A child. It’s an unsettling and exhilarating hope, a promise threading through the blood and breath of my ancestry. Quite ridiculous that it might have come about in this way, a disarray of limbs and fluids beneath a woolen blanket. My child is approaching this world by means of dead reckoning, stumbling geotactically through mute, ancient hallways, through chains of chemistry and sequences of pure mathematics. To think, my baby boy or girl, that what you become depends on how I live. To think how thick with elsewhere you’ll arrive.
I miss you, mother.
Dawn is rising, and the world is breaking open like a shell. We smell the coffee brewing like oil, like a fiesta, in the first-class cabin. We stir from sleep. The green panes of the televisions break into light, their screens lamping over the seats as our dreams go glimmering away. Beneath me, the tips of drifting clouds open brilliantly. They look, the clouds, like some soaring firmament of architecture—solid and compact, unyielding. If I jumped from here, they would break my fall. I would brush myself off and salute this plane as it roared away. I would drink deep breaths and drift through space. I would walk the cloud footpaths, swing wide the gates, and climb the cloud stairs to my bed in the castle.
Sometimes I find myself thinking that I’m going somewhere, that all of this motion is indeed a motion toward, that into the trail we leave behind us, wrapping this world like a net, will fall our destination. Sometimes I find myself thinking that I’m going somewhere, until I realize that I’m already there.
The Light through the Window
There was once a window cleaner who lived on the seventy-first floor of a great glass building. Each morning he donned his jumpsuit, his boots, and his sky-colored cap, then climbed from his bedroom window onto a wooden platform with taut wire rigging. He turned the heavy steel winches that, side by side, reminded him of the infinity symbol—the one that lowered and raised him, the other that trolleyed him along each floor—and all day long he washed the windows of his building. He sprayed them with his misting hose as the sun rose through the morning and sank through the afternoon. He planed them dry with a rubber-edged blade as the curtains behind them slid open and shut. This was in the days when motorcars flowed through the city like a river of silver mercury, and he often listened to the gust of traffic as he rubbed at gummy spots with a cotton rag. The high wind sent drops of water rolling up the glass. His shadow slanted away beneath him. If he worked diligently, he could complete three and a half floors by late afternoon, and when the windows went orange with the setting sun, he would remove his cap and hoist himself home. Once he left his window open to a spring breeze in order to air his apartment, and when he returned that night to his bed, he found a robin trapped beside him in the sheets. It thrashed and struggled there like a heart, and when he freed it, it flew into a wall. He carried it to the wastebasket on the end of a dustpan. Afterward he always sealed the window tight behind him.
Sometimes at night, unable to sleep, the window cleaner would sit at the edge of his platform and try to count the lights of the city: he watched them sailing red and white through the streets, twinkling from lampposts and porches, hanging in the blackness of tall buildings—so many lights, and within each one a life. The window cleaner wondered how it would feel to be in the thick of them, to be some other person, in a restaurant drinking with friends or in a bed with his arm around his lover. The thought that he had never married or fathered children often filled him with a quiet sadness, and on Sunday afternoons, with little else to do, he imagined himself in one of the small, glistening motorcars on the street, driving across the river with his family. They would go to a carnival, perhaps, or a shopping mall, and the boys would fight with each other in the back seat, and he would feed them hot dogs and french fries until they were groggy and quiet.
Certainly, though, the window cleaner loved his work. He wasn’t the first of his family to tend these windows: he had learned the trade from his father and grandfather—both of them window cleaners, both of them now gone. As a small boy he had ridden along as they scrubbed side by side, watching the pop-tabs he’d collected in his pockets spin to the ground when he snapped them off the platform. In the chill of the evening he would ascend with the men to the seventyfirst floor—once the apex of the building, though it had since been overtopped by floors seventy-two through two hundred eight—where his mother would be waiting to lift him inside. When he came of age, it was the three of them on that platform, though soon enough it was two, and then it was only him. To this day, when his reflection split in the panes of double windows, he sometimes saw their figures standing dimly beside him.
What he learned from the men of his family was this: that a blue sky on a new day is a better thing than most; that there is fineness and value in a surface you can’t see; and that with just a slant of light and a film of water, he could write himself into the rooms behind the glass.
When he felt the clean white heat of the sun against his shoulders, all he had to do was squeeze the grip of his misting hose, spray a haze of fine moisture on the window, and spell his message in it with a finger. Then, stepping aside to remove his shadow, he could read what he had written. The sunlight would catch in the dampness, turning silver, but it would pour sharply through the marks he’d left. It would burst onto the walls or carpets, posting his words there until he cleared them away with his rubber-edged blade. Such light could transform glass into a mirror, but the window cleaner stood so close to the building that he had little difficulty seeing into it, and in the slow hours of bright days, he found this a happy diversion. When he saw someone he recognized, he often wrote his hello. When faced with a messy sitting room (its plants wilting, chairs toppled, picture frames askew) he might write Junkyard or Pigsty or Just Not Clean—and, looking inside, find the words floating there like a label. Though the people in these rooms sometimes noticed him, frequently they did not. Once, in an access of sympathy, he wrote Bless You on the office window of a businessman, and when the sun projected it onto his desk, the man sneezed seven times in sequence without ever looking up.
One balmy spring day the window cleaner was trolleying himself across the west side of the forty-second floor, straying through his memories as he turned the winch. He had just eaten his lunch and was recalling the time his father froze a gold ring with a cap of diamonds into an ice cube for his tenth wedding anniversary. He himself was only a boy then, and so he had been asleep when his parents returned from the terrace restaurant, but his mother told him the next morning that she’d almost swallowed the ring before she saw the glint.
Stopping at the corner of the building, the window cleaner took a drink of water from his thermos. His platform swayed in a gust of wind. Far below him, a pair of children raced along the berm kicking at dandelions. When he turned to the window, he saw a woman rolling across her office in a desk chair. She was gazing at the ceiling, hands joined behind her neck as she walked herself across the carpet, and she was singing something. She seemed strangely familiar. Sometimes, when you yawn or shout, you will hear a noise like the clicking of a beetle, and suddenly the world will sound twice as rich as before. The window cleaner felt something similar happen inside him—a budding in his lungs: the world he was breathing seemed suddenly twice as wide. He activated his misting hose, and in its drizzle the sunlight fractured into seven colors. Then, on the window, he wrote the words Will, and You, but he didn’t know how to continue. He stood there for a moment. He peeked past the haze and saw the woman smiling from her roller-chair, but he could not tell if she saw him.
When his hand began to twitch, he brought it to his side. When he stepped from the light, his shadow stepped with him. He lay awake for hours that night, listening to the barking of far dogs.
The light from past moments is not lost forever: every star, every city, every family and person sends each instant of its light into the measure of surrounding space—and though such rays disperse in all directions, there are forces that can draw them back together. Thus it was that the wind
ow cleaner was not wholly surprised when the next morning, in the dark of a coming storm, he saw from his platform a vision that was many years past. Sponging the dirt from his rubber-edged blade, he detected the rush of an approaching platform. As it neared, he recognized it as his own. His grandfather was handling the winches, his silver wristwatch glinting as he pumped. His father stood pointing into the sky (at a cloud? a jet? a thunderstorm?), and his mother touched her hand to the small of his back: she was carrying a child—she was carrying him—and her belly was as round as a sail. The window cleaner followed behind them as they skirted the corner of the building. Though he could not hear them speaking, he could see them in all their sharpness and color—the snap of youth in his grandfather’s eyes, his mother’s red-brown hair streaming in the wind. When they halted at the living room window, he drifted in above them and lay on the deck of the platform, peering over its edge. His father folded a hand around his mother’s stomach, then held her as she clambered inside. They kissed before she shut the window, kissed once more through the glass, and then wavered like shadows in a guttering flame. When they vanished, the window cleaner lay staring at the sudden space beneath him. The white headlamps of motorcars shone against the dark street, and columns of windows shimmered in the air. It was raining. He descended a floor and, tingling wet, stepped into the stillness of his apartment. The living room window grew steamy with his breath as he searched for the splash-mark of his parents’ lips.
The storm lasted for several days, and then one afternoon a cool salt wind blew in from the ocean, sweeping it into the distance. The lines of the building grew sharp beneath the spring sky, and the window cleaner felt in the cycling of his blood the tug of something like a promise. He pulled himself to the west side of the forty-second floor and began misting the corner window, smoothing it clean, and misting it again. He had a question for the woman in the roller-chair, and he stood silently rehearsing it until her door wheeled open in a flash of yellow light. She entered the room with a hurried stride, stooping to place a leather satchel against the baseboard. When he rapped on the window, she started. He waved to her in greeting, and politely, but with an air of consternation, she waved back. As she lifted her jacket onto a wall peg, he knocked once more. She turned and mouthed a phrase that he couldn’t decipher, then took a step forward, arms akimbo. He beckoned her closer, writing Will as she approached and You as she looked at him with hard gray eyes. Then she frowned and, drawing the curtains closed, vanished.
The window cleaner felt a dwindling sensation in his chest and stomach.
Though he tapped a few times at her window, the woman did not reappear.
The glass of the city soon went orange with the evening sunlight. He listened to the horn blasts of passing traffic, watched a flight of martins darting from an alley, and was taken by a blaze of sudden energy. It was a hard flash of sickness and embarrassment and anger. He coiled his misting hose and cranked the winches of his platform, propelling it from the corner of the forty-second floor. Its rigging whistled and its planking creaked as he sailed from face to face of the building. Its side rail shook like a dowsing rod as he tumbled and dipped and ascended. He orbited the cornice of floor two hundred eight, and he buzzed a peanut peddler on the sidewalk. The sun flashed blue as it sank behind a distant bridge. A cotton rag slipped from the deck of his platform, fluttering away like a lazy white moth.
All this time, as he watched the darkening of the world, the window cleaner thought about the farawayness of other lives, about the fraying wire that bound him to his wishes, about the kindnesses of people who were now no more than ghosts. But as the stars began to brighten overhead—singly or in little clusters, and never at regular intervals—he ceased to think about these things. His hands slowed at the winches, and his body filled with rest, and he thought instead about the dandelion feathers that even the gentlest breeze could carry to the fiftieth floor, the sunlight that turned his shadow around him each day like a clock hand, the way the entire visible world can become caught in the glass of a polished window. He thought about his heart that flickered like a candleflame and his lungs that contracted like a bellows.
As he glided to a stop beside his bedroom window, the window cleaner saw two figures standing at his dressing chest. He recognized the first as his grandfather and the other, a small boy straining toward the light switch, as himself.
The boy pecked at the wall with his hand, and for a moment everything went dark. Then the window cleaner saw the loose shapes of their bodies concentrating as if from a white fog as they approached. They walked quietly beside each other, the man’s palm on the boy’s shoulder, and they did not seem to notice him. When they reached the window they stopped before him. He watched his grandfather lift a misting bottle from his pocket, spraying until a haze of water appeared on the glass, all the while gesturing in instruction to his grandson. Then, satisfied, he stepped to the side. With a shrug of hesitation, the small boy scribbled something in the moisture, and he turned to his grandfather, who nodded. The old man unhooked a flashlight from his belt loop and held it toward the window. When the light streamed like a beacon through the strokes in the mist, the window cleaner watched his own young eyes fill with recognition behind the glass, his own hand float slowly to his lips, his grandfather smile and ruffle his hair. And in the brisk night wind, as he stood on the platform heavy with sleep, he traced the light, and bowed his head, and saw written across his own drumming chest his name.
The House at the End of the World
When I was four years old, and living with my father, I would wait in the well of an oak tree each morning for him to come home, listening for the sound of his boots on the forest floor. The oak tree was an old black giant that stood by our front door. It grew acorns the size of my fist, and its trunk was mottled with a dry gray moss. Every morning when the sun climbed onto my window sill, I would run to the tree and crawl inside. The hollow I liked to sit in was spacious and deep, and I was such a small girl that I fit there easily. I would wait and listen, dreaming up little fantasies to pass the time, and then the leaves would crack, and the twigs would snap, and I’d know that my father was coming home. Our ceremony was this: he would place the food he had caught on a wooden platform by the front door—on some days a fish or a bird, on others a beaver or rabbit. He would knock the mud from his boots, then step over to the oak tree and slap it playfully with his palm—a hard, living sound. “Oak tree,” he would sigh. “You’re my only friend in all the world. I had a daughter once, a girl who loved me, but she’s gone now and I don’t know where to find her.” I would listen quietly, and when my father had finished delivering his lines, I would spring from beneath him shouting, “Here I am, here I am.” He would sweep me into the air and blanket me with kisses. “Ah, Holly,” he would say. Ah, father.
This was during the collapse of civilization, and I believed we were the only people in the world. My father had made certain preparations for these times: in a storeroom off our kitchen were cases of nails and soap and matches. On a shelf above the door stood a set of oil lamps, their globes polished to a liquid shine, and beside them was a box of spare wicks and several containers of lamp oil. A bolt of cotton cloth was leaning rigidly against the corner wall. A tool chest was tucked behind a stack of towels. We had a caulking gun and a sewing treadle and a crank flashlight with an electric socket in the butt. (We had a crank radio, as well, on a table in my father’s bedroom, but it was busted and would produce no sound, not even the fuzz of static.) And then there were the canned goods, large metal cylinders that lined the walls of our pantry, stacked three or four cans deep in columns that were staggered in height. These columns looked like steel pillars, or organ pipes, and when I walked into the pantry with a lamp or a candle I would see thousands of tiny flames flickering about me. There was powdered milk and coffee, rice and wheat and oats and flour, sugar and corn meal, beans and granola. There were carrots and eggs and hard little nuggets of dried potato. My favorite cans were the ones alon
g the front wall, which held chocolate pudding, orange marmalade, and applesauce, and whenever we opened one, I would stand at my father’s side and breathe in that first wonderful smell which came through the puncture.
Our house itself was built beside a stream of swift, clear water in the eye of the forest. Trees pressed against the back wall and then cleared away in the front yard, rising up again on the other side of a meadow. I sometimes thought of the forest as a river and of our house as one of those shoulders of stone that interrupts the current—my father and I were like the fish you find living in the shadows. Two trails stretched from our yard into the trees, one to a blackberry thicket and one to a cluster of birches where we gathered kindling. We had a small garden where we grew potatoes and carrots and pale, misshapen zucchini. In the meadow were mushrooms and clover and, in the spring, small purple flowers that smelled of mustard when you crushed them between your fingers. The grass was not high—we must have walked across it a hundred times a day—and deer occasionally stopped there to wrap themselves in the sunlight; if I clapped my hands, they would bound back into the trees through the loose, cottony brush. I was content in our house. In my bed at night I felt safe and warm. The world had ended. The stream splashed before me, and the forest stirred behind me. My father worked quietly in the next room.