Still Time

  Which critic was it who claimed that tragedy derives both its sorrow and its horror from the fact that time moves in one direction only, so that nothing can ever be foreknown and everything that happens happens only once, so what’s done can never be undone? For years John found that a fine insight, useful in his teaching, and sometimes even in his own work. But lately it seems he’s learned the knack of sidestepping time—or perhaps time has learned to sidestep him—for it seems that more and more, events come and go without reference to chronology, moments dropping in or moving on like the odd cast of characters who wander through his bedchamber door.

  For instance, the last time he looked out this picture window, he would have sworn the welkin was a vibrant blue, the tree beside the casement all leaved in gold. But now, a mere trice later, the sky is sodden gray, the branches barren sticks, the lawn a sullen, wintery green.

  He has been thinking about The Winter’s Tale—or trying to—thinking about The Winter’s Tale and the rest of the romances, though his thoughts drift like fish in a glass fishbowl, meandering in lazy circles, hardly pausing when they reach some invisible wall before they turn to swim back another way, occasionally catching the light as they shift and twist so that they shimmer with a momentary loveliness before they float on past, slipping like minnows beyond his grasp.

  He has been thinking about redemption and deception—or trying to—since even now, alone in this strange chamber, there are so many interruptions to his work. Rain splattering the window. Blowing leaves and flocks of wind-whipped birds. A drifting harridan. A pabbling man. Fresh towels. Another dram of med’cine to be quaffed.

  Still he soldiers on. Still slogs through bog and quagmire, still strives to understand. Understanding matters. That’s what he tells his children … or his pupils … perhaps his progeny … or prodigy … or his pups. He who dies with the most understanding wins.

  But perhaps even that truth has drifted away, since in the end, in Pericles and Cymbeline, in The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, and perhaps even in King Lear, forgiveness and reconciliation seem to matter even more. Forget and forgive, say chastened Lear and compassionate Cleomenes. Others say it, too.

  Forget.

  And then forgive.

  I like your silence, it the more shows off Your wonder. That’s what grave and good Paulina says in the last scene of The Winter’s Tale when she draws the curtain to reveal the statue Hermione has been for sixteen dreary years. And maybe, John muses, as the branches whip the sky and rain slaps its drops against the glass, Hermione speaks so little after she is stone no more not because she has been silenced by her husband’s rage but because she’s learned the value of wonder.

  The next time John sees Will, he means to ask him that.

  A woman comes to see him sometimes—and sometimes even now. A lined, warm woman in bright sweaters and worn jeans that invite him even now to ponder her dear bum. Bum, for the sum of the buns, and buns for both sweet cheeks, such fun bundles of language, such satisfying puns. There is no fun in Shakespeare, though. It’s not a word he had, nor a word he ever had need of coining. For him, joy, delight, and happiness sufficed.

  John is happy to be visited by that kind and handsome woman, delighted to have her company in these strange quarters, though she often strikes him as an epiphany come too late. He has never loved a woman so wholly before, but he wishes he could have loved her better, loved her sooner, loved her even more and longer than the small forever he’s been given with her.

  She seems fond of him, too, seems actually quite to dote. For that reason alone he knows he must be careful, for he wants never to break another heart.

  “You,” he tells her when she comes, “you are, my. You.”

  Then he pats her hand. Wordlessly.

  Wordlessly, he studies her face, searches her eyes for meanings, for understandings. He’d forgotten—or had he ever known?—how naked a face could be, how open and expressive, how exposed. He’d never known—or had he forgotten?—how utterly one human could love another. Love beyond love.

  Understanding may come hereafter.

  Gusts of feeling or even thought still sometimes come, arriving like a wind rippling the calm surface of a stream.

  Gently down the stream—he sang that once. With a child, a girl of five or six. Row, row, row. He remembers nodding and tapping her shoulder, cuing her when to begin, remembers smiling his encouragement for her to keep singing, to stick to her own words, keep to her own tune. Life is but a dream. He remembers her gleeful laughter when they reached the end.

  A round, he’d said. Let’s sing a round.

  Or was he the child?

  Remember, he thinks. He should—

  But it seems his too, too solid mind is melting, thawing, resolving itself into a dew.

  Adieu.

  Adieu, adieu, remember me. The ghost says that, in Hamlet. And whether it is an honest ghost or not, each reader must discover for himself.

  Reade him.

  A woman arrives.

  On this wet and wind-lashed day when trees are growing in the hallways and the ancientry croon about hark the herald angels and laughing all the way. The outside weather clings to her. Her chilled skin when she bends to kiss his pate, the rain sheen in her rumpled locks. Her hair is a plain chestnut color, a fact that pleases him inordinately, and for no good reason. Her countenance pleases him, too. Looking at her unremarkable young face, he feels a surge of gladness. He remembers those eyes, although he cannot say why. He remembers remembering them.

  Déjà vu again.

  That’s an old joke. He smiles at it now, recalling someone making it and the others laughing, a band of young men in a dusky tavern. He tastes the hoppy sizzle of ale, cold and golden in his mouth, swipes the foam off his lip with a rugged wrist.

  At the sight of his smile, the woman smiles, too. “Hi, Dad,” she says. “I’m back again. Me and my foolish heart,” she adds as if making a joke she expects him to understand. Deliberate as a judge, he watches as she flops into the chair beside his own, watches as she greets the gray world beyond the glass, the rain now dashing slant against the pane.

  Waits until she parts the air between them to take his hand.

  Now their linked fingers lie in his lap like a small warm animal, a pet that might need feeding.

  “Give me your hands, if we be friends,” he says, marveling at the finger pile, some straight-knuckled, others skewed and knobbled, the way they all accommodate each other, even so.

  “‘And Robin shall restore amends,’” the woman replies, her voice bright. “That’s Puck, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You taught me that, Dad, back when I was a girl. ‘If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is ended.’”

  “Mended,” he says, giving the mingled fingers in his lap a little shake. “‘All is … mended.’ Remember. There is no, end.”

  “Mended,” she echoes, dutifully. “‘All is mended.’”

  That you have but slumb’red here While these visions did appear. He is so glad to see her. He has been waiting his whole life, it seems, for her to come. He would tell her that, if only he could recall her name. He can feel it shimmering on the tip of his mental tongue. And yet, like Hamlet’s ghost, it vanishes when he calls. And whatever history he had with her now seems so distant, like the review of a play he has never actually seen, like the plot to Two Noble Kinsmen or King John, like poor young William Page’s Latin declensions in The Merry Wives of Windsor : Forsooth, I have forgot.

  “I thought we could give it one last try.” The smile that trembles on her face is a lovely, delicate thing, a butterfly on this deep winter day.

  “One,” he tries, testing the word, curious to see where it might take him. A thought flits across his face. “There’s something.” He frowns. “I was going to … tell, something … to say.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Something …” he gropes, “it was … matterful.” But though he frowns and strains, in the end he has to sigh, “It’s gone
.”

  “It’s okay, Dad.” Her hand hugs his. “It doesn’t matter. Or if it does—it’ll come back later.”

  “When I’m … gone,” he answers, though he sounds more wry than sorry. And yet a thought descends, pat as another deus ex machina. “Still … in coffee?”

  “I am,” she answers ebulliently. “But not for long. I have great news, Dad. I’m going to college, after all. I won that scholarship, the one I told you I’d never have a chance to get. For a game concept I came up with. It’s called Green World.”

  “Green?” he asks the barren tree and blowing rain.

  “Green World. You gave me the idea, Dad. How green worlds make people change, how confusion leads to transformation, and we have to leave our known safe lives before we can become anything really new. I worked those ideas into a concept for a game about how art and nature mirror and question each other, how humans are the interface between them. It’s about finding a way to come to terms with chaos, and holding on to what matters, even as we let it go.”

  Her words are enigmatical, but her happiness is palpable, and he delights in it.

  “I watched loads of plays online,” she prattles. “I read a bunch, too. Sally sent me your teaching copies, with all your notes. She said I could keep them. Maybe I’ll show them to my kids someday.” Her talk is like a brook, a sparkling babble he does not need to understand. He trusts there is some wisdom in it, nonetheless.

  “I like Sally,” she says. “We’ve talked some on the phone. I’m headed off to ArtTech in a few days, but I’ll be back for spring break, and we’re planning on getting together then. Mink—that’s my fiancé—he wants to learn about bees.”

  Afterwards, she sits in her car, sobbing a painful happiness while rain rattles the metal roof and tears drip off her chin to spot her coat.

  “You sure about this, Ran?” Mink had asked before she left, his concern a treasure she trusts will never tarnish.

  “Not sure at all,” she’d answered tersely. Sighing carefully as if to avoid jostling her resolve, she’d added, “I only know I’m headed off to college in a few weeks, and there’s a good chance I’ll never see my dad again.”

  “But haven’t you already said good-bye to him, like about a million times?”

  “Maybe that’s why I think it’ll probably be okay whatever happens now.” When he’d looked skeptical, she’d said, “Think about it like this: visiting him again is nothing compared to what I’ll be doing next. Living away from you for the next four years, taking all those programming classes, a girl trying to break into—and then out of—the gamers’ world. If I can do all that, I’m sure I can make one last visitation to dear old Dad.

  “Besides,” she went on with a sly smile, “I do kind of want to tell him to his face that it’s thanks to him—and his Will—that I’m going to ArtTech after all.”

  It was on the drive home after her last visit that the idea came to her. Distraught at having lost her father and her last chance at ArtTech in a single hour, she’d spent the first twenty miles sobbing and swearing. As the road wound through the lush vineyards where the grape harvest had just begun, she’d held loud conversations with the father in her head, yelling and pleading, accusing, cursing, and beseeching.

  By the time she’d joined the freeway, she’d mourned and ranted her way through the fiercest of her outrage and her grief. Rubbing away her tears, she’d driven in silence, too sorry to even turn the radio on, while her thoughts kept tugging helplessly back to her visit, the pity and the absurdity of it, and even the odd moments of interest: Cressida, dead white man’s game, green worlds.

  Green worlds—she’d brooded, gazing at the truck heaped with grapes that she was following—it sounded like the name for a computer game. And merely to distract herself and keep her losses at bay, she’d begun to imagine what a game called Green World might contain.

  She’d begun working on it because it was her absolute final chance, but once she got inside it, she forgot about her chances, thought only of the promise of the game. Abandoning any hope of winning, she’d worked doggedly, steadily, but with a hot ferocious passion—sketching out ideas till dawn more nights than not, working until the work itself came to sustain her, until her love for what she was creating mattered more than any other prize.

  She plundered Shakespeare’s comedies and his romances, streaming videos and watching DVDs. She’d tried to read the plays and to read about them, combing the Internet and venturing into the UCSC library to learn more. There’d been much she hadn’t understood and much more she hadn’t understood well. But there’d been marvels, too, things that moved her or made her think—gems and joys and heart-stopping jabs.

  Some of her searches led to her father’s work, his articles, his books, his ideas referenced in other people’s writing. Learning his thoughts by reading them, she felt again the ache of all she’d missed.

  But she found him, too, in some strange way. She discovered in his writing his own passion and his care. Reading him, she’d seen he’d been much more than just her father, failed or not. And the more she read of him, the more she’d begun to believe he had tried harder as a father—and suffered more—than she had ever given him credit for.

  A blast of wind buffets her car, sends water bucketing across the windshield. With a final sob, she digs the tears from her eyes and wipes her face.

  Bequeath to death your numbness be stone no more. The words arise in her mind like a distant lovely scent or a half-remembered tune. She’s not sure where they come from, which character or what play, and yet they seem to fit so well all that she is feeling.

  AN OLD MAN SITS. In the great churn of now.

  An old man sits as the sun widens and the green returns.

  No John at all, but just a picture window through which the world blows, a wind hole. Nothing left but sensations raining softly down around him, petaling, leafing, lighting and shadowing. A lifetime of sensations, drenching him. On this strange spring day that seems to have sprung from nowhere.

  Green light flutters against pale green walls. Outside, the world ticks on, indifferent to any gaze. The bricks stand tall. The ivy curtain hangs. Daffodils and tulips sway in their bright chorus line, and sparrows bound across the greensward like kernels of popping corn. White clouds wander overhead, towered citadels, whales and dragonish vapors that roam the sky like dreams. Or memories.

  Sometimes a memory envelops him, even now. Diving into a green cool river. Watching his mother flour the cutting board. Pushing a squealing child on a swing. Most of those memories are shadowed things, shreds and whispers that elude him even as he tries to reach for them. But occasionally they still arrive precise as stories—memories polished by decades of remembering, remembrances so keen he lives them still.

  There was a garden. Long before his mother’s face grew gray. Back when every now was new. A garden swooning with lilacs, shining with daffodils. And he was in that garden, he is in it still—not remembering, not staring through stiff glass or squinying back through time—but standing in its lemonade light, inhaling its dizzy scents, wrapped in its warm hum. Little Johnny, wrapped and rapt.

  Everything is busy, lazy, buzzy. He sees his own white knees, the mocha dirt, sees the rainbows the sun makes when he squints his eyes half shut.

  He sees his mother, in her polka-dot dress. She comes humming, sweeps him up. “A round,” she says, smiling into his eyes, nodding, her face encouraging him while her voice sings, Row, row, row your boat— “Now you begin,” she interrupts her singing to say.

  “Row, row, row,” he tries, his voice high and happy, but then he hears her words and gets confused. Fumbling, he loses track, sings her part instead gently down merrily merrily life stream but a

  dream

  He stops, hot and flustered. But then she laughs and then he laughs, a round of laughter that erases his shame. The bee hum spins honey, the sound a kind of stream, another dream. merrily merrily merrily And he is once again so happy inside that buzzing singin
g laughing shining garden that there is no part of him left to think it. He is happy. Because. He is.

  our little life Is rounded with a sleep. That’s what the sage and sometime mage Prospero has to say. We are such stuff As dreams are made on be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. Be not disturb’d with my infirmity.

  A woman comes, a young woman with a bright countenance and tousled hair. A woman he loves dearly, although he knows not why. Together they walk out of his cell into springtime, air warm as bathwater, world alive with daffodils that come before the swallow dares. And grass, newly grown and mown. The smell of green. Bees bumble by, their lulling hum. Birds flit and twitter. He shuffles down the sidewalk, her hand warm on his arm. A gift. A miracle. The present. They move slowly, one small step and then another. When he pauses, she waits. “It’s good to be … home,” he says, a full sentence, comprehensible. She saves it as a treasure.

  Together they shuffle forward until they reach a pair of chairs.

  “Would you like to sit?” she asks. Her voice is soft, gentle, and low. An excellent thing, he thinks, giving a slow, judicious nod. She helps to maneuver him toward his seat, steadies his upper arm as he lets himself thud down. “There you go,” she says.

  In response he farts, loud and long.

  “Well roared, Lion,” she gleeks. He nods again, serene.

  They sit together, waiting.

  A crow lands on the fresh grass, cocks its glossy head to consider them with a brazen eye.

  “Up … start,” he mutters. The rumble of his voice startles the bird, and it hops back into the air, catches itself on black wings, lumbers skyward.

  They giggle together, father and daughter. The air heals.

  After a while the waiting ceases, and they simply sit, the same breeze ruffling his grand white hair and her rumpled brown. Time dissolves.

  He feels the breeze, its fingerless caress, watches the green lawn where an entire universe thrives—insects, microbes, bacteria, worms—all busy and oblivious, the mindless mind of the world.