An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (8 page)

Lydia looked off into the room as if searching for her thought. “There is,” Lydia said, “a drone at the edge of the universe that marks the moment of its creation, a constant hiss, not music, but the sound against which music could be heard. It sounds like breath leaking
through tightly pressed lips. No, like a mother hushing a child to sleep. I've listened to it. It surrounds everything. It marks the edge, astronomers like to say, of what's known.”

“Like the mouth that holds the shape of the last word said,” though why I responded with these words, I don't know.

The moth flew from the lampshade and landed on one of the half-melted candles, and Olin, either in anger or disgust, tried to swat it, knocking it over. The flame went out as it fell, but the wax splattered onto the table, onto my plate, a single drop suspended on the tines of my fork, cooling as I watched.

I walked home that night knowing I would fall in love with Lydia. I went home along the walkway, each slab of cement a clinker that said over and over again the names of those I love,
mother father sister mother father sister
, and in that repeating phrase, another name added to the music, hers,
Lydia
. In another universe I wasn't so sad. Somewhere, the laws were different. Gravity wasn't a grave. Somewhere my mother and sister lived; somewhere my father lived with us, singing his song, his translated song, his song whose music re-created the world. Somewhere he was singing it, singing inside it, living inside the song he sings, as all of us do, together.

I went home that night and sat at my desk. I took out one piece of paper from the old ream my father kept in
the bottom drawer, the same paper on which he scribbled the notes for his translation, the musical paper, and in the lines of the first staff, I wrote:
I learned to be a quiet child
.

The breeze blew the lilac's scent away from me; I was no longer within it; and with the fragrance, the memory left too. My book bag heavy in my hand. I was—as usual—late for class.

T
HE PEARL FELL THROUGH THE WATER.

Pearl lay on her bed, awake but dreaming. Mother had said she could not leave her room, would have no dinner, would put herself to bed.

It was the vernal equinox, though Pearl did not know this. The day was divided exactly in half: half light and half dark. She lay on the blue square of her bed, on top of the covers, watching the light change; her thoughts were below the sea. The pearl was falling through the water.

The white whale watched as it fell in front of its eye. And Pearl saw so many things, so many more things than the pearl that had fallen through the grating into the ocean underneath the house. A picture in a frame fell through the water as an oak leaf falls off a tree, shuttling gently back and forth as it descends, a picture of a woman holding a blue umbrella, pink cheeks, looking gently down so that her eyes could not be seen; a woman who looks like her mother. Pearl remembered her mother's blue umbrella, remembered her mother opening it over her head when the rain started to fall, and how it looked to Pearl as if her mother were opening a clear blue sky underneath the dark one, a sky in
which no storm could occur. And there it was!—the blue umbrella open, open in the water, falling so much slower than the pearl and the picture. Bubbles rose while objects fell; little circles of breath that no one breathed, or who breathed them?—she did not know. The white whale swam among them all, a cord tangled around its giant body. An apple tree in blossom. How did it fall in the ocean?

Pearl stared at the ceiling, now gently lighter than the dark-filling room. She stared up into the blank wall and saw the tree falling through the water, so peaceful a motion, each blossom attached, nothing lost, swaying as the current moved through it as it would have moved in the wind; it looked like a wedding dress falling through the air. Pearl watched the white whale open its mouth. It was larger than her bedroom; it was, she thought, the size of her house. A little girl could live her whole life in a mouth like that, making a bed in the papery billows, breathing the air it breathed, the room lit by a candle in its head, burning on the whale's own oil. She would be inside it as it swam among all the lost objects. She would sleep when it slept, whose only bed is the ocean's bed, scratching words in its skin as it rolls in its dreams around. She could see it. The white whale opening its mouth.

It was then that Pearl understood what she must do. She thought she could hear her mother crying in her bedroom; but her mother wasn't crying. Pearl knew she must retrieve what she lost and give it back to her
mother. She must dive into the ocean, the ocean under the bed.

She crawled under the bed, lifted the grating off the duct. It was a much larger hole than she thought it would be.

Pearl fell into the water.

“D
ANIEL, YOU'RE QUITE LATE FOR YOUR OFFICE HOURS.
They are written
quite
plainly on this card.” The chair leaned closer to the card tacked onto my door, as if to see it in a new regard that might mitigate or regird his ire. “Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.” Looking down at his watch. “And it's almost 10:00.”

“You're right. I apologize. I'm not in the habit of being late. I somewhat lost track of time this morning.” He nodded once, curtly, almost martially, and started to turn around. Slightly under my breath, realizing I shouldn't say it even as I did, “Students never come to office hours anyway.”

“And why, Daniel, do you think that is?” He pivoted on one foot a half circle to face me again, his wiry eyebrows raised above his eyeglasses like two crescent moons, covered in moss or dust, over the planetary sheen of his eyeglass lenses.

“Students have changed. They are, well—disgustingly self-sufficient.”

“No, Daniel, you have changed.” He waited for my reaction, an atmosphere of tension he conjured in the hallway to see if I would cry or confess or storm away in insult and anger. I stood there, book bag in hand, and, sighing, leaned against the doorframe. An instructor
hurried by, looking down at the ground, her heels' knocking echoing behind her.

“How have I changed?”

“Have you read your evaluations lately?” A dumbfounded stare. “Well, have you?”

“No, I haven't.”

“What used to be glowing praise about your enthusiasm, your love, your infectious way of convincing students to care about what they read, of getting them to think, have all changed their tenor to concerns about your disinterest, your apparent boredom, and so on. You used to inspire, and now you,” looking flustered, stammering, “you—you
expire
. You, you—read from notes.” His attempt to upset me had only upset himself. He looked on the verge of tears. He started to lift one hand to put it on my shoulder, and then, thinking better of it, put it in the pocket of his jacket, and continued down the hallway, farther away from his own office, shaking his head as he went.

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” I called out down the hall after him. And without turning around, he took his hand from his pocket and waved the back of it at me three times before plunging it again out of sight.

I went into my office and closed the door. My desk I kept perfectly clear. Books on the shelves in alphabetic order. No photos on the walls; only a clock whose minute hand vibrated when it clicked into place. A
window overlooked the green where students hurried between classes, where the old oak with the obtuse burl grew more grotesque by the decade. A dead fly on the windowsill; I picked it up carefully by the tip of one wing; its forelegs pressed together as if in anticipation or prayer; I dropped it in the wastepaper basket.
As if I needed a reminder
, I thought. To inspire one must be inspired. I had been and now . . . it was, or I was, or both were, changed. Not that the books I taught had fallen in my love or regard for them. The opposite. I loved them as much as I ever had, maybe more; I just felt incapable of being loved by them in return. Somehow I had made myself unworthy of the words, those others' words—words that had put in my mind worlds, a careful disorder I lived within and out from which I looked at my students and invited them in. The classroom is its own peculiar cosmos, built not of natural laws, but of laws of attention—sympathetic chords that the teacher plucks in himself so as to secretly force the same note to vibrate in his student. How does one learn?—that is an awful, unanswerable question. I wanted my students to suffer a confusion that clarified, to leave the classroom unable to explain even to themselves what had just occurred over the previous two hours, as if, once one stepped back out the threshold of the classroom's door the spell had been broken, one had unwittingly drunk from the river Lethe by stepping over it, invisible though it may be, and the distinct memory of the discussion, what the discussion brought light to, slowly disappeared in content even as it
remained in form, an empty form whose emptiness was the only reminder that it had once been full, world-full, thought-full, but a few minutes ago. Knowledge was this absence of knowing—
that
is what I taught, thought. But how could I have suspected I would become my own philosophy? That from within emptiness I would have only emptiness to offer? To speak about pages as if they were still blank, to hold them up and say,
See, do you see—say it if you do—that underneath these words the page is blank? The words disguise that blankness as meaning in order to secretly imbed the blankness in you. Words speak around a silent heart. A word is a giant who buries his heart in silence where it can never be found, and in the silence it pulses, not a sound, but sound's opposite, a blank deafness of muteness inside a simpler quiet, the mind's quiet when it seems to say to itself, I'm ready to think, and then waits for thought to begin
. Blank faces, they all look at you, little planets above the flat plane of their desks. It isn't a look of expectation, not of hope, not of yearning—it is a look of fact, the fact of itself. The eye is a dark tunnel behind which mysterious processes occur—distraction and judgment. Behind the eye is the clear pool Narcissus stares into and drowns; but so too is Echo's echo chamber, all the words others speak to us rebounding against the skull only to be spoken back. The world is the condition of asking others to love you by using their own words to convince them to do so. Infinite repeat. Day after day of walking from my office, walking down the hall, down the stairs, to the classroom where students were still assembling, the dark
wainscoting adhering to the wall, waiting for them to sit, for chatter to subside, not a silence of patience, but the old chaos in whose silence alone meaning could occur; saying over and over again, countless times,
let's open our books, let's open our books
, the sound of the pages being thumbed through,
let's open our books
, specifying a page, a specific word, the breath in a sentence one comma requires you to take,
let's open our books
. It is a form of enchantment. Professor as conjure-man, professor as initiate, professor as medicine man, professor as holy fool, shaking the book as a shaman shakes the rattle, beating the book as the shaman beats the drum—but it ends. It does not end well. The hand drops from its power, or the power drops from it the hand.