My father waved good-bye. I didn't wave back, scared I might drop my new cold smoky marble. At the core a spiral glinted and coiled like a small windy flame turning in on itself. That night my mother shook me from a dream, whispering he was dead, he was dead, he was dead, as if to teach a language and I answered: he is dead. Even in sleep my hands had not opened. 1 Great Love, like a hostile parent, always watched us to see if our nails were clean, if there were crumbs at the corners of our mouths— imperious Love, irascible, muttered about a catastrophe we would never know, close and remote as a lit window— you will never know how I suffered in Logos because of your ignorance and we lovers unbuttoned shyly in the night of war and amazing wealth, sad for each other, telling each other little jokes to make it easier, wanting nothing except twilight: but that Love always with a project: the darkest night; sharpest pencil; softest pillow; cruelest betrayal; so we blessed each other in a language we invented, more silent than thought, each word backlit as in a dream where there is no choice but kindness, and that Love, furious, searched among the laws for a single name, erased on the day we met. 2 The rake splayed on the lawn, a hose glittered over daffodils, the brillo pad circled the dish, smoke hovered above the chimney, the comb journeyed with many setbacks through a forest of scented hair, and the voice cried in a dark room. If we were lost in a second of happiness, how bright will we burn in paradise? Not even God may enter the past yet we sneaked there hand in hand and carved our names in the pith of the apple tree. If loneliness were a taxi, I'd give it our old address: 1 Pison Drive, a block from Euphrates: picket fence, gambrel roof, bent hoop, bug light, dangling tire, in the garage a bike with training wheels, waiting to take us to our father's mansion. Pity the visitors bent under shopping bags, who have kept their huge hats here where there are no seasons, who run from station to station with a question so inconsequential even we patients smile. Admire the nurse and the aide who fill out a form, one beginning at the front, the other at the end, speaking of Bon Jovi; the doctors, washing side by side, discussing an even greater doctor; most of all, revered the orderlies who have come from across the sea to wheel us through the corridors to a place where we will be tested, where we will finally belong even more inherently than here, where we will no longer be watchers but the matter itself, flesh and soul transposed to degrees on a scale of radiance.
		Excerpted from The Fall by D. Nurkse. Copyright © 2002 by D. Nurkse. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.