High Tide Read Free Page B

it cultivated a soul, that sought-after pearl, or not? Most likely not. There isn’t a pearl down there, no archeologist has ever found a pearl in place of a heart. It’s unheard of. Maybe you yourself are the pearl, the fruit and creation of this strange life, but the sudden stillness of the heart, the coup of that flesh, which you possibly loved more than your own, can drive you insane in its stillness and assimilation to the earth. And the decomposition of the heart, its imperceptible transformation into earth and worms, soil, roots—it hurts you, and you’re ready to dig it up out of the dirt, bring it into the daylight, this useless thing that has no spark, no movement, no echo. It’s an obsession.
    But her thoughts have peeled away; at least that’s done with. She takes a hesitant step away from the lee side of a pine tree and moves forward. Sand mixed with black soil, so loose that she sinks down into it up to her ankles. A firebreak freshly tilled in the anticipation of forest fires. There won’t be any more fires. Her thoughts have peeled down to the moist, living pith. Down to her being, to the present, free of the past, the future, genetics, ancestry and contemplation, from high school certificates and notices from detention centers. It suddenly seems to her that this spiritual peace is thievery. Like an unending and painful embodiment of others’ lives—it was such a deep hole, but now it’s just a thick layer: the woods, the road, and the sky. That has to be proof of suffering, she wants to shout, but falls quiet. And if that ends up being the only chance to keep going? Stoop down and grab a handful of your shadow along with the sand—nothing but the woods, the road, and the sky. And you. A thickening of matter, an accidental obstacle to the sun’s rays, a being without genes, without ancestors, without a past, or a future. An observer, someone who has seen one or two of the most beautiful moments of her life in nature. There aren’t many of these moments, but there are some, and she can’t stop thinking about them. She thinks she’ll even remember them in her final hour, like fog snaking through the city on a sweltering summer morning. The movements of fog animals in the empty city streets, when the mist slips its tendrils into the ancient river valley. Movement without movement. Or when the first snow falls on the lake in the forest. A black, clear mirror that glitters endlessly, a disappearing curtain of white, an army of snow, billions of flakes that cease to exist as soon as they touch the clean, black void.
    Yes, but was there ever ugly scenery in the woods? Wasn’t the darkening sky every fall evening when, if you were able to persuade yourself to stop for a few seconds in a clearing to see a pair of ravens fly off with a low “craw-craw,” to see the white jet trails of a plane in the gleam of the setting sun turn redder and redder, and the fine lace of the north-facing treetops grow mysteriously blacker and blacker against the rich yellow sky… wasn’t that beauty? Just like the concentrated color of an expanding sunset before the night thickens, before the earth sinks into itself—there’s no sign of the ideas the wind carelessly sowed where the forest stands in the crisp, wintery stillness, immersed to its roots and tips in a meditation only it can know. A beauty for itself, yet simultaneously meant for her to see. Meant for her, a single body so small in this large clearing. And the glimpse of life that finds her in that moment is rapid and just as insignificant as a train whistling as it leaves an empty station. An essentially unnecessary gesture, a superfluous signal without an addressee; because there isn’t anybody here, just the surge of tracks from horizon to horizon and the inky wall of frozen spruce trees, along which the train carries its cry and the warm electric glow of its windows.
    She once read,