An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (25 page)

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Authors: Dan Beachy-Quick

The light on in the hallway shone bright enough through the open door to let me see the words on the page as I wrote them. I tried to never work at night, when my day-dulled mind sensed less, dimmed by the hours' intravenous opiate. I looked at the postcard on my desk, propped up against a paperweight, at the three stars scratched into it. It wasn't memory. It wasn't memory I had to write. It was memory's opposite, which the day's forgetfulness alone makes possible to see. I picked up my pen. I turned over the last written page. There it was. And it was blank.

He watched the ship move away to the horizon, and when at the horizon, he watched it disappear. He stood on the rocks and hummed to himself and he watched the ship turn into nothing. He thought he had also disappeared to them. He had become a single point, anonymous, fated only to begin a line and end a line and travel the circuit between. Here I am, he thoughtâthis man who had ceased to think of himself as someone who says “I,” this man who felt he was narrating his own story even as
he lived it, this man who thought of himself as “he,” and in stranger moments, stronger moments, thought of himself below any name that hints at the human, “it,” and in exalted realization, “a”âa singer standing on the singing rocks. For it was as he had read, and in dreams as he had seen, names scratched into platelike rocks, livid white letters against the stone's deep gray, the only record of the lives those names named, lost even now at sea, floating forever to the ocean's bed, the white whale swimming in delight or in blindness among them, judging and forgiving, ignoring and abandoning. These names were their graves
. Allan,
he said out loud
. Allan,
he said again, pressing his tongue against the back of his teeth, extending the last letter's soundânnnnnnâuntil it rang in the ear, as if testing the one thing he still knew about himself, that the letter at the end of his name was a secret bell he spent his life learning to ring. He had come to find out what door it is that bell asks to open. He took the scroll from his bag and held it tightly in his hand, and then began to make his way over the rocks to the path, a dull ringing music marking every step, a music that died quickly, the music of the names of the lost
.

Certain experiences precede themselves, and the superstitious call this dÃ©jÃ vu. But he wasn't superstitious. He knew how words work when sung. When sung a word uses what it names as an arrow uses a bow, and where that arrow lands is where experience opens, long in advance of the archer's foot finding the quiver still vibrating in the ground. This is Apollo's lessonâarcher god of poetry and vision. The lyre is also a bow. The poet also a hunter. But the poet is a hunter in reverse; the poet is that hero who hunts the dead so as to return them to
life. He is a poet, Allan thought about himself
.

He walked along the path, lighter rocks in a line between the darker ones. The landscape looked covered in cinders, not ashâhalf-burnt and only waiting a spark hot enough to finish the conflagration. The largest boulders movedâthose ancient tortoises whose shells scraped against the ground, grinding rock against rock, forever trying to ignite a spark they were too slow to fire
.

Ahead of him he saw a small grouping of buildings, askew huts with tin roofs. A thin trace of smoke rose from a hole, and he walked toward the largest hut from which that plume curled. A low humming that emanated through the battered screen door stopped when he opened it. A small boy began to silently cry when he saw Allan, turning his face against his father's legs. The father put his hand on the boy's head and the boy turned around, leaning back against his father, his arms bent behind him, clasped around his father's legs. The father looked at Allan and said “Hello” in English, a slight accent in the voice that Allan couldn't place. “My father told me that you'd be coming.” The boy began to cry again, making no sound. The boy looked at Allan with terror in his eyes, as if his arrival had long been feared, and fearing it so long had done nothing to ease the horror of the moment occurring. The boy's father looked at Allan directly and without emotion, numb to anything but the fact that this strange man stood in this room with them, that he was undeniable, and that the story his own father had told him for so long was a true story, had always been true, despite the years of scoffing at his father's words, of dismissing his father's work as a fool's myth, a trickster's occupation, remnant of a dying culture,
nostalgia for stories in which magic solved the problem of sickness, the problem of the world; this man looked at Allan with eyes that could not deny what they could not believe
.

An old man lay in a bed, thin arm on top of the haphazard sheet, naked foot exposed. The old man shivered beneath the cloth. “He's cold,” Allan said. “No,” the man said, “he's not cold.” A single layer of gauze covered the old man's eyes, through which, as through a veil, his eyes could still be seen. “He complained about the light,” the man said. “His eyes are always wide now. For him it is always dark and his eyes are wide.”

Allan took the scroll out of his bag. The man looked at him; he never seemed to blink. “Go ahead,” he said, “he knows why you are here.”

“Do you sing like your father?” Allan asked.

“It is a language I refused to learn, a superstitious language. I am a man of science, and I left this island to learn the real names of things. I am here now only because my father is dying, and to watch as his words don't save him.”

“The words will save him. I've come here becauseâ”

“It does not matter to me why you've come. My father said you would. He told me he must see you. He is about to die, and what you are about to do will be what kills him. He has no strength left, not even for this sham.”

“You will see,” Allan said, “that you are wrong.” He unrolled the scroll, and began to sing the song he taught himself. The first syllable extended into a sustained note growing higher and higher in pitch, and it unlocked in Allan's mind, as he had come to expect and withstand, the most intimate memories
of his wife, her hair spread across her pillow, the snail's track of her eyes in bliss, memories he had learned not to ignore but to use as the entrance into the next syllable, the next word's low note in which memory ceased. At the sound the old man stopped shaking and, as Allan knew he would, began to sing the song below the song, the drone without which the melody had no power. Allan felt beneath his feet the floor sag, as if the song he sang were weighing him down, or as if he and the old man were singing the earth open, singing the solid earth into liquid, singing slowly earth into ocean, into which Allan slowly sank, caught in the midst of the transformation he himself sang. He saw through his eyes and behind his eyes, a double-visionâsaw the bed of the old man beginning to rise above him, saw the old man's son staring down at him, saw the boy run crying from the room; and he saw, too, his own son at home, reading a letter on his bed; he saw his wife just after she died, and his baby daughter in his arms; he saw an apple tree in full bloom floating in the air, but the air wasn't air; he saw the white-blossoming apple tree in full bloom floating in the water; he saw a pocket watch on which a fox in amateur hand had been etched on the metal falling through the water, its chain a straight line above it like the tail of a comet; he saw a blue umbrella open; and swimming between them all, lazy, omnipotent, a white whale with a black cord wrapped in coils around its body
.

And then the vision stopped, and then the floor was a tight circle around his waist, and Allan looked up, still holding the note in his mouth, still singing the word, a small word, singing “and.” He was singing “and,” a word of great complexity in
the song, the word that refuses any other word's desire to be unconnected, to be alone. The old man bolted upright in his bed, sweat trickling down his face. His eyes were wide open and yet unstaring behind the gauze, roving around, as if looking for something missing, some object of which he must gain hold
.

Allan could not help himself. He broke the song in order to ask in the song's language what he must do. What must I do? The old man turned his head slowly over, tilted it slowly down, and looked at Allan. He understood Allan's words. What must I do? Teach me. The old man spoke. His son watched; listened, shook slowly his head no. The old man spoke but Allan could understand none of his words. What must I do? Allan looked below him and, as if peering through depths of clear water he saw two shapes rising toward him, one embraced or within the other. What must I do? And the old man answered, yelled his answer in rhythmic chants, words Allan could not understand but could almost recognize, the words of the scroll but words that in the old singer's mouth took on a different shape so that Allan did not know how to grasp them, to fit them into understanding. The old man spoke more emphatically, gesticulating wildly the same spiraling motion over and over; and then he stopped, stopped talking and stopped his arms from gesturing. He looked at Allan directly, eyes piercing behind their veil, and in perfect English the old man said, “Why can't you hear me?” Allan looked below him and saw the two shapes rising, and above them, the water growing dark, becoming solid. In horror, Allan thought he heard knocking beneath the floor that now was only floor, was ocean no longer, but there was no knocking, there was only the
thud of the old man falling out of bed to the ground
.

“It is as I told you it would be,” the son said. He took a long while to bend down to his father. “And now you should go. That was not your song to sing. You should have known that. It's not anyone's song to sing. It's a bauble, a plaything. A story for fools told by fools.” He put his hand on his father's neck; put his open hand in front of his father's mouth. “And now this foolâ” and the man stopped speaking, stood up, and turned his face away to the wall
.

The stupid moon shone through the window. I don't know why that thought was my thought as I put down my pen, as I turned the pages over, as I turned my father over in my mind, as I put my father away, as I put him down.

The stupid moon shone through the window.