An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (20 page)

Pearl held a green book in her hand. “I knew you'd come,” she said.

“I just read this story—” and Pearl held open a page on which an illustration showed a woman walking up from the ocean onto the beach, her arms held out, and a child standing up, waiting for her on the sand.

A
CHILD'S FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD IS NOT HIS
realization that adults are stronger but rather that he cannot make magic
. I read again this sentence that I had copied out many weeks before on a scrap of paper and left on my desk, weighted down by a stone against the open window's occasional breeze. I have spent many hours looking at it, pen in hand, nib unmoving on the page. Looked at it without comprehending it, seeing someone else's words in my own handwriting, as if the scrap weren't simply a reminder of a sentence that had sparked in me some dim recognition I wanted not to let go of, some thought in me silent and unknown, needing to be spoken by another to be perceived by me—those words written in my own hand like some mask worn inside the face instead of over it. Put on the mask of another's words and speak them as my own.
A child's first experience of the world
. . . is that he must make up a new language to speak about it, a magical language, in which every word creates the thing it names. Such a child might spend hours in his room, sitting in the dark closet, reciting words he made up and waiting to see if what he named appeared. This child might believe his words could change everything, that—just as asking in the night for a glass of water brought Father into his room
carrying a glass of cold water—so calling out into the closeted air secret names might bring forth greater miracles, darkest words attached to the deepest wishes, desires speakable only in this language that exists for no one but this child who, at times, maybe only once, yes, just once, spoke one word over and over again with such force he felt the closet walls shake around him, felt the ground he was sitting on tremble, felt it quake as if the floor were about to tear apart and open beneath him, not to swallow him but to let out those he called for, to return them to him, those whose secret name he finally had discovered after so many years of trying, of failing, of searching for the secret syllables in the songs of birds or in the furious buzz of a hummingbird's wings as it floats an instant before the flower before plunging itself in, and now he had found that word he knew existed, had heard it whispered in his ear when he found a nestling dead on the ground, this word he had spoken softly and then louder and louder until he felt his lungs ragged with the heat of yelling so that it could finally be heard; and when the ground did open there was no sound but only a blinding flash of light as he knew there would be, as he had expected but against which he could not keep his eyes open, and he felt as he knew he would arms around him, for he had called for these arms into the air; but then his eyes adjusted, and the arms around him weren't the right arms; they were his father's arms around him, holding him tightly against his own shaking to stop him shaking, pressing thumbs against his eyes to
stop them crying, saying
calm, calm, it's
O
.
K
., calm, calm
, stroking his hair, soothing this boy whose open eyes seemed not to see anything, or to see everything at once, which is its own form of blindness; his father who picked him up in his arms, the strength of those arms against which the boy felt all his weight relax, his whole body in his father's arms. Such a child would, if there were such a child, if such a child had ever been . . .

There is, I thought, staring down still at the scrap, the terrible trouble of a life that is not your own. That's trouble enough. This always ever being oneself—myself. This endless self-taste that ends only when I end, as if my whole body were a tongue walking through the world, not just tasting what collided against it, but tasting itself taste, every sensation the inevitable proof of myself still being me. The classroom a stage in which I perform myself. The nagging rumor in dreams that every figure, not merely the younger self who wanders still through the mental woods watching the long-tailed blue birds snatch dragonflies from out the air, youth who looking down sees he's walking not through the fallen leaves of the deciduous trees but through the ash of the burnt forest, youth who wakes up as me to realize that even the ash is him, is myself.

It is the worm at the tongue's root—myself—that withers the words into dry silence when the topic shifts, when what asks for words is beyond me. Blank space of empty page, Sibyl's open hand—

My father returned but he never came home. There was a shipwreck in his face
.

Grandma Clarel cried whenever she looked at him, and he asked her to leave. How old was I? I can't remember. I see myself sitting on her lap, my head buried in her shoulder, not crying, only breathing as gently as I could, as if I could learn to be so calm she would unknowingly carry me away with her, and I see myself as I am now, half-hearted professor, holding her hand at the kitchen table long after she has died, as if I had grown up at that table, had never left it, had never let her go, as if the kettle on the stove were just beginning to heat, and the water sounded like a tiny tympanum beat inside it, building to a crescendo that would never come
.

But Grandma Clarel did leave. She bent down to me and said, “You have your mother's eyes.” And then she hiccuped a small sob, stood up, met my father's gaze, who stood sallow and gaunt behind me, his hand on my shoulder as if I were the anchor holding him still, his hand clenched there like a hook, and said, “Allan, please ask me to come back if you need any help.” I'd never heard her speak like that, with such precise tact. It made me cry to see how careful she was being; I felt that she was afraid for me. “We'll be fine, Clarel,” my father said, not coldly, but with his now-continual lack of emotion. And as she stood on the porch, her giant portmanteau beside her, my father didn't turn around or turn me around, but, keeping his hand on my shoulder, pulled me backwards as he stepped into the house, keeping his eye on Grandma Clarel all the while, as if he were pulling me down into the darkness of the house as into a chasm, as if we were sinking and Grandma Clarel were the
witness, and the door closing closed over us instead of in front of us
.

I put the pen down. I read the scrap. I read the page I'd written.

Father never spoke about his journey. When he returned he no longer had the scroll. He never sat in his study at his desk singing out the strange words. He had killed the music in himself, or it had been killed. At night he would sometimes wake from terrible dreams, still asleep though his eyes were open. One night he stumbled hurriedly through the halls, his arms brushing the walls, chanting
No, No, No,
over and over again, his penis hanging out of his pajama's fly, swinging back and forth as he jaggedly ran, and then, when he stopped running, when he stood still, when he stopped saying
No
and was silent, pointing obscenely at the ground
.

I read the page I'd written. I read the scrap. I put the pen down, thinking.

Safe, if slightly horrible, if somewhat weak, to write what I know. I have been witness to every page I've written, an open-eyed fact within the page and outside it, my being both character and writer at once. It is a simple drama that has no plot. Self gazing at self, dredging from dim memories crystalline moments—the angle of light on a pane of glass, the smell of sherry on breath—imagination wearing memory's mask to rescue clarity from dim suspicion.
I was, therefore I think
. But it's
not enough. The endless detail of a half-forgotten day, details that could fill hundreds of pages and still describe nothing certainly, nothing actually—and why, now, do I see the pucker of Lydia's breast when she takes off her shirt in the early autumn chill . . . details to distract the mind from its own impotence. But life is elsewhere. Lurking at the boundary, where experience reaches its hazy edge across which it becomes something else, something known only by leaping into the unknown, where a monster sits, demonstrating patience. What must be said I will not say. I will not say because I cannot see. I need eyes that aren't my own. I need eyes that see by their own light. Imaginary eyes.

I looked at the scrap. I didn't read the page I'd written. I turned it over and put it on the pile. Beneath it another blank page marred by no word.

I looked at the pen. I picked up the scrap. I read it . . .
he cannot make magic
. I crumpled it up and threw it away.

I looked down at the blank page. The blank page is a form of light, lit by the eye as it tries to see itself see. The blank page is the eye's light.

M
EMORY CONJURES ABSENCE INTO PRESENCE. PAST
scenes, none complete, fill the eye from behind—the eye also opens backward, pupil dilated wide in the mind's dark. Then the body moves by habit, the mind giving motion over to the muscles. I knew it was time to clean up the breakfast dishes and gather books and notes together and leave for school. I stood up from the chair and noticed, before my hand grabbed it, the dark crumbs of toast on the plate like stars across a porcelain sky—stars in reverse.

Lydia put her clothes back on in the night. I watched her with some concern and some amusement from the bed, naked under the thin sheet. She buttoned her jeans, pulled her hair back and looped a band around it, and said, “Get dressed.”

“Dressed? It's almost,” looking at the clock's spectral numbers, “two in the morning. I'm just going to lay here in my state of blissful post-bliss and daze into unconsciousness.”

“Nope. Not tonight, Lothario.” She yanked the sheet off of me and I instinctively covered myself as if in sudden
shame. She picked up my clothes from off the floor and threw them on the bed. “Tonight's the Perseids. We're going to go watch the sky fall down.”