An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick Page A

photograph, so that the pages, like a peacock’s tail folding and unfolding, kept fanning from side to side, not the blue eyespots of the peacock’s feather when fully open, but her eyes, dark brown eyes, now looking at me as the pages’ thin lines crossed them. “It’s just as you describe,” she said, handing me the pages.
    â€œYou’re the first person I’ve shown it to,” I said as we walked through the hall to the living room, a small fire in the fireplace.
    â€œYou haven’t shown it to Olin?”
    â€œNo. He has a remarkable disdain for contemporary fiction. He thinks death is the first qualification for being able to write. He thinks it’s only good taste to give up life before picking up the pen. Mostly, I agree. But here I am, tawdry in the work.”
    â€œI don’t know if I should ask this, but—is it true?” She sat down.
    â€œYes.” I paused. “No”
    Lydia looked at me. “Are you sure you’re awake?”
    â€œYes and no. It’s hard to tell.”
    â€œDid your father translate a myth?”
    â€œHe tried. I don’t think he felt that he ever managed it fully.”
    â€œDid your mother die? And your sister, too?
    â€œYes. That’s true.”
    â€œYou’re writing an autobiography?”
    â€œI don’t think so. I’m not sure, to tell you the truth.”
    I brushed my hand against her wrist. “It’s a novel, I think, about the fiction of the self.”
    She looked at me as if disappointed that I could say such a thing. “Is the self a fiction?”
    â€œIt seems to become one.” I pointed vaguely at the pages on the small table separating both our chairs. “I began to write it after our dinner at Olin’s. What you said—about worlds next to worlds, worlds within worlds—it reminded me of my father. It sounded like something he would say, or would have said.” It almost sounded like nothing at all, just a vibration in the night, the thunder, so far away.
    â€œIs a planet not yet found a fiction?” Lydia seemed flustered or frustrated. She kept clicking the nail of her thumb against the nail of her middle finger, a pensive, half-angry sound. “Is a galaxy past our vision a fiction? A black hole? Dark matter?”
    â€œI’m not sure,” I said, taken somewhat aback.
    â€œA theory isn’t a fiction. It’s a hazardous guess at what’s real without the comfort of a fact to say so.”
    â€œThe self is dark matter?”
    â€œThat’s not what I’m saying.”
    â€œThe self is a black hole?”
    â€œNo—that’s not what I mean; that’s not what I mean at all.” She looked down at her hands as if they weren’t her hands, watching them as she would watch two animals weary in the yard. And then, she turned to me, and picking up the pages I’d written, said “This is the dark matter of the self. Words whose weight holds you together. It’s not a fiction if you’re really at work on it. It’s a theory, an experiment. It will prove you to yourself or nothing will. It’s these pages that are the telescope looking inside itself, the contemplation of the mirror where the distant light comes to focus, a question not about what is being seen, but a question of how it is being seen.” She put the pages down. “When I decide I might love someone, when I come over in the night to make love to him, I want him to mean himself when he says I . When he tells me he loves me, when he says I love you , that can’t be a fiction.” She stood up. She stood in front of me. She slowly undid the buttons of her shirt. “Do you love me?”
    The heaviness in the air before the storm. Lightning-flash lit up a cloud from within itself, a paper lantern.
    â€œI love you.” I felt the question in my voice.
    Lydia pushed her shirt from off her shoulders and let it fall to