An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick

dream indelible in my mind.
    I looked back and I failed.
    Page’s poor memory whose poverty is its perfection.
    I stood up, novel in hand, and dropped it in the trash bin. It landed with a metallic thud, a single drumbeat, and then all was silent.
    I walked out of the office. I walked out of the house. I walked through the dew-wet grass to the window. I stared in at the study, at the desk, where every morning for many years I sat and wrote. I stared into the room at my absence. I was the one who was missing.

CHAPTER 9
    I T RANG YEARS AGO THE PHONE THAT WOKE ME. I’D gone to bed early, strangely exhausted. It was Lydia. “Did I wake you?” I tried to brighten my voice, but sleep was there, occupying it. Lydia’s voice in my ear, but her body far away. “I read your novel. I wanted to call and tell you.” Her voice spoke outside of time, articulate air.
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œI did wake you. I’m sorry. I just wanted to thank you—”
    I spoke thickly through sleep’s fog, a kind of amnesiac veil through which I could almost remember myself and almost remember Lydia, a fog wakefulness burned steadily but not quickly away, so that every word I spoke came from a person different than myself, more intimate because more strange, as if I hadn’t yet had time to fully assemble myself, and the words leaked out of the gaps as the rosebush peeks through the fog’s tatters as morning’s heat gathers. “No, I’m awake. I was just thinking about the night.”
    â€œThinking about the night?”
    â€œThinking in the night, I mean.”
    Lydia laughed. “Well, I’m sorry to end your thoughts.”
    â€œDon’t be. Thinking was getting me nowhere. I was thinking the moon was an eye that blinks. It takestwenty-eight days for the eye to blink. The full moon is when everything is seen. The stars are the shapes the moon thinks.”
    â€œIt sounds like something from your novel.”
    â€œI know. Everything does—it’s a bit of a problem. The novel is just one long dream that doesn’t know it’s a dream. But that’s only the first part. I think it will be long, long and sprawling and disorderly, tying time in a knot.”
    â€œA Gordian knot?”
    â€œA wedding knot.”
    â€œThe marriage of time? Whom does time marry?”
    â€œTime marries Timelessness. It’s a marriage on the rocks.”
    â€œI did wake you up, didn’t I?”
    â€œYes, I’m glad you did. Dreaming about the moon gives me headaches. Why don’t you come over?”
    â€œAre you sure? It’s almost going to be late.”
    â€œThe warm milk cocktail has worn off, and my eight p.m. nap has rejuvenated me.”
    â€œ O.K . I will.” Lydia hung up the phone, decisive.
    I kissed Lydia at the door, her slight blush in the porch-light. I had never kissed her before, not held her or her hand any of the times we had met for coffee or dinner after meeting at Olin’s. The crickets chirped. The firefly’s luminescent green flash in zigzag behind her and a heartbeat later a green flash in the lengthening grass. The moon squinted down, the only witness. Clouds, a cautious curtain, began to close. The nightfilled with a privacy that included us. The crickets sang a song that marked a boundary we were inside of; it was about us. I kissed her once more, on the cheek. “Please, come in.”
    Lydia stepped into the hallway. “Is that your mother in this picture?”
    â€œIt is.”
    Lydia reached into her purse and pulled out the manuscript I’d given her, thirty pages pinched together by a paperclip bent slightly out of shape. The first pages written on my father’s sheets for musical notation; in the dim light I could make out the title written in red. Lydia held the pages up so that they spread out like a bouquet, gently rolling her wrist back and forth as she looked longer at my mother’s