Falling Out of Time Page 5

  another two or three

  small moments to which you turn,

  return.

  Dawn on a riverbed, up north,

  the story I read to you there,

  the alcove in the strange gray

  rock in which you nested,

  curled.

  You were

  so small,

  and the blue of your eyes,

  and the sun, and the minnows

  that leaped in the water as though they, too,

  wished to hear the story, and the laughter

  we laughed together.

  Just that, just those, again

  and again,

  those memories, and

  the others

  gradually fade …

  Tell me, are you purposely

  robbing me

  of solace?

  And then I think, Perhaps

  this is how you slowly habituate

  me to the ebbing

  of pain? Perhaps,

  with remarkable tenderness,

  with your persistent

  wisdom,

  you are preparing me

  slowly

  for it—

  I mean,

  for the separation?

  CENTAUR: You’re back. Finally. I was beginning to think you’d never … that I’d scared you off. Look, I was thinking: You and I, we’re an odd couple, aren’t we? Think about it: I’ve been unable to write for years, haven’t produced even one word, and you—it turns out—can write, or rather transcribe, as much as you feel like. Whole notebooks, scrolls! But only what other people tell you, apparently. Only quotes, right? Other people’s chewed-up cud. All you do is jot it down with a pen stroke here, a scribble there … Am I right? Not even a single word that’s really yours? Yeah? Not even one letter? That’s what I thought. What can I say, we’re quite a pair. Write this down then, please. Quickly, before it gets away:

  And inside my head there’s a constant war comma the wasps

  keep humming colon what good would it do if you wrote

  question mark what would you add

  to the world if you imagined question

  mark and if you really

  must comma then just write

  facts comma what

  else is there to say

  question mark write them

  down and shut up

  forever colon at

  such and such time comma in

  this and that place comma my son

  comma my only child comma aged

  eleven and a half

  period the boy

  is gone

  period

  TOWN CHRONICLER: And with these last words, using both hands and terrible force, he pounded the table, and his face contorted so painfully that for a moment I thought, Your Highness, that he had struck his own body.

  MIDWIFE:

  Dear God, such pain

  cuts suddenly deep down

  in my stomach, my girl—

  if only I knew that th-th-there, too,

  when you arrived,

  when you finished

  dying,

  you were welcomed with loving arms

  and a warm, fragrant t-t-towel,

  and someone,

  or something, in whose bosom

  you found peace

  in those first moments.

  TOWN CHRONICLER: Next to the train station, in the dark, by a lopsided house, stands the elderly teacher. His silver head leans in against the wall of the house to whisper a secret. With a commanding gesture, as though once again having been waiting for me, he invites me to sit on the sidewalk by his feet. Two plus two equals four, I murmur after him, and instantly feel relief. Three plus three is six. Four plus four—eight. My presence seems to fill him with life: he scribbles exercises on the wall, his eyes aglimmer. Five plus five is ten, I sing along joyfully, craning my neck back to see him standing over me. His coattails fly as he leaps from one exercise to the next. My voice grows soft and thin. I imagine that my feet do not reach the road and I can swing them. Ten plus ten twenty, I cheer, and from the second-story window someone empties a chamber pot of wastewater on us and yells: People are trying to sleep!

  I get up and stand next to the teacher. We are both wet and shamefaced, as though caught in a foolish prison escape. The teacher looks suddenly small and shriveled like a baby. If only I could touch, I would take him in my arms and rock him and hum until he fell asleep. Instead I open my notebook, and in the most official voice I can muster, I ask him for details.

  ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

  The questioners persist:

  And has it no fissures?

  No cracks

  or crevices?

  No.

  And can you

  touch it?

  It has no touch.

  But tell us: Is it full or

  hollow, this great fact

  of your life? Is it slack

  or taut?

  No, no,

  I respond awkwardly, it’s

  here, it’s

  here!

  But you’ve already said that!

  Yes, it’s odd how little

  I have to say

  on the matter. Surprising

  and disappointing, I know,

  but it, namely that,

  meaning the death

  of my son, of Michael,

  twenty-six years ago

  in a foolish accident

  (a prank gone awry,

  a bathtub, a razor,

  veins slashed

  in the course of a game),

  it seemingly swallows up

  the words and the wisdom,

  all the keys.

  Only one thing remains

  steadfast:

  it is here.

  Whether I come or go,

  whether rise or lie—

  it is here.

  When I am alone

  or sitting in the square,

  or teaching a class—

  it is here,

  filling me up entirely

  until nothing is left and

  there is no room,

  sometimes, for myself.

  Yes, that is certainly something I wanted

  to say (and perhaps it should be noted):

  that I have no room

  for myself. Or just

  for a breath. Yes,

  that’s the thing:

  one

  good

  breath,

  a deep

  breath,

  whole

  and pure,

  without the convulsion

  of horror

  in its depths—

  But of the thing itself

  (as I have said)—

  nothing,

  not one word.

  WALKING MAN:

  When I have a flash of memory—

  you sitting over your homework in the kitchen,

  or smiling on the beach, in an old photograph,

  or just asleep in bed—

  I instantly awaken

  what came the moment before.

  Or what will come the moment after.

  Before my memory caught you;

  after the photographer froze you.

  Then I knead you:

  so your features broaden

  into a smile,

  then slowly focus

  in contemplation.

  So your eyes light up suddenly,

  change colors

  in the light,

  brim with fury

  or amazement

  or intrigue.

  Thus you shall walk in your room,

  this way and that, in the cool of the day,

  small waves

  of grace,

  naïveté and youth

  move beneath your skin,

  your fair hair skips

  on your forehead.

  And now you will turn to me and say:

  But, Dad, you don
’t understand—

  Or in your sleep, beneath a sheet,

  your chest will rise and fall,

  rise,

  and fall,

  and rise again.

  (Ah,

  I have asked too much.

  I will be punished.)

  And yet,

  my son,

  you do move,

  you do move

  in me.

  CENTAUR:

  Sometimes I play games

  on it, the goddamn it,

  activities: “Death is

  deathful.” I wink at it,

  like it’s a little game

  we play: “Death will deathify,

  or is it deathened? Deatherized?

  Deathered?” I patiently recite,

  Over and over, rephrasing, finessing:

  “We were deathened, you will be

  deatherized, they will be

  deathed.”

  What else can I do—

  neither write

  nor live. At least

  language

  remains, at least

  it is still

  somewhat free,

  unraveled.

  TOWN CHRONICLER: Tell me about the cradle.

  CENTAUR: What’s that? What did you say?

  TOWN CHRONICLER: The cradle. In the big pile, behind you.

  CENTAUR: I hope with all my heart, you miserable clerk, that my ears deceive me.

  TOWN CHRONICLER: It has two ducks painted on the side.

  CENTAUR: It’s a real shame, clerk. You’ve ruined the moment.

  TOWN CHRONICLER: His shoulders start to swell. His cheeks, too. My gamble has failed. He struggles to move himself away from the desk and stand up. I have to get out of here, quickly. I’ve never seen him not behind his desk. In fact, until this moment I have not seen him stand. I remember what I read about him in the town archives. This is the time to flee, but my legs disobey me. He grows larger and larger in front of me. He will get up, that is clear, get up and uproot the house with him and split the roof. The toys and the clothes and the other remnants of childhood will crumble to dust and scatter every which way. It’s a shame. Such a shame. I was almost beginning to like him. He groans; his face trembles. I hear, from there inside with him, in the room, loud taps and a strange creak, like a large, sharp fingernail scratching a tile. I close my eyes and tell myself it’s only the desk; it’s just the desk making that sound. A thought flies through my mind: He will get up from his chair and pluck me into his room and devour me. And another thought: That desk has hooves.

  CENTAUR: Damn, damn! Not even stand up? Shit. Shit!

  TOWN CHRONICLER: His head plunges onto his chest and he weeps. I swear, he weeps. I’d best be gone. Otherwise I will embarrass him. I will wait one more moment and then leave. His shoulders heave. Quick, truncated shudders. He covers his face with his hands. I count the cracks and grooves in the sidewalk. Correct a few mistakes in the notebook. Then, having no choice, I begin to listen to the different layers of his sobbing until I hear one I know well. If I were to cry, this is likely how I would cry. I listen. From the minute the thing happened to my daughter, I forbade myself any self-pity whatsoever. This requires, of course, a certain degree of self-control and constant guardedness. At night, too. I cannot forbid the centaur to cry, however. That is his private affair, even if for some reason he insists on weeping in my voice. I try to guess what my wife would do in this situation. I rise up on my tiptoes. My hand hovers over his head. This is a hand that has no right to touch a person. Pathetic, impure, the hand of a coward. I take a deep breath and shut my eyes and caress his curls. “There, there,” I say.

  He falls silent. Silence descends on the whole town. I dare not move. Thus, with my hand resting on the centaur’s head, I suddenly hear, very close, right in the place where my hand touches the large, sweaty head, the voice of the man who walks the hills.

  WALKING MAN:

  In the first year

  after, alone at home,

  I sometimes called your name,

  your childhood

  nickname.

  With strength I did not possess,

  in madness, with dauntless

  peril to body and soul,

  I would imbue that short,

  yearned-for

  word

  with magic dust:

  domesticity,

  serenity,

  routine.

  Then utter a calculated, casual:

  “Uwi?”

  If I said it just right, I hoped

  (I dreamed, I schemed),

  you could not refrain

  from responding

  to the simplicity,

  which transcends

  worlds and borders—

  I would say “Uwi” and you would

  slide down and come true

  in a blink, the echo

  of my call,

  a minor tide

  trickling from the there

  into the here. And that would be

  your answer,

  natural and practical,

  as exhalation

  answers inhalation,

  a tribute

  to the miracle of

  powerful routine.

  Oh, I would say to you,

  watch a game with me? Or

  shall we take a walk

  together now?

  How did it happen, my child,

  that of all my words,

  there is one

  that will never,

  ever

  be answered?

  TOWN CHRONICLER: “But where is there?” asks my wife the next day as we take our evening walk—she down the street, me following her, hidden by the shadows. “Where is this there he’s going to? Who even believes that such a place exists?”

  As she ambles, she throws these words into the air. I feel almost weak-kneed from the surprise. I look around to see if anyone has heard her, but fortunately it is only she and I on the street at this hour.

  “Maybe there has been here all this time?” she continues, and the matter-of-fact cadence of her voice unsettles me even more: she might as well be conversing casually in our kitchen.

  “And maybe we’ve been there, too, just a bit, since it happened to us?” She straightens up and a new momentum seems to drive her steps. “Maybe there has always been here, and we just didn’t know it?”

  A cool breeze blows. She wraps a scarf around her neck, leaving her beautiful shoulders bare. She does that for me. Today is my birthday, Your Highness, and she knows how much I love her shoulders.

  “And if that is the case”—she takes a deep breath—“then maybe, maybe she is here with us, every single moment?”

  The powerful stab of the words makes us both stop.

  “Just imagine,” she whispers.

  We keep walking. She up front, I in the shadows of houses and through darkened yards, shaken.

  ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

  “A father should not outlive his child.”

  The clear-eyed logic of this rule

  is rooted not only

  in human life, but also,

  as we know,

  in the science of optics, where

  (in the spirit of the great Spinoza,

  the lens grinder)

  we find an extremely daring

  axiom: “The object

  (‘the life of the son’)

  must never be located

  in the universe

  at a distance

  from which the father

  (‘the observing subject’)

  may encompass all of him

  with one gaze

  from beginning to end.”

  For otherwise

  (and here I interject),

  the observing subject

  would become

  at once

  a lump

  of lignite

  (known also as:

  coal).

  TOWN CHRONICLER:
Now, from day to day, the wayfarer’s walk grows more vigorous. At times it seems, Your Highness, that a nameless power hovers over the town, envelops it, and—like a person sucking an egg through a hole in the shell—it draws these people and others toward it, from kitchens and squares and wharves and beds. (And—if there is truth to the shocking, dizzying rumors, Your Highness—even from palace rooms?)

  The woman atop the belfry—once in a while I look up and see her there among the clouds, her silver hair unbraided, flying—she, too, must sometimes cling to the spire with both arms or else be swept up in the invisible storm. Now, for instance, her mouth is agape, and I do not know whether she is shouting out in the silence or eagerly swallowing words as they float past.

  WALKING MAN:

  Like a fetus hatching

  from its mother’s womb and body,

  his death made me the father

  I had never been—

  it bored

  a hole in me, a wound,

  a space, but also filled me

  with his ubiety,

  which churns in me now

  with an affluence

  of being I have never

  felt before.

  His death

  has qualified me

  to conceive him.

  His death

  makes me

  an empty slough

  of father—and of

  mother: it bares

  my breast for

  no one there to suckle.

  And on the walls

  of my womb,

  which on that day was hewn,

  his death—with fleeing captive’s fingernails—

  notches off the score of days

  without him.

  Thus, with lucent chisel,

  his death

  engraves its news on me:

  the bereaved

  will always

  woman be.

  TOWN CHRONICLER: The next night, my wife and I take our daily walk again. Between the houses we catch an occasional glimpse of the small procession ambling over the hilltops on the horizon.

  TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE: In recent days I think I see, over their heads, in the air, some sort of reddish flicker, a chain of embers hovering above …

  TOWN CHRONICLER: As usual, she sets our pace. When she pauses, I stop, too. Sometimes, when she is lost in thought, I must enter a yard and huddle behind a fence, praying I won’t encounter a dog. At this moment she watches the strange embers at length, and I, as always, watch her. The faint moonlight falls on her face. She was so beautiful once. She is now, too.

  When we finally arrive at her home, she opens the door. But tonight she lingers at the doorway, turns, and looks straight into the dark, as though guessing exactly where I am hiding. I feel the home current wafting toward me, warm and fragrant. She hugs her body and sighs softly. I may be wrong, but perhaps it is her way of telling me that she would like to fall upon me now, screaming, teeth bared, and beat me furiously with her fists, tear my skin off with her nails.