An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (12 page)

Pearl's mother stood up from the table and walked to her daughter's room. The door was closed. She opened it. There was the space where her daughter had lain down pressed into the sea-blue quilt.

The room was quiet but not silent. She could hear a rhythmic sound, it filled the room, a sound almost not a sound, a presence, as the ocean unseen in the night is a presence, rolling up on the shore and withdrawing. It sounded as if the ocean were in the room.

Pearl?—no answer.

I
SPEND MANY HOURS, AS EVERYONE DOES, LOOKING
through glass. There outside the window is the silver poplar in summer's full bloom; this is a fact I know and which you must believe. My house is old and the glass is rippled and fragile. I see the tree; it is there. I'm sorry if this sounds like philosophy. I want to say I know the tree is there, the silver poplar; the wind blows the branches against the pane of the window I see the tree through. I know the tree is there, but I do not believe it. Through the rippled glass it appears to me as, when a boy, I gazed down through the water at the silver minnows, slight waves undulating above the glittering fish, a wave's beveled edge moving the fish when the fish do not themselves move, water catching the sun in scalelike bursts of light that the fish disappear within, though the fish, whose own bodies also catch the light, seem to cause the dazzle of their own absence; I remember reaching my hand through the water and watching them dart away. The branches of the poplar tree are pushed by the wave that is the wind breathing through it, a motion I watch through the old rippled glass. There are mornings when I think I could, as when a young boy by the lakeshore, put my hand through the glass—which is a liquid, after all—and watch it part around my hand. A
window is a slow-flowing river, always flowing south, and the glass would part as a river current parts—a small eddy there behind my wrist, and the v-shaped wake formed by the current's speed pointing downriver. But if I did put my hand through, if I could do so, then the poplar would, as the minnows always did, leave in a flash of sunlight on leaf; I won't risk it.

The mind is its own malady. A pane of glass etched on one side by thought and on the other side by the world, and so seldom do the two etchings match that when they do we feel as if the gods have returned, or we feel in the hands of fate or genius or art—or worse, we feel godly, we feel ourselves one of the fates (here are the lines of those threads in my hands), we are the genius, we make the art. By “we” of course I only mean me. The mind is its own malady—fragile, rippled pane.

I spend a lot of time looking out windows; everyone does, I suspect. I wake at dawn as I always do and go to the study, my father's old study, sit at my desk, my father's old desk, and look out the window. There is the silver poplar—which I know exists, it must exist, which I need to exist—gradually, as if from out a fog, appearing distinct from the dark gray light, emerging from the night in whose element it had been, for all I know, fully subsumed; or from the night, in my eye, the tree is daily exhumed. Sometimes I forget the glass is there, that I am seeing through it. Sometimes I forget I am seeing through my eye. Sometimes I look down at the pages in the trash bin, pages I've thrown out but cannot
remove; sometimes I notice the way in which the single pages separate, how from a certain angle the edges appear as palm fronds, and cast upon the page next to them a frond-like knife-edge shadow; sometimes I notice how dark the pages look down at their center when the pages splay outward like the petals from some night-blooming flower—every book being a night-blooming flower the reader enters into headfirst, the pollen smeared inside the ears, dehiscent promise of new dreams unfolding within and replacing the wilting old, desire's buzz a white noise the reader's winged mind no longer hears—or I can see on the faces of disordered pages random words, words now connected in my mind that otherwise would never be joined, a syntax of fate or of chance,
quiet door's already ancient song
. I make note of these sentences, for what it's worth. I think they pin down my straying thoughts as a needle pins down a specimen.

I spend a lot of time—what it is that time is—looking out the window in my study. Almost every day there is an hour, and by hour I mean an angle of light, every hour being but an angle of light, in which I see myself looking out the window, looking out at the poplar there in the yard. I see my own reflection. When my mind has wandered too far from me, I see my father in the window looking at me. He has a look on his face I've seen before—the look he often had when he returned from the island. It is a wide-eyed look, as if someone has just asked him a question he had never before asked himself;
and at the same time, a sorrowful look (some forms of surprise also being forms of sorrow), as if in hearing the question, perhaps a question he is only asking himself, he realizes already he has no answer. A helpless look. This look on my face reflected in the glass—there it is again, just now. Why am I always staring through myself to see the world? The poplar tree is a fact, and a fact does not need belief to exist. It would exist without me; I need that to be true. Sometimes I see a face in the window and I realize it's always my face slightly rippled in the rippled glass—a face I can imagine putting my hand through, putting my hand into, if I move my hand slowly enough, grasping in the air or under the water, trying to catch the face before it disappears.

I catch my hand moving in the air as if of its own volition when the phone rings and breaks the magic.

“Hello? Hello?” the voice asked before I could say hello. “Who is this?”

“This is Daniel.”

“Daniel?”

“Yes. You called me.”

“I know, Daniel. I know that. I just wanted to make sure it was you. You never know if the call does go through to the person you intend it to. It is a troubling and inexact technology. And many people's voices sound alike. It's best to verify. At least, I think so.” The chair's voice was nervous and exasperated. “And it is you, which is good, as you are who I wanted to call.”

“Is everything all right?” I asked. The chair, in all the years I've taught at the college, all the years he had supervised me in the department, had never called me at home before. I worried he might be calling to renew his concerns about my teaching, or worse, to segue those specific anxieties into more general ones. I worried he might reverse my own question, and archly, voice filled with innuendo, ask me in echo,
Are
you
all right?
, emphasizing
you
with almost cosmic absurdity. I felt annoyed in advance, ready to hang up.

“No, Daniel.” He paused, gathering himself. “It's not.”

“It's nothing serious, I hope.”

“No. Well, yes. I mean, I don't yet know,” at which admission he caught his breath, a slight gasp, as if trying to stop himself from crying. “It's Bitsy. I found her this morning fallen over in the kitchen, staring at her bowl of water, and she couldn't get up.” Bitsy is the chair's poodle, an ancient dog whose legs for years now trembled as she walked, a creature whose purely timorous nature found her rearing back on her hind legs to turn and flee at the slightest threat—a bird landing in front of her, or a student kneeling down to pet her. The chair kept a photo of her on his desk; she was his only family. He drank coffee from a mug with her portrait transferred in grainy pixels across its surface, an effect I found odd, slightly disturbing, when at faculty meetings I stared at the dog on the mug, her face looked half-hidden behind the veil of her own face, as if she were some ancient Sybil refusing yet to speak her vision.

“I'm sorry. Can I be of help?”

“That's why I'm calling, Daniel. Thank you for asking. I am supposed to teach this afternoon, the last day of my summer seminar. But I need to take Bitsy to the vet—I am distracted. I was hoping you could take my place. The class is on
Moby-Dick
, the end of the book; an hour-long conversation. Then send them off to work on their essays.”

Moby-Dick
was a class I used to teach every other year; it is a book it would not be unfair to say that I love. I love it to such a degree that it became difficult for me to teach it—not difficult—almost impossible. I would make jokes to my students,
obsessed with a book about obsession
, try to excuse my raving as a natural enthusiasm when more truly I felt caught in the darkness of the work, no, the dark within the darkness of it—it seemed to speak of me as I spoke of it, and at some point, it became too much for me to bear, repeatedly entering into the same pages, my old copy with marginalia in different colors filling the margins, the same thoughts worded differently across the years, always reaching the same conclusion, Ahab and the white whale, yes, but even more so Ishmael, orphan Ishmael, who saved himself by putting his arms around his friend's empty coffin, a coffin engraved with the tattoos that covered his friend's body, so that the coffin was itself his friend, and whose etchings were an entire treatise, a whole epistemology, on the working mystery of the universe. No one can read it.

“I haven't read it in years. I'm sure I wouldn't do a worthwhile job. Have you thought of asking Olin?”

“Daniel, please. It would be a favor to me. I'd look upon your helping me out quite favorably.”

I could see that I was trapped. I would have spent my afternoon jotting down abstract notes about the course I was planning for the fall, a course on wonder and wonderment, on enchantment and symbol—a nearly useless activity. “Of course. I'm sorry I hesitated.”

“Thank you, Daniel. The class is at two o'clock in the old seminar room.”

“I hope Bitsy will be
O
.
K
.”

On hearing her name he hiccupped. “Yes,” he said, his voice strained and high, and then, calming himself, “I hope so too.”

After the call had ended, I continued to hold the receiver for some time, staring out the window. It was now fully morning, I thought, as the dial tone began its low, ceaseless buzz. I put the phone in its cradle.

I walked over to the bookshelf and pulled
Moby-Dick
out, sat down with it at the table, set it on its spine, and let it fall open.
Chapter CIII, A Bower in the Arascides
. On the left-hand page, underlined in three different colors of ink, so that the last red line clipped the top of the letters below it,
The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak
through it
. I closed the book and looked out the window. I heard a robin's startled cry, and then saw it fly up from the grass below my vision. It landed on a thin branch, a branch too thin to hold its weight, and its momentum carried it forward even as its talons clenched the twig, so that the bird spun and hung upside down; it could not right itself; it seemed unwilling to let go and fall to the ground or to fly away as it fell. I could not see what had scared it. I just watched it holding on to the branch—this just a moment. And then it did let go, and fell down to the grass it had fled. I guess that it felt the danger had passed, or that the danger was a danger no longer; it had acquainted itself with its horror—staring at it upside down from the swaying branch—become sociable with it, and returned.

I
T WAS THAT SUMMER, THAT REFULGENT SUMMER LONG
ago when breathing was its own luxury, that I last read
Moby-Dick
—that summer Lydia and I were in love. We read it together, each separately, but at night reading aloud favorite passages to each other, passages that occasionally would be the same. Ishmael on the masthead, Lydia and I beneath the white sheets.
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligation to observe all whale-ship's standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”