Still Soft With Sleep (A Novel based on a true story) - Prologue

by Vincenzo Barney

We kick off the second week of the second round of PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest, with our second Finalist’s first chapter. Over the next two weeks, we’ll serialize the first few chapters of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack. Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.

Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.

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World was in the face of the beloved,

but suddenly it poured out and was gone:

world is outside, world cannot be grasped.

Why didn’t I, from the full, beloved face

as I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drink

world, so near that I could almost taste it?

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Keep those tears hid out of sight.

—Mick Jagger

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PROLOGUE

I’m standing on the balcony looking across the park and she is calling me back to bed.

She’s tired but there is play to her voice. “It’s cold Adam, close the door.” She hits “door” with a lilt and I can hear her smiling and rolling in the sheets. “What are you even doing out there?”

What am I doing out here? I’m looking across the park from the 30^th floor, up in the violet and the glass of Manhattan. It’s December and there’s been a frost in the rainfall. The winter winds are pouring in billows through the fluted slalom of Broadway, curling the cold open brim of Columbus Circle and putting a tilt in the frosted trees. Days before, when I saw the park from the woman’s apartment in the daylight, it stretched out like a lawn at my feet, full of unpetalled trees and evergreen needles like the sharp burrs one stepped across as a child barefoot in the grass, the needles listing toward their far off Apriline seams, the big stitch of Spring. But now past midnight the park is a stretch of cold Atlantic darkness. There is curvature in it. It curls up into Harlem. It touches the bluffs of the Eastern and Western shorelines in a slow shattering sound and there is the memory of salt air it. A dusting of snow is coming down like gentle starfall upon it, and the snowflakes are so light and so far away that you lose them in the darkness and can’t tell if they ever touch its sea. Christmas has added to the fallen glitter of its surface, to the underdapple of its midnight swells, and its swell is cold and heavy and slow like the ocean in winter, but an ocean that will not let all light into its waves, only select stars in the seabraid, and the reflection of these stars glide its three miles of mirror and it is so vast that even from thirty floors I feel I am looking up into it.

I don’t know how the old feeling got back in but it did. Like a breath. It was just a matter of the depth of the inhalation, the memory of salt air. There you are, hidden, bottom of the lung. The feeling of breathing into somewhere else. Deep tunneling breath of a slipstream, like if you could withstand it you could take this breath in forever and whereto. Perhaps when one stays awake so long past midnight they go on dreaming in some secret place and I’m dreaming there now, underneath, and breathing into the lungs of myself in dream.

In its wake the old feeling was putting a long drowned ribbon through the swells of the park. It was the feeling some stage before tears, when memory is poised in the rim of the eyelids, when memory has come into the musculature and the eyes and one feels the cold blooming of the memory coming out of the bone. A pain as old as the musculature, as old as the world and the human design swimming it. And in this a feeling of deep tethering, as of touching the bottom of the ocean through hundred-mile currents and subterranean storms secret from the surface. This the primeval depth that floats the iris, the eyes a brief brim of glitter as if the reflection of the stars have wetted in. And you don’t fight it but you tingle with it and you remember that you have been waiting for it to come back to you and you try to gaze into its overcoming, a pain as old pain itself. I know now that I had been drinking my way toward it when I met the woman inside the room a week ago. A swell under the bow of the bar brought her into my arms and I steadied her in the steepness and her face had been a hint I didn’t catch of the changing currents. And here I was now, on the stern.

Earlier in the room there had been a sudden overlap and Her face was under me again. Not the face of the woman inside the room now calling me back to bed, but Her. A face I thought I’d seen for the last time. This was how the feeling back got in, in the overlap. As the woman and I’s cheeks clung side to side I suddenly saw Her shining up from below like the moon coming into the surface of a pond in an open field before the sky, and Her face glowed upward onto my neck. As the woman breathed me in and heaved and we bound more closely together I held my eyes in a squint the way one looks at a Monet to find its clarity and the light of Her face came bursting through my eyelids and blurred into focus and even when I opened them wide to take Her all the way in She was still there and I did not have to squint to see Her. When I was a child I used to press my eyes close to the blue wallpaper of my bedroom and unfocus my eyes and the white circular clouds of the wallpaper would double and separate, one for each eye. I could not tell the real apart from the double. Then I would slowly refocus my eyes and the doubled image would hang there next to its original, lifted off the wallpaper. Seeing Her there below me had been like this.

The woman laid against me with her head on my chest and her profile tilted under my chin. This was the way I always remembered Her, with Her eyes closed and Her soul sealed in. In Her eyes had once been hazel and amber through which she watched whole aeons of sleep, florations of dream, the ripples of Her irises pushing the surface of the lids in dreamtide and Her own currents. Between the eyelid and the hazel a mysterious frontage, an invisible dimension that gated these glowing roses from me, and which I had laid on the other side of at night, gazing across. All I had to do now in the room was look down at the woman to see Her like this again. There was no blinking Her away.

I don’t know why, but I couldn’t remember Her any other way except in this pose of secret intimation. I could never make Her open Her eyes in my memory, and if I could I couldn’t get them to look straight at me. In the room I suddenly smelt Her and tasted Her breath in my mouth, in the back of my throat running down to my Adam’s apple and pushing past it where I lost it and its route became secret. I used to sleep within the field of this breath, like a flower breathing in the carbon dioxide, putting me to sleep in the green clearings of Vermont a killed flower, dreamily warped in the windblown heat shimmer of Her breath skimming off the green tilt of hills. It had been a decade since I stood behind the foldable wall in the funeral parlor carrying my eyes across the whole of the room on my knees, looking everywhere but up at Her face. I carried my eyes across everything that could be seen, Her feet at the edge of the cot wrapped beneath the blanket, my hands clasped tightly before Her without prayers whispered into their folds and then, slowly, I saw my hands part and hold the blanket loosely which had covered Her and I let my eyes look up toward Her profile, silent and softing against the afternoon light on the winter wall. I was like a little mouse, with the fear that She may suddenly move an inch, that She may unclose Her eyes but She did not and I laid my forehead against Her’s and looked down in the enclosed darkness so that for this minute in the funeral parlor it was like nightfall and we were sleeping nose to nose in the dark again, the night fuzz snowing out of the air. Her face like coordinates in the grid, shaping and angeling the room’s dark bedroom blue. This is how I remember Her, the crescent lids the long lashes had twined closed, curled into Her cheeks. The cutely snubbed nose down to the thick pinched lips. The soft black twinkling of a room at night. Breathing and dreaming and in my arms, still soft with sleep.

It seized me suddenly, as the woman I was with slept and I kept looking down whenever I wanted to see Her face again, that today was the day. I’d almost forgotten. It seized me that I’d almost forgotten. It was a decade now since She had Decembered away, first through those thirty feet of darkness and then through the ice. Destiny had brought a heatwave in to thin the ice or else She may have simply broken Her legs, never passed through. Today was the day She did it, sometime after midnight. But the musculature does not forget and remembrance is like growing conscious of the breath, the mechanism and the chest over it and the heart within it like a rill within a river. It is like taking control of the breath and then with a startle forgetting how to let go of it and let the body do it again. I felt alien suddenly from the world, from moonlit sheets and bodies and as the feeling came back my muscles felt younger and my body lighter and loose in the buoyancy of a long ago afternoon ocean. The feeling touched the original self that was still there. It passed straight through like a ribbon through a wound. This original self that had twired to Her a decade ago, had lived a thwarted life of secret tunneling, forbidden branching. It walked the paths of a dark cold garden I was kept from. Death is a separation and this was the pact of my letting this self separate – that it not age. That we live in secret from each other. But I had buried its secret. I had worn it down and put a weight on it. It was youth with no body to get back into, a ghost of myself that had branched away inside and haunted the secret tunnel leading out of the body, lonely and vivid. He had had his eyes opened wide to the invisible rim within, waiting in mourning for Her to come back in through the natural gates of the body. Waiting for this old feeling to slip back across the sill and its promise of intimacy with Her. I lived in secret from him but from time to time I could feel the cold draft from this door left forever open to December and so I began to bury him. I made it a maze to get back to him and this door he kept. Every morning for years I turned heel and kicked the earth back over the open passage as I left for the day and the original self took it on both turning cheeks because he was a pious pilgrim, a devotee of Decembers. He had only to wait and grow abandoned like Janus, turning to look both ways as first She separated from him down the forbidden hall and then as I separated from him in the opposite direction, aging away from his piety. Only I knew that he would be waiting here with a plaintive patience until the day I approached him, in old age or in surprise, and took his hand and joined him through the door and out of our body. He could not move otherwise. She was an Ophelial leak in the stream and he was forever in awe of this leak. He was forever remembering what Her cold lips felt like kissing her goodbye on the cot. He’d never forget. While I had grown up and fallen in love again and again no other woman had ever touched his lips but Her. He was forever in stone for he had looked back over the shoulder and he wanted to be turned into stone so he could look backward forever at the complex loops of the past knotting perhaps into the deep future. It was good to know he was still there, that he would never blame me, but he was a slurrying, a running of the self, the ink of an ancient love letter rushing rainbrushed past the edges of the page, falling out of handwriting. The blurred page taking on the weight of rain. Now the intimacy of being caught in the same storm as him, out on the stern. Somewhere in Her death had been a promise about how I’d live the rest of my life, and here I was in a new rain of old sounds.

It started in my ribcage. I felt panicky and tiptoed to the bathroom and looked away from the dark hints of my face in the mirror. I did not want a reflection and I did not want a face and I did not want a name. I did not want to be in some scenery which She had lifted from, could no longer thread through. That I was here and had turned 30 and She was 21 forever, that most dreamed toward American age. And yet she was buried in Bethlehem. It panicked me. I walked to the balcony then. I wanted to pour back into the universe through my chest. I was not scared up so high in the wind above those hundreds of feet of darkness and beneath the stars, but I was sad not to be able to draw closer to them, to blend back in. I had passed long ago into the elegiac side of Her death, and then the elegy ended. I had fallen out of all that breadth and range that Her death had opened to me. And yet She was still fading from me somehow. After all this time still flowing away. I hadn’t been watching the currents. I had been hiding from the sea. The panic of holding on in the midst of Her withdrawal, being outstripped by Her disappearance and the disappearance of mourning. Like a tide gone too inland to ebb back, the elastic snapped, the currents halved. She was a billow, unribboning and flowing away to some unbowable point down the thread, to some boundlessness I could not find Her in. That I kept waiting for Her to visit from, approaching from overhead like an angel.

I was thinking again like my younger self. I was back in his voice. I had stretched dangerously away from Her for so long and now found the currents had changed on me. I was up to my waist in waves, in the sea of the Vineyard Sound.

In truth I had been drinking towards Cape Cod all this time. There is a relation between an overpoured whiskey in winter and the Cape in summer, the sharp wince and the warmth puts you in the sea breeze. If I drink enough I can feel the waves and smell the sea and it takes the weight from my shoulders. Stresses and tensions you didn’t know you had dissolve when you hit the ocean, and the mark of a man is to bring him to the ocean and see what he dissolves down to. It’s when these dissolve that things push up through the sand. Sex is like ballast on a night of this kind of drinking, so that you are not plunged down in darkness and you are not on land either, but bobbing in the deep sea sun innocent of all danger, so open to being reached back towards. She lived in this place that whiskey touched on shortening December evenings.

There was a summer I was ready to face again and I let the tides of this feeling drop me on the shores of Martha’s Vineyard. The first summer that had come without Her in it. When Her name lifted from me, deified. I could no longer say it. It was as if to have known once what God’s name was but then to have been flowed away from, the drawing back of the tide an act of forgetting, but also of stretching far enough away so as to draw back into you tight like an elastic and it was snapping back. So I was back in that summer a decade ago, the summer I spent with Elvis. Elvis is a strange name anywhere in the world except Londonberry, the Vermont hamlet where our college was hidden in the woods. At Londonberry College there were Rivers and Ariels and Elvises against the green leaves and December vapor and snowlit purple mountains bright as rosedust every drunkenly misrisen Sunday morning, and in that Eden I was called Adam. I thought back to a summer and a destiny I had slipped away from long ago. Something I could not hold still for, or whose purchase of fate was the elusive brevity of its enclosure, the escape it made from me. It had come to orbit me in a timid oval of gold, once a year. Not in Summer but in Winter. A sunshot sadness. An overlit solstice of Junes, Julies and Augusts braided through me the dreamlike coloration of Chappaquidick just the other side of Edgartown, and the license of youth pushed to its limit. I had let myself be flowed away from, but now the tide was coming back in, and suddenly She let the light back into Her waves and I wanted to dive.

Associated Press - Tuesday December 20th, 2016:

LONDONBERRY, Vt. (AP) - Vermont State Police are searching for a Londonberry College student who was reported missing over the weekend after her car was discovered at a swimming hole in the Green Mountain National Forest.

Troopers say 21-year-old Ajjul Wafa left a Londonberry residence where she was staying on Saturday and didn’t return. She was reported missing on Sunday morning, December 18th.

Police say her vehicle was discovered Sunday at Dorset Quarry next to Vermont Route 30 on Sunday.

Wafa was last seen wearing a large green sweatshirt. Police say she’s about 5-foot-3, 130 pounds with brown eyes and curly black hair.

If seen citizens are asked to contact their local police department.