An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick

other, passages that occasionally would be the same. Ishmael on the masthead, Lydia and I beneath the white sheets. Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligation to observe all whale-ship’s standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”
    â€œIt’s lucky I’m not alone in the heights,” I’d say, “what with the problem of the universe sitting here beside me as it whirls around within me.”
    â€œIt is a problem, isn’t it?” And then grabbing the edge of the sheet, and giving it a quick tug upward so that the cloth billowed above our bodies, revealing us to ourselves, she would sing out, “Thar she blows!”
    I remember her body then, her white body beneath the sheet’s gauzy light—her living body impossible to speak of or define. It was a woman’s body, breasts and hips, a pale body, and it was Lydia’s. A body with a name.To say her name the tongue presses against the backside of the front teeth, draws back to the top of the palate, liquid to plosive, and then the tongue drops, the mouth opens as the hard e lowers into the long a , the tongue just edging over the bottom teeth, and the name is said, it is spoken, expelled with the breath as the sheet falls back down, as she turns toward me, having heard her name . . .
    â€œBut you know what the danger is?”
    â€œOf hunting whales? I’d guess it is the whales.”
    â€œNo, of thinking alone on the masthead.”
    â€œYes? That you fall down.”
    â€œRight. But it’s what you fall into.”
    â€œThe ocean.”
    â€œYourself.”
    She looked at me, the sheet fully settled back over us, under the waves again. “That’s why it’s good not to be alone.”
    I hold now in my hand that same book I read that summer with her, carrying it from the study, in between the hallway’s white walls that somehow seem to press toward me, glass picture frames only a brilliant white sheen showing nothing of the faces they covered. I walked to the hook where my book bag hangs, opened its flap, and put the novel in. I’d long ago thrown out the notes I kept diligently for many years—my attempt at thinking intricately enough to trace the intricacy of the book, those yellowed pages bound together by arubber band, my mind outside my mind, words to remember what otherwise I might forget. I put the novel in, spine first so the thumb-dirty pages faced upward, and snapped the bag shut. Taking it from the hook, I walked out the door to school. It felt empty. But in my head the book was heavy, an anchor-weight plunging my mind again to airless depths. The summer day today eerily calm, no wind, no breeze. The waters were still. Or would be still, if I were on the water. The trees looked to my eye burdened by the weight of their leaves, as if the very thing that sustained them, that took in the light that fed them, was their most intimate threat. Invisible within one tree a house finch sang. I walked underneath the song. The broken shell of a robin’s egg on the path, smear of yolk, but no tree above it from which it could have fallen.
    That refulgent summer long ago, that summer, when Lydia and I were in love, we went to the art museum downtown to see the new exhibition. We walked up the granite stairs and through the revolving door in the opaque glass wall that was the museum’s front, only to see ourselves approaching ourselves in the mirrored surface of a faceless rabbit standing attentively in the foyer. Actually, we appeared twice. First in the belly, our images growing less distended as we neared the polished curve; then in the rabbit’s featureless face, our heads’ dark upside-down circles where the