eyes coming to a dead end, like railway tracks in a landscape reaching the point where the workers went home and the job has been left for some other time, tomorrow or never. A sense of nowhere to go. The railway tracks lying there pointing, making the landscape a pool—or a picture you can see.
She contemplates. I understand, that thoughts like that exist: what exactly do I want, where am I going, if I am even able; and she asks me if it’s a problem. If I can’t get away, if I have to stay here, is it then—a problem.
I shrug. I suppose not, I say. But both of us know it is; that it really is a problem.
Cooped up in here.
The winter shuts you in or shuts you out, that’s how it feels, a sense of not being able to get anywhere. It’s inside us both. No way forward, no way back. She wants to know if I’m having trouble finding rest here. You can’t really settle. That’s how she puts it. There’s a pause. Neither of us breathes. Again, I shrug.
I’m fine, I say.
But it’s not about finding rest. It makes no difference, rest or no.
I’m in love, I tell her finally, sitting down at the table opposite her. Her eyes dart between me and the receipts; she thinks better of it and pushes them aside.
Yes, she says.
It’s making me restless, I say in a voice that sounds brittle, dry, combustible. A ray of sun captured in a glass would be enough to make it break; it could happen any time. Forcible means. Because in a way I’ve already seen too much. An odd sense, all of a sudden, of things being arbitrary. That it’s not my dead man who’s important; suddenly it’s someone else, the new man, on whom my life depends. I think to myself: can I never just be in one place. Without that magnetism. That’s what the snow does. Or that’s the illness the snow cannot cover up, cannot heal; the snow as salt falling upon injured raw thoughts, raw emotions. When did it happen. The snow comes in the night, and the magnetism wells up in me, I wake up magnetic, and as a magnet: held back, restrained, the entire space between this new man and me vibrates in that way. A disconcerting tension. Movements drawn in the air, movements revealing themselves—the second before they exist: then perhaps amounting to nothing. Distress at what might have been—so precious.
I think: this is anything but precious.
It’s foreboding, the way a house can be when you arrive at a late hour and the lights are out. Or early—and the lights are out. I think I’d rather be in an unhappy relationship with someone than this: to be without someone. Without those eyes to—well, what, exactly. Give me life. All the time to bring me into being, with just a glance. Rather come into being as a stranger, someone else, than this, not to exist at all.
I am in love with the wrong man. And I am constantly leaving someone I love. A person can come unstuck, but I didn’t come home for comfort.
It’s about the apples. It’s that.
For you have lost everything.
Nothing is like you remember it, and everything you encounter clutters your picture of how. Nothing remains of the world you remember; moreover, it’s impossible, it cannot ever have existed. It’s something other than love, something other than an absence of love. It’s the picture that arises when the two things are placed on top of each other. A blurred image in which all faces become strangely open and desolate, imbued with—well, what, exactly. Time that won’t; a room that won’t.
And the grief on that account.
The illusionist.
I FALL AND remain lying in the grass. Lying the way I landed. Late August, a tractor idling in the field out back. The door of the cab is wide open, abandoned, mid-sentence.
There is a lack of movement in the landscape.
As though the day in fact is night; as though the sun in fact is a rice-paper lantern suspended from the ceiling, as though someone just wants to make sure everyone is asleep. That no one is reading or talking, or interfering with each other, or looking at comics. In other words: that no unreason occurs.
But then there is nothing but unreason: all of a sudden unreason is the only thing there is.
Are you asleep, I whisper to my mother.
There’s no answer. The words linger, an echo from before, my dead man’s voice; are you asleep, he asks.
And I was.
Or else I was playing dead.
The knots in the ceiling planks resemble almost anything. A five-legged deer. A half-moon, dripping. Something a person doesn’t forget in a hurry. An apple tree with red apples in a corner of the garden, those kinds of remains; summer in mid-winter. And still it snows.
As it has snowed all day, it continues to snow.
As though the snow wants to prove something: that the composure with which snow can fall never has to do with fatigue; the snow is not sedate, it is simply inhuman. Like the winter this year, inhuman in every respect. Marching tirelessly on, repeating itself in patterns understood by no one. The dark is paled by the brightness of snow. Every now and then a red apple falls through the dim gray into the snow, here beneath the tree’s basket of a crown, black bark. A snap as the apple strikes the membrane of hard ice formed by the change in the weather that never materialized other than as a moment’s hesitation in the winter, a sudden mid-winter assault—of summer. At once the frost came whistling. Then a hard casing of ice, fifty millimeters thick, now with a coat of new snow. It’s all right, I say to my sleeping mother, whispering the words in the dark, sleep now.
It can be as simple as that, too.
That you can lie quietly together and be somewhere else, alone.
Yes, says my mother, awakening with a start.
Where have you been, I ask myself, what was it you needed to finish.
Can’t you sleep, she asks, turning in the bed. I think: what am I doing here, in my parents’ bed. I’m far too old to lie here; and always have been.
Everything is the opposite. The snow whirling up, vanishing into a cloud that cannot be distinguished from sky. I whisper to my mother: yes, I whisper, go back to sleep. She sleeps at once, without transition, departs the room, and yet lies so completely still. For years you don’t notice, but then it becomes so clear, death residing in your own mother; you see your grandmother in her, her mother in yours. And then another face still, recognizable, and yet unfamiliar. A disconcerting face, this third one.
She turns over onto her side and sleeps on.
Then turns and sleeps again.
More than once: a face, my mother’s face, disappearing. And the third face that can only be my own, the only explanation: mine.
Inhumanly tall grass.
Inhuman nights. I think—I have been so spoiled. I have never wanted anything I couldn’t have. Now there’s only one thing I want, him, and everything I don’t want I can have.
Rest and stillness.
ALL THE TIME I had the feeling there was only one thing left keeping me in this world. But then
