BLANK PAGES . . . IN THEM, AS A WATERMARK SEEN WHEN held up to the window’s light, hides the Delphic oracle, Gnothi Seauton, save it isn’t the window’s light that makes the command visible. Certain scenes the book prescribes for itself, a kind of fate. Critics disdain the “episodic” but it is an ancient decree the writer, when honest, is helpless to deny. Two sentences and the morning’s writing feels done; and those words not even fictive, not furthering the plot, what of plot there is—criticism masking cryptic doubts. What more there is to write is hidden in what is already written, those pages already filled that, facedown on the desk, are as blank as the unwritten pages awaiting the next words.
The hour stretched out before me, longer than itself.
Essays to grade sat in a folder in my bag; notes to review before teaching; it all whispers and waits on the edge where time becomes time again, when memory returns to its confines as a debtor returns to prison; the obligatory day is the turnkey, locking memory away.
My father’s name was Allan; my mother’s name was Maria. These are facts I keep to myself. I think of them as Father and Mother; those are the names by which they live in me, names that are not names at all, simply these earthly types the gravestones mark: father, wife. Allan was a man who died after destroying his career in crazed pursuit of translating a holy text; Father was the man who on his deathbed forgot my name, the name he gave me, and who said, looking at me directly, “You’ve been a good son.” The leaves of the poplar clicked against the window as they did then, a gentle coaxing to pay attention not too closely. The white underside of the poplar leaves—
Father didn’t want a funeral, but his mother-in-law refused him; she already thought he was deranged. She arrived by train, carrying in both hands ponderously in front of her a portmanteau stitched together from an old tapestry: a red bird with a flame-like tail perched on a water bowl in the middle of a flower garden, and curving from underneath the bag, slightly frayed, a sundial complete with shadow; the time was two o’clock.
“Take this, Daniel,” she said, handing it to me, a bag I couldn’t lift by myself. All my family save my aunt called me Danny; but my grandmother believed in the propriety of the speaking of proper names as much as she betrayed that propriety in her actions. I dragged her bag after me as I followed her down the hall. “Allan, Allan,” she sang out, almost as if singing a song to coax a child from his hiding spot. “Allan . . .” Her voice wandered through the house ahead of her, spreading out through the rooms she had yet to bodily enter, filling in every empty space with her overabundant self. I silently dragged time down the hall after her. “Allan, I’m here, I’m here to help.” Stopping to look down at me, “Now, go along and get me a cup of lemon tea, my feet are killing me, from travel, you know this about me,” and as if she hadn’t been speaking to me at all, picking up her address to my father mid-sentence, “Allan, travel wrecks my nerves. I feel faint, Allan. Allan, I feel—” and then she stopped talking. Not because Father had emerged from his study, but because she saw, in the middle of the living room, the fire in embers behind them, the two coffins.
“We don’t have any tea.” Father had appeared.
“No, you don’t,” she said in a voice of deep concern, and, hearing me inch up behind her with her massive bag, sat down upon it, giving me only a moment to escape being sat upon myself, and started crying, not loudly, but silently, the most quiet I ever remember her being. She cried and looked at the coffins. Minutes passed. Father wandered back to his office, back to his desk, the scroll open on it, window open despite October’s chill.
She looked at me blankly. “It’s so small.”
I looked at the dark box in which my sister lay. “She is small,” I said, and put my arm on her knee, and stood beside her while she cried. Everything was so quiet. I could hear my father’s pen scratch the page from his study down the hall.
There was also the scratch from my own pen, sitting there at my desk, which was his desk then. There in the blank pages hid the old oracle, know thyself, impossible decree. It was Aunt Leonie who, sickly on her bed when we visited in the summer, drank lemon tea and ate cookies, asking after the gossip of the town. But Aunt Leonie is not my aunt, just a character in another book whom I want to be a character in mine. My grandmother was Clarel; she drank instant coffee; she was grief-struck by her daughter’s death—the word, I think, is siderated. The muses, I thought as I put the written pages on a pile and put the pile away, tell lies as if they were the truth, and tell the truth when they like. Memory is the mother of the muses.
As I grabbed my bag to go to work I thought about Clarel’s bag, a bag as large as I was at the time, a bag I could have curled up within and gone to sleep—it would be as if I had never been born. I thought about the bag, and what the bag implied; that somewhere, at an angle almost discernible, there sat in the sky a bright sun, a sun that never moved, whose light cast down on the garden also grew a shadow on the sundial. It was two o’clock. And written on the sundial, in letters finer than the thread could show, were these words: The Hour Knows / What Shadows Show.