Read Falling Out of Time Online
Authors: David Grossman
Falling Out of Time (8 page)
COBBLER:
Barren brain-hill,
a terrible sight,
it pulsates perhaps
once
in a thousand years—
TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:
It is the brain of the universe,
and it is cold, frozen. It is not
what emits the wail. It is
desolation, only desolation,
mute and deaf
and flat,
it has no wails,
no thoughts,
it has
no answers and
no love.
DUKE:
And you—pick up
a hoe and till a bed.
Plant in it a pillow, a lamp,
a letter, a picture of
a beloved face, perhaps also a kettle,
thick socks, gloves and a satchel,
a pencil or paintbrush, a book
or two, a pair of glasses, so that you
can see near
and see far.
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Tell me about the rocking horse.
CENTAUR:
You again? Won’t you ever shut up?
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Tell me about the soccer ball, about the cowboy hat. About the birthdays, tell me about them. About the magician’s wand, the blue kite—
CENTAUR:
You’re torturing me.
TOWN CHRONICLER:
About the toy boat—
CENTAUR:
Junk! Memory husks!
TOWN CHRONICLER:
At least tell me something about the cradle.
CENTAUR:
How about you tell me something about yourself for a change? You’ve been coming here for weeks, ten times a day, interrogating me, turning me inside out like a glove, and you yourself—nothing! Just a clerk! Following orders! Hiding behind your royal edict, which any idiot can see is a fake, with that ridiculous drawing of the duke wearing a crown. I mean, come on! You could have put a little more effort into it. A five-year-old can draw better than that!
Okay. I get it. I can be quiet, too. Here. Being quiet. A rock. A sphinx. You’re not looking so hot yourself either, you know, these last few days, but I am absolutely going off the deep end, yes, that’s not hard to see. This fight with
it
, goddamn it, is doing me in. I admit it. And this silly thing that happened to me with the desk? I bet you’ve heard the stories around town, right? For that reason alone you should have stopped bothering me with your nonsense. Don’t you have any mercy for a poor centaur? And a bereaved one, at that? Come on, look at me. No, I mean it. Climb up on this window, use both hands, don’t be afraid. What’s the worst thing I could do to you that you’re not already doing to yourself?
So? Nice, isn’t it? Aesthetically pleasing. Have you ever seen such grafting? Such a curse? Half
writer, half desk? Well, there you have it. You can get down now.
Finita la tragedia
. What do you say? It’s quite a thing, isn’t it? Didn’t I tell you there was nothing as pleasurable as other people’s hell?
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Your son once lay in that cradle.
CENTAUR:
And now he has a different one.
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Help me, Centaur. Those piles of yours are driving me mad.
CENTAUR:
I’ll never leave this place.
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Thirteen years ago I lost my daughter.
CENTAUR:
These last few days, when you were being a real pain in the ass, I was beginning to think it might be something like that.
TOWN CHRONICLER:
I can’t talk about her.
CENTAUR:
I built the cradle
with my own two hands. The day
he was born, from branches of oak. My wife
painted the two ducks.
She painted so beautifully.
She was a quiet,
gentle woman. She left me,
three years after
the boy did. If I could have,
I would have left me, too.
Adam—that was his name.
Adam. I placed him
in the cradle
after he was born. He lay there
with his eyes open, looked
at me, studied me with his gaze.
He was so serious! He always was,
his whole life. His whole
short life. Serious
and slightly lonely. Hardly
any friends. He liked stories.
We used to put on plays,
he and I,
with costumes and masks. You asked
about the cradle. My wife padded it
with soft fabric,
but he could only fall asleep
with me, on my chest. He would cling
to me.
I just remembered, you’ll laugh,
but there was a special sound
I used to make to put him
to sleep on me. A sort of quiet,
deep, trembling
moan.
Hmmmm …
Hmmmm …
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Excuse me, sir, would you mind if I also …
CENTAUR:
Not at all …
Hmmm …
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Hmmm …
CENTAUR
and
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Hmmm …
WALKING MAN:
Walking, walking,
neither awake nor
asleep, walking
and emptying
all my thoughts,
my passions,
my sadness, my fervor,
my secrets, my volition,
anything that is me.
Look at me, my son:
here I am not.
I am but a platform of life,
calling you to come
and be through me—
to occur, if only for a moment,
to once again be purified
by what is.
Come, do not hesitate,
be now,
I am gone,
the house is yours,
and it is furnished with every limb.
Flow into it, pool in it,
this blood is your blood now, the muscles,
your muscles. Come,
be present,
reach your arms
from world-end to -end,
rejoice from my throat, laugh, vibrate,
celebrate,
all is possible at this moment,
everything now is
yes
,
so love and burn and lust
and fuck.
My five hungry senses
are at your command like
five horses foaming at the mouth,
stomping, raring
to gallop to your never-end.
Do not stop, my boy,
your time is short, meted out,
my eyelids are trembling now,
soon I will come home,
soon my pupils will contract
in the light of confining logic. Quick,
taste it all, devour, be deep,
be sad,
determined, delighted, roar,
tremble with pleasure and power,
my pleasure is yours, my power, too—
enchant, shower your soul,
be the swing of a sower,
a cascade of grain and
golden coins streaming
like light—
be engorged like an udder,
and torrid as midday,
and rage, and rave,
tighten your hand into a fist until
arteries swell in your neck,
and be thrilled, like a heart, like a girl,
be agape, thin-skinned, alight
with the glory of
one-off wonders,
be a whole,
momentary fraction
of eternity.
And as you do so, pause suddenly, breathe, inhale, feel the air burn your lungs, lick your upper lip, taste the salt of healthy sweat, the tingle of life, and now say fully:
I—
(Damn it, I realize now:
that pronoun is also
lost, it died
with you, leaving me
with only
he
and
you
and
us
, and no one
will ever again
say
I
in your voice.
That too. That, too.)
Just hurry, my boy,
dawn is rising, the magic
soon will melt, so you must love,
and, even if betrayed,
even if you taste the venom
of disdain, love
and be brave, but be cowardly, too,
be everything, touch defeat,
touch failure, hurt someone,
disappoint
and lie.
Quick, my boy, pass through all these,
there is no time to linger,
such illusions are so brief,
but you must touch, caress
a warm body, a woman,
bounteous breasts in your hands,
the head of a newborn child, unborn
to you.
Quick, quick, the first strip
of light—
see the world you never saw: New York,
Paris, Shanghai, so many faces
in this living
world—
No, no, stop—
it’s too late now,
come back
to rest,
quick,
to obscurity,
to oblivion,
just do not see
with my own eyes
what happened
to you.
WALKERS:
Our feet lift slowly
from the earth lightly
lightly we hover
between here and there
between lucidity
and sleep
the thread will soon
unravel
and we will glide
and look
at whatever is there
at whatever we dare
to see
only when walking
in a dream
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Sleeping … They’ve been sleeping almost constantly for days, sleeping their minds away. Sleeping and walking, speaking to one another in their dream, each head leaning on another walker’s shoulder. I do not know who carries whom and what force drives them to walk—
DUKE:
Sometimes, alone
in my private chamber,
I take off both shoes and look
at my feet and think
it is
him.
ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:
I hit him. He was
a stubborn boy, and impudent,
with strange opinions
even as a child, and I—spare
the rod, spoil the child—I had to
beat him.
When he raised his hands to protect
his face, I hit him
in the stomach.
WALKING MAN:
But where are you, what are you,
just tell me that, my son.
I ask simply:
Where are you?
Ayeka
?
Or like a pupil before his master
(for that is how I often see
you now),
please teach me—as I not long ago
taught you—
the world and all its secrets.
Forgive me if my question
sounds foolish and insipid, but
I must ask because
it has been eating
at my soul like a disease
these past five years:
What is death, my son?
What
is death?
MIDWIFE:
Great, definitive death,
my girl,
with b-b-boundless power. Eternal,
immortal d-d-death. And yours.
Your single, little death,
inside it.
COBBLER:
Actually, I wanted
to ask, What’s it like,
my girl, when you die?
And how are you there?
And who are you
there?
DUKE:
It is a perplexing thought, my son,
but perhaps you now know
far more than I do?
Perhaps a new and wondrous world
now carries you in flight,
and with a massive flap of wings
it spreads out
its infinity, just as
in our world here it long ago
lavished your soul with its abundance,
your pure, boyish soul. I feel
so young and ignorant before you.
TOWN CHRONICLER:
Every so often a tremor passes through them, all of them, one after the other, as though an invisible hand had slid a caress down the spine of the small procession, lingering lightly over the head of each and every one. In their sleep, they straighten up toward it like blind chicks hearing their mother’s voice, and their eyes glow through their lids.
MIDWIFE:
I see her
jumping,
dancing in the kitchen,
before she fell ill,
when she still
had the strength. And her f-f-father,
my man, my love,
my cobbler, kneels before her
and places his hands: shoes for her feet.
COBBLER:
Am I dreaming?
I hear my wife.
I swear
her words are
hardly broken
anymore!
MIDWIFE:
… he walks her
through the house in his
hand-shoes, and laughs
until the roof almost flies off,
and she hugs his neck
and squeals, she has only just
learned how to talk,
you remember,
just beginning to say
her first words,
Dad-dy,
Mom-my,
Lil-li-li-li-Lilli.
COBBLER:
Lilli,
my
Lilli.
WALKERS:
We walk. Impossible
to stop. My body
won’t allow it. My feet
are weak. And me, my breath
is short, yet still our body
will not stand. It pushes from inside, onward
,
onward … It’s like
going to meet your sweetheart
,
isn’t it, Mrs. Chronicler? Yes
,
my lady of the nets, it’s like a lovers’ rendezvous
.
WALKING MAN:
This void,
this absence,
death alone can render—
and it is not at all
a disappearance,
a cessation,
nothingness.
It has one final place,
a window opened
just a crack, where still
the absence breathes, still loosened,
palpitating, where one can still
touch the
here
,
still almost feel
the warming hand that touches
there
.
It is the threshold,
one last line shared both by here
and there, the line to which
—no farther—
the living may draw near,
and where, perhaps, they still can sense
the very tip,
just one more hint,
the fading embers, slowly dying,
of the dead.