I WOKE UP LATE. SUCH A SIMPLE SENTENCE. I WOKE UP late and went to school.
My office door stood wide open. I walked in. Nothing was missing.
On my desk, in the very middle of it, some pages stapled together. I sat down on my desk and picked it up. Handwritten at the top in blue ink: Here is my paper—Ishmael.
The children who sat in the desks in that school forgot everything as soon as they learned it. In the afternoons the hill’s giant shadow fell over the school—a heartless shadow—and the morning’s lessons, what two apples added to two apples equals, what the names of the shapes on the map were, all disappeared. The teacher didn’t notice that anything was wrong, for she would forget herself what she taught.
When the children went home they were quieter than when they left. It was a quiet their parents appreciated, which made them quiet as well.
The children would go to school and forget more and more of what they had known of the world.
Many things struck them all as beautiful, the teacher and the students. A golden butterfly flew in the open window and fluttered around the room in widening circles, a butterfly that seemed to glow. It landed on the finger of one boy who held his finger out, but the glow dimmed, and the butterfly flew weakly away.
Eventually there were no words left that any of the children could remember, and their parents remembered only a few—their child’s name, perhaps, or perhaps their own.
One day, before the school bell rang, the children wandered out of the schoolhouse. They wandered out only because the door had been left open. They walked past their parents even as their parents called out their names. They had no names they knew. Each child wandered off in his or her own direction, they didn’t know to follow each other.
The boy on whose finger the butterfly had landed walked through a field of goldenrod. Bees as big as thumbs hummed as they worked, and the boy heard this, and he hummed too. He hummed as he wandered through the field.
He walked across the field and into the woods where the jack-in-the-pulpit grows. The forest was dark but the boy had forgotten how to be afraid.
He saw a little glow shining from a hole in the ground and he walked over to it and looked in. There in the bottom of it was the golden butterfly glowing, but when the boy reached down to touch it, it flew up beyond his reach, and circled in widening circles around him.
A fragment of the butterfly’s wing had broken off, and glowed golden in the dirt. The boy reached for it but it always seemed below his grasp, so that without knowing he was doing so, the boy dug the hole deeper, dug until he was standing inside the hole he was digging, and then the fragment was in his hand, and he dug no more. The glow went out as soon as he held it. But something else glowed, a pale white glow. The boy bent down and picked up a rock. It was a white rock, a crystal rock, a quartz. It felt warm in the boy’s hand, and gently pulsed. The boy closed his hand around it and felt it beat warmly in his hand.
The butterfly ceased its circling and landed on the boy’s shoulder. He looked at it, and when it flew away, he followed it. He climbed out the hole with rock in hand and followed its golden light through the dark woods, followed it through the field of goldenrod where the bees slept inside their blooms. He followed it all the way to his school, and up the hill that stood next to the school. The sun was rising, but the boy didn’t know the difference between night and day. He followed the butterfly up the hill to a little spring, a little spring in the middle of a little pond. The butterfly dipped down and touched the water, flew up and over to the boy and gently touched his hand that held the beating rock. The butterfly repeated this over and over again, until a dim thought grew bright in the forgetful boy’s head.
The boy threw the stone into the pond, into the spring, and it disappeared with a splash. The butterfly flew in front of the boy’s face and glowed so brightly the boy had to close his eyes. He heard himself say, “Too bright.” These are the first words the boy remembers ever saying.
Somewhere the hill that was a giant opened his eyes, and his eyes grew wider. He didn’t stand up, he didn’t wander off. The giant only opened his eyes and watched. He saw the schoolhouse beside him. He felt the boy walking down his back.
At every step the boy remembered another word, but they were dim words, unconnected to anything he saw, anything in the world. He kept repeating to himself, “and and and.”
And when he had walked down the hill he found himself by habit walking home. He knew it was his home when he saw it. He knocked on the door and when the door opened he saw a man who bent down and opened his arms and looked at him.
Then the boy remembered, and he said one word. The boy said, “Father.”
I put the paper down and walked to my office window.
I could see the yellow lawn and the leafless trees through the transparent reflection of my own face. Through my own face I could see the pale sky, so very pale, blank as a page, and I thought to myself, too bright, too bright.
“Father,” I said.
And my own face said “Father” back to me.