and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.Denise Levertov, “To the Reader”
The twilight was fading from the slate-gray Mansard roof across the street when, clutching his frayed astronomy textbook, Gabriel walked into Freddy’s Cafe and Diner. He could see, even through his reading glasses, which faces didn’t welcome him.
“Hi, Gabe!” Freddy’s mouth bit down silently on that “b” under its ridiculously waxed mustache, little affected curls at each end. Freddy was behind the bar, wiping a mug. Gabe could hear it in his imagination—the “oinking” of the squeaky glass.
The men at the bar turned to look at him. Their faces were blank, middle-aged, sagging, cynical. Their faces said that they had heard about him. They didn’t greet him. That was okay. Gabe didn’t greet them. Thanks to his reading glasses, which were held loosely on his head by a worn elastic band, they looked reassuringly blurry. He could see the linoleum, though (the lenses were good for about four feet): cigarette butts and a dog flea poised to jump. The back room was full. He could tell by the air.
“I don’t have much space in back,” Freddy’s mouth was saying.
Gabe pretended not to be able to read him. “In the back,” he signed.
“No. Look. It’s full up.” Freddy signed slowly; his ASL was awkward. He took Gabe to the door to the other room, where the closeness assaulted him. It was like a red-velvet cave, little bonfires at every checkered table. Freddy turned him so he could read his lips: “I won’t have a place ready for the next twenty minutes, except that one over there by the window.” A blur in the distance.
Gabe shuddered. He let his eyes flick sideways past the corner frames of his glasses, and he caught the stare of the heaviest, the most sarcastic man at the bar: “…asshole won’t sit next to a window,” said the man’s mouth. Gabe licked his lips and backed up, stepping into the coat rack. Harsh fabric jostled around him and the rack tottered. Freddy caught his arm, turned to face him.
“We could pull the blinds,” he signed.
“Okay,” said Gabe, feeling the silent, throaty rasp of his own speaking, and Freddy nodded. Freddy could be trusted, despite the goofy mustache made even more ludicrous by his thick, horn-rimmed glasses. This mustache seemed to want to smile for him, even when Freddy wasn’t smiling. Gabe trusted its integrity.
As he followed Freddy into the dark, Gabe passed the convex mirror above the door. He saw in it beyond his own distorted reflection a sallow woman with red, mobile lips who was talking about her adultery. Gabe realized that his reading glasses had slipped down and he pushed them back into place. He had to get new elastic, soon.
Freddy drew the blinds, brought him some decaf, brought him his salad with the oil and vinegar dressing, brought him his meatloaf. Freddy always waited on Gabe himself. “Still won’t buy my telescope?” signed Freddy, nodding at the book Gabe had plunked down next to his plate: How Stars Are Born. Gabe shook his head, pressing his lips into a perfunctory smile. Freddy had an attractive, thirty-year-old hearing-impaired daughter, and once she had held a conversation with him, but his eyes couldn’t follow her hands: he was looking too hard into her bosom, where her shiny locket was reflecting the light from the windows behind him. She read him incorrectly and blushed and got up and went away. Freddy had forgiven him, or the daughter hadn’t told. She had been born deaf. She was lucky. Gradually, after his “accident,” Gabe had grown used to the pressure of silence.
Gabe dumped a little of his salad on the plate; he liked it mixed up with the rest of his food. He sopped the gravy up with his bread, and opened his book to the bookmark. Not all pages were good. Some were too shiny. The best had black words stamped into grainy white, like this old book. No glossy photos; nothing reflecting but the ideas in the faintly depressed letters. This book was especially intelligible. It made sense, it was familiar, it held no surprises for him, it gave him only the essentials, it didn’t snow him with incomprehensible details. While he read yet again about the Virgo Cluster and Fritz Zwicky’s hypothesis that it was “dark matter”—unreflective, undetectable—that held most of the universe together in a great gravitational tide, tossing the visible rest of it like froth on a black wave, the elastic of his band broke completely and his glasses fell into his gravy with an impressive splatter. Thousands of minute spits of grease, each with their own distinct reflection, flew out and attached themselves to the wall. As he watched them, a light went on in a distant upstairs window across the busy street and Gabe knew then that Freddy’s blinds were inadequately drawn.
A man in a red T-shirt paced around in the attic window of the building with the Mansard roof, and like a magnet he drew Gabe’s gaze. Gabe must have made some kind of incoherent noise, for several of the other diners were staring at him. The woman was laughing, bits of mustard daubing her back teeth. Gabe tried to retrieve his glasses but the cuff of his denim jacket caught on the edge of his plate which upended into his lap, specs and all. “Christ!” he rasped soundlessly, and the violence of it threw his head back a bit and he saw a little more of the window way across the street. Beyond the minute imperfections of the window glass, the walls of the apartment were dingy, institution white, crazed with slender, wandering cracks.
Freddy came to warm up his decaf, and Gabe stared at him with a kind of fury, scrubbing at his glasses with his napkin. Freddy looked at the mess in his lap. “Let me get you a sponge,” he said, turning.
“These blinds don’t work,” said Gabe, and more heads turned. His voice after his deafness was always too loud. He felt a rush of shame.
“What’s wrong with them?” said Freddy.
“They need to be tightened. They don’t tighten.” He couldn’t somehow turn away from it. He never could.
Far across the street, the man paced away from the window and reappeared in another one. He was a thick man, with blond, thinning hair and a beard. He ran his hands over his head in a gesture of distraction or anger or both, and when he turned around, Gabe could see the dark patch of sweat on the back of his red shirt.
Stepping over the mess of Gabe’s dinner, Freddy tried to tighten the blinds.
“Turn them the other way,” Gabe gestured, his hands rolling over and over each other in demonstration, trying not to look through the blinds and not succeeding.
Freddy turned them the other way but they stubbornly refused to slant up. Their slats stood parallel to the floor. Gabe stuck his glasses on his nose in desperation and the greasy lenses blocked his vision beautifully, but the frames slid off with the extra lubrication from the salad dressing, hit the floor and skidded out of sight.
Meanwhile, the man in the window moved, exposing a mirror on the far wall, dark against the cracked paint. The man’s reflection threw up its hands, fists clenched. The man’s reflected mouth was moving. “You little SHIT!” it said.
“They don’t go the other way,” said Freddy, still at the blinds.
“What’s the problem?” mouthed the waitress, who had come to the table.
“I’ve lost my reading glasses!” Gabe could feel his words stop the breath in his throat.
“Can you keep it down over there? We’re trying to eat.” English from the lips of the adulterous woman. By this time, the waitress had the blinds up completely.
Far away across the street, the tiles by the gable were loosened, the windowsill was peeling. The cracks in the walls inside were a lunatic road map; the mirror was an antique, tarnished with age, pock-marked, chipped at the corner. The man’s reflection moved to a wardrobe between the windows, flung the door open, kicked at the white legs inside it, the tiny, swollen hands, no bigger at this distance than the dot of an “i”, veins bulging at the wrists, held up and secured by a frayed belt tied to the coat hanger. It was all slightly green in the far-off glass of the mirror, but Gabe could see the corner of the boy’s mouth around his spit-wet rag: bruised, blood mingling with tears.
“Lower those blinds!” shouted Gabe, lunging at the cord in the waitress’s hands. The waitress’s mouth opened in protest.
Now he had done it. The whole room had its many eyes on him.
The waitress settled Gabe with a look of contempt and bewilderment. The blinds came down as they were, inadequately drawn.
“I’m sorry,” said Gabe. The diners turned back to their food; jaws resumed their chewing and talking. Freddy brought the check. Nine dollars and fifty-seven cents. Freddy’s mouth under the waxed hairs of his mustache was a grim line. He bent down and picked up Gabe’s slimy reading glasses and set them carefully on the table. Gabe saw, reflected in Freddy’s own large lenses, the light across the street wink out.
He watched Freddy leave the room. He wouldn’t come back here now. He wouldn’t buy Freddy’s old telescope. He wouldn’t date Freddy’s daughter.
He could do what he’d done in other cities. He could get someone to call the police and report an incident; he could write it laboriously down for them, what he had seen through a distant window, reflected in a mirror, in an attic apartment across a wide street when he wasn’t trying to look. When he didn’t want to look, but did anyway. And there would be the awkward explanations to the uncomprehending stranger: the thick speaking, the frantic gestures, the agonizing labor of explaining how he saw what he did.
Sometimes they made the call and the police would come. More often they didn’t.
Gabe picked up his glasses, picked up his book, paid his bill, saw the smirks of the men at the bar, saw the sebum blocking the pores on their noses, saw the uvular stop of the back of the tongue, in the cave behind the teeth of the one man as he said, swinging his face around: “…the freak’s going.” Gabe stood outside, fingering his inadequate reading glasses and shivering in the wind.
It only took a glance to see into a distant window. A fraction of a second to see deep into the human skin. Gabe didn’t know if he needed to see less or more; he only knew that he saw surfaces and darknesses in them, and it kept him moving out from the hinterlands, closer and closer to the very edges of civilization. He needed civilization, he needed to read: head buried in the grainy page. He feared the alternatives. He didn’t want to do to his eyes what he’d done to his ears.
It was six fifteen, and the moon was rising full and pink over the now-dark Mansard roof. He was human; surely there were good things to look at in his human world, like there were clear things to read? Gabriel crushed the stars to his side and stared up into the barren valleys and mountains, into the Sea of Tranquility, his gaze brushing the Maskelyne crater, shimmering in the veil of earth’s atmosphere, but a swooping gull blocked his view for an instant. Its eye caught the embers of the Pacific. There, far out beyond where it was safe to swim, beyond where even water could reflect, the sea was tossing, tossing its white froth on dark matter.
