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professors, some so old the marble lettering’s sharp cuts had eroded away into faint impressions, names returning to nothing. My father’s headstone was among them. So was my mother’s. So was my baby sister’s. My whole family in the ground behind the chapel where the devotional bells marked the hours, and the stones mutely absorbed them, counting time a lesser fact than time’s end. All the ringing stops.
    I didn’t kneel down. I didn’t break into tears. No memories flooded my mind. I read the stones— father, wife, child (with a lamb on the stone’s curved top)—over and over again until the words ceased to be words, ceased to give a name to that which has no name, to those who have no names, ceased to insist that it can be spoken of, the world, and the people in it, those we love, who gave us life and for whom we lived. I know what it is: a stone in orbit. The sun is a golden bell. I could see it up there, behind the clouds, a perfect circle. A perfect circle—
    â€œFather,” I said, “remember the apple tree.”

CHAPTER 7
    I WENT HOME. MY MOTHER WAS HANGING ON THE WALL ; I looked at her and in my strange distraction the image turned a corner in my mind’s labyrinth, and for a moment a thought of the Furies put the Furies in my eye, sitting on a grassy knoll catching their breath; and then I looked away. I went into the study and pulled out the novel again—the hundreds of pages held together by rubber bands, the first pages written on my father’s musical sheets, then a thick cream watermarked vellum, then thin newsprint and more gray, and so on, as if the book’s progress could be measured in geological strata, sedimentary layer upon layer, pressure pushing the book into form. The first pages weighed heavy on the last, a fossilizing pressure. Written by hand, over the scales of the musical staff so that the lines cut through the letters, the title: An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky . I read the last sentence written, It was my sister —words written just that morning, but which felt an age ago. I have no memory of her. I picture a baby with her mouth open, but I’m only imagining it. Or I see her milky-blue eyes looking up as if into the other world from which she was just pulled and back to which she must soon return—the look of nostalgia. But I’m making it up. Father wandered through the halls holding her as shedied, as his wife lay dead in their bedroom, but he never bent down to let me see her. I heard her breathe, and I heard her cry; I heard when breathing and crying ended. I turned the page back over. Blank. I looked at the thick volume of all those handwritten pages, of all those thousands of words, each one of them containing a little breath. I thought the pages held their breath, that this was the meaning of a book—that it was holding its breath for as long as it could. It was afraid it might drown. I pushed the breath aside on the desk, and pulled from a drawer a sheaf of letters I’ve read and reread, read and reread, for what feels like my whole life. My whole life spent holding my breath—
    Call me Daniel. I have a gift I keep to myself, the gift of self-abandon. It is the orphan’s lesson if he can learn it—not to feel abandoned, but to continue his abandonment past the bounds of where the loss should end, parent’s death that prefigures one’s own. Fate is everywhere speaking; it does not call you by name; it tells you to name yourself. Call me Daniel. It is the name my father called me, and it is the name I call myself. It is as real as any name; it works just as well. Call it out to me as I walk down the street and I will turn around, smile or wave, perhaps even walk over to you to chat or reminisce. I have trained myself to do exactly this, as I know you’ve also trained yourself. “Daniel”—and I turn around and say yes quizzically but warmly; I look up and