“That’s right,” Jessica said, still laughing. “It’s Morgan’s notebook I’ve lost this time, I’ll bet you anything.”
For just a moment she thought she saw the yellow flag ripple in the breeze, and then it stopped. “My turn to buy,” she said, and they headed back into the Mermaid Café.
“I remember about Morgan,” Simeon said, as she’d hoped he would. “So you finally met him?”
“Yes, I did. He’s not what I thought, though.”
“Is he your true love?” Simeon asked.
“Possibly,” Jessica said. “All the same, can you help me throw the yellow couch off the roof this afternoon?”
“Whatever for?” Simeon asked.
“I want to watch it fall,” Jessica said.
Trading Polaris
I’D ALWAYS LIVED ALONE until you came, Alia. We hadn’t just been lovers, companions; you led me beyond time. With you I was able to watch its comings and goings from the tops of invisible ladders, of trees, its messengers little ghostly animals we’d given birth to while dreaming there, while making love. We spent three summer months together, in my white clapboard house facing the sea. Before you came it was just an empty ballroom where I danced with sea winds.
September came; you had to be home. You lived an eight-day walk above our seaside valley. You asked me to take you part way. On the fourth evening we camped by a rocky waterfall; in the morning our campsite was enveloped in a golden mist. You were gone, our fire dead. I was afraid I’d never see you again, for you’d disappeared into that yellow fog as though into a cloud that might carry you away, to rain you down in a place where you might find smarter lovers.
I left the fire pit and began to walk in the direction I believed your village lay. The flat land swelled into shallow wooded hills, reminiscent of a woman’s body, but it wasn’t yours. It was Sonia’s, but I didn’t know that then.
When I made camp that night I tried to climb the spirit ladder as you’d taught me, up to the starry place we’d gone together. At the top of that ladder it’s possible to see into the past and future, to retrieve from the sky what is necessary to the life of Earth dwellers—the trick is to keep your brains intact on your way back down—such as they are. I’d so willingly shucked the husk of self to fly—a husk that seemed, while visioning, irrelevant, but a necessary cloak, you reminded me, for navigating this world, its people. On the way down, my first time with you, I was still so borderless I could understand the speech of trees, the secrets of rivers. I consumed this wealth of new knowledge gluttonously, never thought how there’s no use in wisdom if it can’t be shared. I understood so many new languages but could no longer speak. Is that why you left me? You said you’d go, part way, but I’d always thought we’d say goodbye first. It was when we descended together I learned how much stronger you were than me, how much more treasure you could carry down the ladder and still remain intact. Did you vanish because I proved too weak to carry knowledge?
Alone, I tried to climb again, the way you’d shown me. Hoped that, could I climb high enough, I’d be able to signal you, call you to return, but four of the ladder’s incorporeal steps were missing. I thought perhaps I’d broken them our last time. Who had we left up there, unable to descend? What nameless beasts had we spawned—dream pigs or fishes running amok in a world I couldn’t see? The part I could see it with was still up there, perched on a broken rung. I would have to find my own way to knowledge now; the path you’d given me was barred. I’d have to go into the woods alone.
At the forest’s edge I camped beneath an enormous rock, standing sentinel, a single child in a short-grassed open place, interspersed with flowering bushes, grazed by goats. I thought of our town park, its monuments and manicured lawns, its planted shrubbery, but this was landscaping by four-footeds. They had planted even the bushes, shitting out guava seeds in the fall. It was places like this, I thought, tamed by wildness, that we’d modelled our first parks after.
I looked at the stars before I fell asleep. For a brief moment it seemed they were falling from the sky, like pieces of quartz singing into my brain. My grandfather spoke to me that night. Long dead, he spoke from the past, but the stars, who had heard him, gave his words to me repackaged in the present, for to stellar beings, who live so long, not a moment had passed between his time and mine.
My grandfather wakes from sleep and shakes off his dream of being an unborn me. He stands up, sees the blinking distant lamps of ships at sea disguised as fireflies. He wakes to a cold wind and maybe bears in the not so far off woods that might come out to eat him. My grandfather feels safer in the open places, imitating his mind that, like mine likes to travel unencumbered, far searching. He turns and looks at the stone, and at its mouth, into which all the time has gone. All the time in the mouth of the stone. The stone in the shape of a head. It speaks so slowly that to hear it say one sentence would take a lifetime. “Ah,” says my grandfather, “It is you I’ve been listening to all my life; you have eaten up all my time.”
My grandfather goes back to our town to find that everyone he knows has died. He waits for his own death, but it does not come. In the café he drinks lemonade and casts shadows in the late afternoon sunlight. His old body, still casting shadows. So many things we can’t do in old age but there is a skill that follows us past the grave.
So he hadn’t died camping alone as we’d always thought, even when too old for it. He had returned, but first passed through a stone’s mouth, and so came back too late, after even I had passed away. How lonely for him, and, it suddenly felt, for me. The one person in my family who knew what it was to learn alien languages, who sought that knowledge as eagerly and foolishly as me, caught now forever on time’s opposite side.
Of course all his words didn’t follow me out of my dream, but I woke with that searing insight nonetheless, a comet trail if not the comet itself. I looked at myself to see whether I’d turned into my grandfather as I slept. It seemed possible. I’d come closer to him than I ever had when he’d lived.
It was only then, because I’d seen it in my dream, that I noticed how the stone resembled a rough human head, whether by chance or by human carving it was hard to say. I imagined my grandfather chipping away at the rock as though it was only its lack of human shape that prevented it from being more loquacious. I scratched under the grass until I found the remains of an old fire pit. Among them, a knife blade of his I remembered from childhood, its carved wooden handle rotted away. I broke it, angry he’d disappeared twenty years before, couldn’t share what he’d learned on his own strange journey except in dream fragments. Yet I felt my journey really did cross his, if only in a timeless time.
I was grateful for the woods. There at last I found streams to wash in. There I dwelt on memories of my days spent with you, Alia. Oh Stone, give me back our time.
But the stone I’d left behind hadn’t said a thing to me. Like you, the stone thought I didn’t quite rate. I thought of going back and smashing it, but I had no sledgehammer with me, no words strong enough to break a stone already so old. And wasn’t that what grandfather tried, chipping away at it? As though to give it a human face would make its speech quicker, easier to understand? Perhaps that’s when it swallowed him, for having the audacity to try. Oh, Stone, tell me where Alia went.