Falling Out of Time by David Grossman Read Free Book Online

MAN:
    In the first year
    after, alone at home,
    I sometimes called your name,
    your childhood
    nickname.
    With strength I did not possess,
    in madness, with dauntless
    peril to body and soul,
    I would imbue that short,
    yearned-for
    word
    with magic dust:
    domesticity,
    serenity,
    routine.
    Then utter a calculated, casual:
    “Uwi?”
    If I said it just right, I hoped
    (I dreamed, I schemed),
    you could not refrain
    from responding
    to the simplicity,
    which transcends
    worlds and borders—
    I would say “Uwi” and you would
    slide down and come true
    in a blink, the echo
    of my call,
    a minor tide
    trickling from the there
    into the here. And that would be
    your answer,
    natural and practical,
    as exhalation
    answers inhalation,
    a tribute
    to the miracle of
    powerful routine.
    Oh, I would say to you,
    watch a game with me? Or
    shall we take a walk
    together now?
    How did it happen, my child,
    that of all my words,
    there is one
    that will never,
    ever
    be answered?
    TOWN CHRONICLER: “But where is
there
?” asks my wife the next day as we take our evening walk—she down the street, me following her, hidden by the shadows. “Where is this
there
he’s going to? Who even believes that such a place exists?”
    As she ambles, she throws these words into the air. I feel almost weak-kneed from the surprise. I look around to see if anyone has heard her, but fortunately it is only she and I on the street at this hour.
    “Maybe
there
has been here all this time?” she continues, and the matter-of-fact cadence of her voice unsettles me even more: she might as well be conversing casually in our kitchen.
    “And maybe we’ve been there, too, just a bit, since it happened to us?” She straightens up and a new momentum seems to drive her steps. “Maybe
there
has always been here, and we just didn’t know it?”
    A cool breeze blows. She wraps a scarf around her neck, leaving her beautiful shoulders bare. She does that for me. Today is my birthday, Your Highness, and she knows how much I love her shoulders.
    “And if that is the case”—she takes a deep breath—“then maybe, maybe
she
is here with us, every single moment?”
    The powerful stab of the words makes us both stop.
    “Just imagine,” she whispers.
    We keep walking. She up front, I in the shadows of houses and through darkened yards, shaken.
    ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:
    “A father should not outlive his child.”
    The clear-eyed logic of this rule
    is rooted not only
    in human life, but also,
    as we know,
    in the science of optics, where
    (in the spirit of the great Spinoza,
    the lens grinder)
    we find an extremely daring
    axiom:
“The object
    (‘the life of the son’)
    must never be located
    in the universe
    at a distance
    from which the father
    (‘the observing subject’)
    may encompass all of him
    with one gaze
    from beginning to end.”
    For otherwise
    (and here I interject),
    the observing subject
    would become
    at once
    a lump
    of lignite
    (known also as:
    coal
).
    TOWN CHRONICLER: Now, from day to day, the wayfarer’s walk grows more vigorous. At times it seems, Your Highness, that a nameless power hovers over the town, envelops it, and—like a person sucking an egg through a hole in the shell—it draws these people and others toward it, from kitchens and squares and wharves and beds. (And—if there is truth to the shocking, dizzying rumors, Your Highness—even from palace rooms?)
    The woman atop the belfry—once in a while I look up and see her there among the clouds, her silver hair unbraided, flying—she, too, must sometimes cling to the spire with both arms or else be swept up in the invisible storm. Now, for instance, her mouth is agape, and I do not knowwhether she is shouting out in the silence or eagerly swallowing words as they float past.
    WALKING MAN:
    Like a fetus hatching
    from its mother’s womb and body,
    his death made me the father
    I had never been—
    it bored
    a hole in me, a wound,
    a space, but also filled me
    with his