She sat there several minutes longer, staring into the unchanging empty room, then started the car and backed up a little ways and then when the house was out of view and she was on the road, her headlights on again, filled with a violent loneliness that the moon did not understand.
A darkening silo. A rolling spill. A rolling split of hill. Of lengthening day-sore gray. Her weight on her forearms and for a moment the perfect construction: The shiver of stars as the legs disappear through the surface. Obliteration of a dual sky brought low for even them to play in. She couldn’t much see her, just the sliver of pale like a white comma on a black page. She waited. They would cast into each other. Gaudy sky of a late afternoon. Black moons darned underneath her nails. The last light glinting the dome of the streetlight and would have reached her face and body, lit the very few stray strands of hair and shivered her body with luminescence and delicacy had she not been in the wrong place for this to happen.
Calm outside, no stars, streetlights lit pools in darkness, wet sidewalk shimmering. A few months later—
In the bathroom the warm steam from the hot water taps slowly seeping out of the cracked window. The last bell rang. Light, pale, fell in and lit everything evenly, even deep in the crevices and valleys of her heavy clothing.
She watched her children shrink to black sparks, trailing way through the gray streets and gleaming muddy fields and yards.
The short clack of echo rocketed in her ear, high and grinding.
Though having sprung off in different directions they meet again at the place in space where the universe loops around again and meets itself. There they connect, intertwine and forget which was which.
A tree and its roots.
The Commonwealth of Kentucky was once an ocean. Not a land of bluegrass but an endless expanse of blue waves, waters full of indescribably creepy creatures that frisked and scuttled below the surface of a sea that was ancient even then, but over time the waters receded and the dead of those obscure monstrosities slumbering on the floor were battered and crushed by currents to grains and granules. Trilobites, brachiopods, gastropods, crinoids, edrioasteroids. Crushed and crushed and crushed. The bodies sifted down, each upon each, and as ages passed they became stone, the strata of which tell and retell a story. Limestone, the living rock, the soft monument, rainwater washing it away in drips and drabs, year after year, leaving a vast vein of caves. At every moment that soft rock erodes away under unsuspecting feet.
The City of Crow Station is in the exact geographic center of the state, more or less, and as a result is directly over the center of the yawning void. Bats and blind shrimp and the bones of lost children. One day it is going to collapse, the entire Commonwealth of Kentucky, every bronze statue of a thoroughbred, every distillery and secret crop hidden between the rows of corn. The City of Crow Station, home of the first Post Office west of the Allegheny Mountains and the first ovariotomy. Harrod County and its vast fields of cud-chewing bovines. The Bluegrass and the Pennyroyal and the Jackson Purchase. Those last limestone pillars that hold the whole Commonwealth aloft will give way and the schools and real estate agencies and farm supply stores and hogs and horses and ducks will tumble down into that bleak blackness. Children will tumble and poor farmers whose breath is scented with family recipe mash and estate lawyers still in reverie of the fees for the administration of a dead millionaire and beautiful long-legged high school boys and strong-armed girls will tumble. Body over body, legs twirling, endlessly down and down, passing the slower bodies of former loves and the caskets of old teachers spilling open.
This ancient abyss waiting the sun’s call to rise. The lifeless swells of sand waiting the air’s call to bloom and glow. The worn away bones of every scuttling and nameless thing waiting to rise as rock and mountain.
SEVEN
“LEAH?” SHE LOOKED UP AT THE MAN STANDING next to her table. Behind him were banks of windows looking out on the midday light of Crow Station, Kentucky. He was tall and middle aged. “Yes?”
“Leah,” he said again. “Can I sit?” She nodded. She had just taken a sip of her sweet tea and her lips felt wet. The man sat and looked at her, smiling, without saying anything. “What can I do for you — I’m sorry I didn’t catch your name.” The man was smiling at her and not saying anything and she became very uncomfortable and was about to say something when he began again. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s been so long and I can’t say that I would have recognized you had I not seen the article. Leah, it’s me. Jacob.”
Broken men and women, slight shuffling and trembling before the weight of the hollow light. Why the whispers? they wonder. Each shuffles, each sweeps their shattered fragments along the halls or through rain water wet streets. Under light, under light: fluorescent and green — a child once cut a paper to seam a scene — a boy chased from the arcade, from the lush hill by a man of some shadowy bulk — or knelt in the floor by the window at night, chin on sill, eyes crossing, stemming the tide of sleep no more, thinking: nothing. At night their beds are rafts on a wide river or man-made lake. Their stuffed dogs and blankets: travelers met at the last station, ragged and hungry. The hot stream that flows backward when they hear the slow songs crackle on the radio, is never going to empty into a sea. They will realize as they brush the little bit of hair back from their glassed eye, filling out the same form for the nth time. They will think, “—.” They can only think of the book they read once. They will remember one day while passing a used bookstore, seeing a copy in the window: rain rotted, binding blown, mold mournfully draped like crepe. They will remember the book they read each night for a week straight, under the covers, lamp light or by the glow of the radio. Two children, siblings, the bag of jewels or cash, the rich married couple, the unlocked doors, a man in a black coat under trees by the beach, backlit by the plump moon: the moon knows nothing about any of this. Then they will walk on, will not remember how the book ends. Then they will go back to work.
When she thought about it later, she could not remember what her feeling had been. Had she wanted to embrace him? Had she wanted to scream and run? Had she been afraid? Had she felt a swell of recognition and love? When she thought about it later, she couldn’t remember having any reaction. She could clearly remember everything about the moment — the man, the windows bright behind him, the smells and sounds of the small restaurant at lunch time. She could even see herself, as though she’d not been part of the scene, only observing it from afar. Every mote lolling on a slight breeze of greasy air. The clack of every tooth of every person around them on bent tines. The swirling scents of stale coffee and ancient grease deep-frying the town into oblivion. The arc of a fly battering its black body in a corner. In that moment, Leah Shepherd was aware of every contour of the physical universe which she was the center of with this man sitting across from her in front of the windows bright with the day’s light, but what she felt inside was a complete mystery to her. She was a surface across which creation played, but below, no light prevailed. She’d sat and she’d listened to him.