An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (4 page)

        
Olin cleaning the chair's glasses with the end

        
of his shirt and then kissing him

        
I stood in the room, reading

        
the old book, a cut on my finger

        
left my fingerprint in

        
blood

        
on the page

        

        
A whale sounds down in the ocean.

        
Eye as small as a foal's. I know

        
he sees me watching him

        
the white whale. There is a tarred

        
rope tangled around him, but

        
it does not slow his descent.

        
Placid as ice as it forms

        
within the element of its

        
own composition.

        
There is a man in the mouth.

        
That man is me.

I was glad to be hungover when the sun woke me up. There is no doubt the hangover is real—except when I try to explain it to myself. I drank, I walked home, I read. I had many dreams that I dreamed. And now I have this pain behind my eyes, it has a shape, a circle or an orb, it isn't large—this pearl that is the pain in my mind.

I
POURED MYSELF A CUP OF COFFEE AND WALKED DOWN
the hall to the study. My father had lined the walls with cork to quiet the noise of the street. He feared that the intermittent voices of women discussing their children, of children furtively whispering their cruel taunts of the local man who, half-crazed and half-drunk, knocked on doors and yelled into houses, “Encyclopedias for sale!” but who had no books to sell, of vendors selling their wares on the streets, pushing a cart with bells dangling from the handle, “Ices, ices, ices and treats,” a song in refrain syncopated by the tinkling notes, the man who every day chose a different corner from which to proclaim, in stentorian tones, “The world has ended, and it's gonna rain, the world has ended, and it's still gonna rain, get out, it's calling, get out, it's too late to repent, the world has ended, and here's the proof,” at which point he would sing hymns from the old hymnal, his eyes closed, in a profound bass that at its lowest notes seemed not to be heard so much as felt, of daily conversations, of men discussing the derby, of the poor woman who as she walked talked to herself, “It couldn't have been different, it could have been different” over and over again, just as the young girl wandered with the daisy in her hand, “He loves me, he loves me not.” Father said the slightest intonation overheard
could destroy a day's work; a single word could make worthless hours of concentration. This language, he'd tell me when I'd listen, couldn't be translated by simply referring to a dictionary; there was no dictionary. But the difficulty was far greater, he claimed. One couldn't, he couldn't, nor could anyone, create a dictionary of this language, write down the various parts of speech, what transliterated words referred to object or person or action or comparison or indication or conjunction or division in our own language; this language was rooted, if such a word can be used in this case, in a profound instability, in which no single word ever stilled into definition of one single thing. Not only could one not tell apart the definite article from the indefinite, that sound that word is, slightly altered by intonation, extended by breath, could become not only a word referring to a bird, but
a-bird-that-nests-on-the-open-bare-ground
and also, simultaneously, so my father claimed,
the-fragile-rock
. It could drive me mad. I could be driven mad by it. He would stare down at the old transcription, written on a scroll rather than bound, as if the language were a landscape instead of a book; two stones held the scroll open, stones rubbed smooth by the ocean, large as my father's hands; he would stare down at the words written on the paper, and then close his eyes, for hours close his eyes, and do nothing at all, write down nothing. He kept by the scroll's side a sheaf of paper on which was printed musical staff. It is a song, a music. You have to hold the whole music in your mind to hear the story, it has to be sung to be said, and if I write down a
word plucked out from the tune the entire song falls apart, everything is lost, it's all blank, the ear is blank. You must hear it to see it, and when you see it, you can write down some equivalent. He would talk to me, when he talked to me of his work, in the first person and the second person, so that listening to him absorbed me into him, or him into me, the division between father and son, him and me, I and you, falling prey to the same indeterminate quality of the language he was translating. He didn't, my father, translate the myth into words, but into a musical notation of his own composition, a notation made of musical notes, other marks to distinguish rhythm, wavelike lines rolling upward or downward through the staff to mark intonation and, should he be able to complete his thoughts for the day, one word he'd write on top of the page,
white
or
cloud
or
water
or
then
. “I have discovered today that
and
is the same word as
or
; it is the most complex word I've understood.” He didn't look victorious when he said this to me; he sounded defeated. He held out his hands as if he were offering me something. And when a word would break through the room's cork-lined silence, it would be gone, all of it, the whole music, world's melody; when through the walls rumbled the awful words “The world has ended,” my father opened his eyes, and in his look was the proof.

I
LEARNED TO BE A QUIET CHILD.

I learned to be a quiet child
. These are the words with which, now many years ago, I began the novel I'm still writing. In the mornings, it is my work. I don't show it to anyone; I don't tell anyone I'm working on it. I am, in certain ways, embarrassed. I began with ambitions the very first sentence ended; a novel whose taproot dug down into fairy tale, but from that root, split, rhizome-like, erupting out of the ground in shoots and leaves that seem wholly unconnected to their source, different leaves, different worlds, but should one be able to trace the fine thread-roots over their strange coursing, the disparate would be seen as whole, a many and a one, the multiple world.

But what I write about is myself, my childhood, my friends, dinner parties, music, the bewildering dazzle of social hierarchies, artists I know and the art they make, my father's work. I wanted to write a different world; I write the small, cunning world I am. It is a limit I have resigned myself to, my life. The page is a curious mirror one polishes with oneself to see oneself clearer, but the polishing, as it brings the surface to a sheen, also warps it, alters the image into beauty that does not exist, or cruelty that does not exist, except latent, a virus or a seed
dormant in the personality, awaiting the right condition to spring into life, to viruslike infect the cell, to weed-like run rampant through the field, but the only element of life is life, this life I lead, in which the pages I write become the fallow field waiting to be turned over, where the sentences are the plough's edge turning up the sod into sillion's dark shine. This work—I cannot seem to stop it, though I would like to—this effort at consciousness that dismantles itself into uncertainty, changing facts into myths, self-myths, so that reading back through the pages, the hundreds of pages, gives me back to myself in altered form; did I seduce the student in my office when she came in the early spring, here where the northern latitude keeps night arriving early, asking about Melville's
Encantadas
?; did I speak to her about enchantment, about song and place, about the dinner party in the summer air, tents lit by torches, in which I saw the island tortoise walk into the dark woods,
memento***
in burning letters on its back?; did I put my hand on her knee, and run my hand up beneath her skirt? What I have made up about myself has so insinuated itself into my imagination it acts as fact; imagination embraces fact, subsumes it, as an amoeba will swallow itself to end its hunger, and then sated, split in two, and make of itself another. I once ended a semester's class, after Ishmael, another orphan, had been rescued by the devious-coursing
Rachel
, by saying “A book begins by defining ‘Who I am'; it ends by asking ‘Who am I?' We are allergic to the world; consciousness
is an allergic reaction to the fact of the world; it is our understanding that is a form of irritation, a rewarding irritation, and we think, because we think, we have accomplished something noble, something valorous, that we can say what it is something means; but it is just a symptom of the allergy, the mind trying to rid itself of itself, of what enters it by casting it back out, words for world.”

I know that I ended a class with these exact words. It is recorded in Book
III
, Chapter
VI
on page 147 of the manuscript.