February 17, 2013

• Forgetfulness

  They were in a library that had no books. They had all been checked out and never returned.

  On the mezzanine they sat at a drexel table and watched the sunlight filter in through pores in the drapery. The sun set two hours earlier in the library. A garden grew on the second floor that no one watered. Everyone who looked at it walked away thinking that outer space is a garden.

  They did homework. He yawned ferociously.

  ‘Get more sleep,’ she said. He tried to not look at her hair, which she never did.

  ‘Maybe you should get less sleep.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep last night. I’m just not a yawner.’

  Do not use the word love, he thought. Do not use it.

  ‘Should we move on? I’m tired of science.’

  ‘No,’ she said. She tapped her feet on the curled table legs. He had been moving but he froze, like the man on the third floor staring quietly at an empty shelf.

  ‘Well maybe we should just go down to the pond and skip stones instead.’

  ‘Why are you always so serious?’ She said this in a way that invited him to speak for hours.

  ‘Because I am afraid.’

  He could have danced with her but he did not want to ruin the fact that he did not know what the truth was. The books had all been checked out.

  ‘I don’t like quotation marks,’ she said. ‘They are thick as glass.’

  It was a town where there were no fines and therefore no one did anything. The thin wood steps creaked as he took them one at a time all the way down. He had reached the moment where there was too much of the world to say anything.

  The librarian had a splotchy beard, half-moon glasses and hair like a cresting wave. He looked up from his ledger with the long, dried-out curiosity of an experimental physicist.

  ‘I’d like to return this book,’ the boy said.

  ‘This book isn’t in our records,’ the librarian said as he index fingered his way down a list.

  ‘All the same.’

  He tore his glasses from his face and teepeed his hands together. ‘Stop trying to mean something.’

  Outside a thin mist rose up from nowhere, like the sewers were breathing out sweet air, like the roads were sweating their long-held misery, like the twilight air was where the ocean hung. He walked through it to another world. In a rutebega field a woman’s hands and face came to him, with messy hair and dirty hands, but he knew that she would love him, if she did not love another.

  ‘We live in a cloud of nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Our lives are prayers for rain,’ she said. 

  Where did Woman come from? Why was the world sinking down?

  It occurred to him that it was never meant to be night. They stared together at the forest where the souls of those awake wandered in their truest forms. They laughed, they ran, they danced, and if they wept, they wept alone.

  ‘Have you ever cried?’ he asked.

  ‘I have never stopped,’ she said.

  The moon shone a curious silver light through the forest, that made the silhouettes light against the darkened trees, but it did not matter for waking souls are blind. The boy watched as hands and faces, each with a pair of broken wings, rose up in the field around them and bowed and prayed toward the forest. Could there be enough prayers for a world unknown to itself?

  ‘I watched the moon through my bedroom window as a child. Can we never see ourselves?’

  ‘You only die at others’ graves.’

  He bowed his head. ‘What does your body look like?’

  ‘I have chosen to weep; I shall never love.’

  On the way home he realized the sky was a contradiction of the words nothing and everything, just as humans were. Dawn came and he tripped in the dirt and left behind him a pool of darkened mud. At home his parents sat at the table with their hands clasped, as though in weak prayer. They said they were getting a divorce and he realized that he had never seen them as together. He closed the door gently behind him.

  Do not use the word love, he thought in the tone of a closing garage door.

  It was hot next to the open fields, on the road lined by insect-ridden telephone poles that stretched on toward forever. He tried to remember the night before; nothing in the world of meaning is an inference. It grew rocky and he found a set of train tracks and followed them to a ravine. Below the sky-high trestle miners worked at the base of the mountain in a drying creek bed. They were small compared to his past. His feet dangled from the tracks and the world seemed spread out to him, like he was a being that . . .

  He put his hands on his cheeks and stared ahead. He wondered if he was praying.

  • 1:15 pm
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