An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

from my case, tried to draw what I had always failed to describe; it was a likeness I was pleased with until, the car hitting a rut in the road, I drew a line through his eye. His was a face that could not be described; there was a line between his eyes that cut through them. He looked at me as if I were him. “You know it already. Your mother has died.” My father, he was not an unfeeling man; he spoke with no emotion. I can hear his voice now. Emotion—it stops when it enters grief’s true realm. The bird sang out the hour .
    I had a little sister and no mother; my father had a daughter and no wife. My sister was not well. The doctor handed her to my father and said she did not have long to live, that my father should name her, but he wouldn’t. He said he wouldn’t give her a name. He simply took her from the doctor—a man who seemed to me to disappear at that very instant, as if in being in such proximity to death and life made him less than material, subject to laws other than natural laws—and beganpacing through the house, through the long hours left in the night, until the morning grayed the sky into vision, humming some tune that is no song, and I followed him, humming the same tuneless notes, echoing his steps with my steps, running my fingers along the walls of the house until, the sun breaking the horizon’s line, he stopped his dark song, stopped his wandering, and said, “It’s done.”
    It was my sister .

CHAPTER 9
    T HE BOX WAS EMPTY.
    The girl put the empty box back on her mother’s dresser and went back to her room. She got down on her stomach and inched under the bed; her legs stuck out.
    The girl thought about the pearl in the duct. She could see it in her mind, patient in the dark, a little world around which the hot wind blows. She could be as patient as the pearl; she was a pearl herself; her mother called her “my little pearl”; her name was Pearl. On her stomach, under the bed, blanket’s bright fringe dimming the light, the girl knew what it was the pearl felt like.
    She knew that the metal grating led downward into the house; she could picture it. She could see the duct slope downward and expand, she saw the duct beneath the house was larger than the house, widening into the earth beneath the foundation, opening into the inner ocean, the ocean inside the world where the islands are still uncharted, where there was no map, where the stone faces stood sentry looking for ships, statues whose eyes were pearls; she could see the pearl in the sea, falling down in the water, swayed only slightly by the current as it blew. She saw it falling, saw on the ocean’s bed the oyster with unhinged mouth open, awaiting the pearl’s return. Pearl was in the ocean too: blanket’s blue fringesealike swaying surrounding her. It was nice to drown; necessary. Then she could hear the voices. The voices in the water. One of the voices was her mother’s.
    It came up through the ductwork, her mother’s voice in the kitchen. She was talking but no one was there with her. It was the old story, the story her mother told: The giant took out his heart and buried it . Her mother’s voice told her the story from the ocean’s bed where in the water all the stories tell themselves over and over again. Pearl fell with the pearl, lullaby of her mother’s voice. The box was empty, but it was empty in another world, a world in which the night sky was starless as was the inside of the box, night’s black velvet. That was a world in which everyone was asleep. That was the world everyone slept in, the world before the turbulent dreams began.
    Mother’s voice stopped speaking before Pearl heard it stop. In her dream her mother’s voice was the ocean. The long current was the pull on her legs, it was the current, until the ocean stopped being the ocean, when the blue water became again the blue fringe, when she woke up. Her mother