Falling Out of Time by David Grossman

Author:David Grossman [Grossman, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35014-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

Oh, I would say to you,

watch a game with me? Or

shall we take a walk

together now?

How did it happen, my child,

that of all my words,

there is one

that will never,

ever

be answered?

TOWN CHRONICLER: “But where is there?” asks my wife the next day as we take our evening walk—she down the street, me following her, hidden by the shadows. “Where is this there he’s going to? Who even believes that such a place exists?”

As she ambles, she throws these words into the air. I feel almost weak-kneed from the surprise. I look around to see if anyone has heard her, but fortunately it is only she and I on the street at this hour.

“Maybe there has been here all this time?” she continues, and the matter-of-fact cadence of her voice unsettles me even more: she might as well be conversing casually in our kitchen.

“And maybe we’ve been there, too, just a bit, since it happened to us?” She straightens up and a new momentum seems to drive her steps. “Maybe there has always been here, and we just didn’t know it?”

A cool breeze blows. She wraps a scarf around her neck, leaving her beautiful shoulders bare. She does that for me. Today is my birthday, Your Highness, and she knows how much I love her shoulders.

“And if that is the case”—she takes a deep breath—“then maybe, maybe she is here with us, every single moment?”

The powerful stab of the words makes us both stop.

“Just imagine,” she whispers.

We keep walking. She up front, I in the shadows of houses and through darkened yards, shaken.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

“A father should not outlive his child.”

The clear-eyed logic of this rule

is rooted not only

in human life, but also,

as we know,

in the science of optics, where

(in the spirit of the great Spinoza,

the lens grinder)

we find an extremely daring

axiom: “The object

(‘the life of the son’)

must never be located

in the universe

at a distance

from which the father

(‘the observing subject’)

may encompass all of him

with one gaze

from beginning to end.”

For otherwise

(and here I interject),

the observing subject

would become

at once

a lump

of lignite

(known also as:

coal).

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