ONE MORNING IN LATE July I woke up and took a cigarette from a pack sitting on a dirty plate on the floor. I swiped around through the litter on the coffee table, trying to find a lighter. I found a box of matches on the floor, under the skirt of the couch. When I held a lit match to the cigarette in my mouth, I saw that my hand looked gray and withered. Some of my fingernails were long and grimy. Others I’d bitten down and spat on the rug. I realized that I must look like a castaway. I hadn’t bathed in a long time. I tried to figure out how long it had been; I couldn’t. The closest I could guess was five weeks. I must have changed my clothes sometime, though, I thought to myself, but I couldn’t recall having done that, either, although I did remember rummaging around in Susan’s closet and finding one of her old belts for my pants, which had gotten too loose to stay up on their own. Susan’s belt looked like it was forty years old, as if she must have bought it at a thrift shop. It was made of white leather and had a big, medallion-like buckle on it, with a fish that looked like it was swimming after its own tail and the word PISCES in block letters. The certainty that I looked terrible and the urge to see just how bad struck me at the same time, so I went into the bathroom to inspect myself in the mirror. At some time in the previous few weeks, I had draped a pillowcase in front of the mirror over the bathroom sink. I had also turned the full-length mirror so that it faced the wall. I think I had covered the mirrors because I had been embarrassed by how I leered at myself when I washed my hands or managed to brush my teeth before passing out late at night after I had taken so many pills or drunk a bottle of cough syrup with the usual whiskey. But that morning I wanted to see my actual appearance. I suppose I had some hope of being frightened into repentance.
I looked distressingly bad. My hair had grown up into a tangled pile that listed off the left of my head. I hadn’t shaved in at least two months and had a sparse, stringy beard on my face and neck. Most upsetting, though, was how thin I had become. At the time of Kate’s death, I’d been trying to lose ten or fifteen pounds because even though I still got plenty of exercise landscaping I guess my metabolism had slowed, and I still ate steak twice a week and pizza and snacks and pretty much anything I felt like, especially late at night after Kate and Susan had gone to bed and I was watching sports or reading. When I looked in the mirror, though, it seemed as if I’d lost fifty pounds or even more. My face looked pale and gaunt, my neck like a bundle of ropes. I was lost in my T-shirt, which had food and drink stains on it and was yellowed at the underarms. When I’d first found Susan’s belt and put it on, I’d thought it might look sort of hip, sort of charmingly disheveled, but it looked ghastly cinching my pants. I resembled someone I’d have expected to find on a park bench, under a Sunday newspaper, sleeping off a bottle of fortified wine. When I thought that, I felt bad for whatever poor soul had to suffer my comparison with him.
THE OBSIDIAN GIRL MOVES through the trees at night. She moves across the fairway of the golf course, near the road, by the stone wall that acts as the hood for the footlights to the stage. She is all but invisible, the girl of black glass, appearing only as a wobbly blur. She is a dark lens. Through her, the dark underpinnings of the world are visible, but they turn whoever might see them to stone, or to ice, or to salt, or to marsh grass. Every night, just before dawn, she climbs down into the hill through a hidden trap door. She sounds like a crystal decanter rolling along the granite seams that lead down to the heart of the hill, where a furnace burns all day and all night and dark, vague men shovel coal into its white-hot mouth. When the girl made of black glass appears, the men lean their shovels against the walls of the chamber and retreat into the shadows. The girl steps in front of the furnace and the heat roars out and over her like a shimmering hurricane. She tilts her head back and holds her hands out at her sides. The heat blasts at her, and the tips of her fingers begin to glow. The outlines of her face and arms and legs begin to buckle and kink. Her legs give at the knees, and the rest of her slides off them and drops in front of them. She remains upright for a moment on the stumps of her legs, but then she topples face-first onto the dirt floor in front of the open furnace. It appears as if she is sinking into the dirt at first, but she is actually melting. The glass girl is melting. The glass held the shape of a girl only while it was cool. But now it is molten and pools over the floor. There is no way to tell if the glass leaks out of the girl or if the girl leaks out of the glass.
There is a sound that no human ear can hear, coming from a place no human eye can see, from deeper within the earth but also from deep in the sky and the water and inside the trees and inside the rocks. The sound is a voice, coming from deep inside the throat of the world. The sound is a note from a register so low that it cannot be heard, but many people throughout the town are disturbed from their sleep by it. It is a note from a song the shape of which is too vast ever to know. It encompasses and sustains all that is human but is not loyal to the human, only to what is latent within the human. It terrifies. The awakened clutch their hearts and gasp and groan and press their hands into their temples. They fuss over their problems and feel in their guts that if they had not been born to trouble they would not have been born at all, and that their troubles are the only sign that they still cast shadows above this earth. The note is a part of great, vaulted cathedrals of chords that keep the universe speeding out from its own genesis. It is sensate, and down in the chamber of the hill it sounds both like weeping and like laughter, and both are at the grief of the glass girl, who throws herself in front of the fires every morning just before dawn and who, to her unending despair, is remade every evening, in a deeper foundry, and evicted from the depths of the hill, back to the surface, where the cool air flowing through the grass cools and sets her glass eyes and her glass brow, her glass brains and her glass heart, and she begins another night as the brittle memories of a man who is the father of a girl she never was.
I SPENT SO MANY nights sitting in, stealing through, crawling over, and sometimes passing out in, the cemetery, and always behind Kate’s stone, so she’d be spared, that I came to think of it and the hills and the adjacent golf courses as a large, elaborate set, constructed on a rotating stage. The stone wall served as a hood for the footlights, and the putting green was the apron of the stage. The hills were counterweighted with enormous granite boulders and cylindrical lead weights the size of small towers and many tons of magnetic iron and other ballast. They were held in place during the day by brass cogs the size of Ferris wheels, which in turn were held in place by black iron pawls on pinions, deep, deep in the earth. Late at night, levers released from capstans and gears began to turn, and the top-heavy hills upended into their nocturnal arrangements in perfect silence and with such smoothly machined precision that it was almost impossible for the human eye to perceive, even on the brightest night, under the brightest, fullest moon. The hills shifted and recalibrated all night long and only the most alert, vigilant observer, exactly aware of what it was for which he watched, could sometimes sense just the finest tick of a shift in the corner of his eye. When he looked over, he would see nothing. But he would have the distinct feeling that the rise he was looking at was not quite in the same place as the last time he had noticed it. Only he could not quite remember clearly, already, and would doubt himself for a moment, until his attention was diverted again by what appeared to be a new seam in the silhouette of the crown of the hill, and so on, for the rest of the night, as the stars rotated up from beneath one side of the hill, arced over it, and sank back down into the other side, until the whole set finally arrived back at its fully upright, daytime position, in the instant before dawn, and the first light of day crested the hill and the observer would see that the land was as it always had been, and would think how odd it is, the mind’s tricks, and what a strange trance he must have been in to think that the topography moved around at night, and he must really have been half — or more — asleep for much of the night, although he was certain that he had been fully awake the whole time. But after all, he would think as he rose to leave, that is how sleep always does overtake us.