. Do you know what she forgot?”

Ishmael and I stood in front of the bookcase from which I'd stolen the book.

“She forgot her parents.”

“Right.” I looked at Ishmael. I looked at him in his eyes with my eyes. “And so this baby spoke her first words. Do you know what they were?”

“Mom. Dad.”

“Right. And they appeared.”

Ishmael looked at the shelf. He saw the broken pieces of the lock in the gap left by the stolen book. He looked at me. “You borrowed this book?” He pulled open the case, but I put my hand against it, against the glass. I felt the glass cool against my fingers.

“I think I might borrow it a while longer,” I said. “Maybe you should borrow it from me.”

Ishmael closed the glass case, and we walked down the stairs and out the building, hurrying so as not to be late for class.

E
VERY HEAD TURNED TOWARD US WHEN WE ENTERED
the room.

Ishmael took his seat, and I took mine.

“I've been thinking about the essay assignment,” I said. “I know some of you have been having a difficult time coming up with something to write. It's strange material we're reading. Myth and fairy tales, stories of wonder and magic, darkness and light, shadows and bodies. It is like entering a new world, these stories. Paying attention to them initiates you in things that shouldn't be real, shouldn't feel real—monsters and heroes, simpletons and princesses, wise women and witches. Analyzing wonder feels like writing an argumentative essay about your lover proving you love her. It's, um, untoward, impolite, something. And of course, this is college, in which no one tells you that learning how to think is a lesson in betrayal.” I couldn't tell if I made any sense to the class. Not so sure I made sense to myself. No one nodded his head; no one took notes. “So, I decided all of you should have a different option—one that doesn't ask you to betray the work you've done, but asks you to do it further.” I glanced at Ishmael. I thought to myself,
There he is
. “There's a story my father used to tell me. He told it to me every night before bed. It's a story—
maybe the only one—I know word for word. It doesn't begin ‘Once upon a time,' but let the phrase linger as if already spoken in your ear.