But he doesn’t dare tell it in the morning because nobody’s ready for it; people are balancing paper cups of coffee between their knees while unwrapping their fast-food breakfasts, or they’re rooting around in the cupboard looking for the pancake mix, or they’re carefully measuring out spoonfuls of coffee while the water comes to a boil. Besides, if he told it in the morning, the dog would not want to go out, the cat would not want to come in, the rush-hour traffic on the bridges into the city would come to a halt, the little waves on the river would harden into something like frosting or stucco, birds would fall from the sky, and the nocturnal animals—raccoons, opossum, skunks—would stay awake to hear it. No way; he couldn’t tell it in the morning.
Noontime seemed the perfect time, shadowless and relatively idle; but if Guy told the story then, the whole day would fall apart like two halves of a cantaloupe, the goopy seeds of everything that was going to happen ruined, exposed like film to the brilliant midday sun. Impossible. He couldn’t bring himself to tell the story while the hour and minute hands, posed as if in prayer, pretended to be still, and he doubted anybody else could either.
Dusk is the time to tell a story, he thought. But then Guy noticed how for all the peace that seemed to accompany that delicious hour, it was plummeting into yesterday like an accelerating raindrop above a river and he couldn’t bring himself to even begin. All the shops and businesses would remain open and the iron gates unlocked, people would sit immobilized on benches at bus-stops, chicks in their nests would grow desperate waiting for their parents, mice in the walls would crouch there in the first pangs of hunger, no bread would be cut, no plates passed across tables, no gossip about the day would transpire. Farmers coming in from the fields would stop with one foot in each of two plowed furrows, and the landscape outside the commuter train window would never change, nor the reflection of the faces equally available in the glass. On second thought, dusk would be a terrible time to tell the story.
It went without saying that he couldn’t tell the story at night, partly because of certain episodes in the story itself, not to mention its themes, but also because walking around the whole day carrying a story you can’t tell is wearying to the point of exhaustion, and Guy needed to sleep. Besides, it was a dark story, and at night the dark is too complete to augment with further darkness. The story would disappear, a shadow into shadow, ink into an inkwell, a panther deep into the jungle, a Black Maria idling, headlights off and far from any streetlamp. Unthinkable to tell the story at night. Out of the question.
Guy can only even try to tell the story if he starts in the split-second before first light, the moment before the roosters notice and kickstart the day, drowning him out with their habitual jubilation, along with the last bitter hissing cat brawl of the night, church bells, engines starting, barking dogs, and the first alarm clocks. It’s the best Guy can do: “Once,” he manages to say at that exact right moment, but then another day, with neither memory nor forethought, with its trillion stories, breaks.