An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (6 page)

My father's name was Allan; my mother's name was Maria. These are facts I keep to myself. I think of them as Father and Mother; those are the names by which they live in me, names that are not names at all, simply these earthly types the gravestones mark:
father, wife
.
Allan was a man who died after destroying his career in crazed pursuit of translating a holy text; Father was the man who on his deathbed forgot my name, the name he gave me, and who said, looking at me directly, “You've been a good son.” The leaves of the poplar clicked against the window as they did then, a gentle coaxing to pay attention not too closely. The white underside of the poplar leaves—

Father didn't want a funeral, but his mother-in-law refused him; she already thought he was deranged. She arrived by train, carrying in both hands ponderously in front of her a portmanteau stitched together from an old tapestry: a red bird with a flame-like tail perched on a water bowl in the middle of a flower garden, and curving from underneath the bag, slightly frayed, a sundial complete with shadow; the time was two o'clock
.

“Take this, Daniel,” she said, handing it to me, a bag I couldn't lift by myself. All my family save my aunt called me Danny; but my grandmother believed in the propriety of the speaking of proper names as much as she betrayed that propriety in her actions. I dragged her bag after me as I followed her down the hall. “Allan, Allan,” she sang out, almost as if singing a song to coax a child from his hiding spot. “Allan . . .” Her voice wandered through the house ahead of her, spreading out through the rooms she had yet to bodily enter, filling in every empty space with her overabundant self. I silently dragged time down the hall after her. “Allan, I'm here, I'm here to help.” Stopping to look down at me, “Now, go along and get me a cup of lemon tea, my feet are killing me, from travel, you know this
about me,” and as if she hadn't been speaking to me at all, picking up her address to my father mid-sentence, “Allan, travel wrecks my nerves. I feel faint, Allan. Allan, I feel—” and then she stopped talking. Not because Father had emerged from his study, but because she saw, in the middle of the living room, the fire in embers behind them, the two coffins
.

“We don't have any tea.” Father had appeared
.

“No, you don't,” she said in a voice of deep concern, and, hearing me inch up behind her with her massive bag, sat down upon it, giving me only a moment to escape being sat upon myself, and started crying, not loudly, but silently, the most quiet I ever remember her being. She cried and looked at the coffins. Minutes passed. Father wandered back to his office, back to his desk, the scroll open on it, window open despite October's chill
.

She looked at me blankly. “It's so small.”

I looked at the dark box in which my sister lay. “She is small,” I said, and put my arm on her knee, and stood beside her while she cried. Everything was so quiet. I could hear my father's pen scratch the page from his study down the hall
.

There was also the scratch from my own pen, sitting there at my desk, which was his desk then. There in the blank pages hid the old oracle,
know thyself
, impossible decree. It was Aunt Leonie who, sickly on her bed when we visited in the summer, drank lemon tea and ate cookies, asking after the gossip of the town. But Aunt Leonie is not my aunt, just a character in another book whom I want to be a character in mine. My grandmother was Clarel; she drank instant coffee; she was
grief-struck by her daughter's death—the word, I think, is
siderated. The
muses, I thought as I put the written pages on a pile and put the pile away, tell lies as if they were the truth, and tell the truth when they like. Memory is the mother of the muses.

As I grabbed my bag to go to work I thought about Clarel's bag, a bag as large as I was at the time, a bag I could have curled up within and gone to sleep—it would be as if I had never been born. I thought about the bag, and what the bag implied; that somewhere, at an angle almost discernible, there sat in the sky a bright sun, a sun that never moved, whose light cast down on the garden also grew a shadow on the sundial. It was two o'clock. And written on the sundial, in letters finer than the thread could show, were these words:
The Hour Knows / What Shadows Show
.

T
HE DEW ON THE GRASS, SOMEONE HAD WALKED ACROSS
it, footprints that looked like shadows. His path marked by the dew being removed with each step became the dew-wet marks that darkened the cement, each step less distinct as the wet soles dried, soon just a circle-of-heel behind a circle-of-toe, and then only the toe, fainter in the middle so that the print seemed cloven, as of a deer, and then smaller, a goat—the old god Pan leaping back into the trees whose leaves his pipes had coaxed into unfurling. The man walked away into nothing—the same direction I was walking in—another self who had watched me through the window as I wrote, a previous self, some alternate version, or someone not yet to be, the impossible self who could have been, who is and isn't at once, not troubled by memory by writing memory down, the dew on the grass, those pearls of dew he stepped through, the only evidence he exists outside of me. A thought leaves no print; leaves only the print of word in ink on page. A footprint so mocking as it disappears; you follow what cannot be followed, it says. My own absence wandered out ahead of me walking, thinking the thoughts I'd forgotten to think or cannot think—that the morning's writing had cast me out ahead of myself and that I was impossibly, unexpectedly
late, following myself to work, under the tree-lined walkway, where the leaves had only recently unfolded from their buds.

The path went by the statelier houses on the outskirts of the college, keeping a respectful distance; the grandeur could be seen, but not the lives inside it. In the early morning, earlier than this hour, a light in a bedroom window would sometimes switch on, a yellow square in the dawn. Sometimes I could see the shadow of a woman in the yellow square. I often walked the same path as a child, by myself, or with my father as he walked to school, reciting to me the lecture he soon would recite to his students, looking at the notes written in his Victorian hand on the yellowing square of notebook paper, forgetting the young boy walking beside him wasn't a student, “The rose must be told it is sick,
O rose, thou art sick!
, it doesn't know it for itself. The worm that loves it, whose secret love destroys it, flies in the storm in the dark. The worm is winged, a fact which we seldom imagine and must not forget. It is easy to hate the worm, but the worm, more than the rose, is who we identify with. Students (and here he'd look up, as if expecting to see his class, and seeing only the apple tree in bloom on the rise, and then looking down at me looking up at him, would lower his voice, and continue), the worm is invisible, it flies in the dark, it cannot be seen, its love is secret, and it finds in the rose her bed of crimson joy. That bed is deep in her heart. The heart is a crimson bed, the place of consummation both erotic and spiritual. The rose does not
know it's sick; the poet must tell her. The poet must tell the rose that in her there lives a worm, a worm that loves her, and that its love will kill her. The poet must tell her, as the professor must tell you, the worm is in you, it does not kill from hate, but destroys in love, it was inside her, no one told her, it—” and then Father stopped, the apple tree was before us, and he looked up into it, the pale-pink almost-white blossoms filling the entire canopy, the pale petals all the paler against the dark branch, and some petals falling, as if the tree were a cloud, pale little petals, as pale as faces in winter. “Remind me, Daniel, of this apple tree tonight. I need to think about it more—for the translation.” He looked sad. We kept walking, but the lecture was over.

Father left me at the door to Trillbyrne Hall, the building in which the English department had been housed since the college's founding. The architecture was neoclassical, but with certain eccentric touches: chimera as caryatid, and atop the cupola, a windvane in the shape of a whale, the letter
S
carved out of the iron for an eye. Every direction the whale looked was
south
—a whale is always diving down. I remember walking back along the path, thinking about the rose, the sick rose. I cried as I walked. And when I got home, I wrote on the little notepad kept by the phone in the front hall,
Remember the Apple Tree
in a child's blocky script. Then I went into my father's office, pulled my favorite book from the shelf, the book I was not allowed to read, and sat in the cave under his desk reading:
The faeries sleep inside flowers. They sleep
all day and all day the buds are closed. But at night the blossoms open, and the queen of the faeries scratches a line in the earth where a river will flow. The river flows to a house where a woman is soon to give birth. The faeries secrete themselves into the room; no one sees them because they hide in people's shadows. It is hard for them to stay so still in the shadows; staying still takes all their effort. The faeries wait to steal the baby, to put her in the boat made of leaves, to carry her to the faerie land, where she too will sleep in flowers—for faeries want nothing more than to raise a human child for themselves. And when the child is grown, when she can walk and talk and think, when she begins to suspect the faeries are faeries, that she has been stolen; just before she asks who her mother and father are, where they are, the faeries take her on a long journey to the volcano that marks the center of their world; the queen commands them to do this. They walk beside the child as she walks to the crater's mouth. The faeries say they must all jump in, that the volcano is a doorway into another world, the world in which the child's mother and father live, waiting for their child to return. The faeries say they found her as a baby on the lip of the volcano's mouth and rescued her; they say they've been through the volcano many times. And when the girl jumps in the faeries jump with her, fall with her until the heat becomes too great, and then they unfold their wings, and the girl looks up at them as she falls, floating in the hot air . . .

I turned the corner where the apple tree used to stand—cut down many years ago, and in whose place the saplings never seemed to be able to grow. Bag heavy
enough with books to make my hand ache. For some time now, I realized, the dew-wet footprints were again on the path.

Some scents in spring burst forth with such fragrance to encounter them is as if to run into a person, but instead of collision, you step wholly into the body of the other and live for a while inside her. Only she is no
her
, only the body of the lilac's scent, which never fully diffuses through the air. It is a scent I try to avoid, a moment I try to avoid, this reverie inside the lilac's odor, this scent that is a presence without a body, a touch more subtle than physical touch, that evokes memory from nothingness, memory so vivid as to be felt in the nerves, to live again that which cannot be lived again, love lost and the lover's lost touch, she who I let leave; it is a scent that grows sickly when one lingers in it not moving, stays in it remembering what cannot help but be remembered, making love in the bedroom with the windows open while the hailstorm violently stormed, destroying the garden, the pea plants' threadlike tendrils pulled from the twine around which they'd twined, shredding the leaves from the trees; and it is never “one” who steps into the lilac's scent and forgets to keep walking, it is always me. I looked down. There were his footprints, whoever he is. One foot after the other until, once again, growing smaller as they progress, the prints disappear.

I thought to myself: I must remember to tell Father about the apple tree.

Then, very quietly, I said to myself her name—