Falling Out of Time by David Grossman Page B

night, knocked on our door,
    and said: At such and such time,
    in this or that place, your son
    thus and thus.
    They quickly wove
    a dense web, hour
    and minute and location,
    but the web had a hole in it, you
    see? The dense web
    must have had a hole,
    and our son
    fell
    through.
    TOWN CHRONICLER: As she speaks these words, he stops circling her. She looks at him with dulled eyes. Lost, arms limp, he faces her, as if struck at that moment by an arrow shot long ago.
    WOMAN:
    Will I ever again
    see you
    as you are,
    rather than as
    he is not?
    MAN:
    I can remember
    you without
    his noneness—your innocent,
    hopeful smile—and I can remember
    myself without his noneness. But not
    him. Strange: him
    without his noneness, I can no longer
    remember. And as time goes by
    it starts to seem as though
    even when he was,
    there were signs
    of his noneness.
    WOMAN:
    Sometimes, you know,
    I miss
    that ravaged,
    bloody
    she.
    Sometimes I believe her
    more than I believe
    myself.
    MAN:
    She is the reason I take
    my life
    in your hands and ask
    you a question
    I myself
    do not understand:
    Will you go with me?
    There—
    to him?
    WOMAN:
    That night I thought:
    Now we will separate. We cannot live
    together any longer. When I tell you
    yes,
    you will embrace
    the no, embrace
    the empty space
    of him.
    MAN:
    How will we cleave together?
    I wondered that night.
    How will we crave each other?
    When I kiss you,
    my tongue will be slashed
    by the shards of his name
    in your mouth—
    WOMAN:
    How will you look into my eyes
    with him there,
    an embryo
    in the black
    of my pupils?
    Every look, every touch,
    will pierce. How will we love,
    I thought that night.
    How will we love, when
    in deep love
    he was
    conceived.
    MAN:
    The
    moment
    it happened—
    WOMAN:
    It happened? Look
    at me, tell me:
    Did it happen?
    MAN:
    And it billows up
    abundantly,
    an endless
    wellspring. And I
    know—as long as
    I breathe,
    I will draw
    and drink and drip
    that blackened
    moment.
    WOMAN:
    Mourning condemns
    the living
    to the grimmest solitude,
    much like the loneliness
    in which disease
    enclothes
    the ailing.
    MAN:
    But in that loneliness,
    where—like soul
    departing body—
    I am torn
    from myself, there
    I am no longer alone,
    no longer alone,
    ever since
.
    And I am not
    just one there,
    and never will be
    only one—
    WOMAN:
    There I touch his
    inner self,
    his gulf,
    as I have
    never touched
    a person
    in the world—
    MAN:
    And he,
    he also touches
    me from
    there, and his touch—
    no one has ever
    touched me in that way.
    (silence)
    WOMAN:
    If there were such a thing
    as
there
,
    and there isn’t,
    you know—but if
    there were,
    they would have already gone
    there.
    One of everyone would have
    got up and gone. And how
    far will you go,
    and how will you know
    your way back,
    and what if you don’t
    come back, and even if
    you find it—
    and you won’t,
    because it isn’t—
    if you find it, you will not
    come back,
    they will not let you
    back, and if you do
    come back, how
    will you be, you might
    come back so different
    that you won’t
    come back,
    and what about me,
    how will I be if you don’t
    come back, or if
    you come back
    so different that you don’t
    come back?
    TOWN CHRONICLER: She gets up and embraces him. Her hands scamper over his body. Her mouth probes his face, his eyes, his lips. From my post in the shadows, outside their window, it looks as if she is throwing herself over him like a blanket on a fire.
    WOMAN:
    That night I thought:
    Now we will never
    separate.
    Even if we want to,
    how can we?
    Who will sustain him, who will
    embrace
    if our two bodies do not
    envelop
    his empty fullness?
    MAN:
    Come,
    what could be simpler?
    Without mulling or wondering
    or thinking: his mother
    and father
    get up and go
    to him.
    WOMAN:
    In whose eyes will we look to see him,
    present and absent?
    In whose hand
    will we intertwine fingers
    to weave him
    fleetingly
    in our flesh?
    Don’t go.
    MAN:
    The eyes,
    one single
    spark
    from his