Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (17 page)

What was he to say to such a thing? If he was this sort of person, he had never recognized it: he wasn’t sure he even knew what it would
mean
to recognize it. As he tried to puzzle it through, he heard her breathing deepen. A cricket sounded at the window, and the house and all its spaces seemed to spread with an electrostatic silence. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps you’re right.” And when she didn’t reply, he closed his eyes and gathered the blankets to his shoulders.

He was soon asleep.

The next morning there was an answer waiting for him on his desk, written in his wife’s hand:
I love you,
it read, but the word
love
had been crossed out and replaced with the word
miss,
which had been crossed out and replaced with an empty space, as though his wife had given up on the message altogether.

He looked for her in the kitchen and the pantry and the bedroom, though he’d just come from there. He stood on the front walk and watched his neighbors drifting by like sails: she was not among them. He even tapped on the trapdoor of the attic with a broomstick, querying her name with a brief little note of embarrassment in his voice. When it became clear that he was alone in the house—and because the day was supposed to begin in this way—he lit the stove and drew the curtains and prepared a breakfast of eggs and toast. He completed the stem of a k that morning, and busied himself that afternoon with the initial stroke of a W. All day long he listened for the sound of her shoes in the hallway, their change from pad to click at the edge of the carpet and floor. He listened for the snap of wood as she spurred the fire, and the creak of the pantry door on its hinges, and the thousand peripheral noises that told him he was home and she was near.

It was not until the sun fell that he realized she had left him.

The type founder had kept house only rarely in his life—and then just for the few short days it took his wife to mend from a sickness or return from a visit to the children’s—and the orderliness he’d known for years on end seemed to give way over succeeding weeks to a slow confusion of dirt. The stove filled with heaps of white ash, and dust collected at the saddles of doorways. A gray-green discoloration on the bedroom window sill fattened from a dot to a blotch to a bell-shaped stain. When he walked across the carpet in the sunlight, he could see transparent cloudlets erupting from beneath his feet, and when the temperature dipped in the evening, he heard popping and groaning noises inside the walls. It was as if the basic matter of his house, the board and the tile and the stone, was separating joint from joint. The process seemed beyond his control. He fell to his work.

As he leaned over his desk each day, lead or brush in hand, his head would fill with scenes that were charged with the vibrancy of memory. Sometimes he simply watched these scenes—allowing them to sharpen and dim or to mist away into other memories—but often a particular image would grow so rich in its detail that he could not help but moisten his brush and spread before himself a few leaves of paper, compelled to represent it. He began each picture with a jot of black ink and pursued its strokes and bends to the corner of the page. The drawings he made were not very good, and he knew this, but occasionally he would find in them some small piece of a letter that would make all his efforts worthwhile. He discovered in a sketch of a streambed the polliwog tail of a capital Q. He found the crook of aj in the upturned beak of a sparrow, and a question mark twist in the shadow of a door knocker. He saw these things suddenly, with a start in his breath like the lashing of a whip, and he struggled to perfect them with his brush and his hands. He fell asleep sitting at his desk, awakening in the morning from dreams of stone tools and cave art, of dyes made from blackberries and paintbrushes chewed from the fiber of twigs. His fingers tightened into a fist, and he massaged them with mint oil. His face became feverish, and he covered it with a wet cloth. When the elements of a letter had all taken shape, he drew a final copy of it on a sheet of china clay paper. He carved it, reversing the structure, into the end grain of a hardwood block. And he set this block in a case of shallow drawers, ready to be pressed into molds at the foundry—to be cast into type of a more durable sort.

Sometimes, when the letters lay hidden and he had to search his memory, a vision would come to him of the bruise-colored stain at his bedroom window. It was an image like a snare, holding his thoughts close and tight, and to see his way past it was like the tussling of an animal.

It was a sky-blue spring morning when the type founder carved the finishing stroke of his final letter: a capital I. He blew the shavings of wood from his desk and watched them float into the air. Then he went to wash his hands in the basin. When he came back, the line of the sun had moved from the edge of his desk to the carpet, casting his type case in a haze of black shadow. He repositioned the case in the light against a wall and stepped back to take a look. Its cells were filled, its hinges glinting—A through Z and a through z in roman and italic, all the marks of punctuation and all the marks of reference.

Every character was complete, filed neatly in its drawer, and he drew a satisfied breath, feeling as new of heart as a flourish of wedding confetti. That afternoon, he thought, he would button himself into his vest and jacket, fasten the clasps of his type case, and carry it to the foundry. It wouldn’t take long to produce a plaster mold, and afterward to cast his work in lead and in antimony. He might walk home as early as nightfall, his arms heavy with metal type. Then he would prepare a stew for himself, with meat from the butcher and greens from the grocer, and he would hold the letters in his hand as he ate, testing the heft of them one by one, their satisfying coolness and the fineness of their grooves.

As these words went rolling through him, the type founder followed the slant of the sun across his storage case. And though it took him a moment, he noticed something there that brought his thinking to a halt.

The light moving over the rows of type had pulled at the darkness and glare of the letters: certain hollows had grown deeper, certain angles had grown sharper, certain flags and descenders now shone as white as day. The image they formed in their turns of light and shadow became clearer as he squinted away the details. It was the face of a woman, her head cast slightly to one side. A strand of hair fell over her cheek, and she was staring as if into a great distance. It was like the shape of a cloud in an oncoming rainstorm, both distinct and illusory, and he recognized that it was nothing more than a product of his own dreaming vision. All the same, he would have watched it until evening struck, but a short time later a flock of birds disrupted the sunlight. The image rippled in their passing and then vanished from his sight.

When he left his house that afternoon, he thought that he was setting out for the foundry. His jacket and vest were buttoned close and his type case was swinging in his hands. But at the corner by the large blue-brown climbing stone, where the road into town met the road to the river, his feet remembered a different path.

He found himself standing alongside the water, first beneath a walnut tree and then on the bank where he used to walk with his wife. A couple of children were marking the soil with long sticks, and an old man nearby stooped to inspect the cuff of his pants. A butterfly floated along the shoreline with its otherwordly wings. It was only when the type founder saw a mother lifting her baby from a carriage, heard her pat the space between his shoulders with a “hush-a” and a “there, there,” that he realized his mistake: it had something to do with aspiration, and neglect, and the river that was flowing past him, and the choice to walk there unaccompanied, and he felt his own foolishness rise up inside him and send a frost through his body.

Then, sick with the weight of his thoughts, he shaped that foolishness into a wish, cupped that wish for a moment in his hand, and sailed it into the water like a stone.

And who’s to say that such gestures are without consequence, that our hopes and petitions can have no influence in this world? The type founder knew as if it were the clearest of his memories what he would see when he got home and opened his front door. He set his type case against a tree—it was finished now, and he no longer needed it—and he started up the riverbank. Then, thinking better of it, he turned back and gave the case to the woman who was coddling her baby. “Alphabet blocks,” he explained, “for the child.”

He made his way along the cobbles as swiftly as he could, and arrived at his porch with the sting of the walk still burning in his lungs.

His wife was in the living room, her back to him, running her finger through a line of dirt at the window: it was just as he had wished it, just as he had seen it. He opened his mouth to speak and his throat made a rustling noise. “Sometimes—” he began, and she turned to look at him from the window. He stood in the open doorway and a small wind slipped around him.
Sometimes we have the wrong dreams,
he was going to finish.
I’m sorry,
he was going to say. But his wife gave a little smile, a freshet of red in her cheeks, and rubbed the dirt from her hands with her blouse.

“I know,” she said, nodding. “I know.” She gestured around the room, where currents of dust were swirling in the spring air. “We’ve got some work to do here, don’t we?” she asked, and the look on her face was a sign that welcomed him home.

The Jesus Stories

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they
should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not
contain the books that should be written.
—John 21:25

This is one story: Jesus, the son of Mary, born by law into the house of Joseph and by custom into the line of David, but whose true father, the Holy Spirit, was engendered of no one, went out into the world to find his people. In the hills beyond Jerusalem he met Satan, who said to him, “I am Man’s Prince, and you are Man’s Son, and we are of a kind, you and I. These stones can be as bread to us. These cities can be as beds. Everything you see here is your home.” But Jesus answered him, “You are not of my family,” and departed from him into Galilee. There he gathered around him twelve disciples, and he lived with them for many years, telling them stories and supposing them to be his brothers. But they did not understand him, for they were not of his family, so in time he sent them away. He was called to a wedding in Cana one day, where he met his mother. Seeing her, he was filled with sorrow, for though she embraced him as a son, even she did not truly know him. She was of this world, and he was of another. “Woman,” he said, “what have I to do with you?” When he died on the cross, he died between strangers.

This is another story: At Golgotha, the place of skulls, Jesus was crucified, and wrapped in linen, and sealed into the earth, and this might have been the end of him, but it was not. It is given to each of us to experience everything. This is God’s secret, the invisible truth that gives shape to our lives: everything we are capable of knowing, feeling, and suffering, we will. Jesus, being God, was capable of infinite experience, and so he returned to this world, every part of him, to finish living his life. His anger caused the earth to shake and ripped the veil of the temple. His joy sent a clean wind whistling through the trees. His sorrow went walking through empty rooms, smothering candles and moaning like a spirit. His body appeared to his disciples on the road to Emmaus, and their eyes were opened, and they knew it to be him. And though his body was carried into heaven, the rest of him—the anger, the sorrow, the joy—remained behind. Every ghost story is another chapter of the Gospels.

The N. are a religious people, converted to the Christian faith by early Jesuit missionaries; they are steadfast in their commitment to the church, if unorthodox in their application of its creeds. It is the purpose of this report to provide a brief account of the conversion of the N. and to examine the key artifact of their culture: the pleocanonical Gospels, or, as they are more popularly known, the Jesus Stories. I have spent the last five years studying these texts, and while I have not yet finished my review of them, I believe that I am in a position to submit my preliminary findings.

First, I shall briefly discuss the conversion. Tradition tells that when the Jesuit missionaries first appeared to the N., gliding from out of the sunlight beneath an array of white sails, the people mistook their ship for a giant bird, and were astonished when it gave up to the sea a host of tiny men. A tribal document describes this first encounter: “The men rowed ashore and spoke to us in a strange tongue. They came clothed in heavy robes, which they would not remove, even though the heat of the sun was upon us. They wore crosses on lines around their necks. ‘What place have you traveled from?’ we asked them, and they answered, ‘God has sent us to you,’ a phrase which sounded like a riddle or a proverb in our tongue
¹
and so made us laugh.”