Brad Nelson > Recent Status Updates

He has in his time owned clavichords, virginals, and other early keyboard instruments. He prefers the sound and feel of the harpsichord; because it is not possible to control the volume of the quill-plucked strings, the music arrives like experience, sudden and entire.

We assign a moment to decision, to dignify the process as a timely result of rational and conscious thought. But decisions are made of kneaded feelings; they are more often a lump than a sum.

His visual memory was excellent and, like many people whose primary sense is sight, he thought of revelation as the development of an image, first blurred and then coming clear. He ruminated the way most of us look for a lost object: We review its image in our minds and compare that image to what see see, mentally refreshing the image many times a minute and turning it in space.

The chamber where Mason spends his life is quiet, but it has its own soft pulse, the hiss and sigh of the respirator that finds him breath. It is dark except for the glow of the big aquarium where an exotic eel turns and turns in an endless figure eight, its cast shadow moving like a ribbon over the room.

Pictures of the past few days punished Starling for the lapse, flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.

Graham filled his glass again and sat at a table by the window, staring at the empty chair across from him. He stared until the space in the opposite chair assumed a man-shape filled with dark and swarming motes, a presence like a shadow on suspended dust. He tried to make the image coalesce, to see a face. It would not move, had no countenance but, faceless, faced him with palpable attention.

Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.

When he closed his eyes he thought he could feel the points of light move over him, and when he opened them, those might be the lights of cities above or beneath him. There was no more down or up. The light machine turned faster as it got warm, and the dots swarmed over him, flowed over furniture in angular streams, fell in meteor showers down the walls. He might have been a comet plunging through the Crab Nebula.

Graham's copy of the sketch grew soft around the edges from the sweat of his hands. Often it was difficult to get residents to answer the door. At night he lay in his room with powder on his heat rash, his mind circling the problem as though it were a hologram. He courted the feeling that precedes an idea. It would not come.

He brushed his teeth with Italian toothpaste, he ate Italian meat, he was vanishing day by day into the aged streets, the dark-faced crowds. He boarded the great green buses with their silver numbers and passed, noticing them less and less, the worn columns, the statues weeping black. He was lost among them, the passengers, audiences, crowds, condemned just as they to the humblest of daily acts.

Time had spoiled for Viri. It reeked in his pockets. He had projects, somewhat vague, appointments, but nothing to do. His eye would not fix on things, it slipped off them like a dying insect.

All the old and interconnected knowledge—architecture joined to zoology and Persian myth, recipes for hare, the acquaintance with painters, museums, inland rivers dark with trout—all would vanish when the great inner chambers failed, when in one final hour the rooms of his life dropped away like a building being wrecked. His body had turned against him; the harmony that once reigned within it had disappeared.

He sat in the kitchen and his daughter made him tea. This simple act that was like love, in which no insincerity could ever be concealed, touched him deeply. In bewilderment he realized it was like some worn piece of furniture in a refuge, it might be nothing to someone else but in these poor times it was everything, it was all he had.

He was suddenly parted from his life. That presence, loving or not, which fills the emptiness of rooms, mildens them, makes them light—that presence was gone. The simple greed that makes one cling to a woman left him suddenly desperate, stunned. A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained.

He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.

They were talking about the day ahead as if they had only happiness in common. This gentle hour, this comfortable room, this death. For everything, in fact, every plate and object, utensil, bowl, illustrated what did not exist; they were fragments borne forward from the past, shards of a vanished whole.

The car was filled with the faint aroma of tobacco, of perfume, like the compartment of a train. If one were standing in the darkness watching, they passed in an instant, the brilliant headlights pouring before them, a moment’s glimpse of them, no more. In the cold the sound vanishes, then even the distant red of tail lights is gone. Silence. Overhead perhaps the faint noise, brushing the stars, of a plane.

She poured more brandy. She was like a silver Christmas helix, a foil decoration turning slowly, the dazzle descending only to reappear time after time.

Strange cards, their illustrations like those in books. They left her fingers with a faint, crisp sound. To the side of the cross she placed four cards in a column, one after another. The next to last was Death. It seemed to spread darkness over the rest. It was as if, casually, they had begun to read someone else’s letter in the middle of which suddenly was horrifying news.

Nedra gave a slight sound as if finding a mistake in her work.

“It’s impossible to live with him,” she said finally.

“It isn’t. That’s plain.”

“Impossible for me. No, you don’t see it. I love him, he’s a marvelous father, but it’s terrible. I can’t explain it. It’s what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can’t do and what you must do. You just turn to dust.”

The room was nearly empty. It was that still, central hour of the day, slow, deliquescent, two-thirty or three, the invisible cigarette smoke mingled with the air, the peel of lemon beside the empty cups, the traffic on the avenue silent, floating past as if in death, women in their thirties, talking.

They sat beneath a dome of heat, of midday silence, in attitudes of languor, as if exhausted, as if somewhere in Sicily, exchanging secrets which encircled them like slow currents and were as sweet to confess as to hear.

He drank a demitasse of coffee into which he stirred two spoons of sugar. He was an unmarried son come home in the morning, the son who has lost everything. He sniffed. He had nothing to say. He was as empty as one who has committed a crime of passion. He was his own corpse. One could see in him both the murderer and the half-nude woman crumpled on the floor.

Her father was still at work. Her mother was sitting there in a folding chair, and her child ceased to breathe. In an instant she was gone. She was lighter suddenly, much lighter, she lay with a kind of terrifying insignificance. Everything had left her—the innocence, the crying, the dutiful outings with her father, the life she had never lived. All these weigh something. They pass, dissolve, are scattered like dust.

Silence is mysterious, but stories fill us like the sun. They are like fragments in which reflections lie like broken pieces; collect them and a greater shape begins to form, the story of stories appears.

He sat down to the table like an Irish laborer, hands stained, head down, potatoes, meat, thick slices of bread. He was silent, he had no jokes in him, he was waiting for things to resolve themselves while he ate, to form into something unexpected and interesting like the coat of fine bubbles on one's leg in the bath.

She goes out in the deep water in a rubber tube, daring, kicking like an insect. It is morning, the surf falling forward, its white teeth hissing on the shore. Viri watches, sitting on the sand. She waves at him, her shouts carried off by the wind. He understands suddenly what love of a child is. It overwhelms him like the line from a song.

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.

In the early winter evening she passes Columbia. The traffic is thick but moving. The food stores are crowded, the flashes of the railway above her make blue images lit like executions in the dusk.

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.