Forest Dark

by Nicole Krauss

  In the living room Epstein touched a switch, and the lights, wired to an automatic dimmer, came to life, illuminating the burnished gold of two halos on a small panel that hung alone on the east wall. Though he had seen it happen countless times before, he could not watch this effect without feeling a tingle in his scalp. It was the only masterpiece he’d kept, a panel of an altarpiece painted nearly six hundred years ago in Florence. He had not been able to bring himself to give it away. He wished to live with it a little more.

  Epstein moved toward them: Mary bent and nearly bodiless in the pale pink folds that fell from her dress, and the angel Gabriel, who might himself be taken for a woman were it not for his colored wings. From the little wooden stool wedged beneath Mary one gathered that she was kneeling, or would be kneeling, if under the dress there were still anything physical left of her—if what was Mary had not already been erased so that she could be filled up with the son of God. Her curved shape was an exact echo of the white arches overhead: already she was something no longer herself. Her long-fingered hands were folded over her flat breast, and on her face was the grave expression of a mature child meeting her difficult, exalted destiny. A few feet away, the angel Gabriel looked lovingly down on her, hand over his heart, as if he, too, felt there the pain of her necessary future. The paint was shot through with cracks, but that only added to the sense of breathlessness, of a great and violent force that strained below the still surface. Only the flat golden discs around their heads were strangely static. Why did they insist on painting halos like that? Why, when they had already discovered how to create the illusion of depth, did they always revert, in this instance alone, to a stubborn flatness? And not just any instance, but the very symbol of what, drawn close to God, becomes suffused with the infinite?

  Epstein took the frame down off the wall and carried it under his arm to his bedroom. Last month, a nude by Bonnard had been carried out on her back, and since then the wall opposite his bed had been empty. Now he had the sudden desire to see the small annunciation hang there: to wake to it in the morning, and to look on it last as he drifted off to sleep. But before he could manage to catch the wire on the hook, the phone rang, disturbing the silence. Epstein strode toward the bed, propped the frame against the pillows, and picked up the receiver.

  “Jules? It’s Sharon. I’m sorry, but apparently the guy with your coat was feeling ill and went back to his hotel.”

  Outside, across the expansive dark, the lights of the West Side glimmered. Epstein sank down on the bed next to the Virgin. He pictured the Palestinian in his coat, kneeling over a toilet.

  “I left a message but haven’t gotten through yet,” Sharon continued. “Would it be all right if I waited until tomorrow to go over? Your flight isn’t until nine at night, which leaves plenty of time for me to go first thing in the morning. It’s my sister’s birthday tonight, and there’s a party.”

  “Go.” Epstein sighed. “Never mind about this. It can wait.”

  “Are you sure? I’ll keep trying by phone.”

  But Epstein was not sure; such had been the slow unfurling of self-knowledge these last months, but only now, when his assistant posed the question, did he feel the wing beat of clarity pass overhead. He did not wish to be sure. Had lost his trust in it.

  Out in the Blue

  The idea of being in two places at once goes back a long way with me. Goes back for as long as I can remember, I should say, since one of my earliest memories is of watching a children’s show on TV, and suddenly spotting myself in the small studio audience. Even now I can call up the sensation of the brown carpet in my parents’ bedroom under my legs, and of craning my neck to see the TV, which seemed to be mounted very high above me, and then the sickening feeling that spread through my stomach as the excitement of seeing myself in that other world gave way to the certain knowledge that I’d never been there. One could say that the sense of self is still porous in young children. That the oceanic feeling persists for some time until the scaffolding is at last removed from the walls we labor to build around ourselves under the command of an innate instinct, however touched by the sadness that comes of knowing we’ll spend the rest of our lives searching for an escape. And yet even today, I have absolutely no doubt about what I saw then. The little girl on the TV had my face exactly, and she wore my red sneakers and striped shirt, but even those could be chalked up to coincidence. What could not is that in her eyes, for the few seconds that the camera came to rest on them, I recognized the feeling of what it was to be me.

  It may have been one of the earliest things my brain preserved, but as the years passed, I didn’t think much about it. There was no reason to; I never encountered myself anywhere again. And yet the surprise of what I’d seen must have settled down through me, and as my sense of the world was built up on top of it, it must have alchemized into belief: not that there were two of me, which is the stuff of nightmares, but that I, in my uniqueness, might possibly be inhabiting two separate planes of existence. Or maybe it would be more accurate to look at it from the opposite angle, and call what began to crystalize in me then a sense of doubt—a skepticism toward the reality foisted on me, as it is foisted onto all children, which slowly displaces the other, more supple realities that naturally occur to them. In either case, the possibility of being both here and there was stored substrata along with all my other childish notions, until one autumn afternoon when I came through the door of the house I shared with my husband and our two children, and sensed that I was already there.

  Simply that: already there. Moving through the rooms upstairs, or asleep in the bed; it hardly mattered where I was or what I was doing, what mattered was the certainty with which I knew that I was in the house already. I was myself, I felt utterly normal in my own skin, and yet at the same time I also had the sudden sense that I was no longer confined to my body, not to the hands, arms, and legs that I had been looking at all my life, and that these extremities, which were always moving or lying still in my field of vision, and which I had observed minute by minute for thirty-nine years, were not in fact my extremities after all, were not the furthest limit of myself, but that I existed beyond and separately from them. And not in an abstract sense, either. Not as a soul or a frequency. But full-bodied, exactly as I was there on the threshold of the kitchen, but, somehow—elsewhere, upstairs—again.

  Outside the window the clouds seemed to be passing swiftly, but otherwise nothing seemed strange or out of place. Just the opposite: everything in the house, every last cup, table, chair, and vase, seemed in its right place. Or even, in exactly the right place in a way they rarely do, because life has a way of enacting itself on the inanimate, forever shifting objects a little to the left or right. Over time this shifting accumulates to something noticeable—the frame on the wall is suddenly crooked, the books have receded to the back of the shelf—and so a great deal of our time is spent idly, often unconsciously, moving these things back to where they belong. We, too, wish to enact ourselves on the inanimate, which we want to believe we’re sovereign over. But really, it’s the unstoppable force and momentum of life that we want to control, and with which we’re locked in a struggle of wills that we can never win.

  But on that day, it was as if a magnet had been passed under the house, snapping each thing back to its proper position. Everything was touched by stillness, while only the clouds hurried by, as if the world had begun to turn a little more quickly. And as I stood halted in the kitchen doorway, that was my first thought: that time had sped up, and somehow I, on my way home, had fallen behind.

  The skin down my back prickled as I stood frozen, afraid of moving. Some sort of error had occurred, neurological or metaphysical, and while it might have been as benign as déjà vu, it also might not have been. Something had become misaligned, and I felt that if I moved, I might destroy the chance of it naturally correcting itself.

  Seconds passed, and then the telephone rang on the wall. Instinctively, I turned to look at it. Somehow that broke the s
pell, because when I looked back again, the clouds were no longer racing, and the feeling that I was at once here and there—upstairs—was gone. The house was empty again but for me standing there in the kitchen, returned to the familiar limits of myself.

  I had been sleeping badly for weeks. My work wasn’t going well, and this left me feeling constantly anxious. But if my writing was a kind of sinking ship, the larger landscape—the sea in which I had begun to sense that every boat I tried to sail would eventually go under—was my failing marriage. My husband and I had drifted far apart. We were so devoted to our children that our growing distance could first be excused, then masked, by all the love and attentiveness that were regularly present in our house. But at a certain point the helpfulness of our shared love for the children had reached a kind of apex, and then began to decline until it was no longer helpful to our relationship at all, because it only shone a light on how alone each of us was, and, compared to our children, how unloved. The love we had once felt for and expressed toward each other had either dried up or been withheld—it was too confusing to know which—and yet day in and day out we each witnessed and were moved by the other’s spectacular powers of love, evoked by the children. It was against my husband’s nature to talk about difficult feelings. These he had learned long ago to hide not only from me but also from himself, and after many years of trying unsuccessfully to bring him into conversation about them, I’d slowly given up. Conflict was not allowed between us, let alone fury; everything had to go unspoken, while the surface remained passive. In this way, I’d found myself returned to a boundless loneliness that, while unhappy, was at least not foreign to me. “I am essentially a buoyant person,” my husband once told me, “while you are a person who ponders everything.” But over time the conditions both within and without had proved too much for his buoyancy, and he, too, was sinking in his separate sea. In our own ways, we had each come to understand that we had lost faith in our marriage. And yet we didn’t know how to act on this understanding, as one does not know how to act on the understanding, for example, that the afterlife does not exist.

  That is where things stood in my life. And now I also couldn’t write, and, increasingly, couldn’t sleep. It might have been easy to pass off the strange sensation I’d experienced that afternoon as the slip of a stressed and addled brain. But on the contrary, I couldn’t remember my mind ever feeling as clear as it had during the moments that I’d stood in the kitchen, convinced that I was also somewhere else close by. As if my mind had been not just touched by clarity, but poised at its very pinnacle, and all my thoughts and perceptions had arrived etched in glass. And yet it wasn’t the usual sort of clarity that results from understanding. It was as if foreground and background had shifted, and what I had been able to see was all that the mind normally blocks out: the endless expanse of not-understanding that surrounds the tiny island of what we can grasp.

  Ten minutes later the doorbell rang. It was UPS, and I signed for the package. The deliveryman took back his little electronic device and handed me the large box. I saw the beads of sweat on his forehead, at odds with the chill in the air, and inhaled the smell of damp cardboard. From the street, my neighbor, an elderly actor, called out hello. A dog lifted its leg and relieved itself on the wheel of a car. But all of this did nothing to dim the intensity and strangeness of the sensation I’d just experienced. It didn’t begin to dissolve, the way a dream does on contact with waking life. It remained incredibly vivid as I went about opening the cabinets and taking out the ingredients for dinner. The sensation was still so powerful that I had to sit down to try to absorb it.

  Half an hour later, when the babysitter came home with the children, I was still sitting at the counter. My sons danced around me, full of the news of their days. Then they sprang loose from their orbit and went racing around the house. My husband arrived soon afterward. He came into the kitchen still wearing the reflector vest that he had biked home in. For a moment, he shone. I felt the sudden urge to describe to him what had happened, but when I was finished he gave me a strained half-smile, glanced at the unmade dinner ingredients, removed the folder of takeout menus, and asked if I felt like Indian. Then he went to go find the children upstairs. I immediately regretted having said anything. The incident touched a fault line between us. My husband prized facts above the impalpable, which he’d begun to collect and assemble around himself like a bulwark. At night he stayed up watching documentaries, and at social gatherings, when someone expressed surprise that he knew what percentage of the bills printed in the US were $100s, or that Scarlett Johansson was half Jewish, he liked to say that he made it his business to know everything.

  The days passed, and the sensation didn’t come again. I’d just gotten over the flu, which kept me in bed shivering and sweating and looking out at the sky with the slightly altered consciousness that illness always brings on me, and I started to wonder if maybe that had something to do with it. When I’m sick, it’s as if the walls between myself and the outside become more permeable—in fact they have, since whatever has made me ill has found a way to slip in, breaching the usual protective mechanisms the body employs, and as if mirroring the body, my mind too becomes more absorbent, and the things I normally keep at bay because they are too difficult or intense to think about begin to pour in. This state of openness, of extreme sensitivity in which I become susceptible to everything around me, is heightened by the loneliness of lying in bed while everyone else is busily going about their activities. And so it was easy to attribute the unusual sensation I’d experienced to my illness, even though by then I was already on the mend.

  Then one evening a month later, I was listening to the radio while doing the dishes, and a program came on about the multiverse—the possibility that the universe actually contains many universes, perhaps even an infinite set of them. That as a result of the gravitational waves that occurred in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang—or a series of Big Bang repulsions, as evidence now suggests—the early universe experienced an inflation that caused an exponential expansion of the dimensions of space to many times the size of our own cosmos, creating completely different universes with unknown physical properties, without stars, perhaps, or atoms, or light, and that, taken all together, these comprise the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy.

  I had no more than a layman’s understanding of current theories of cosmology, but whenever I came across an article about string theory, or branes, or the work being done at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, my interest was always piqued, and so by now I knew a little bit. The physicist being interviewed had a mesmerizing voice, at once patient and intimate, full of deep, underground intelligence, and at some point, at the host’s inevitable prodding, he began to touch on the theological ramifications of multiverse theories, or at least the way they confirmed the role of chance in the creation of life, since if there is not one but an infinite or nearly infinite set of worlds, each with its own physical laws, then no condition can any longer be considered the result of extraordinary mathematical improbabilities.

  When the program came to an end, I switched the radio off and heard the low, rising hum of cars approaching as the traffic lights turned a few blocks away, and the clear, bright sound of children’s voices in the nursery school run out of the basement of the neighboring apartment building, and then the deep, mournful horn of a ship in the harbor some three miles away, like a finger left down on the harmonium. I’d never allowed myself to believe in God, but I could see why theories of a multiverse could get under a certain kind of person’s skin—if nothing else, to say that everything might be true somewhere not only carried the whiff of evasion but also rendered any searching useless, since all conclusions become equally valid. Doesn’t part of the awe that fills us when we confront the unknown come from understanding that, should it at last flood into us and become known, we would be altered? In our view of the stars, we find a measure of our own incompleteness, our still-yet unfinishedness, which is to
say, our potential for change, even transformation. That our species is distinguished from others by our hunger and capacity for change has everything to do with our ability to recognize the limits of our understanding, and to contemplate the unfathomable. But in a multiverse, the concepts of known and unknown are rendered useless, for everything is equally known and unknown. If there are infinite worlds and infinite sets of laws, then nothing is essential, and we are relieved from straining past the limits of our immediate reality and comprehension, since not only does what lies beyond not apply to us, there is also no hope of gaining anything more than infinitesimally small understanding. In that sense, the multiverse theory only encourages us to turn our backs even further on the unknowable, which we’re more than happy to do, having become drunk on our powers of knowing—having made a holiness out of knowing, and busying ourselves all day and night in our pursuit of it. Just as religion evolved as a way to contemplate and live before the unknowable, so now have we converted to the opposite practice, to which we are no less devoted: the practice of knowing everything, and believing that knowledge is concrete, and always arrived at through the faculties of the intellect. Since Descartes, knowledge has been empowered to a nearly unimaginable degree. But in the end it didn’t lead to the mastery and possession of nature he imagined, only to the illusion of its mastery and possession. In the end, we have made ourselves ill with knowledge. I frankly hate Descartes, and have never understood why his axiom should be trusted as an unshakable foundation for anything. The more he talks about following a straight line out of the forest, the more appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest, where once we lived in wonder, and understood it to be a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of being and the world. Now we have little choice but to live in the arid fields of reason, and as for the unknown, which once lay glittering at the farthest edge of our gaze, channeling our fear but also our hope and longing, we can only regard it with aversion.