Brad Nelson’s Reviews > Light Years > Status Update

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 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.”