Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story (Hamlet, 5.2.344-46)
I.
Three weeks ago the people at college stopped looking at me. When they first turned aside their faces, and tilted their lunch trays away from me, I cringed and felt sick. But now I don’t mind it. You get used to things, when they keep happening: something sharp in them is lost. How joyous, then, how joyous, life!
I bought flowers today at the shop just off the campus. The owner and her cat, both growing grey, lie under the same sleep-like trance. They look as I feel. When I enter they lift their silvered heads, squint dreamily, and shut their lids as if the world, they discover, is not interesting enough. I don’t know why I stopped by today. I don’t need the flowers, certainly, or not these specific ones, at least. I bought lilacs and two roses sweating with moisture, and the irises that are always singing something deep in their throats. I got back to the room and put them in a glass pot. The flowers looked terrifically friendly as they bent their stems over the rim, as all flowers look. But you could tell they’d rather be in the flower shop with the lady and her cat, that they preferred to sleep, to rest.
No, I can’t rest in this room—not at all!
Today, just a little while ago, I stood on the bed behind me and looked glancingly at my reflection. I never look at it straight on. I used to, though, before the man in the café who strangled me to death. Now I glanced sideways, like a quick raindrop at a pane, at my face, my hair, my bright globes of eyes. I prefer to look at myself this way—it’s the way they’ve all taken to looking at me now.
I spent most of today writing a letter to a woman I have met but have few memories of: my mother. She sends me a photograph of herself and her new husband every year. She is always the same in the pictures.
She doesn’t know I’ve been strangled to death. I find it’s simply too embarrassing to explain it to her—that I’m here, that I’m breathing and in all ways sound, but not alive, as other people are. She senses it, though, like the rest of them. Every so often I catch a word in her letters that isn’t directed toward anybody, a sort of fuzziness that means she has momentarily forgotten to whom she is writing. There is sometimes also a proverbial flicking aside of the head, a queasy sense of being stepped on politely through the page.
She writes books, and sends me her manuscripts, folded up in manila envelopes, before she sends them in to be published. I believe she sends them to me because she knows I have the time. Today, for example, was spent mostly tracing a bulbous, water-shaped crack on my window and composing letters. Much of the day was also spent looking at the clock on the wall and wanting to smash it! I avoided people, but then one doesn’t care about people.
The letter I composed this morning went like this:
Dear Agatha,
Thank you for your last letter, and especially for the manuscript—a wonderfully demented retelling of Antigone. I read it so voraciously I nearly caught fever once I was done. I had to go for a walk afterward to get your book out of my system. I wonder, incidentally, if there really is a cave somewhere in modern-day Thebes in which Antigone once lived only on millet & wine, crying those raucous bird-cries, sentenced to a death-in-life which was a torture to her (and when death came for her it was sweet, since there is more room to breathe in Hades than in the caves of this earth—as one has always secretly suspected).
You must try not to worry about me. Even I don’t worry about me. You must consider me
yours fancy-free,
-------------
I felt very proud of this letter, after it was written and sealed. Light and droll, the way Jane Austen must have written her letters (all except for the part about Antigone and death, but I felt I had to keep it. One must allow me my little diversions). It let our two minds meet in the way I’m sure a literal meeting could not have. Laugh, laugh, I tell her between all the little words. Or gape at the page in confusion, but in any event, look.
II.
In the afternoon I went to send the letter. It was raining heavily; I crouched under my umbrella, and gazed from under it at a world hung with mist. At the post office I moved to the front of the line and slid my letter under the plastic sheet.
“Slide the letter under the sheet,” the mail woman instructed me.
“It’s under the sheet,” I said, doing with my face what I believed was a smile.
The mail woman looked in my general direction from under slightly raised brows. She worked her jaw around a piece of gum.
“It’s not under the sheet,” she said.
“Ah,” I said. I looked down and found it was still in my hand. “My mistake.” I slid the letter promptly under the sheet.
The mail woman’s eyebrows rose until they were hidden under a fall of platinum hair.
“Miss,” said the mail woman in an impressive monotone, “there is a line behind you. Won’t you be so kind as to put the letter under the sheet.”
“We’re all waiting,” said the quavering voice of an old woman who stood behind me. She glared out of watery green-flecked eyes. She was the only person behind me.
“Are you sending a letter or aren’t you,” said the mail woman.
“This is all very curious,” I said to the mail woman. “I distinctly remember putting the letter under the sheet twice now.”
The mail woman pointed at my hand with a smile of pity.
“It’s in your hand, miss,” she said.
“Hell,” I said. I looked at the letter in trembling confusion. “Damnation, hell.”
“Next!” called the mailwoman over my continued and increasingly emphatic imprecations.
“Hell!” I said, suddenly looking up from the letter. A revelation was at hand. “Is this because I’m dead?”
“Miss, I’m going to have to call the manager if you don’t move,” said the mail woman.
“We’re all waiting,” said the lone old woman behind me with the hoarse cry of a pterodactyl.
“Oh, I see. It must be because I’m deceased,” I said. I contemplated kicking the wall (to see if my leg would go through it, or contrariwise).
“I warned you—” said the mailwoman.
“No, no,” I said. “No need for that; I’ll be on my way.” Bowing my head quickly and cordially to the old woman, I cried generally, “Goodbye, ladies, goodbye, goodbye, sweet ladies,” and, turning abruptly, made my exit.
Everything went smoothly on the way back to the campus. I could move my feet, for example, and in so doing propel myself forward. This I saw as a very encouraging sign. I sang to myself lustily and unabashedly, as many tone-impaired people do, and even waved at the three bikers speeding past me (who did not, however, wave back or acknowledge me in any perceivable fashion).
When I came into my little room there was a swathe of red cloth lying across one of the beds. This was the roommate. Her name often slips my mind. You will forgive me if it does so now. Something vaguely flowerish, Marigold or Rosamund. She was now propping her bare heels against her bedpost, her hunched-up knees making two red hills in the skirt of her dress. She took up from her bedside table, and languidly sipped, what looked like a bottle of apple juice. Her eyes crossed as she tilted the bottle toward her mouth, into which rich golden bubbles tumbled. I had seen her in this pose often.
“Hello,” I said to the roommate. I remained by the doorway: the roommate has the effect on me of headlights on shy deer, a frozen dread of the too-bright and too-real. “My letter,” I added, when the roommate continued to empty the yellow stuff into her mouth, “won’t send.”
“What?” said the roommate. She inspected the interior of the bottle with one eye.
“My letter,” I said. “It won’t send.”
“What?” said the roommate. The inspection complete, she took another long sip.
“Hell,” I said.
“Language,” said the roommate in an echoey burble.
I kicked the doorframe.
“Hell,” I shouted.
“What?” said the roommate.
I advanced further into the room and delivered a good kick to her bedframe.
“This is because I’m dead, isn’t it?” I shouted, leaning over her feet.
“What a…ah…day,” said the roommate, yawning. She sat up in bed, the hills of her knees receding, and positioned the apple juice carefully on her bedside table. “I’m going to a party,” she informed me. She swung her feet over the foot of the bed and slipped on two little red shoes that had been waiting open-mouthed on the carpet.
I stepped suddenly away from the foot of the bed. “Oh,” I said, “I’ve got an idea. Well, you don’t have to, but—since you’re going out already, could you— if you aren’t very busy—“
“Hm?” said the roommate. She was now standing before the mirror propped against her desk, bending over sideways so as to twist up her dark hair. A reflection bent in a faded imitation and made a rueful face at itself.
“If you aren’t terribly busy,” I continued, “I would be grateful if you would stop by the post-office, on the way to this party of yours, and slip in—this—“ I held out the letter to her back.
“A moment,” said the roommate, now leaning with her face very close to the mirror. A reflection wrinkled its nose.
“It’s just one letter,” I added.
“Ok, ok, I’ll take it,” said the roommate. With her face still inches from the mirror, she reached back one arm and flailed it in the vicinity of my hand, until her fingers caught the letter. At last she turned from the mirror, the ghost receding from the glass, and made her way to the door.
“Oh,” she said at the threshold, looking down at her hands, flexing the narrow fingers. “You forgot to give it to me.” She smiled absently in my direction. “What was it? A card?”
The letter was still in my hand. My hand shook the letter like a little white fish, like a little white flag.
“I apologize,” I said, my lips trembling. “Indeed I apologize profusely. This is all because I’m dead, you see. It’s very—very—inconvenient. “
“That’s nice,” said the roommate, smiling absently in the direction of my face, and departed.
III.
I sat on the bed and held the letter in my hands. I didn’t trace the shape on the window. I couldn’t look at the dripping flowers. I couldn’t look at anything very closely; a curious tremble of tears turned all the lamplight into elongated, wobbly streams.
After sitting in silence without moving, I was, at last, thirsty. I realized this only by degrees—my gaze had become so fixed on the crumpled letter that my limbs, in response, seemed to have frozen—and I stood up from the bed slowly, as if out of a trance. My eyes, wandering in a parched delirium, fell on the apple juice, which still sat on the roommate’s bedside table. I leaned over the roommate’s bed frame and snatched it up. I sat down again: a strange feeling, to be sitting on another person’s empty mattress, where the covers did not part to each side for me but lay entranced in their alien heat.
“Goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, goodnight,” I said to the echoing inside of the bottle. I lifted it and gulped, and gulped again, and thought that the apple juice tasted decidedly unlike apple juice and rather nicer, and gulped once more. The room slipped sideways, very gradually, as if a wave had come and bumped its head below the room and rolled once, ever so gently. But that was nothing, really. After another few gulps of the golden elixir, the room became a dim and bright and dim again kaleidoscope of color, and I sank onto the roommate’s bed in order to watch the too-bright too-dark dance of the light, and myself in the light, as through a distorted glass.
All at once there was a rap at the door. I lifted my head.
“Don’t come in!” I cried.
“It’s only me,” said a voice.
“That’s one too many people!” I cried.
“Open the door,” said the voice.
“I can’t,” I said feebly.
“I can pick locks,” said the voice. There was the fiddly rackety sound of a lock being assiduously picked.
“I’m armed,” I said fuzzily into the rumple of sheets.
The door opened and a tall, slim person came into the room.
“Hello,” she said. In the lamplight her eyes were brightly and gravely directed at me.
“Hello,” I said, more out of surprise than politeness.
“Are you --“ (she spoke my name).
I nodded from the bed.
“Ah,” she said mournfully. “Ah. I thought so.” She came further into the room and, after a still moment of thought, in which her limbs seemed gently to twitch, sat at the foot of the bed on which I still lay. She faced toward me. Her eyes were large and dark and the lids drooped pleasantly at the sides.
“And who are you?” I said, in a hushed voice. I did not want to break the spell of another human being’s looking directly at me.
“Ah,” she said, still with the same bird-like note of mourning. “I thought you would remember. I’m Leah. I was in the café with you on the day you were murdered.”
“Oh,” I said. I felt the bubble of a sob in my throat. I crumpled the sheets in my hand. “How horrible.”
“Yes,” she said, her mouth turning down. “Then he murdered me, too.”
“How horrible, horrible,” I said, with the same keening, trembling note that ran through Leah’s voice. “The squeezing—the squeezing—did he do that?”
“Ah,” said Leah. “Yes.”
“But you woke up,” I said. “You didn’t go anywhere.”
“Hell didn’t want me, nor heaven,” said Leah.
“The fiery pits of hell,” I said morosely. “They didn’t want me. No, that’s not it. Far worse, they don’t exist.”
“They don’t exist,” said Leah, in a low, thoughtful murmur.
“Incidentally,” I said, “was I sitting at the café with you when he murdered me?”
Leah nodded. “I thought you would remember.”
“I don’t believe I remember you at all,” I said.
“Ah,” said Leah, looking down at me kindly with her drooping eyes. “It happens like that sometimes.”
“You go to school here, then?”
“Oh, yes,” said Leah.
“I suppose you’ve been snubbed.”
Leah grimaced. “Ignored.”
“They can all go to hell.”
We giggled.
“Why do you suppose,” Leah said, “it’s happened to us?”
“It’s because we’re artists,” I said.
“It’s because we’re women,” said Leah.
“It’s because we’re poets.”
“It’s because we’re irrationalists.”
“It’s because we’re anarchists.”
“I’m not an anarchist,” said Leah gravely.
“Oh,” I said. “Neither am I.”
We sat in silence. The room had grown dark, but the faint glow from the lamp made two gold coins quiver in Leah’s eyes. Leah’s hand crept over the bed sheet and grasped mine, swinging it gently.
“What should we do about it, then?” said Leah.
“There’s got to be a way out,” I said.
“Out,” said Leah slowly. “You mean out of here?”
“Yes, here,” I said.
“Ah,” said Leah, “I’ve thought about that before.” She looked at our clasped hands, her mouth turning down. “I never tried it.”
“Neither did I.”
“I was always afraid I’d wake up here again.”
“That’s just it,” I said. “Worse and worse. You dig and you dig…Nothing underneath but another chip of glass, red or blue or purple, or without color of course, and then another…Yes, glass all grimy with dirt or with something worse, something which looks and smells worse, in which the merciless universe…or a bored god…or nobody at all, in fact…Yes, that’s quite expressive...Nobody at all allows you to see yourself very very smearily, again, then once again…What a joke!”
“But suppose we could do it,” said Leah.
“It would be a relief,” I said.
“We’ll just have to set about it right,” said Leah.
“How nice to die from tuberculosis,” I said. “All of life lived in a dim, horrible fever. And what are those haunted lines: ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die…to cease upon the midnight…’” I yawned hugely.
“We mustn’t get carried away,” said Leah, whose eyes were very bright, a pure shining gold-and-black, like two snapped-open pocket watches.
“We could do it like people in books,” I said, keeping my voice down to a tranquil murmur. “They so often get it right, with just enough poetic style and simplicity... with artistic merit. They don’t make a botch of things.”
Leah looked down at my face. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s think about it. Let’s sleep first and wake again and talk tomorrow.”
“I won’t be able to sleep,” I said. I squeezed her hand in a spasm of terror. “Don’t leave me, Leah, don’t.”
Leah dislodged my fingers.
“Ah,” she cried. “What’s this?” She pulled out the crumpled white letter that had been imprisoned (for oh, how long!) in my hand. She held it in her own. It shone like a little white star between her fingers.
“Keep it,” I said. “I don’t want to look at it again. I don’t believe there would have been an answer, anyway.”
Leah held it for a moment without speaking, then nodded slowly.
“Tomorrow, then,” she said, and stood up from the bed.
“I won’t sleep,” I said again, though I yawned until tears came into my eyes.
“Are you afraid,” said Leah gently, “to wake up and find you’ve only dreamt me?”
“Yes, in fact,” I said, and felt a tremor go through my limbs. “Or that I’ve forgotten you. That’s worse I think. We’re so alike that—on trying to remember you—I may think only of myself…”
“If you don’t find your letter tomorrow,” said Leah, “it means I’ve been here.” She smiled at me, with tenderly turned-down lids, and left. My own lids, at this point, were so heavy with an alien, unwanted sleep that I only saw the barest shade slice through the lamplight like a large moth and slip itself out the door.
III.
I have had the loveliest dream. No, it wasn’t a dream, was it? There was a girl, a flesh-and-blood girl, who was like me in spirit… These were the thoughts I had upon waking. When I opened my eyes the light in the room was so new that the foot of the bed glowed with a sheen of white. I was, I recalled, on the roommate’s bed. The roommate had not returned from her party.
I tossed the blankets from my body and dressed in a fever of quiet efficiency. I will go there, I will do this, I thought. What I meant was, I will go to breakfast, and see the girl again, the dark-and-light girl with the drooping eyes; but I was in such a state of excitement that I only consciously knew that there was something I desperately had to do, someone I desperately had to see. I put on my shoes and socks briskly. I peeked glancingly at my reflection in the mirror, a quick flash of the eyes in the light. I went out the door.
I reached the dining hall out of breath, having rushed there with an ember, with a warm smoldering thing, in my chest. The people there were sitting, eating, but oh who cares about people? They did not look at me, and when I passed them by they turned slightly away, just a twitch of the shoulder blades, as if I were an evil wind that had passed through. Then I turned a corner and saw, with a shock of recognition, a slim person sitting alone at one of the tables, with subdued red hair, dyed the color of undersea coral. Her eyes were fixed brightly and gravely on me, with the gaze of one convalescing from a fever.
“Ah!” I said breathlessly, careening toward her at a run. “It’s you, isn’t it? I didn’t forget you.”
“No, indeed,” she said, smiling.
“You’ve got red hair!” I said, shyly.
“So I have,” she said.
“You must forgive me,” I said, my breath still coming in gasps. “I’ve remembered everything but your name.”
“Leah,” she said. “You forgot yesterday, too. Come, come, sit down.”
I sat down across from her. “Will we do it today, do you think?”
“Quietly,” said Leah, her eyes very dark. “Yes, we’ll do it today.”
“We’ve got to brain storm,” I said. “We’ve got to pick—our—brains.”
Leah took out a pad of paper and a pencil from her bag.
“Only the very best,” she said, and poised the pen over the paper.
“Ophelia,” I said.
“Anna Karenina,” said Leah.
“Juliet.” I licked my lips.
“Madame Bovary,” said Leah in her best French.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Far too distasteful. Downright aesthetically displeasing. How very long it took her to die!”
Leah nodded, and crossed it out.
“Now, what materials do we need?” said Leah.
“A body of water,” I said, “preferably a brook; a train; a dagger.”
“I have a dagger,” said Leah mildly. “We’ll have to search the grounds for the other two.”
After a brief breakfast, at which both of us picked but which neither of us could stomach, we left the campus and walked along the road by the post office. It was very quiet, very serene. Into the silence one bird would chirp, like a little bell, then another. The green trees looked thin and flat in the new light, but their leaves were thick and healthy, with a sheen like fruit. Leah grasped my hand and swung it.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a brook here,” I said.
“Neither have I,” said Leah. “But I’ve seen a willow growing aslant.”
Indeed there was a willow growing aslant, but what it was growing aslant of was an old brick building whose paint had washed off in streams of alternating pale pink and white.
We stood beneath the willow (that is, if it was a willow; one wasn’t a botanist, after all) and the thin blue shadows of leaves nodded up and down our arms.
“I believe,” I said finally, “that we’ve got the concept all wrong. We can’t kill ourselves without the brook. The tree plays a part, of course, but only just.”
“We’ll have to fall out of the tree,” said Leah. “Singing snatches of old lauds.” We didn’t know lauds.
We climbed the tree as best we could, but neither of us was particularly agile. We sat sullenly on a rough obliging limb, tickled by leaves, and looked down.
“We can’t break a leg from here,” I said.
“You’re right,” said Leah. “Let’s get down.”
We slid from the bough and tumbled to the grass.
“If only there were a brook,” I said. “How I would leap into it, like a fish into its native element… How I would love the cold, the smooth colored stones at the bottom!”
“And never to wake from there,” said Leah softly, as if imagining the softness of the water—the bed of it.
“We’ll have to settle with our Anna,” I said finally. “Death by train, after all, suits the modern world much better.”
We went looking for the train station. Neither of us had ever taken the train before. We were both apprehensive of large mechanical things.
“Have you got a time table?” I said.
“No,” said Leah. “Anna didn’t have a time table, after all. She took the first train that came. We must go by the book. We’ll have to wait indefinitely for the train.”
We walked in silence. Leah hugged her arms to her chest, her mouth turning down.
At the train station we sat on a bench side by side, clasping hands. Next to us a man shook out a newspaper and put a cigarette carefully between his teeth. His eyes slid to us, then back to the paper.
“What if somebody sees?” I said into Leah’s trembling ear. “How distasteful that would be! We’ll be nothing but twinned red viscera all over the tracks.”
“Shh, shh,” said Leah. She swung our hands. Below us the tracks, lying spellbound in the heavy sunlight, flew side by side in two perfect parallel lines, like faithful birds.
“Why don’t we stand on the tracks,” said Leah.
“What, now?” I said.
“I don’t want to miss the train,” said Leah.
We stood and walked, together, over the warm iron railing and down onto the slats. We looked down the snake of the track. Though nothing yet came thundering down, and though nothing yet made the ground quake, I felt the terror of standing in the accustomed path of that unseen monster.
The bells began to clang madly. The ground shivered and shook.
“Ah,” said Leah mournfully. “Ah, ah.” She could say nothing more.
“Oh, let it be the end,” I cried.
“No, no praying,” said Leah. Her eyes were hooded, and seemed to be looking inward. “We’ve been left behind; there’ll be no more praying for us.”
“Let it come,” I cried. I saw all at once the face of the train, brown and grimacing, and the intimation of the long body behind it. Leah and I cowered together as if against a wind, and leaned forward so that our faces might meet the face of the train. We closed our eyes. A great rumble and rush came toward us.
“Why won’t it come, why won’t it come,” said Leah.
I felt the hot breath of the train, felt the huge animal scream of it. The wind roared and roared for a long time.
At last I opened my eyes. I was sitting on the bench, nestled beside Leah. A few feet from us sat the man with his newspaper, the cigarette still cocked in his mouth. I looked at Leah with wide eyes. She looked back at me. Her eyes were moist.
“Where are we now, then?” I said.
“We haven’t gone anywhere,” said Leah, very quietly. Her hands were folded in her lap. She looked down at them as if singularly unsurprised to see them there.
“Ah,” I said. I swallowed a sob rising in my throat. “I felt almost certain we had.”
“No,” said Leah. Her mouth moved but only a hollow shell-roar came out. “We must have dreamed the train coming.”
The tracks were empty and lay shimmering under the heat in a white haze.
“Now for the dagger?” I said.
“Now for the dagger,” said Leah.
IV.
“Perhaps the problem,” said Leah, unsheathing the sharp knife that she kept in her bag, “is just this: we aren’t desperate enough.”
“I feel significantly desperate,” I said, my voice rising. “That is, appropriately desperate. My desperation suits the occasion.”
Leah bent her head carefully over the knife to inspect it, so that the red of her hair appeared as a stain on the blade’s fine silver, and said, “We haven’t been spurned by or torn from the love of our lives. Neither have we been stripped of our sole reason for or means of living. None of these things has happened to us.”
“No, nothing has happed to us,” I said. “You must remember that, Leah. That is what has happened to us.”
“That’s not very much,” said Leah.
“No,” I said, “but it makes a world of difference.”
Leah squinted distractedly, as if she had not heard, at the knife. It gleamed and smiled like a long tooth.
“Well,” said Leah. She drew a finger along the sharp edge until round red gems seemed to be popping out of her skin. “We’ve really botched things.”
“It’s not our fault!” I said. “We did our best and we were refused. Don’t,” I said, looking more carefully at Leah’s finger, “cut yourself yet, for heaven’s sake.”
“I’m conducting an experiment,” said Leah composedly. Her mouth had scrunched up its drooping corners and was fixed in a small half-smile, without cheerfulness, as if she surveyed her work from a distance.
“Leah,” I said. “Leah. Leah!”
Leah dropped the knife in her lap.
“There!” she said. “I felt that. I really did. And look!” She held up the finger but it looked more like a long red pulsing thing that dripped more red over her lap. “It bleeds still. It hasn’t closed up. It’s open, open…” Leah put her finger down in her lap and cried. Then she put a hand over her mouth and laughed screechily, in gasps, and then cried again.
“Leah,” I said. “Leah.” I put my hand out in a helpless gesture toward her lap.
“I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding,” screeched Leah. Then she cried and her shoulders quivered, up and down, as if many leaves batted against her.
“Leah,” I said. I took her hand in my hand, the red one, the slippery one, and said in a feeble sing-song in her ear, “Don’t cry, Leah, sweet, sweet Leah.” Her hand trembled in my hand. Then she hiccupped twice and her shoulders slowly stopped their quivering and slackened, and her heavy head rested itself in the crook of my shoulder. Her hair stuck to my neck.
“I’m tired,” said Leah, her voice small and hoarse.
“I know,” I said.
“I want to sleep,” said Leah, just above a whisper. “But how.”
“We mustn’t give up,” I said. “We’ve still got the dagger.”
Leah lifted her head from my shoulder and appraised me gravely. She squeezed our clasped hands.
“You and I both know,” said Leah, with great gentleness, “that it’s no use. Think about what prompted Juliet. And think, then, what’s prompting us.”
“What do we do, then?” I said. “What can we do?”
“We need a place to rest,” said Leah decisively. She wiped wet hair from her face.
I gave a weak laugh. “It’s impossible to rest anywhere!”
“We need a cave,” said Leah.
“A cave,” I said blankly.
“Like Antigone,” said Leah.
I breathed out slowly, once.
“Ah,” I said. “A death in life, you mean. And when death came—“
“And when death came,” finished Leah, beginning to smile, “it was sweet.”
“Sweet, sweet Leah!” I said. “Full of good ideas. Let’s find ourselves a cave.”
“No, my dear,” said Leah. “We must carve one out ourselves.”
“Why ever waste the time?”
“I don’t trust natural caves for our purposes,” said Leah.
“As you say, then,” I said. “I believe your instincts are infallible when it comes to these sorts of things. And of course,” I said, beginning to feel excited, “we’ll need good supplies of millet and wine.”
“Naturally,” said Leah.
We made our way back to the campus, and found a corner store that sold cheap wine and Wonder Bread, and deemed it all sufficient for our purposes. We packed huge loads of it into two suitcases.
“Now for the cave,” said Leah.
We waited for evening to come, then night. At last the dark sky was hung with huge stars. There was no wind, and the night felt hollowed-out and emptied of sound. We crept out of the dormitory with our heavy suitcases, and the bending of the grass under our feet sounded like the cresting of waves, and our breathing like a roar. We could barely speak to each other; the night forbade it.
We stopped in front of the pink and white brick building, against which was the willow growing aslant.
“Under here,” said Leah, gesticulating with the shovel she had brought. “Beneath the tree.”
We took turns with the shovel. We dug up the hard earth bit by bit and tossed it behind us. It smelled of Autumn, of moist wormy creatures, of old leaves, of a deep hidden spring. Leah began to sing, some song about stars and sleep and a long, long night, and I began to sing too, lustily and unabashedly. We smiled and sang and tossed up earth and became smeared with it. We tasted it and breathed it in.
At a certain point—it must have been nearing dawn, because the sky had lightened to purple—Leah dropped the shovel and stood still. We were now in a pit whose walls came up to our necks.
“Look,” said Leah, just above a whisper. She pointed at the sky.
I wiped my forehead with a dirty hand and looked up. Above us the huge stars beamed like faces. I looked and looked at the dark until I felt that I was surrounded by a shell-like interior, in which all sound was huge with echo.
“It’s open, open,” I said.
“I know,” said Leah. She smiled. “And everything is looking at us.”
“Do you think so?”
“Why don’t we sit down,” said Leah, as if she had not heard me. She opened up a suitcase that lay in the pit with us and handed out portions of its contents. I sat cramped beside Leah on the earthen floor but I felt light, as if I were rising.
We dined that night on millet and wine.