An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (22 page)

Lydia at night at the dining room table, papers and books spread around her. She leaned her face against one hand and—as if the other hand did not belong to her—watching as her pencil marked the circumference of a circle over and over again, never following the line perfectly, so that the first definite edge grew blurrier, more complex, as if the orbit were wobbling.

I saw that the floor was littered with dozens of such pages.

She didn't look at me as she spoke. “It's a terrible knot.”

“What is?”

“All of it is a terrible knot.”

“You'll untie it,” I said.

She laid her pencil down on the page. “No,” she said, “the secret isn't to solve it. The secret is to pull it tighter.”

Picking up the keys from the glass dish, cheap trinket won years ago, seaside town at dusk, houses' windows lit up yellow but printed so poorly on the glass the little yellow squares were off-center, and the yellow light seemed to be burning gently through the inside of all the houses in town. The mistaken stars stamped in the sky. Picking up the keys, picking up the spare change.

For many years, after Lydia left me, for many years, always in March, a postcard would arrive in the mail. The pictures on the postcards stick in my mind: a pond the small type on the underside says is Walden Pond, a hummingbird in front of a flower, a page from the first edition of Emerson's essay—in which underlined in red ink (and this pressed into the card, marked by the sender)
We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. “You will not remember,” he seems to say, “and you will not expect.”
—, Greek vase on which Hermes forever is stealing Apollo's sacred cattle, a violin in a glass case, a handmade butterfly made of gold, a lithograph of a whaling ship with a whale breaching over it, Pan playing the flute, and an antique mirror in whose convex surface no one appeared. For nine years a postcard would arrive, this was always in March. Nothing was written on them save my address in a nondescript, blocky hand. But pressed into each one were three marks, three stars, handwritten asterisks, in the same configuration each time.

Every year, in March, someone sent me a constellation. The constellation was mine. The card I knew came from Lydia.

And then, one year, the postcards stopped.

Sometimes at night I would walk outside to try and find those stars. But the night was a book I could not read. There was no one to translate the stars. One of those stories was my story, but I didn't know which one. My
story was above me, not mine. I looked up and the light-pierced dark unscrolled dumb always above dumb me.

The door closed behind me.

I mean to say, I closed the door behind me.

I closed the door behind me, and I left.

S
OMETIMES I THOUGHT I COULD HEAR IT, THE EARTH
rolling in its rut. But it was always just the wind crushing the leaves—I mean, blowing through them.

It was a windy day.

Sometimes I thought I could see it, the wind blowing over the land, the ferocious body of the wind larger than the earth it shook.

But it wasn't the earth that was shaking.

But it wasn't the wind I could see.

I found a note taped to my office door.
Stopped by to discuss paper. See you in class. Ishmael
. I'd forgotten we'd made an appointment. I opened the door, peeled off the note. Ishmael's handwriting looked strangely elongated, letters distended as if stretched past the limit of their elasticity. His script was like he was, trying to express more than the limit could hold. In class he seemed at times painfully inward, each sentence spoken by another student a blow that bruised him. Other times he spoke with an eloquence that seemed to surprise him, almost to control him, a brilliance he could not reconstruct later without the leaping antilogic of intuitive realization. We would often talk after class, walking down the hall together. Ishmael stepped very lightly—when he was
silent it was if he wasn't there beside me, there and not there at the same time. He'd sit down in the chair across from me, gaze distractedly out the window, glance at the titles of books on the shelves, look at the floor, as if by looking from side to side he could find a way to reconstruct those thoughts in full whose vestiges glittered in his mind. He would at such times have the ravaged look of a man less complete than the ideas he contained—a look not quite of despair, but of a certain kind of helplessness made palpable only by virtue of the inaccessible secret, a kind of power, whose intricate knot kept tying itself tighter within him; one that he could witness, feel within him, but that he could not untie himself. He was a strange boy, a wonderful one; in some ways, I felt I loved him, a feeling that frightened me, that made me frightened of him. I folded the note up along the crease he'd pressed into it, and then folded it in half again, and then again, until it could no longer be folded, and, half-mindedly, slipped it in my pocket.

A novel, I thought, even a short story—taking books and notes out of my bag and placing them neatly on my desk—fills itself with sentences that do the mundane work.
I walked down the hallway
because a character I call “I” must walk down the hallway to get to a room where something must occur or be found;
I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked down the hall to the study
. Setting the scene, adding a detail—
the spring night was cold; a flash of sunlight on leaf
. These sentences that trigger the imagination's base, unspoken-of need for logic, for the everyday;
these sentences that contain no thought, no realization, that move the reader's mind down the hall with a hot cup of coffee warming his or her hand, this trick of words that conjures memory in the nerves, thoughtless sentences whose only effort is to make what does not exist seem actual. It leaves, I thought, noticing four dead flies on the windowsill and brushing them into my hand, a bad taste in my mouth. I threw the flies away. The air of the room had a scent I had never noticed before, and if the odor was new or if I hadn't in all the years I've worked in this office been sensitive enough to discern it, I couldn't say; it smelled like an old book just opened. Absurdly, the image came to mind of the whole of Trillbyrne Hall being one page in a giant pop-up book, and as I puttered around my office, arranging my books, arranging my notes, looking out the window in my continual abstraction—I mean distraction—I did so only because a child somewhere past the horizon of my meager realization pulled the paper tab with the arrow pointing down. I wish there were a way to put my thoughts away. But that is the nature of distraction—and distracted is what I am—that it teaches thought to evade capture by flinging it always into the speed of its own momentum. In the middle of one pane of glass I saw a handprint that must be my own. Seeing it stopped my mind's wandering. I thought,
There's work to do
. I thought,
I'm at work
.

The edition of Hawthorne's stories I had ordered for class contained in it mistakes I found wonderful even as my students complained in frustration. One signature of
pages had been sewn in backwards and upside down, so that in the middle of “Young Goodman Brown,” as he's walking through the dark woods, the students found themselves, at page's turn, staring at the last sentence of “Rappaccini's Daughter,”
Just at that moment, Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunder-stricken man of science: “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is
this
the upshot of your experiment?”
printed upside down on the bottom of the page, a number hanging dizzyingly above it on the topmost margin like four apples—
88—
about to fall off an invisible tree. It was also missing the last page of the story we were to have read for today, “The Artist of the Beautiful.” I picked up my old copy and walked down the hallway to the photocopier. Passing Olin's office I noticed the door slightly ajar, so I pushed it open to say hello. I saw, though so quickly I couldn't be sure I did see, Olin's hand on a student's knee; but when the door fully opened, when my own shape filled the frame, Olin was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed over the slight paunch of his stomach, looking as nonplussed as ever.

“Hello, Daniel.”

“Olin,” I said, returning the mock cordiality of his tone.

The young man whose back was to me reached down and grabbed the strap of his backpack. He stood up, the bag so heavy with books he tilted back down. “Thank you, Professor,” he said. He turned quickly
around, eyes cast downward, cheek burning, saying “excuse me” with quick politeness as I moved to the side to let him leave the room.

“Call me Olin. Why rest on formality?” Olin called after him as he left. “Youth,” Olin said. “Innocence.” He said these words as if they could not exist together for long.

“Olin—” I said his name with the slightest hint of recrimination at which he opened his eyes wide in childish awe.

“Daniel—” he said in the same way.

And suddenly, frustrated by the game, “Have a good class,” and I turned around and left.

Olin called out after me, “A drink later?” When I turned around he was leaning out into the hallway, one hand clenching the doorframe, the other hand waving at me as I walked away.

“Yes. A drink.”

I held the book down against the glass as the green light's line scanned forward and backward. The same page spat out eighteen times in the tray. I picked them up, turned them over, only to find that beneath the reproduced page from the book the bottom of my palm appeared, jagged crosshatched lines dark against the pressed skin's white pad. I looked at my palm, loose paper clasped inside the book in my other hand. Thick line below my little finger that bent upward toward my index finger as it tapered into nothing; thicker line beginning below my index finger that breaks into two lines as a river breaks, one
stream trickling into nothing in the middle of my hand, and the other, a semicircle skirting the hill at the base of the thumb. (The mind finds a landscape and makes a map; sometimes it sees a landscape that is not there.) A thin line, a spicule line, that cut across the middle of my hand, dividing one line in two, nearing the curving line next to the thumb but never touching it, as if in my hand were a child's math lesson, a graph showing how a curving line never touches the other, how between those two lines there is always a gap, even if the gap is infinitesimal. Simple geometries etched in the hand, and impossible ones. The hand contains its own parable. It bears on it lines of trajectory that cross, shows points of intersection; and later it reveals that what collides never touches; it bears, as if burned into it at birth, a chart of the
innavigable sea
between us and all things.