Free The Visible World by Mark Slouka Page A

yet I could see all of our old things: the low white bookshelf in the living room and my child’s desk and my bed with the pirate lamp and the chair my father sat in whenever we had guests, all of which we had left behind. And though I could see all these things, I knew, as you can sometimes know things in dreams, that I no longer lived in this place, that I was only visiting, and I wandered about from room to room, looking at these things which were still so familiar to me, wondering what had become of them, and it seemed to me that they must miss us.
    I didn’t remember that dream for a long time. Many years later I found myself on a train traveling south from Prague to visit friends near Jindřichův Hradec. Wet snow had been falling all morning, but now a dull winter sun had broken through. Coal smoke hung like a mist over the towns with their smudged little houses. The train ran beside the river that curved against the hills and spread in great gravelly shoals between the fields, and everywhere I could see the remnants of a flood which only that past October had submerged all the things I was now looking at. I saw a sofa lying upside down on a sandbar and a white refrigerator like a boulder in the current. On the television antenna of a low abandoned building I glimpsed what looked like a pair of blue pants, stiff as a weathervane. And at that moment for some reason I remembered my dream—the dream I had had a year after we had moved out of our apartment on 63rd Road. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I watched the country scrolling by. All along the way, beards of trash hung in the bushes and the trees like Spanish moss, except that here everything was at the same height—the high-water mark—everything below having been swept away by the current.
    Strangely enough, just as dreams will sometimes color our memories, the view of the river that day and the dream it recalled together forced themselves on the past, so that afterward, whenever I thought of our old apartment, my recollections would always carry a residue of future times, and remembering our apartment I would immediately be forced, like a man stumbling down a series of steps, to recall wandering those same rooms in my dream, and from there to remember the winter morning I’d spent, years later, looking out the dirty windows of the train to Jindřichův Hradec at all the things, once caught in the current, the flood had left behind.

11
    WHEN I THINK BACK ON OUR FIVE SEASONS AT THE LAKE , I see my father reading in the big wicker chair that usually stood in the corner under the lamp with the green shade but which he would drag in front of the fire on chilly days. He was a great reader, my father: at ease, engaged, capable of sitting for three hours at a stretch without feeling the need to get up or move about, indeed, almost immobile except for now and again a small inward smile or a slight tilt of the head in anticipation of the page’s turning. Sometimes I’d see his arm swing like a crane to the little table at his side. He’d pick up the glass with three fingers, begin to bring it to his lips—all this without once looking up from the page—and stop. And the glass would just hang there, sometimes for a minute or more, and I’d make bets with myself about whether it would complete its journey by the time he got to the bottom of the page, or be returned, untouched, to the table.
    My mother read too, though differently. For days or weeks she would read nothing at all, or nothing but the newspaper, then suddenly take a book off the shelf, pull a chair next to my father’s, and disappear. She read with an all-absorbing intensity, her stockinged feet drawn up underneath her, that I understood completely and yet still found slightly unnerving. Hunched over the book—which she would hold at her stomach, forcing her to look straight down—she looked as though she were protecting the thing, or in pain. No smile, no cup of tea, no leg thrown easily