The Implacable Order of Things

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TODAY THE WEATHER DIDN’T fool me. The afternoon is perfectly still. The air scorches, as if it were a waft of fire and not just the air we breathe, as if the afternoon refused to die and the hottest hour had begun. There are no clouds, just wispy white streaks unraveled from clouds. And the sky, from down here, looks cool, like the clear water of a dammed stream. I think: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and the earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, when we die, we fall and sink into the sky. This sky that’s a bottomless stream without fish. The clouds just hazy threads. And the air an inwardly burning fire. Hot, invisible flames that make our skin swelter. Air that, like a tired man, doesn’t even stir.

A time will come when not a sparrow can be seen, when nothing can be heard but the silence of everything watching us. The time will come. I’ll see it on the horizon. As surely as I realize this now, I realized it yesterday when I entered Judas’s general store and ordered my first and my second and my third glass. I realized that all across the plain the cicadas and crickets will fall silent. The slenderest twigs of the olive and cork trees will stop climbing into the sky; from one moment to the next they’ll turn to stone.

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