An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky

by Dan Beachy-Quick

  “Something similar happened to me last night.”

  “I’m sure, Olin, it did.”

  “And what was your future?”

  “That I’d be blessed with the chance to know you. ‘One day,’” she said, “‘you will know Olin.’”

  “When I was a boy I could not fall asleep without my mother kissing me. I tormented her with my neediness. But without her kiss, or the extended luxury of her reading me a story, without her presence once again coming into my darkening room, where the magic lantern spun and cast the image of a hunter hunting a wolf that in turning become the wolf hunting the hunter on the walls, I could not risk sleep that, even then, more so than now, I knew was like death. I didn’t like to dream. To nightly be given a new world only to find it taken away every morning—a world like our own, sometimes less so, in which those I loved, my mother even, became the monsters they hid inside themselves all day. A fearful thing, yes? It’s why I’ve chosen a healthy insomnia as an adult,” his tone ironic but his face hollow, “to avoid sleep as I can, now that my mother is asleep for good.”

  “The magic lantern . . . you sound as if you grew up in the last century.”

  “I did.” Olin’s wit was remarkably dry, to the point at which even I, his good friend, couldn’t always tell when he was kidding. He sat in his chair looking at me with some snide innocence, the look of a person who cares that you believe what he is saying so that he can believe it himself.

  “I remember when we had to share a room once at a conference. You were asleep in an instant.”

  “All a ruse. I wanted to protect you from suffering through a night in which I’d ask you to call me Little Olin and tuck me in. Do you know how hard it is to willfully snore lightly for eight hours? It’s murder on the nervous system. I woke up exhausted.”

  My wine was almost gone. “It is hard, Olin, to know when you are telling the truth.”

  “No, Daniel, it’s easy. I’m always telling the truth.” He paused. “I mean, I never am. It’s hard to tell the difference. I get so confused.” At which he winked, stood up, patted me on the shoulder, and walked away, out the room, empty wineglass still in hand.

  I took a last sip and followed him, nodding and waving at those I knew, making my good-byes, glancing at the chair playing cards at a table with a stately older man, somewhat portly, dressed in an evening jacket whose lining was scarlet, and whose lips, if I wasn’t mistaken, were slightly rouged; a man whom I had never seen before.

  The night was bitterly cold. No stars. A kind of brittle fog, unique to our landscape, had settled in. The street-lamps with their cloudlike nimbus lit the walkway. The cold air had fallen to the ground in the minute ice crystals that, at my every step, crunched and dissolved, leaving behind me my dark prints. The night played through my mind, myriad images caught in the chandelier’s facets, organized not by time, but by some other order, crystalline.

  I walked up the steps and put my hand on the knob, colder even than the night was cold. My father had owned this house; it was the house I grew up in. He had died many years ago; my mother many years before him, when I was still a child.

  I opened the door; I’d left it unlocked. And in a pique, for no reason, I shouted out into the empty house, “Ishmael, I’m home.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CLOCK STRUCK NOW ELEVEN TIMES.

  The same mute faces on the wall.

  Only one photo of my mother exists. In it her eyes are cast downward. The photo is in black and white, but the photographer hand-colored it: the blush on her cheek, the blue handle of the parasol, the green embankment. As a young boy I would, as Father translated in his study, stand before the photo, bending lower as I neared it, as if I could find an angle from which I could look up and see her eyes staring down at me. My father, catching me crouching, said, “It won’t work,” and dropped his eyes back down to desk and work.

  Now marked the half hour with a single toll.

  I walked down the hallway, entered my father’s study that is my study now, opened the bottom drawer to the desk, and shuffled through the folders until I found the one I wanted. At night, the mind thinks and the body acts. Or is it the body thinks and the mind acts? Sitting down in the old chair my father sat down in, the chair that’s always been old. This body that performs its memory, these hands that open and open the folder, these eyes that see, that read, that read what the mind behind them knows by heart, this heart that pumps the blood, this blood, this ancestral blood in which untold stories circulate, untold tale in the finger, this finger, that touches the page it wrote. Or I wrote. I mean to say this story I didn’t write but that I wrote down. This story Father told me. Someone told it to him—or maybe not. Maybe he made it up, a distraction for him more than for me, his son who after his mother died feared sleep, and the dreams in sleep in which his mother, my mother, returned. Maybe he memorized it—the words never altered—so that, as he spoke, sitting in the chair in the corner of my darkened room, his mind could attend to what mattered to him: the language he was learning, an oral language whose basic words and grammar were translated by a missionary two hundred years ago and whose helper had written down, in the phonemes of the romantic alphabet, though tainted by the Latinate habits of his ear, a story told by an elder of the tribe, written on a scroll, titled in Spanish, Mito de Creación, a thick roll of paper my father found in a box in a country library as he travelled through England as a young man, bought for a few pence, and whose academic life, when I was a boy, and until he died, was devoted to translating. It was a task he never finished, much to his regret. I might be wrong. Perhaps every word of the story he spoke he vividly saw, escaping into the same story he gave me for my escape, and to change a word would destroy the world he was conjuring. Either way, he sat in the darkest corner of my room, so that his voice seemed to come from the night itself, the night lulling to sleep the child unwilling to go to sleep, the night telling its story.

  After my father died, the very day he died, I sat at this desk and wrote down that story word for word. I wrote it down in my illegible scrawl and took it to my room, lay down on my bed, and in the dim light read it, and read it again, over and over again, until the window began to grow light. The alarm clock went off at 5:45. There had been an earthquake in Guatemala, a powerful earthquake felt in Belize and Panama; only one person had died.

  I took the pages to my room, undressed, and got in bed. The wine tugged my mind toward the still house’s familiar silence. I read the story.

  After the giant removed his heart and buried it in the ground his eyes gradually grew smaller and smaller until he seemed to have no eyes at all. He did still have eyes, but they were no larger than pinpricks, smaller than the eyes of a mole, as small as a spider’s eyes, and let in so little light that the giant was mostly blind. He couldn’t tell when it was night or day and so he stopped sleeping. He couldn’t walk without running into trees or tripping over ridges or falling down in rivers. The giant just sat down and didn’t move. He sat so long that moss grew on him. Grass grew on the moss. Trees in the grass: an aspen grove. He seemed dead but he was not dead. When the wind pushed through the aspen and the leaves made a riverlike music the giant would hear it, some nerve would awaken, and though he had no heart, from his pinprick eyes a tear would fall, so thin and meager that the wind that caused it would also take it away. People who passed the giant thought he was only a hill whose stony crest was pink as skin. Their parents and their parent’s parents had walked by the hill many times, had carted their goods down the road that curved around the giant, and in all their memory that hill had only ever been a hill. But the birds knew. Whether they could hear his breath, or feel the slightest twitches of muscles that sometimes sent a leaf spiraling down from a branch in midsummer, or sense beneath his head the hum of his thinking, no one can say—so there were no nests in the aspen trees. But the people didn’t notice this either. To the sudden absence of birdsong at the hill when they walked past it the people all were deaf.

&n
bsp; It was at the foot of this hill that the people of the village built their schoolhouse.

  The story has no end I know. It has no end because my father never told me an end. As a boy I would ask him to tell me the rest.

  The voice from the dark would say, “The rest is in your dreams.” And then from out the dark my father would step and walk from my room.

  It was not a dream I ever had.

  I read the story once, twice, I read the story. In the room, my winter room, I could smell the scent of an apple—why is that? I could smell an apple as if an apple were asleep in the old wardrobe, dreaming about me. I turned out the light. The phosphorescent glow in my eye, the bright white-purple glow behind my lid—do you see it?—doesn’t it look a little bit like an apple tree in bloom? Don’t you see it?—

  I asked who?—

  And fell into a fitful sleep.

  CHAPTER 5

  none of the schoolchildren could explain

  they opened their eyes into circles

  they found the desks pushed against the walls

  when they walked in the schoolroom’s door

  and on the old rutted wood

  near the center of the room

  —they saw a single pearl

  the giant’s heart is

  at fault in the fault

  my father at his desk, looking up:

  there is no difference in this

  language between

  the definite article and the indefinite

  “The” or “A”—there is no way to tell

  he started crying

  “And it’s the first word written down here on the page”

  holding up a page marked by a

  musical note

  Olin cleaning the chair’s glasses with the end

  of his shirt and then kissing him

  I stood in the room, reading

  the old book, a cut on my finger

  left my fingerprint in

  blood

  on the page

  A whale sounds down in the ocean.

  Eye as small as a foal’s. I know

  he sees me watching him

  the white whale. There is a tarred

  rope tangled around him, but

  it does not slow his descent.

  Placid as ice as it forms

  within the element of its

  own composition.

  There is a man in the mouth.

  That man is me.

  I was glad to be hungover when the sun woke me up. There is no doubt the hangover is real—except when I try to explain it to myself. I drank, I walked home, I read. I had many dreams that I dreamed. And now I have this pain behind my eyes, it has a shape, a circle or an orb, it isn’t large—this pearl that is the pain in my mind.

  CHAPTER 6

  I POURED MYSELF A CUP OF COFFEE AND WALKED DOWN the hall to the study. My father had lined the walls with cork to quiet the noise of the street. He feared that the intermittent voices of women discussing their children, of children furtively whispering their cruel taunts of the local man who, half-crazed and half-drunk, knocked on doors and yelled into houses, “Encyclopedias for sale!” but who had no books to sell, of vendors selling their wares on the streets, pushing a cart with bells dangling from the handle, “Ices, ices, ices and treats,” a song in refrain syncopated by the tinkling notes, the man who every day chose a different corner from which to proclaim, in stentorian tones, “The world has ended, and it’s gonna rain, the world has ended, and it’s still gonna rain, get out, it’s calling, get out, it’s too late to repent, the world has ended, and here’s the proof,” at which point he would sing hymns from the old hymnal, his eyes closed, in a profound bass that at its lowest notes seemed not to be heard so much as felt, of daily conversations, of men discussing the derby, of the poor woman who as she walked talked to herself, “It couldn’t have been different, it could have been different” over and over again, just as the young girl wandered with the daisy in her hand, “He loves me, he loves me not.” Father said the slightest intonation overheard could destroy a day’s work; a single word could make worthless hours of concentration. This language, he’d tell me when I’d listen, couldn’t be translated by simply referring to a dictionary; there was no dictionary. But the difficulty was far greater, he claimed. One couldn’t, he couldn’t, nor could anyone, create a dictionary of this language, write down the various parts of speech, what transliterated words referred to object or person or action or comparison or indication or conjunction or division in our own language; this language was rooted, if such a word can be used in this case, in a profound instability, in which no single word ever stilled into definition of one single thing. Not only could one not tell apart the definite article from the indefinite, that sound that word is, slightly altered by intonation, extended by breath, could become not only a word referring to a bird, but a-bird-that-nests-on-the-open-bare-ground and also, simultaneously, so my father claimed, the-fragile-rock. It could drive me mad. I could be driven mad by it. He would stare down at the old transcription, written on a scroll rather than bound, as if the language were a landscape instead of a book; two stones held the scroll open, stones rubbed smooth by the ocean, large as my father’s hands; he would stare down at the words written on the paper, and then close his eyes, for hours close his eyes, and do nothing at all, write down nothing. He kept by the scroll’s side a sheaf of paper on which was printed musical staff. It is a song, a music. You have to hold the whole music in your mind to hear the story, it has to be sung to be said, and if I write down a word plucked out from the tune the entire song falls apart, everything is lost, it’s all blank, the ear is blank. You must hear it to see it, and when you see it, you can write down some equivalent. He would talk to me, when he talked to me of his work, in the first person and the second person, so that listening to him absorbed me into him, or him into me, the division between father and son, him and me, I and you, falling prey to the same indeterminate quality of the language he was translating. He didn’t, my father, translate the myth into words, but into a musical notation of his own composition, a notation made of musical notes, other marks to distinguish rhythm, wavelike lines rolling upward or downward through the staff to mark intonation and, should he be able to complete his thoughts for the day, one word he’d write on top of the page, white or cloud or water or then. “I have discovered today that and is the same word as or; it is the most complex word I’ve understood.” He didn’t look victorious when he said this to me; he sounded defeated. He held out his hands as if he were offering me something. And when a word would break through the room’s cork-lined silence, it would be gone, all of it, the whole music, world’s melody; when through the walls rumbled the awful words “The world has ended,” my father opened his eyes, and in his look was the proof.

  CHAPTER 7

  I LEARNED TO BE A QUIET CHILD.

  I learned to be a quiet child. These are the words with which, now many years ago, I began the novel I’m still writing. In the mornings, it is my work. I don’t show it to anyone; I don’t tell anyone I’m working on it. I am, in certain ways, embarrassed. I began with ambitions the very first sentence ended; a novel whose taproot dug down into fairy tale, but from that root, split, rhizome-like, erupting out of the ground in shoots and leaves that seem wholly unconnected to their source, different leaves, different worlds, but should one be able to trace the fine thread-roots over their strange coursing, the disparate would be seen as whole, a many and a one, the multiple world.

  But what I write about is myself, my childhood, my friends, dinner parties, music, the bewildering dazzle of social hierarchies, artists I know and the art they make, my father’s work. I wanted to write a different world; I write the small, cunning world I am. It is a limit I have resigned myself to, my life. The page is a curious mirror one polishes with oneself to see oneself clearer, but the polishing, as it brings the surface to a sheen, also warps it, alters the image into beauty that does not exist, or cruelty th
at does not exist, except latent, a virus or a seed dormant in the personality, awaiting the right condition to spring into life, to viruslike infect the cell, to weed-like run rampant through the field, but the only element of life is life, this life I lead, in which the pages I write become the fallow field waiting to be turned over, where the sentences are the plough’s edge turning up the sod into sillion’s dark shine. This work—I cannot seem to stop it, though I would like to—this effort at consciousness that dismantles itself into uncertainty, changing facts into myths, self-myths, so that reading back through the pages, the hundreds of pages, gives me back to myself in altered form; did I seduce the student in my office when she came in the early spring, here where the northern latitude keeps night arriving early, asking about Melville’s Encantadas?; did I speak to her about enchantment, about song and place, about the dinner party in the summer air, tents lit by torches, in which I saw the island tortoise walk into the dark woods, memento*** in burning letters on its back?; did I put my hand on her knee, and run my hand up beneath her skirt? What I have made up about myself has so insinuated itself into my imagination it acts as fact; imagination embraces fact, subsumes it, as an amoeba will swallow itself to end its hunger, and then sated, split in two, and make of itself another. I once ended a semester’s class, after Ishmael, another orphan, had been rescued by the devious-coursing Rachel, by saying “A book begins by defining ‘Who I am’; it ends by asking ‘Who am I?’ We are allergic to the world; consciousness is an allergic reaction to the fact of the world; it is our understanding that is a form of irritation, a rewarding irritation, and we think, because we think, we have accomplished something noble, something valorous, that we can say what it is something means; but it is just a symptom of the allergy, the mind trying to rid itself of itself, of what enters it by casting it back out, words for world.”