A SINGLE GRAIN OF SAND.
In the oyster’s mouth—whose whole body is mouth—it becomes a pearl. The bivalve’s irritant becomes the lady’s jewel.
It is a little world, smooth and round. It can be strung on a thread that, worn against the throat, warms to a blood-heat. It can be set on the golden throne of a ring’s setting—a surface milky white, lustrous, but giving back no reflection to the one who brings her hand close to another’s face, one who asks to see the ring, and nearing it, sees his own face in silhouette, a shadow slightly distended across the curved surface. It can be kept loose, in a wooden box with a brass clasp, a box lined with black velvet, a mirror on the lid’s underside—not unlike the nacre in which it was formed—and a child who plays at “mother,” who furtively sneaks into Mother’s room, removes with nervous hand the box from the dresser on which it lay, catching a glimpse of herself as she does so in the wardrobe’s glass, then running out of the bedroom, down the hall, the pearl crashing against the box’s wall, marking the rhythm of her hurried pace.
When she opens the box she sees herself; then she sees the luminescent world against the plush black. A stolen world glows brighter against the night, the night in the box. She picks it up. It weighs almost nothing; isn’t cool to the touch, nor warm—it feels as if it has no temperature at all, a sort of absence in the hand. She rolls it around in her palm, mesmerized, the pearl caught briefly in its orbit by the lines in her palm, in which a palmist would read the future: it will be thrown up in the air, love and life, and transformed as it falls. And as if hearing the seer’s prediction—this seer who does not exist, or doesn’t exist yet—the little girl picks up the pearl between two fingers, picks up her mother’s pearl saved for the day when she has enough for a bracelet—and tosses it into the air. The girl meant to catch it, but didn’t. It hit the side of her hand and bounced away, fell onto the ground, and rolled across the floor with a noise that sounded like a pencil drawing a dark line on a page, rolled underneath the girl’s bed, through the quilt’s tassels that brushed against the floor, the pearl rolled through that loose veil into the darkness under the bed, disappeared to the girl’s eyes, and then, she heard it as it happened, rolled into the heating register and fell in, one tiny metallic clank revealing its fate. The girl sat up; she had been peering under the bed; she didn’t cry, but felt on the verge of tears; she didn’t know why, she didn’t know how to explain it to herself, but she felt proud.
There is no end of detail to things that don’t exist. This pearl?—it had a little mark, a scar almost, like a birthmark, that the jeweler would have drilled through when the time came to pierce through the flaw to make the object flawless. The mother, when she toyed with the pearl, something she did not do often, would unconsciously rub her thumb against that slightest scar, caught in some reverie, some daydream, about her past—a series of thoughts with no connection—she remembered being a little girl with a sore throat, and that her father brought to her bed a cup full of shaved ice about which she thought, when she held it, that the cold rose above the rim as steam rises above a mug of tea, but opposite, and invisible; the mother thought she could see such things. The day of the total eclipse when the silver poplar’s shadow turned into flame, and the disappointment after, when the flame was only shadow again—she remembered these things, holding the pearl in her fingers, rubbing the scar with her thumb. There is no end of detail in that world that doesn’t exist; it is in this world where detail is a limited resource, this world in which I live. There is a line across which the fact wanders and becomes imaginary, but like the equator, it is an imaginary line—one crosses it and knows something is awry only when the stars rise at night in ludicrous combinations. One remembers how the stars should look, though it is impossible to describe to anyone else—to one’s wife: that the bluish star should be closer to the triangle in which two points are more or less reddish (and then pointing), see?, there by the moon! There is a blurry edge, a blurry end, to detail in this world—the ragged moon.
I have a memory, certain memories, in my head. I don’t trust them but I need them. When I close my eyes I can call them to mind, a world that unfolds in the darkness of my head, a world my head contains, in which I watch myself inside myself, in which I can even see my own face, eerie mirror of thinking backwards through time. I see myself standing in the door to my father’s study, leaning against the jamb; he doesn’t know I’m there; he has a scroll and a book open on his desk; the scroll, which he looks at often, his eyes opening wide or narrowing in wonder or in scrutiny, and then he writes in the other book open on his desk; the sound of his writing, of pen on page, I cannot see it, but in my memory I see that sound in lines swirling up from the paper, multiplying as he writes, cocooning him in his own work until I cannot see my father at all, only gray lines moving by their own volition, slowly stilling into form, and my father some strange pupa within the inky silk, becoming something I don’t know.
I see I’ve crossed the equator again. A pearl is made of consecutive layers of nacre, and if one had the patience, and the right tool, one could remove layer after layer—this process might take years—remove the beautiful sheen, ignore the nacre, and find in the very center that irritant in the mouth that caused the unconscious reflex to begin, the helpless instinct that makes of small pain subtle beauty. I would find—
A single grain of sand.