The speech was rousing – a summons to life, a summons to action, a summons to penetrate deep into the hidden places, to turn aside from familiar things, to be humble enough to acknowledge we were wrong. Now, it seemed, we had done so; now, in a time which almost unwittingly wandered back from our tomorrows, pinching the small cheeks of its past, we stood before ourselves with the sure knowledge the hardest things were easier than we could know; the true significance of our lives was open to inspection; the sunset would finally become definitive, exemplary, conclusive …

My father spoke calmly; though he mastered the words, he did not need to raise his voice before them; they did his bidding without complaint, as if they knew inwardly the truth of what he said. Soon, it became clear that they were right, and I saw that, far from empty eloquence, the places his sentences stopped were really limits, and the doors beyond them opened nowhere. It was at that moment that the woman next to me – the woman I found too beautiful to dare to look at, though secretly I had been watching her behind my eyes for hours - turned toward me.

"Reflect on this," she said softly: "Your father is dying." And, taken together, all of these things – my father at a distance and she close enough to touch, the prophetic brightness of his words and the subdued intimacy of hers, the monologue I wanted to end, and the conversation I waited so long to begin, held up against the firm yet gentle way both of them shepherded their words through the darkness, so that they did not waste themselves upon the blind – taken together, this was more than I could bear, and I excused myself, knowing, all the same, that I wanted her to hold me back, and that she would not and could not hold me back. “I’m such a child,” I reflected bitterly, realising that I was powerless to grow beyond her sympathy, that perhaps, in her sympathy, she might even do my bidding. But if she were to do so, it would not be on my account, and thus she would not really be doing it at all.

I had tried to choose him once, shortly before I was born. From the start it seemed like a fool’s errand, and the attendant shook his head. Having measured me, taken the colour of my eyes, counted my toes, remarked drily on my descent and questioned me briefly about my views, religious, political, or otherwise (in my case “or otherwise”), he conceded there must be a legion of compatible fathers; how could I be so sure I would recognise the one that was really destined to be mine? It was only then that I realised that being born was not so effortless after all, and it brought with it responsibilities one would have to shoulder for the rest of one’s life. The attendant was completing some notes that would accompany my application; I stood up and walked to the window. The green, yellow, blue world beyond it was still there, if I wanted it. The attendant had stopped writing; he looked up; I felt his gaze, light and unassertive as, for a moment, he shared my waiting; he understood the greyness of the room; he understood the brightness of the world; he understood that the two were in opposition, and that, depending upon the set of the light, the two could also change places; but most of all he understood that there will come a moment which will be the final moment, a moment in which one grasps one or the other completely, and then everything becomes its opposite, black becomes white, and, like a face melted in a flame, nothing can ever be the way it was before.

I was toying with easy arguments; how harsh it seemed to bring a father into the world without unqualified love, without the absolute certainty his place could be taken by no other, that he alone was appointed to be the one he was. This was not how I felt, though; this argument did not satisfy me. Watching the outside, watching the everything beyond the confines of this place, isn’t it the promise that one day we might stand alone that gives us the strength to be? Why, when I had no reason to be anywhere, did I fly so zealously toward the hospital, in quest of a father to load me down? I knew now, right enough, the kind of father I wanted – a stillborn father, or one who lived no time at all. I shook my head, and left the building without even glancing in the delivery hall, though I have often wondered since then how they would have been - the generic fathers, and the one somewhere among them that I would have chosen. All of them, I imagined, had very pale skin; there was something intelligent and eccentric about them all - perhaps something in their hands - as if they might have been dentists - or ballerinas.

Outside: my friends were waiting, patiently and valiantly; any day now their lives would take off, and they would accomplish miraculous things; they would lead magnificent and incomprehensible lives. Years later I scanned the phone book, and found, almost without fail, that all of them had become women and subsequently married. The sole survivor asked me where it had gone, and, when pressed as to his point - other things, anyway, were beckoning, even if they led nowhere in particular - "our past," he said abruptly: "What did we do with it, where has it gone?" And I explained at length, without taking my eyes off the cord of the telephone, that there was never anything in it, there was never anything there, that, in our different ways, we had shared the abortive quest for parents to call our own and origins that would never dwindle or be revoked. Did it matter to anyone else where our past had gone, and, if it meant so little to them, then why should it matter to us? And, for that matter, if we had it all again, should things be so very different? The few hefty mistakes we make are enough to level us; if we are unlucky, they cripple us for life. But what of the mistakes we have never made, what of the legion of mistakes waiting in the wings? How much worse our lives could be, if we only had the imagination or the innocence to seek them out; how different all things might be if we did not crumple up but stood up straight, or if we even traded blows together. What if we lose? Our lives are lost, anyway.

“But that is exactly my point,” he said. “You say you don’t understand, when you understand perfectly. You have been agreeing with me, in secret, all along …”

I made some excuse, assuring him that he was worthless and would never amount to anything. It was impossible to insult him; he was in full agreement. Then I walked the short distance to the pub, in which I drank one beer after another. I picked up a book, read a few sentences, put it down again. Once again, that uneasy feeling, that everything was shallow and a lie. People dress themselves in so much dignity, I decided at last. Yet they are fools for all that. The most selfish actions are only possible for those who, deep down, have no respect whatsoever for themselves. Maybe the possibility for happiness, then, is somewhat equivocal; but there you go.

The truth of the matter was, my failure was private and personal, and I did not want to have to share it with him. I was not afraid of his condescension; it wasn’t that. It was that, even when your face is in the dust, at least it is your face. However great the disgrace, there is something dignified about being alone – whether it’s that one deserves such solitude, or, on the contrary, that one deserves nothing else, one cannot lie to a mind in charge of all the facts; and it is a kind of strength to hold oneself in check, from day to day, not refusing not to know, not pretending to be mad, but knowing, deep down – knowing and knowing, day and night, year in and year out, year after year, without going mad, but without accepting anything, either. That is dignity, even if it is a dignity for which there are no tangible rewards.

I was sitting in the window, the same place I used to sit as a student, and very slowly, in a red dress, the girl I always used to love walked past the window, and, as she did so, she looked toward me very clearly, and very knowingly, yet without seeing me there at all, so that I saw the rings in the glass and the patterns on the panes, and, foggy and distant, the yellow, even lights, like a lattice, along one face of the library on the other side of the street. And for a moment my loneliness was raised above me, and my feet could not keep pace with the suddenly smooth substance of the streets.

I ran from the pub; in a moment I was at her side. I looked back through the window; half empty, the glass of beer I had been drinking was exactly where I had left it, on the gnarled table top under the light. Like a somnambule her dress flowed on along the street, one foot or the other popping out at intervals; we passed a shop that sold posters and then one that sold sheet music; we reached the corner of a street named after a Welshman where they sometimes set up stalls in the evening. As if remembering a route – as if straining to remember one – she moved on purposefully, past the college on whose floor I had once sat with her. I saw my bicycle as a child, along with the half empty bottle that fell from my greatcoat on the carpet, so that to this day I associate almost any book with the long golden hair that I think of as her name in that stuffy room, and the blood on my knees, and the many long and abortive walks we made together, in which I spoke the first tenth of a hundred things, and then next week I had forgotten or disbelieved how far we had come, and the first tenth was repeated, until the two of us were too old to remain in that place. You will understand why the first tenth is enough, and that if I do not follow things to their rightful conclusions, it is only because those things were stunted from the start, or are so universal that a few strokes is sufficient; it does not matter the language or the time, the first tenth of everything is the same, and that courtship was a regret for origins – a ritual through which one enacts the regret for origins; even at its most elevated, it celebrated, beautifully yet implacably, its inability to begin.

The kiss was so brief, yet so full and so sincere that involuntarily I drew back, searching for the best place from which to watch it. I must have said something – that I was not yet ready to feel whatever happiness is – when she said shhh, and put a hand on my arm; she was laughing; her eyes were wide. Go now, she said, as if my leaving would make her still happier. And, when I shook my head incredulously and could not move from the place we stood: I would not trifle with your affections, she explained patiently. Go now, go along. And at last I understood; behind me, like a caress: Go and tell your father that I mean to marry you …

“My father,” I repeated, regretting that I had not made a better choice; how was I to chip new wood from that old stumbling block? The apparition would vanish; I would be back in my perpetual pub at the borders of its two streets, playing and replaying, till the stylus breaks, the symphony of my past. I would be waiting, after hours, on the long and lonely road that links two misty towns, both out of sight; I would be waiting at the bus shelter where the buses no longer pass, and, even if they did, no one would recognise or remember me. Back in the house of my childhood, however it was that I finally reached it, the stone had grown still colder. A fuse must have blown, and I moved through a set of rooms dark like a fan, starlight slats of light clattering on the boards against my feet, while there, on the nightstand, a small phone wrung out its heart against the night. Turning the handle of the door, everyone turned about equally and with the same expression, like mirrors of themselves, many of them wearing shoes. In a general hush - “I’m to be married, all my life,” I declared, as everyone held me closest, contesting without ambition to hold me closer, to be the presence of my heart.

“I’m so sorry; I’m so very sorry …” a voice said out loud, connected to one of the hands, and emanating from someone’s back. Similarly, on a stretched table, the limbs were long, like folds of cloth; the face, drawn in a regal frown, was watching something on the ceiling, or else something circling far beyond the ceiling, far above us all. Then someone took my wrists, as though my future here were to be prevented in some way; I was drawn to one side. “He’s very tired; everything is fine; he’s very tired,” the litany repeated: “He’s just given birth; he’s very tired, now. Yes, you can see him now, if you want.” Though I failed to understand how this was different from the scraps of a man I saw at intervals between the shoulders and in the places where bodies and their clothes drew apart and ended. “He was such a good father; we will all miss him so much …” someone said, perhaps my sister or a friend of some kind. She held me by the shoulders and looked at me intently; the deep gaze fell through nothing; it passed out into the night without division; when she turned away, I found I was holding a strip of fabric – the end of a dress, something describing a bow. “This emptiness in us,” I began. “What end could it accomplish?” For my father and I, I saw clearly, my father, at least, in his current state, and I in mine, were constructed from a common tissue, one disabused of the substantiality of the world; we existed in the places that were needful, for the prospects that required our intervention; but beyond that being – this being as a kind of courtesy to those about us – we did not require the fulfilment of a material existence; the deck of cards was half blank, yet this did not prevent it from concealing a myriad of aces. Where the baby was supposed to have been born, there was a hollow in a stone. I dipped my hand into it; it felt like enigma and the night, as if secretly - but somewhere close by - it debated its own substance. If he responded then my own wristwatch would be right – right, and not forever wrong. But I had waited too long in this uncertainty; I was bound as I ever had been, and my wrist ticked away the night.

How was I to get this man to my wedding? Could I be married without him, did I need to wait here, in this place, which seemed just now like a perpetual labour? Hastily, I scrawled something on a note – that is to say, a scrap of paper. It had been saying something, I felt sure, before it submitted itself to me. But my own agenda did little to raise its spirits or improve its prospects in the world, and as I kept on writing that word “marriage” and “married” and “marry”, until the word stopped making sense, the ink itself seemed blood of a different kind, and my own notes were resting, after their labour; they themselves, limp and half alive, could scarcely support themselves upon the table; when I pushed them gently, they sank swiftly to the floor without either recrimination or regret. “What claim can I lay on you, to be a father now?” I wondered: I am not oil enough for this wound. Feeling the night air about me, I thought for what must have been the hundredth time – the night: I will die without understanding it; I would give up everything I own and everything promised me, if I could once, just only for this night, please god live in peace … I felt the wind, like a commentary in its own element, in its own key: In this moment, I understand everything and nothing. I know and feel more than I will ever express; if you were to give me this one true wind among a hundred imposters, I would find it out, and not with difficulty, but instantly, and by a smooth, an almost effortless act of grace, one naturally bestowed upon my fingertips. I have a great gift; my birthing was worthwhile; but I will die pointlessly and without remission, in a single, unadulterated act of living toward death. I will die because there is only the truth about us, and people with clownish hands pressed tight to their heads. For myself, I should bow my breast, and strike the head the words are living in …

Somewhere behind, in my imagination, my father had advanced to caress me. What could he know, anyway, doomed as he was to be precursor, and therefore to know everything, and therefore to be nothing, since I would never have him learn enough to take myself away from me? He had a spade, I noted with melancholy resignation; he had been digging his way back to his birthplace from the start. He wore his death upon his wrist – the watch I would take from it while his body was still warm; he knew nothing yet; he was a child. Gangling and overstretched, what else could he be, but a gospel and a dwarf, outfated, underdressed and with conditions of his own – none of which he or I would know, except in living together through the death that would bind us together and, just as surely, raise high the victor, and deposit the loser like so much slurry in the heap where slurry is kept.

My father said something delightful; it was like a flute, and I am not fond of music. He said something sincere; he measured sincerity in a way I had not credited; he made me feel things; I suspected, for a moment, I was in love with him; I was in love with life. Things did not need to be fated; we could explain all discord by misunderstandings. The world was basically good; whales were here to stay; no one held us personally responsible for the genocides we engineered out of hatred. Hatred, too, was a blessing; we could step back; we could take the even keel; nothing could ever have been done differently, and, if it had, then it would have been done differently, and for that very reason, we could scarcely know, in advance, the least thing about it.

 

And so, on this my wedding day, as we approached the church in separate harness, each shackled to the inexorability of our own pasts like tethers to a flying carriage, I chose to give over the form and substance by which I had become known. Henceforth I would live irreverently, being or not being as I chose, not waiting for the present to finish speaking. Why were we here in harness, pressing toward some anticipated future? Why wait, even for a moment, for what the future brings, when by an effort of will we can have it now; we can be in whatever instant that we choose?

"I must see her," I cried; the coachman vaguely dissented, moving his arms in such a way that he illustrated nothing. Now I slipped a hand into my pocket, and toward the back of his flying hair I allowed the green of banknotes to be seen elusively between my fingers. Suffice to say, they were not visible for long. Already the pace had quickened; I felt the coiled notes bleeding between my hands, distance and colour discreetly agreeing the terms of their exchange. A moment later my hands were empty and the two carriages flush, their prancing steeds gay and methodical. A curve in the path that took us this way - the other responded thus, equal and in equilibrium. At a pace, and yet smoothly, as if riding upon a bed, my eyes and her dress drew alongside. The limbs within it, jumbled and intimate, moved in despite of themselves; with exultation I was watching the harmless bob of her head, like a bird at a window box, when, with a sudden movement – “My rose!” she exclaimed, moving her fingers mechanically through her hair; it had not slipped aside, no, that was not possible; neither had it somehow flattened itself out into different shape. It was a heart – a heart that was mislaid.

“You cannot go back for it,” she said indecisively – we had already argued the matter, apparently, with our eyes; the impulses and questions, with dizzying speed, spent themselves in all directions, dying at common limits like a fiery circle, like a halo held on end – “But, all the same, would you?” And now that her eyes had grown full and dark, I seemed to see flapping wildly within them all the doomed and fanciful fabric of the past few days, the road with its harness and the telephone suspended from a hospital, through whose mouthpiece something yellow – perhaps beer or urine – dribbled down the pages. Swiftly I moved – my legs over, my hands at the rail; suspended scarcely by a breath, the ground thundering at my feet, almost I had let things fall, when, sensing the deceit - “My manhood shall recover your lost bloom,” I dissimulated in turn, “but in different form, and by inroads of its own.” Lowering my voice, I continued prophetically: “That which is lost forfeits all right of choosing; it will, therefore take note, love that which serves it best.” Now all eyes were upon me; my speech was fantastic; it was memorable, yet what on earth did it mean? Do not chivvy them; let them lie, for such times are few enough, and a crown is nothing but a hat passed by way of progeny. Wear it then I may, for now, even if my workaday cap is warmer, will never be remembered, and, incidentally, can be worn by me alone.

With a nod, the attendant was gone, gigantic and sudden. The sky was empty, with only the backs of his coat to fill it at all corners, like a blanket. Too large even for a head, everything was black tails and boots and the even clatter of the horses, as though it were these that propelled him from us. An instant later, all that remained was an elevated shoal of dust that spilt slowly down over the hedgerows on each side, as if overflowing from a bubbling cup. He had not gone unaided, though; through the thick of things – “A valiant man,” her voice said softly, willing itself to be beaten by his heels. Now her gaze seemed to caress the space where he had been, as if too shy to fall directly upon it. Was it worth so much to her that one man recover the petals of her past?

Time brought it back, sodden and without dignity. Too many hooves had trampled it; its light and fragrant expedition upon the air – what had it been thinking? – had twisted it out of shape, a brown, crushed thing that no longer even smelled like life, but only a hundred other things. Was this an omen, I speculated, for our future together? And I looked again at her, in the carriage over there; she had not seen yet what the attendant was bringing back; she did not know the way things had ended. If this moment went on forever without resolution, it would not trouble anyone. What was she looking at, now, over the hills? What was she thinking, in her own distance? I inhaled deeply of the blue of her, hovering within or perhaps settling at its own indefinite limits, unsuspected and therefore unconstrained, even if there were no particular place that it wanted to go. “On such a day the haze of heat over a particular village,” I speculated: “On such a day …” For the sentence was its own substance; it dwelled, and thus, abiding in its necessary place, did not need to be completed. I resurrect from here the beginning; nothing else has obligation to mean.

In a heat haze above the country at the borders of a town not far from the well a man and a woman fresh from the fields draw water with a yoke circumnavigated by cattle. I do not understand them, and if I tried to put a name to them, they would frown and withdraw, not just apart from me, but to break with language itself, distrusting anything that tries to represent. I know they pray in a language that will not be believed or heeded; I know their ancestors do, too; I know all of this has been handed down, and will be till the world comes to such places and mitigates them with itself, explaining in its own imperative terms that nothing needs to be believed. I can smell the inside of their mouths on the angle of a street, dusking after sunset; it’s the smell of eucalyptus and dry wood. I know I can knock forever at this door; there will be no answer. I can leave from here each day, never to return, and the brickwork would expect nothing less of me. Even to have reached this place, is only really to have found myself, by chance, among the houses of a street, all of which yawn breathlessly toward the hills, their very foundations turned about to face away, like an impediment.