“Want to see if we can find it?”
Joshua pulled at the lobe of his ear for a second, staring into the middle distance. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Okay,” he decided.
I don’t know what we expected to discover there. Perhaps I was simply seized by a whim—the desire to be spoken to, the wish to be instructed by a dream. When I was Joshua’s age, I dreamed one night that I found a new door in my house, one that opened from my cellar onto the bright, aseptic aisles of a drugstore: I walked through it, and saw a flash of light, and found myself sitting up in bed. For several days after, I felt a quickening of possibility, like the touch of some other geography, whenever I passed by the cellar door. It was as if I’d opened my eyes to the true inward map of the world, projected according to our own beliefs and understandings.
On our way through the town center, Joshua and I waded past a cluster of people squinting into the horizon. There was a place between the post office and the library where the view to the west was occluded by neither hills nor buildings, and crowds often gathered there to watch the distant blue belt of the sky. We shouldered our way through and continued into town.
Joshua stopped outside the Kornblum Bakery, beside a trash basket and a newspaper carrel, where the light from two streetlamps lensed together on the ground. “This is it,” he said, and made a gesture indicating the iron grate at our feet. Beneath it we could see the shallow basin of a drainage culvert. It was even and dry, and a few brittle leaves rested inside it.
“Well,” I said. There was nothing there. “That’s disappointing.”
“Life’s disappointing,” said Joshua.
He was borrowing a phrase of his mother’s, one that she had taken to using these last few months. Then, as if on cue, he glanced up and a light came into his eyes. “Hey,” he said. “There’s Mom.”
Melissa was sitting behind the plate glass window of a restaurant on the opposite side of the street. I could see Mitch Nauman talking to her from across the table, his face soft and casual. Their hands were cupped together beside the pepper crib, and his shoes stood empty on the carpet. He was stroking her left leg with his right foot, its pad and arch curved around her calf. The image was as clear and exact as a melody.
I took Joshua by the shoulders. “What I want you to do,” I said, “is knock on Mom’s window. When she looks up, I want you to wave.”
And he did exactly that—trotting across the asphalt, tapping a few times on the glass, and waving when Melissa started in her chair. Mitch Nauman let his foot fall to the carpet. Melissa found Joshua through the window. She crooked her head and gave him a tentative little flutter of her fingers. Then she met my eyes. Her hand stilled in the air. Her face seemed to fill suddenly with movement, then just as suddenly to empty—it reminded me of nothing so much as a flock of birds scattering from a lawn. I felt a kick of pain in my chest and called to Joshua from across the street. “Come on, sport,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
It was not long after—early the next morning, before we awoke—that the town water tower collapsed, blasting a river of fresh water down our empty streets. Hankins the grocer, who had witnessed the event, gathered an audience that day to his lunch booth in the coffee shop: “I was driving past the tower when it happened,” he said. “Heading in early to work. First I heard a creaking noise, and then I saw the leg posts buckling. Wham!”—he smacked the table with his palms— “So much water! It surged into the side of my car, and I lost control of the wheel. The stream carried me right down the road. I felt like a tiny paper boat.” He smiled and held up a finger, then pressed it to the side of a half-empty soda can, tipping it gingerly onto its side. Coca-Cola washed across the table with a hiss of carbonation. We hopped from our seats to avoid the spill.
The rest of the town seemed to follow in a matter of days, falling to the ground beneath the weight of the ceiling. Billboards and streetlamps, chimneys and statues. Church steeples, derricks, and telephone poles. Klaxon rods and restaurant signs. Apartment buildings and energy pylons. Trees released a steady sprinkle of leaves and pine cones, then came timbering to the earth—those that were broad and healthy cleaving straight down the heartwood, those that were thin and pliant bending until they cracked. Maintenance workers installed panels of light along the sidewalk, routing the electricity through underground cables. The ceiling itself proved unassailable. It bruised fists and knuckles. It stripped the teeth from power saws. It broke drill bits. It extinguished flames. One afternoon the television antenna tumbled from my rooftop, landing on the hedges in a zigzag of wire. A chunk of plaster fell across the kitchen table as I was eating dinner that night. I heard a board split in the living room wall the next morning, and then another in the hallway, and then another in the bedroom. It sounded like gunshots detonating in a closed room. Melissa and Joshua were already waiting on the front lawn when I got there. A boy was standing on a heap of rubble across the street playing Atlas, his upraked shoulders supporting the world. A man on a stepladder was pasting a sign to the ceiling: SHOP AT CARSON’S. Melissa pulled her jacket tighter. Joshua took my sleeve. A trough spread open beneath the shingles of our roof, and we watched our house collapse into a mass of brick and mortar.
I was lying on the ground, a tree root pressing into the small of my back, and I shifted slightly to the side. Melissa was lying beside me, and Mitch Nauman beside her. Joshua and Bobby, who had spent much of the day crawling aimlessly about the yard, were asleep now at our feet. The ceiling was no higher than a coffee table, and I could see each pore of my skin reflected in its surface. Above the keening of the wind there was a tiny edge of sound—the hum of the sidewalk lights, steady, electric, and warm.
“Do you ever get the feeling that you’re supposed to be someplace else?” said Melissa. She paused for a moment, perfectly still. “It’s a kind of sudden dread,” she said.
Her voice seemed to hover in the air for a moment.
I had been observing my breath for the last few hours on the polished undersurface of the ceiling: every time I exhaled, a mushroom-shaped fog would cover my reflection, and I found that I could control the size of this fog by adjusting the force and the speed of my breathing. When Melissa asked her question, the first I had heard from her in many days, I gave a sudden puff of air through my nose and two icicle-shaped blossoms appeared. Mitch Nauman whispered something into her ear, but his voice was no more than a murmur, and I could not make out the words. In a surge of emotion that I barely recognized, some strange combination of rivalry and adoration, I took her hand in my own and squeezed it. When nothing happened, I squeezed it again. I brought it to my chest, and I brought it to my mouth, and I kissed it and kneaded it and held it tight.
I was waiting to feel her return my touch, and I felt at that moment, felt with all my heart, that I could wait the whole life of the world for such a thing, until the earth and the sky met and locked and the distance between them closed forever.
Small Degrees
for margie
s a small boy he was always sitting cross-legged in the grass, gazing for long hours at this thing or another, an igloo-shape of water in the soil or the brown joints of a stick insect. “A dreamer,” his parents said, and they flopped about in their beds at night, for they knew that this would never do. One winter month the whiteness of a blizzard climbed to the second pane of their front window, bottling the world away until spring. He began to study the family books in the glow of the fire. “A scholar,” said his father, nodding proudly; and envisioning a desk and leather armchair at the Academy, he went to find his wife. A hopeful few hours later, the boy’s mother was dusting in the living room. She asked him a question: “What are you reading now, dear?” and he surprised her by answering, “The letter n.” It was then that she noticed him holding his book to the light, staring with perfect emptiness at the blank side of each page. She came to an unpleasant realization. That night she told his father what she had seen. “A fool,” she concluded, and his father damply concurred:
“A fool.”
So when the first adult hairs began to sprout on his chin, they sent him into the city, apprenticing him to the metal founder. A man with a trade, they thought, fool though he may be, was better off than one without. But the boy was not as simple as he seemed. He learned his craft quickly, casting foundry type for printers, raising and reversing each metal word and letter; he had seen such things in shadow before, and he knew their faces and how to distinguish them. He spent his youth and manhood and middle age watching the alphabet roll between paper and plate: sometimes the individual characters became lost, disappearing into swiftness like the leaves of a pinwheel, but occasionally in the turbulence they seemed to distill to a center, boiling apart until he saw the essential glowing wire of their shapes. He met a woman one winter and married her and fathered children, and in time those children grew up, and in time they went away. He worked each day in the orange heat of the foundry and the drumbeat of the presses, walked by the river each evening with his wife, undressed each nightfall, extinguished the lantern, slept by her side, and in this way grew old.
A day came when the type founder was no longer able to cast without pain the copper and lead and antimony of his trade, nor to walk so easily between the foundry and the printing house. Those hands which all his life had been as springy as grasshoppers now trembled after only a few hours’ work. The back that had supported him through the many liftings of his children now knew thistles of pain when he rose from a chair. His knees suffered in the cold and rain, and sometimes in the flawless blue days of summer. At least his eyes had never failed him: they were the same eyes that had blinked him awake as a boy. He could measure a stamp to 0.918 inches, number the birds in a V-skein of geese, read a letter or book without tilting his head. So when his body began to unmake itself, he gave himself over to his vision.
These were the days of Edmund and Robert Claire-Mitchell, deans of the Royal School of Type Design, whose spacious roman typeface—inspired, they claimed, by the memory of a shared childhood lover—decorated prayer books and newspapers and bore the name Justina. And the days of Francesco Corie, who developed his influential Plain New Functional design after a twelve-year scientific study of the blinks and eye movements of the proletarian reader. And of Abram Nissen, the inscription sign cutter, whose rich, graceful script carried the dips and serifs of immigrant market signs.
The type founder had been witness to the designs of these men. He himself had cast the plates from which their work was printed. When the first of the Claire-Mitchell brothers passed away at the turn of the decade, he had attended the memorial service, where a muffled drum played and a state dignitary spoke in eulogy. “He gave to our people,” said the dignitary, “a system of letters as sturdy and balanced as their own best dreams. The words he made were the words of our shared national dialogue, and his stars were the stars of our flag. We mourn the loss of a great man.” The type founder watched the letters of which the dignitary spoke opening and closing on leaflets, undulating on banners, reposing on marble above the new graves, and felt for the first time the wish to design a face of his own.
On a day soon after, he pushed his desk into the light at the east end of his living room. He placed a chisel and brush there, some ink and some lead, and his carving wood and drawing paper. Seven years later, on the morning he retired from the foundry, he took a seat before these tools and began to wait.
He wanted to design a typeface that would recall his hours of childhood watching: m’s and n’s and commas that read as fluidly as the swaying of long grass in the wind; b’s and d’s, p’s and q’s, like lampposts reflected in a pool of water. He was willing to work gradually, assembling and reexamining each stroke of each character, the hairline of aV or the wedded bowls of a lowercase g, over a period of several days. This may seem a form of calculation, but it was in truth something closer to love, which is to say the reverse of calculation. He was trying to render his heart into letters and signs, and he was a man who discovered his heart only by small degrees.
Sometimes, on her way past his desk, his wife would lean carelessly into him or draw a gray hair from his shoulder. “Working hard, dear?” she would ask, and, “It’s coming,” he would say. She, for her part, grew lonely during these hours, becoming quiet and inward, and she wondered why he did not notice.
All her life the type founder’s wife had risen from bed with the calling of the summer birds or the snapping of the winter ice, to dust and whisk and scrub the house. On Tuesdays she beat the carpets and on Fridays she did the laundry. Then, when her children were still children, she spent her afternoons pottering and wandering about with them, reading to them from a storybook or walking them to the park with the large, blue-brown climbing stone. When they moved on to school and then their own adult families, she had less to fill her time. The high hours of the day became formless and bewildering. By one or two o’clock she would have finished the cleaning; the air would be sweet, the rooms still and empty, and she would have nothing to do. Certain people are skilled in such forms of aloneness: they can take some forlorn thing from inside themselves and shape it into a coin or a bird. But she was not one of them. She passed each free afternoon stirring the fire or pacing the hallway. The little mistakes of her past came to her again and again, and she relived them and shook them from her head. Sometimes she allowed herself to drop into bed for a time and simply lie there breathing. Sometimes she felt in her gut a strange sense of impermanence. She waited for evening and the return of her husband, the clunk of his footsteps on the cobblestone walkway, and she waited for the time when he might spend his days at home.
And now that time had come, and with it had come this new seclusion. He worked some days until his lantern was the brightest thing in the window, and still she paced the hallway, and still she lay sighing on her blankets.
One night she came to a decision. Some short time after she’d withdrawn to their bed, she listened to the sound of him at the wash-basin, rinsing his face and scrubbing at his ink-dark fingers. He whipped the water from his hands, then undressed and dimmed the light.
She felt him sitting on the edge of their small mattress. “How far along are you?” she asked.
“I thought you were asleep,” he said. He turned back and leaned against the pillows. “Today I worked on the ampersand. It’s a difficult one,” he said, “so hard to clarify.”
“I could just as well not be here, I think. It would make no difference,” she said.
“Like trying to tie an elegant knot.” He yawned. “What? What did you say? You know that’s not true, dear.”
What she said next she said calmly and without reservation. She did not raise her voice from a whisper and she did not shift from her side. “Sometimes I try to talk to you when you’re working. I’ll need to hear another voice. And when you twist your head to look at me, or when you wave me away for a time with your finger, I can see that it’s as if I’ve vanished into some other moment. You think that people are nothing but time,” she said. “You think that I’m nothing but time. But I’m not time,” she said. “I’m something else.”
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 t
he 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.