An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (5 page)

M
OTHER DIED IN CHILDBIRTH. SHE HAD BEEN CONFINED TO
her bed for months; I found her fingerprint in the dusting of talc on her boudoir's cluttered surface; I bent my face low and blew the dust away. She was my mother who died in childbirth. Altering the sentence cannot alter the fact. I found her fingerprint in the dust and blew it with my breath away; I did this when she was still alive. It was then I was a child
.

I don't remember much, which is why my memory is so accurate: one cast-iron pinecone on the metal chain clicked upward while the other clicked down so I knew the minutes were passing even when the bird didn't—springing out her house's door—sing. I remember the dark rooms of the house lit up by lantern light, a yellow light that warmed the darkness, revealed the darkness, more than it countered it, removed it; but we owned no lanterns. My father read a book. When Mother screamed from upstairs and Father went up to listen through the door, I walked over to his desk. Spine-cracked, the book lay flat. He had underlined one sentence on the page, underlined it over and over again—“It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist”—with such repetitive force he had cut through the page with the pen's nib and crossed out a sentence on the page below. I don't remember reading the sentence; I couldn't read then. I remember turning the page over, and seeing underneath the dark line cut precisely
through the words, severing them in half, “
It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing”
—but I couldn't yet read
.

My father came back and looked at me; I was sitting at his desk, looking at the book he had just been reading, holding his pen in my hand. For many years I have tried to write a description of his face; once, in the back of a car driving through the countryside, being chauffeured to the estate of a wealthy patron of the college, and seeing three trees on the roadside, trees through which the wind was blowing and knocking from within them their cottony seed, I saw once again my father's face, saw him looking at me, and, taking out my journal from my case, tried to draw what I had always failed to describe; it was a likeness I was pleased with until, the car hitting a rut in the road, I drew a line through his eye. His was a face that could not be described; there was a line between his eyes that cut through them. He looked at me as if I were him. “You know it already. Your mother has died.” My father, he was not an unfeeling man; he spoke with no emotion. I can hear his voice now. Emotion—it stops when it enters grief's true realm. The bird sang out the hour
.

I had a little sister and no mother; my father had a daughter and no wife. My sister was not well. The doctor handed her to my father and said she did not have long to live, that my father should name her, but he wouldn't. He said he wouldn't give her a name. He simply took her from the doctor—a man who seemed to me to disappear at that very instant, as if in being in such proximity to death and life made him less than material, subject to laws other than natural laws—and began
pacing through the house, through the long hours left in the night, until the morning grayed the sky into vision, humming some tune that is no song, and I followed him, humming the same tuneless notes, echoing his steps with my steps, running my fingers along the walls of the house until, the sun breaking the horizon's line, he stopped his dark song, stopped his wandering, and said, “It's done.”

It was my sister
.

T
HE BOX WAS EMPTY.

The girl put the empty box back on her mother's dresser and went back to her room. She got down on her stomach and inched under the bed; her legs stuck out.

The girl thought about the pearl in the duct. She could see it in her mind, patient in the dark, a little world around which the hot wind blows. She could be as patient as the pearl; she was a pearl herself; her mother called her “my little pearl”; her name was Pearl. On her stomach, under the bed, blanket's bright fringe dimming the light, the girl knew what it was the pearl felt like.

She knew that the metal grating led downward into the house; she could picture it. She could see the duct slope downward and expand, she saw the duct beneath the house was larger than the house, widening into the earth beneath the foundation, opening into the inner ocean, the ocean inside the world where the islands are still uncharted, where there was no map, where the stone faces stood sentry looking for ships, statues whose eyes were pearls; she could see the pearl in the sea, falling down in the water, swayed only slightly by the current as it blew. She saw it falling, saw on the ocean's bed the oyster with unhinged mouth open, awaiting the pearl's return. Pearl was in the ocean too: blanket's blue fringe
sealike swaying surrounding her. It was nice to drown; necessary. Then she could hear the voices. The voices in the water. One of the voices was her mother's.

It came up through the ductwork, her mother's voice in the kitchen. She was talking but no one was there with her. It was the old story, the story her mother told:
The giant took out his heart and buried it
. Her mother's voice told her the story from the ocean's bed where in the water all the stories tell themselves over and over again. Pearl fell with the pearl, lullaby of her mother's voice. The box was empty, but it was empty in another world, a world in which the night sky was starless as was the inside of the box, night's black velvet. That was a world in which everyone was asleep. That was the world everyone slept in, the world before the turbulent dreams began.

Mother's voice stopped speaking before Pearl heard it stop. In her dream her mother's voice was the ocean. The long current was the pull on her legs, it was the current, until the ocean stopped being the ocean, when the blue water became again the blue fringe, when she woke up. Her mother pulled her out from under the bed.

Pearl turned around and looked up. Her mother was holding in her hand the box, lid open.

The box was empty.

T
HE FURNACE SHUTTING OFF SOUNDS LIKE A WAVE RUSHING
under itself as it draws back into the ocean. That sound, which leads to its own absence, woke me up before the alarm went off. Spring morning, window a crack open, gray-blue light limning the horizon that isn't, after all, so far away. Dreams about the weather. Drops of rain like pearls on rose leaves, last year's old buds withered, like burnt-out suns above them, unable to evaporate the dew. Then the silence in the house wasn't silence anymore: wood's small cracks and creaks, the sound from the first floor as of a squeaky hinge. Then the alarm's click before the radio's voice kicks on. A poet, the reporter reports, studying volcanoes for a new book, disappeared on a small island in Japan. He left the island's only inn early in the morning, a day-pack and a walking stick his only equipment. The volcano wasn't large, though it is active. Police found his footprints at the trailhead, but soon lost them in the heavy forest. The path leads to the crater, where noxious fumes leak out of the mouth. Investigators are certain the poet did not fall into the volcano. There is no explanation for their certainty. A steeper path on the mountain's back has yet to be explored. Night came on before the searchers could conclude their search. The steep path leads from the
edge of the bed, down the stairs, to the study where the same pages wait, some full of words, some empty. The story has lost its order, the story I am writing, this story of my life. Emerson thought the mind's nature was volcanic; my father was the first person to tell me this. A rock falls into the eye and becomes molten in the mind and memory cools it back into the rock first seen. It alters when it reemerges, but one cannot tell the difference. It looks the same, but we are imagining it. Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded sometime must feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms. White hills of pages, there you are—on the flat desk. And only when I sit down do I notice a black beetle upside down, rowing his legs against the air. Then I knew the poet fell into the volcano's crater, despite the investigator's assurance. There is nowhere else to fall.

B
LANK PAGES . . . IN THEM, AS A WATERMARK SEEN WHEN
held up to the window's light, hides the Delphic oracle,
Gnothi Seauton
, save it isn't the window's light that makes the command visible.
Certain scenes the book prescribes for itself, a kind of fate. Critics disdain the “episodic” but it is an ancient decree the writer, when honest, is helpless to deny
. Two sentences and the morning's writing feels done; and those words not even fictive, not furthering the plot, what of plot there is—criticism masking cryptic doubts. What more there is to write is hidden in what is already written, those pages already filled that, facedown on the desk, are as blank as the unwritten pages awaiting the next words.

The hour stretched out before me, longer than itself.

Essays to grade sat in a folder in my bag; notes to review before teaching; it all whispers and waits on the edge where time becomes time again, when memory returns to its confines as a debtor returns to prison; the obligatory day is the turnkey, locking memory away.