Lines of light and lines of longing, passing through me, unobservable, a thing that longs.
And nothing more? Am I nothing more?
I shall stop up my eyes, I shall call back my senses, I shall efface all the world from my thoughts, or, since this is barely possible, shall esteem it as empty and false, and thus holding converse only with my own self, and studying my own nature, shall endeavor to attain by degrees a greater familiarity and intimacy with the thing that I am.
I am a thing that remembers.
I saw her face the first time in its reflection. She was staring into this mirror.
I had not known before that moment that she existed. I did not know it even while I saw. It was her father I was searching for, not yet knowing of the daughter's existence.
The mother had died, an alcoholic death, it appears to be a theme.
Dana was very devoted to her suffering father, attending to him, whether in his melancholy brooding or fleeting fits of inspiration, in the town whose name I cannot recall.
The stars are threshed, and the souls are threshed from their husks. This I recall. It is Blake.
The earth has tilted and the night now is very long. It is the season of diminished daylight, diminished desires, and still I am here. Blind motion rules the world, and the world is full of tilt.
When I came that day it was in autumn, and I passed through the door and up these curling stairs, like the shimmery inside of a shell, a passage from a dream.
A prince might climb these stairs to find his pleasure.
So let me find my pleasure.
It is time, after all, that makes the difference. Remark the difference that separates time's deep and steady stillness from the thin drip-drip-drip of the now. It is the universe's very best trick. Figure it out and you've figured out a beauty, recherche'd your way to temps perdu, to the dark bright mystery on the other side of light.
I followed wordlessly after him, my mind on the possibilities of our collaboration, mounted these swirling steps as now I cannot, assaulted here by moments here and moments gone, the drip-drip-drip of now, momentarily battered by the shallow trickling of time, laced with terrors of longing, on stairs that lead to regions one can barely contemplate, as distant as pity, infinitely remote and steps away: the long dark corridor of unglimpsed links.
I had thought to propose to him that he and I might work together, together approach the formidable problem of merging quantum reality, now clarified through his work, with Einstein's truth. He had presented a realistic model of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. The task now was to reconcile it with relativistic time.
The passage of time is nothing real but a projection from our inner worlds. We know this from Einstein's physics, which shows us a time as stilled as spread space. Time is static, the flow unreal: it is Einstein's truth, and it is the truth. The flow of moments, which seems so relentless and so real, which seems to carry off one's every treasure, leaving one like a chest spilled open on the waves: unreal, unreal. The enigma is that a seeming correlate of that unreal time is present in the quantum world, tangled in quantum entanglement itself. I meant to make that problem mine and with it make my life.
It was her image that I saw first, as she stared into this mirror. I was about to descend, my foot was in midair, seeking the solid state of stair. It was late afternoon, and there was a shaft of autumnal sunlight from the skylight above that left her in the shadows like cobwebs clinging while it fell across her mirrored image.
A trick of the light; I know something of these. I had published several promising papers on the problems of partial diffusion. I saw her face in its reflection and, beset by partial confusion, first thought it a portrait, framed in gilt, capturing a moment in the life of a young girl who wore an expression of the utmost strangeness on her otherwise hopelessly lovely ... lovely...
Lovely.
How to describe that face that had been startled into staring wonder, a girl hammered out of furious gold: I cannot. I see it now before me, but cannot. Yes, her hair was light, yes, I can say that, and that her eyes were blue, because I know it and see it still, the Irish blue, Hibernian blue, in hue Hibernian blue, but in their secretive veil, speaking of extravagances of soul, the other strain, the father's line, the duality of her lines of descent the mirror image of my own, and they were carried through into her lovely, lovely, lovely, as the hosts cried one unto the other, and said holy, holy, holy, though properties of matter all, but what were those properties that made that face that face, oh God that face?
I lose my drift and am in danger of losing far more, for it might possibly be the case that if I ceased entirely to hate that I should likewise cease altogether to exist.
I had thought it was a painting hung upon a wall and framed in gilt. So still, she stared, a soundless gasp formed by her features of wild wonder.
It was a look that I had dreamed to startle in a face, to startle deeper down inside. Alighting from the train, one would turn back to me and gaze, astonished into knowing. But I mistook the seized expression before me as merely representational, hung soulless behind clear glass, and no fingers of light had gone forth to tremble out its secrets.
Later and later, after days and even weeks of reliving her face, I realized why it was that she was gazing in the mirror with that look of violation.
It was, of course, because she had caught my reflection in this gilt-framed glass, the staring stranger poised in the disequilibrium of interrupted descent. The simplest of optical laws: light travels in straight lines. If I saw her image, then she saw mine.
When she whirled around to face me, it was with still that wildness of stare. The one I returned her must have been just as sick with startle.
— I thought you weren't real.
— Not real?
Her voice was a hoarse whisper, and nothing lilting, as if it were being forced out of lungs that were ruined. She shook her head, to indicate a loss for something more in the way of speech. I answered her in kind. Like mirror images, we reciprocally shook.
— I thought you were a painting.
Her eyes were a blue, both cold and searing, I'd never seen, and I was, with all the certitude of well-formed instinct, afraid.
— Who are you?
— Dana Mallach.
— His daughter, then.
— Yes, his daughter, yes.
Her image was contained in here, this sheet of deadened glass that gives me nothing back, her eyes opening wide in startled attention at the intruder breaking and entering into her self-reflection.
She had been staring into this glass, and why, I wonder. In the moment before I came upon her she might have been arranging her hair or losing herself in the metaphysics of self:
Who am I, and what, and where, and whatever it is that I am, how can it be that I am it, just this one and not another, that I am some something in the world, and not the world itself or something like it?
I don't think I ever again saw her glance into a mirror.
The lines of light pass coldly through me, they pass me by, I am a thing hideously unmirrored, the glass empty like the vacant eye that the pitiless show, or like, yes, far more like and awful and true, a young man's eye subjected to a violence of unvisioning, a mirror of the world no more, and there is a girl who squats in the grass beside him, the meaningless message of her chattering teeth the only comment offered in the suddenly split night, so great a silence after so great a noise, and that dead eye filling up with blankness, like this emptied eye before me.
I once had thought that darkness was the something real and light was bare privation. Darkness had seemed to me to carry the heft of substance, enough to hold the weight of predication. I had thought it was the properties of darkness that splashed colors over the world.
We had lain beneath the tree in our backyard, in the mythical land of distant Olympia, with a flashlight playing over the underside of the inky leaves. The man beside me was my father. No metaphysician would have been safe in his presence, but I was safe. Even in the dark, dark night, safe as safe could be. He had little patience for propositional nonsense, but he was infinitely patient with me.
— Look, Justin. See the light up there in the tree. Where did the light got?
My father flicked the instrument so that the end of it was now facing out into the darkness and there was no more light.
— You turned it off.
He took my little hand and laid it over the flashlight's end and my hand's darkness melted away. There were my fingers: one, two, three, four, five. He flicked the torch back against the bark of the trunk, and I followed the spectral orb as it traveled up the trunk, up into the rustling treetop and then out into midair, where it was swallowed and seen no more.
— Me!
My father handed the flashlight over into my own small hands, so small that the heavy flashlight needed them both to hold it aloft, and I pointed the beam up into the leaves, and felt the fingers of light reaching out and up to touch the leaves that spread themselves above us. I rubbed the darkness off, and where I rubbed dim colors came, but the instant my fingers of light left the surface of the leaves, the darkness spilled back over.
I have ascended. The stairway swirls away beneath me.
Mallach led me up into this room, his cluttered study, that autumn afternoon, and we sat across from each other. I had waylaid him as he tried to drift invisibly past me in the department hallway, and he had bade me come to his house to talk about physics, but why he had so bade me I could only wonder now. He was eminently polite, although his crossed leg jiggled with impatience and his expression was bemused, as if he could make no sense of what it was I was saying, as I could make no sense of him, each of us dumbfounded by the matted meaninglessness of the other. He had books and papers, physics, metaphysics, theology and poetry, heaped one upon another, cohabiting and crossbreeding in this room as they did in his violated mind.
Now it is tidied up, this room, the labor of my Dana, who lives only to sort it out, by the dark lights of her despair. She thinks to lead a useful life through this, she thinks to be redeemed. She thinks to think of nothing else, but perhaps she will think again.
There is old sorrow heaped up high here in the corners, the stale odor of her father's old despair, desolating his senses through all the years since she had died, the giddy woman whom he had seen fit to call extraordinary. Her exit, drunk against a township tree, had worked to loosen his ontic attachment, that and his world failure. Attachment had gone slack in a way that wouldn't retract, each tug and it hung looser, and Dotty's death was such a tug, a hefty one.
There is a conclusion to be drawn from that. Disagreeable deduction.
The sickness of his old sorrow still hangs thick. Each madness has an odor of its own and I know his, as I know hers, for the smell of her madness is in this house, too, Dana's own madness, from which I had thought, madly, to save her.
One sees how it was, that I loved her. Another deduction. Will inference never cease?
I am a real thing and really exist, but what thing, what thing, I am what thing?
The haunted child would walk this unlit corridor, its length made double and triple by her frantic vision. I see her now approaching from the far end, her groping eyes sifting through the darkness, grain by grain.
— Every night, Dana?
— Mmm. Until one night my mother woke up and saw me standing at her doorway. She got me to tell her what I was doing and how I did the same thing every single night. That I would see things, terrible things, and that I'd come to check that she and Daddy were all right. She told my pediatrician, and he prescribed some sort of pediatric tranquilizer. I was sedated from age eight to eleven.
She spoke like the little girl that she had been and still became sometimes, childish and charming, the girl who lacked the terrifying knowledge, and I teased her that the early sedation was the explanation for why she had never grown to her full height, for judging by her long, tapering fingers, she ought to have been a taller woman than she is. It was either the lack of sleep or its brutal cure, I teased her, that had kept her from attaining the full stature for which she had been intended.
She is slowly coming toward me, the little barefoot girl in the long white nightgown, the drip-drip-drip of time disordered, so that I can see her approaching down this long unlit corridor. As she would nightly go, so she goes now, on her way to her parents' room, and she will soundlessly open the door and watch them sleeping side by side in their shared bed. I could trail her as she goes and see them for myself.
She approaches and will pass me by, padding softly on small icy feet, and I can see how the properties of darkness have swollen her pupils so that her eyes are given over to blackness, how they peer for the intruder in her house, and she is coming toward me, and passes so near that I can feel the pitiful tremble that the life makes within her and I am here.
I am awash, I am awash, for it is Dana's room, Dana's room, Justin Childs is in Dana's room, and I am Justin Childs.
And how singular is my position, what a singularity it is that I inhabit, so that she ought to pity me, why can't she pity me? I'd pity her to know her so, I'd pity her to the deepest regions where pity can go and I'd cry out for pity's sake—for pity's sake—that I could go no farther, that I could not go with her through all those endless reaches one is made to wander alone, so far a distance from pity's touch and pity's voice.
It is Dana's bed, it is Dana's bed, and the smell that is of her comes into me like my own deepest thought, only deeper than thought, and I must still myself, move less eagerly than I would wish, eagerness now would be the end of me, eagerness above all else must be resisted. I must force my way back into immobility, press myself back and yet farther back until I am contained in absolute stillness.
I would not move a muscle, so long as she slept, and I watched her eyelids shiver over her dreams.
—Do you dream of me, Dana?
I am no dream, though I may haunt her sleeping dawns as I haunt her sleepless nights, I am no dream.
It is her bed, it is her bed, and it must take me in now, as once it did, even as I am now, it is her bed.
It was a different Dana in this bed, that is a part of it, of the ache that opens wide to fill with ecstasy and empty out again, a different Dana suddenly revealed, that is a small part of it, of the awful mysteries held in the body motions of love, to watch in wonder that someone other who steps out, the secret other never seen by unchosen eyes. You see it emerge, and the sight of it is such a startling sweetness to the soul, the sight and the touch of it. With the fingers of my hands she led me to the hidden otherness of her.
It was a different Dana here, where now there is no Dana, no Dana sleeping here, with eyelids shivering over frightened dreams. Dana's bed is stripped, the house around it icy cold, with panicked molecules of air seeking their escape. Her bookshelves are bare, and her closets emptied out. She has taken her books and clothes and fled this town whose name I think now I shall never recall. She has fled and taken all my world from me.
It was a different Dana in this bed, a different Dana suddenly emerging. I do not think I gasped aloud, not aloud, I do not think, but I could not stop the trembling, to behold her swift emergence from the other, a different Dana revealed in the body motions of love.
I had come for dinner. We all drank wine, there were expensive bottles stored up still in the cellar from the days of drunken Dotty. We had begun our work together, Mallach and I. It was he who had sought me out a few weeks after my first visit here.
He appeared unannounced one day at my office, a nicer office than my very junior position warranted, a small space, true, but which yet possessed a sizable blackboard and a window from which I could look out and look down at all the daunting architecture from the vantage point of the seventh floor, where the brightest luminaries of our department were gathered, two laureates and those who were still in waiting, Dietrich Spencer the first in line, for his work on background radiation.
Spencer's finger-snapping had been of no personal significance, for he had quite clearly taken a shine to me and had seen that I'd gotten an office near to his.
Samuel Mallach did not have an office on the starry seventh.
I was very much surprised to see the apparition at my door, who entered with an apology on his lips for interrupting me, while I stood confounded, to find that the author of that astonishing paper had sought me out, his manner to me incongruously respectful, as if he did not know who I was, that I was the most junior member of the department with which he had been associated for longer than I'd been alive.
His manner to me was thus very puzzling, as I respectfully waited for him to speak, and there followed nothing but a long, dismaying silence, finally broken by his faltering voice.
— You're interested in an objective model for quantum mechanics.
— I'm interested in your model.
Another silence, not quite so long as the first, until he spoke again.
— There is no collapse in a closed system. No collapse occurs, unless a system interacts with another.
I assumed he spoke, of course, of the subatomic situation. It was a more than natural assumption, under the circumstances, both his and mine.
— An interaction between two systems: such as a measurement, you mean.
At my words, he stood up and excused himself for having disturbed me, shaking my hand and then leaving as abruptly as he had appeared.
A week or so later, he came again, this time staying longer. He stood at my office blackboard and worked out, for my bemused benefit, some not terribly difficult equations. When he was gone I stared a long while at the pale trails of chalk dust he had left behind, then slowly went over to erase some misplaced symbols, correcting the error that he had made.
The next time he came he seemed less tentative and vague, and as he was leaving he turned back to me, as if as an afterthought, and invited me to his home for dinner.
— It's only my daughter and I. She's probably about your own age. I have a daughter named Dana, you know.
I knew.
— Who are you?
— Dana Mallach.
— His daughter, then.
— Yes, his daughter, yes.
She sat and hardly spoke throughout the dinner, while some quiet woman put down plates of food and later took them away again, disappearing through a soundless swinging door that led to the kitchen. His daughter hardly spoke a word, but she listened raptly, a rapture of attention I could not fathom in the least. I was perplexed that she should turn a face so suffused with unidentifiable emotion onto the cold hard topics on which we spoke, a girl whose light was of some different world, striking imbalance and wild awe wherever it fell. It hardly seemed conceivable, nor, even less so, desirable, that such a girl, who looked to dwell in regions even more remote than a pharaoh's daughter, could take so fervent an interest in the subjects on which her father and I discoursed, for we talked on and on into the small hours of the day.
He did more speaking than I that night, transforming himself, in the process, into a model of inspired lucidity. There was nothing vague and halting about Mallach that night. His very voice was altered, less stiff and more informal, as it traced the hidden life of the electron, and unpacked the meaning of the wave function and the meaning of its collapse.
She did not utter a word of her own, but even so I noticed that her father looked as much at her as he did at me, as if he were concerned that she should understand him, too. I did not guess at all how much she really understood, and thought he looked at her only from fatherly habit, or because it was hard for any human eyes not to seek out the vision of her that night. She was ravishing to the sight.
Her eyes were filled with strange lights, as she rested them on her father and on me, but mostly on him. A girl of furious light beyond the dullish silver of the candleglow, for there had been candles as well as flowers set out, a grand occasion made of it, with goblets that sparkled as if there were diamond dust mixed in the glass. Dana was wearing a dress of wine-colored velvet with a thin velvet ribbon tied around her long white neck, and the gleams and shadows played over the velumen softness as she moved. She carried up green bottles from the cellar, blowing dust and laughing as she decanted the good old wines, euphoric before she had tasted a drop, her eyes dwelling on her father as he descanted on the properties of light.
I could not guess at all at how much she understood of what we spoke, and could not guess that she had tried to do what it was that I had done, to turn his thoughts back again to his physics, as I had done, intent as I was to get the glorious physics out from him. For it was, in the end, only Justin Childs, and I am Justin Childs, who had reminded Mallach of what it was he had lost and what he might regain.
He spoke and spoke that night, all languor and faltering gone, the voice that had drifted like lost gray smoke now vibrating with bright tints and hard intensities, as, tirelessly, he rhapsodized on the search after truth as we physicists know it.
— The world as it really is, after all, the world as it really is.
That is how he put it.
— To turn away from the shadows on the back cave wall, to step out from inside the cave and see the world as it really is, after all.
He gestured with his hands in motions that were fluid and somehow beautiful. The movements of youth and beauty were preserved in his flowing hands.
— And we who do it must subdue our subjectivity.
Her face was caught in some mystery of ardor above the play of candlelight.
— Subdue ego and error and irrelevance of every kind. It isn't easy, it's a hard day's work, a hard life's. And then the bastards make it even harder.
His speech abruptly lurched, turning sharply away from rhapsodizing his love to denouncing those he hated, for Mallach's hatred was as intense as anything else he had ever thought or felt. He hated those who had frozen him out, who had closed ranks around their chosen dogmas and frozen him and his hidden variables out.
— Professor Childs, I'll tell you something very funny. This will make you laugh.
He turned full face to me, and a darker, more lugubrious cast I could not have imagined.
— You know, when I first did it, when I first worked out my objective model for q.m., I couldn't believe that I would be the one to see it, that it was me, Samuel Mallach, who was destined to change how everyone thought about the elementary particles of matter. I knew that I was a cracked vessel to hold the truth, but there it was. I had it. I knew there would be controversy. Controversy and fisticuffs is what I expected. After all, Bohr and his pack had gone way out on a limb with their complementarity dogma and what all. They had gone way, way out. But the last thing in the world I ever expected was to be ignored. That wasn't even represented in my calculus of possible outcomes. I thought that it was only the objective merits of the work itself that mattered, especially in science. If not in science, then where else? I thought that everyone would just evaluate what a man had done on the basis of how good it was, how closely it approximated to the truth. I didn't know how things really work in this world, how it gets decided what should be paid attention to, that it's all rigged, the whole system rigged. The big shots decide and the little shots just march lock-stepped into line. It's the machers who have the last word. That was what my father used to say, whether he was talking about the politics in the little synagogue in downtown Scranton, or about Stalin and Roosevelt. "The machers are no mallachs," they're no angels. It was one of his jokes. You see, in Hebrew "mal-lach " means angel.
— The makers. The big shots. How would you translate it, Dana?
— The machers? Mmm, they're the movers and the shakers, Daddy.
— That's right, the movers, the shakers, the loud noisemakers. And they're no mallachs. My father was right. When I was growing up I never paid any attention to what he said. I figured he didn't know anything at all since he didn't understand the first thing about science. But it was me who was the ignoramus. I was completely ignorant in the ways of the world. The machers are no mallachs. If they had attacked me I could have responded to them, I could have answered each one of their objections. I was ready for them. The whole time I was waiting for my paper to come out I was getting ready for the big fights. But they were too smart for that. Why should they have to go through all the hard work of trying to disprove me when they could just as effectively finish me off by ignoring me! Far more effectively finish me off. Here's something else you might find funny, Professor Childs.
That I very much doubted. I already had reason to suspect his forecasts as to my amusement.
— Do you know that I seem sometimes to have only one strong emotion left, only one true passion, and that's hatred? Hatred for the forces that have destroyed so many lives, including mine.
— Daddy, you're not destroyed, don't say that you're destroyed.
— I am, Dana. I am destroyed. Relative to what I could have been, I am destroyed.
When he spoke like this, of his hatred and his despair, then the bliss fled from her face, all the warm colors bled from her face, and her eyes went pleadingly in search of mine, in wordless language, imploring that I must help him, stop up the embittered contents of his soul.
It was as if I heard her speaking directly into my innermost mind, and in answer to her silent appeal I broached the formidable problem. He, of course, immediately understood the problem I was indicating: the necessity of relativizing his model for q.m., of showing it to be Lorentz-invariant and thereby reconciling relativity theory with quantum mechanics, the fundamental nub being this:
Relativity and quantum mechanics, each of which precipitated a major conceptual revolution, cognitively clash with each other. Both can beautifully cover the phenomena that come directly under them: in the case of quantum mechanics, the elementary particles of matter; in the case of relativity, the four-dimensional manifold of space-time. But when they are brought together, as they must eventually be brought—matter being situated, after all, in the domain of space-time—the covering fabric is rent unintelligible, and hideous absurdities invade.
Mallachian mechanics seems, at first blush, more irreconcilable with relativity theory than other formulations of quantum mechanics, as the very few physicists who had bothered to take notice of his work had emphasized. But this is only because it brings out into the light what the other formulations obscure, which is the utterly startling, but nonetheless utterly undeniable fact that nature is, in the word of the physicist, "nonlocal": events can have instantaneous influences on other, far-distant events. A crude way of seeing that nonlocality—and therefore quantum mechanics—is at odds with Einstein's relativity theory is to remember that it is fundamental to relativity that nothing can travel faster than light, whereas these instantaneous propagations of influence seem to indicate superluminal, in fact infinite, velocities. The cognitive dissonance can be expressed in far more subtle and technical terms, involving the relativistic condition of Lorentz invariance, which, when conjoined with quantum nonlocality, allows for such unacceptable anomalies as "backwards causation," which would be the future's affecting the past.
Einstein pursued, through all his last sad years, his elusive dream of a "unified field theory" that would comfortably embrace both q.m. and relativity, and it was in something like the spirit of Einstein's last dream that I broached with Mallach our possibly embarking on the search for the final reckoning.
He understood, of course, that the dissolution of the difficulty of reconciling the two monumental theories of twentieth-century physics required nothing less than the solution of the problem of time, the final explanation of how a correlate of illusive nonrelativistic time appears to be caught up in the quantum situation known as entanglement: systems becoming so enmeshed with one another that the question of their distinct wave functions can no longer be meaningfully raised; only the wave function of their union can be defined. He understood precisely what was entailed in my posing the possibility that he and I, complementarily joined, might together approach the formidable problem, leaping like Empedocles to emerge, both of us, divine.
—The solution would have to be very deep, and I know it would be very beautiful. I can't see the form it will take yet, but I know it would be very beautiful.
At these last words of mine, he pushed himself back from the table, his one thin leg crossed over the other, his right elbow poised on his knee and his chin resting in the open palm. He did not speak for five minutes or more, as Dana watched him and I watched them both.
That was all he said, and he drew it out like an endless sigh.
— Well.
As one might sigh above a grave.
Then for several moments more we all three sat, each stupefied on thoughts, until he looked over the brilliance of crystal and candles at his own vision of a girl and smiled sadly at her. His smile was one of his saddest expressions, and there passed the slightest nod across the table from him to her and back from her to him, some transmission of information moving between them faster than the speed of light, like tachyons streaking across the dining room table, and I watched.
Only then did he seem to remember me again, and he smiled at me, not quite so sadly as at her.
— I will think about what you have said, Professor Childs. You will think and I will think. Perhaps the work you have in mind for us is possible. Perhaps it is even still possible for me. Though I am old with wandering.
There issued a short sound, something like a laugh, vanishing before I could quite ascertain if a laugh was what it had been.
— Do you know the poem? The poem by Yeats?
I shook my head.
— You must read Yeats. You must read Blake, Justin Childs. Tell him, Dana.
She laughed, the full range of her rapture all at once now rekindled, and repeated the words of her father obediently.
— You must read Yeats, you must read Blake, Justin Childs.
It was the first time she had pronounced my name. I could never have known what it would be like to hear my own name coming out from between her parting lips, Justin Childs, when I am Justin Childs.
—No, no, the poem. Recite the poem for him.
She looked at me, turning her strange rapt attention full on me, and she shrugged her velveted shoulders and colored in self-consciousness. I had thought myself gone as far as I could go, but at the sight of the wine flush spreading down over the skin that the velvet of her dress had left bare, I went still further.
Softly and solemnly, like a good schoolgirl, she began to recite, because he had requested it of her, the words of the poem:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
He said nothing more after that, and did not sigh his graveside sigh, but pushed himself from the table, this time unfolding his long and wasted body and slowly rising. Without a word he kissed her good night on her forehead, and then held her at arm's length for several moments more, staring at the spot he had just kissed. He kissed her again on each of her eyes, and turned to me, offering a limp and silent handshake, his hands now gone old. I thanked him for the night, he smiled, shook my hand again, just as limply, and left the room.
She told me to wait, she would be back in several minutes, and she followed him out. I heard them climbing the long swirling stairway together, their quiet voices covered at last in the measured heavy silence.
I was in a problematic state, a state of body as well as of mind, a steady pounding in the blood and subtle body.
These are sensations I cannot recall with perfect clarity and calm, and, with just so little clarity and calm, I sat and waited for the reappearance of the girl.
She came to the door and motioned silently for me to follow her.
I could not bear to end the night, though I had no thought that I might prolong it through any effort of my own. I was just as passive as I was pounding, and I dreaded, in my problematic state, to leave the house on Bagatelle Road, just as I dreaded to stay, for I knew to stay would be terrible, but not so terrible as to leave. The world outside her sphere was suddenly given to me in all its drabness and all its coldness, the world as it really is, after all, the world as it really is, so that I wondered how I would from now on bear it, live and yet not feel it, and wondered how it was that I had lived until now, what had I thought of and what had I felt?
She did not lead me to the door, but past the door and up the swirling stairs.
I followed mutely after, as I'd followed her father that first autumn afternoon, and I followed her down the haunted corridor that led us to this room, it is Dana's room, where we sat facing each other on this bed, it is Dana's bed.
She took off her shoes and they dropped soundlessly onto the thick white carpet, and I told her, so unlike me but for the pounding motions in my blood, of the fingers of my light, how they had pierced my telescope's clear lens to probe the dim, dark bodies splayed gently onto the night.
She listened with a look half-serious and not, sitting back on her feet so that she was kneeling, her knees just barely touching mine, and she reached out both hands and took my glasses off, placing them carefully on this little table. I did not gasp aloud, I do not think, not quite aloud, but I kissed her lips, and took her hands and kissed them, too, and tried to kiss her lips again, but she turned them away, and I was mortally afraid, for a split second of eternity, that I had done something wrong to turn her from me.
She had a look both serious and not, I could not quite get hold of it, as she took hold of the fingers of my hand, and she traced them with her own long index finger, the up and the down of the wavelets of my hand, so that it was the fingers of my hand that went to fire, and she took them in her mouth, one after the other, between those softly parting lips, mmm, she whispered, her mouth against my ear, fingers of light, with a look both serious and not, my fingers reaching for the knowledge of her, moving over her cheeks, her neck, her mouth, and she pretended that they burned her tongue, taking them into her softly opening mouth, fingers of light, her words against my ear, and with the fingers of my hand she led me to the otherness of her, it was a different Dana, to see such a Dana emerging from behind the other, to see the thing her body really was, how unafraid she was, stepping into the fire to emerge divine, Dana divine and taking me in, her body arched upward like a flame above my own, fierce at one moment, tender at the next, her tenderness was the most terrible aspect of it all, I did not know if I would emerge from it at all.
—Close your eyes Dana for pity's sake close your eyes for pity's sake I am dying against the glass beating helpless on the glass while you stare at me unmoved.
Gazing at me from out of the ice blue stillness of her unforgiving eyes, not a motion of pity to disturb the hard, smooth surface of her stare, a different Dana, a frightening unknown.
— For pity's sake Dana pity me please pity me.
My two fists blackening while they beat against the glass and the icy flames roared up and through me, paradox abounding, even in death, for I was turning to ice through the agency of fire, caught fast inside the flaming car, which she had driven and she had crashed, her cold voice relentlessly cataloguing the reasons for her hatred.
— It was you who destroyed him. Not my mother. Not me. Only you, Justin Childs.
And I am Justin Childs, crushed and caught in metal, beating blackened against the glass, while on the other side stands my Dana, perfectly still and staring, hesitating the long fiery seconds that would have saved me.
— For pity's sake for pity's sake why can't you pity me as I'd pity you?
The knowledge come at last, the answer written plainly in her terrible eyes.
Through hollow lands and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone.