An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (9 page)

I try to not let myself feel how it is I feel.

I try not to remember; I write so I don't need to remember—let the pages live that life.

But I fail.

The dead fly I'd thrown in the trash bin rattled weakly against the metal, not dead at all. The metal amplified the sound, a buzzing that didn't fill the room but annoyed the ear, the flightless wings trying to fly. I don't know why, I don't know why it must be so, all of it—that it is as it is, has been as it has been, my life; my life's transparent wing. I looked out the window at the oak, blue storm-light darkening the sky, and I thought,
I can't bear it
.

No, I said it to myself differently. I said,
It can't be borne
.

I left my office, locking the door behind me. I told the secretary that I felt ill, and needed to cancel class; would she please be so kind as to tape a note to the classroom door? Thank you. I left Trillbyrne Hall and walked across the green, across the campus to the old chapel to the north, the chapel with the cemetery behind it, the headstones of old professors, some so old the marble lettering's sharp cuts had eroded away into faint impressions, names returning to nothing. My father's headstone was among them. So was my mother's. So was my baby sister's. My whole family in the ground behind the chapel where the devotional bells marked the hours, and the stones mutely absorbed them, counting time a lesser fact than time's end. All the ringing stops.

I didn't kneel down. I didn't break into tears. No memories flooded my mind. I read the stones—
father, wife, child
(with a lamb on the stone's curved top)—over and over again until the words ceased to be words, ceased to give a name to that which has no name, to those who have no names, ceased to insist that it can be spoken of, the world, and the people in it, those we love, who gave us life and for whom we lived. I know what it is: a stone in orbit. The sun is a golden bell. I could see it up there, behind the clouds, a perfect circle. A perfect circle—

“Father,” I said, “remember the apple tree.”

I
WENT HOME. MY MOTHER WAS HANGING ON THE WALL
; I looked at her and in my strange distraction the image turned a corner in my mind's labyrinth, and for a moment a thought of the Furies put the Furies in my eye, sitting on a grassy knoll catching their breath; and then I looked away. I went into the study and pulled out the novel again—the hundreds of pages held together by rubber bands, the first pages written on my father's musical sheets, then a thick cream watermarked vellum, then thin newsprint and more gray, and so on, as if the book's progress could be measured in geological strata, sedimentary layer upon layer, pressure pushing the book into form. The first pages weighed heavy on the last, a fossilizing pressure. Written by hand, over the scales of the musical staff so that the lines cut through the letters, the title:
An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky
. I read the last sentence written,
It was my sister
—words written just that morning, but which felt an age ago. I have no memory of her. I picture a baby with her mouth open, but I'm only imagining it. Or I see her milky-blue eyes looking up as if into the other world from which she was just pulled and back to which she must soon return—the look of nostalgia. But I'm making it up. Father wandered through the halls holding her as she
died, as his wife lay dead in their bedroom, but he never bent down to let me see her. I heard her breathe, and I heard her cry; I heard when breathing and crying ended. I turned the page back over. Blank. I looked at the thick volume of all those handwritten pages, of all those thousands of words, each one of them containing a little breath. I thought the pages held their breath, that this was the meaning of a book—that it was holding its breath for as long as it could. It was afraid it might drown. I pushed the breath aside on the desk, and pulled from a drawer a sheaf of letters I've read and reread, read and reread, for what feels like my whole life. My whole life spent holding my breath—

Call me Daniel. I have a gift I keep to myself, the gift of self-abandon. It is the orphan's lesson if he can learn it—not to feel abandoned, but to continue his abandonment past the bounds of where the loss should end, parent's death that prefigures one's own. Fate is everywhere speaking; it does not call you by name; it tells you to name yourself. Call me Daniel. It is the name my father called me, and it is the name I call myself. It is as real as any name; it works just as well. Call it out to me as I walk down the street and I will turn around, smile or wave, perhaps even walk over to you to chat or reminisce. I have trained myself to do exactly this, as I know you've also trained yourself. “Daniel”—and I turn around and say
yes
quizzically but warmly; I look up and recognize you because you recognized me, whoever it is
you are, who knows what it is you know of me. The Furies pursue names through the desert places, the guilt on the names, repeating the names between each other,
Daniel, Daniel, Allan, Allan
to incite each other to volcanic anger, spitting the names out ahead of themselves to run all the faster,
Allan, Allan
, pursuing the guilty names. A writer (I've learned to make no mistake about it) is a lesser Fury—writing down the names while a moth climbs back up the leg of the chair it fell from—not accusing someone else of his guilt, of her misdeeds, but participating in the guilt, recreating it so as to relive it, to share it, not to judge it; the only accusation says in its fated tongue
you were there without me
, but now I am there with you, faulty and necessary witness, fictional but true, here I am with you, Father, Father, call me—

Dear Daniel
,

I am in my stateroom on the only boat that would take me as a passenger. If I didn't have money to offer, where would I be? The captain doesn't trust me, nor do the men
.

I won't say sorry because I know you understand. I know you will understand. These letters will help you understand
.

It is hard to write on the desk as the boat rocks on the waves. I hope you'll be able to read all the words. I've discovered many new aspects of the scroll since your mother died. Her death has helped me as a translator. I hope that doesn't sound callous to you. It made me understand something about this language I could not understand before. Maria, her name, when she was alive, I could speak it and she would come. Now I can
say
Maria
and mean her exactly, but because she cannot hear me, she cannot come. The same word still calls out, even into death
—Maria.
This is one of the scroll's lessons. Living makes us think that every word ends at the thing it names, but it isn't true. Things live in the middle of their names to distract us from all a word says that is not discernible. We've learned to stop at what is at hand and be satisfied, a child asking for a bauble. But death removes from us what we love, and then the word pushes out past its normal limit, drops its reference from itself, and its sense turns into a singing in which a word ceases to mean any one thing, a singing that opens up abstraction, the interstitial connection between forms—the way an apple seed is also the apple tree is also the apple blossom is also the apple fruit, but more, the way it is also the pollinating wind, also the bees, also the child that, plucking a fruit from the branch, bites into it. “Apple” is a word in the myth. I've spent the morning translating it. It cannot be written down, for writing stills it—a kind of death. It must be held in the mind in all its singing complexity. Then the word contains in it all its history, every utterance is in each utterance, a line that stretches back to the first time it was spoken. The word is a realm that includes us all. The mythic word, the ur-word, spoken unknowingly by the fruit vendor on the street, by mothers and daughters, it reaches back to that first saying, when to name something was to create it. A dictionary—no one teaches us this—is a book of ontology. But a spoken word springs forward, too. To say
apple
predicts the countless times the word will be said again, forges the connections that do not yet exist, a man not yet born giving an apple to the woman he loves but she also does not yet exist; to
say
apple
includes them. A word—and this is why your mother's death has opened me to my work—has nothing to do with time. We infect our language with our own mortality. But the word is outside of time, and refuses to do time's work. Some poets know this. “But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.” A word is a small thing in the world, Daniel, but it contains the world. To learn how to speak is to learn how to be in the world—not in the day, but the world past the limits of the day, the old world that doesn't exist in time, the world in which nothing has been lost, the heroic world of monsters and gods. The singer's world
.

The myth on the scroll, it is a song of that unending, that never-yet-begun, world. To sing it opens it up. The mouth is a kind of door, or maybe the entrance to a cave. Plato's cave—where in the mind a word throws a shadow on the wall. To sing the words turns us around, and we step out of our own mouths into the real world, and the words that tricked us into seeing a world that didn't exist are the same words we use to describe the world that does
.

I had to leave. I'm not sorry
.

I'm sorry that you are too young to understand this letter. One day you will understand. One day I'll teach you this song and then the song will be yours.

Love
,

My father left and Grandma Clarel moved in, drinking instant coffee in the living room. She wouldn't talk about him, save to refer in vague terms to “his trip.” Letters
would arrive almost every week.
A letter, Daniel, a letter
, and in her exasperation she would fan herself with the envelope that she meant to give to me, looking aghast as I kept reaching up toward her face to grab it, saying
stop it, stop it
, and then seeing the letter in her own hand, give it to me, and, bright red, flustered, return to the kitchen. I'd go to my father's study, sit under his desk, and read them over and over again. I didn't understand them, but his handwriting was so distinctly his, the page in my hands seemed like a kind of embrace. I read them so often I memorized them—no, not memorized them. It was not memory. The letters imbued themselves in me. I couldn't quote a single sentence from them; I saw the world through their pages. I would look up, once the letter had been read, at the bookshelf. There, in green with gilt lettering, sat
Wonders and Tales
. It was a book I never read from again, even as, in my child's mind, it kept calling to me to retrieve it, calling me to it—

Dear Daniel
,

I must tell you about the myth, but it is hard to do. To write it down too precisely betrays it. But you should know it, the parts of it you can know
.

Beneath the sky another sky opened;

within the sea another sea
.

In this sea one creature lived:

a white whale. It swam through the sea
.

There was no land; there was only water. The whale was no god, but without the whale no god could exist. Time did not
divide day and night; there was no day and night. The whale was like an island, but there was no land
.

A flame inside the whale's head spoke to it; the voice said “dive down.” The white whale dove to the sea's bed, swam among the ragged rocks that cut the whale's skin, carved into its skin words the flame inside its head chanted as it swam among the cutting rocks. The whale's whole body was etched with words when the voice in the flame said “leave,” and then the whale left. It did not take a breath. The white whale swam to a desert place where the sea-bed's soft sift lay deep and undisturbed by a single mark. The voice said “sleep” and the whale slept, and in its sleep it rolled in the sand, pressing into the seabed the words carved on its skin. It rolled in its sleep until every word carved into its skin was pressed into the sand it slept on. And in its sleep it dreamed
.

The whale dreamed a dream of the sun over the land, a sun it had never seen; it dreamed the sun when it slept on the word
sun
pressed into the sand. The sun cast its warmth on the ground and from the ground a seed sprouted, and in the whale's dream the seed became a tree full of white blossoms, and from the blossoms blew the seeds of other plants, of every plant, seeds the sun warmed until they sprouted, and then the land was green; the whale dreamed of this tree when it slept on the word
apple
pressed into the sand. There were no animals and no people in the dream. When the whale awoke the voice in the flame said “breathe” and the whale swam up to breathe, and there it saw the sun and the green land. The whale took a breath and the voice in the flame said “dive down” and the whale dove down, dove faster when the voice said “faster.” The
white whale dove at great speed and when the voice in the flame said “die” the whale struck the seabed with its head, struck the seabed with such force its head cracked open and the sperm escaped into the ocean, each drop becoming an animal as it rose, every animal as it all rose, fish and turtles swimming in the water, birds springing into the air, deer and antelope, lions and elephants, stepping onto shore, and humans, crawling from the water and standing up walking toward the fruit hanging from the apple tree. The whale when it died opened a chasm at the bottom of the ocean, the bottom of the world. The whale's broken body fell into the chasm
.