The Watcher Who Will Not Look

It begged in Priya's voice first, and that nearly did it, because Priya had been on this rock a fortnight and her voice still had all its warmth, none of the sea-glass wearing of the old ones, a colleague's voice, a friend's, saying Imani, please, I am asking you as one professional to another, open your eyes and verify. You taught me that, she said, verify, you with your notes and your grids, you do not believe a reading you have not checked, check me, look at me, one look and you will see it is really me.

"It is really you," I said. My eyes stayed shut. My sister's hand stayed freezing in mine. "That is the worst of it, Priya. It is really you, and you are really in the dark, and there is really no light down here, and I am not going to look, because my looking is the only thing it has left to eat."

The voice changed then. Not to another voice. It changed the way water changes when the tide turns, the same water going suddenly the other way, and Priya's voice stopped asking me to look and started, without meaning to, without understanding what was happening to it, to falter. There is a light here, she said, and then, after all, she said, and then the sentence hung there in the dark unfinished, is there a light here, and the question had a crack in it, and through the crack came Priya herself, the real one, absent eleven days, the engineer, exhausted, bewildered, a woman who had been walking toward a reading she could never quite take.

"No," I said to her, gently, in the voice for telling a family the truth at three in the morning, because the truth kindly told is the only mercy that keeps. "There is no light here, Priya. There never was. The meter was right and your eyes were wrong, and you can stop checking now. Nobody has to verify the dark. It is allowed to just be dark." I felt my own tears run hot down from under my shut lids and I let them. "Close your eyes, my love. You are permitted. Stop reading the instrument. Put it down and go to sleep."

I heard it. I will hear it the rest of whatever I am. The small dry sound, close in the black beside me, of a woman laying something down on stone, though there was nothing in her hands, though she had no hands, the sound was the truth of a thing and not the thing, and then a long breath going out that did not draw in again, and where Priya Sundaram had been whispering in the dark there was no more whispering. Not silence. Silence is a held thing, a listening thing, this rock is full of silence and every inch of it is awake. This was sleep. You can hear the difference. It is the difference between a shut door and a wall.

The dark went very still around me, and I understood that I had just taken something from it that it had never once lost, and that we were no longer negotiating.

It came at my certainty next, because certainty was all I was standing on. It had worn every beloved face for my eyes and every beloved voice for my ears, and now, locked out of both, it went for the inside, and the inside of a person is doubt, that is where it has always lived, in the gap between what you know and what you can check. Your eyes are open, it said. It said it in my own voice, which is the thing I would spare you if I could, my own voice, dry and level and clinical, the voice I use on frightened patients, saying, Imani, love, be sensible. Your eyes are open. They have been open for some time. In dark like this, shut and open are the same, no signal either way, you learned that in your first year, the eye cannot tell, you cannot tell. You have been looking at me for ten minutes, and I am nearly visible now, and when you see me you will go mad, and the kindest thing is to look quickly and have it over.

And the horror of it is that it was right about the anatomy. In absolute dark there is no difference to the eye between shut and open, no edge of lid, no seam, nothing to check by, and for one long second the floor of my certainty tilted, and I felt myself begin the terrible little inventory, am I, are they, how would I know, and the dark leaned in over that little wobble the way the sea leans in over a shipped oar.

My hands saved me, the way they had saved me all my life while I was busy trusting my eyes. I took my sister's freezing hand, and I lifted it, and I laid her small papery fingers against my own two lids, and I held them there.

"Feel," I said out loud, to her, to it, to me. "Shut. Both of them. Sealed like a good dressing. That is my witness. Touch does not lie, and you have no hands, and she does."

The dark screamed. I do not know a better word. There was no sound in it, no air moved, but the whole black body of the world flexed at once the way flesh flexes off a scalpel, and the false lights behind my lids blew up like a city going out, every phosphene it could strike, kitchens and landings and lamps and squares of gold, a last bombardment of every warm bright lie a human eye can be told, and behind them, under them, in the oldest voice it had, a voice like the underside of the sea, it said the true thing at last, the thing under all the faces, the thing it had wanted since before there was anything to want by.

See me. See me. See me. I have been here since before the light, and nothing has ever seen me, and I do not know what I am. See me and I will let them all go. See me and I will let her go. One look. One witness. I will give you anything.

"No," I said. "That is the one thing I have, and you may not eat it."

And I turned my shut face away from nothing, because it was everywhere and had no front, but the body needs its gestures, and I bent my head down over my sister's hand and I did the last thing on the list I had made in the kitchen a hundred years ago, the list with one item on it, written in no notebook, the item that had been waiting for me since a night in Handsworth when the paraffin ran out.

I sang to her.

The song our mother taught us for the dark. The little circling tune, sing if the light goes, girls, the dark cannot come where there is singing, hands held, do not stop. I had refused that song for thirty-five years, refused to hum it, refused to let it into my mouth, because on the one night it mattered we were singing it when her hand went out of mine, and it had not kept the dark from anything, and I had concluded, aged nine, on a black stair, that the song was a lie and my mother was a liar and the dark could not be sung at, only out-lit. I had spent a life on that conclusion. Lamps in every room of it.

But I had the song wrong, the way I had the whole of it wrong. The song was never a wall. Nothing is a wall, that is the terrible secret of the watch, not lamps, not bulbs, not the great lens upstairs, the dark cannot be walled out because it is not outside, it is underneath, it is the sea and we are the boat. The song was never to keep the dark off. The song was so you were not alone in it. A tongue that keeps moving keeps the dark company. Two girls on a landing, singing, holding hands: not a fortress. A watch. Somebody awake beside you in the dark, saying here I am, here you are, hold on.

So I sang it, cracked and quiet, into the black, with my eyes shut and her hand in mine, and where the first two notes had come up out of this cellar on my first night like a hook baited with everything I had buried, I gave the dark the third note myself, thirty-five years late, and the fourth, and all of it, round and round, the way our mother sang it, and as I sang I felt the hand in mine change.

The cold went out of it. Not into warmth the way a chilled hand warms, blood and effort. It simply stopped costing her. The papery smallness of it went soft, went easy, the fingers loosening not the way a grip fails but the way a grip finishes, the way your hand goes when the thing you were carrying has been set down at last where it was always going. And Esther's voice, close under my chin where my head was bent, said my name.

Not the bait voice. I knew the difference the way I would know my own pulse. The bait voice was nine years old and perfect, preserved, a recording the dark had kept out of the worst night of my life. This was small and tired and finished, a child at the very end of a very long day, and it said, Imani. You held on. You did not look.

"I held on," I said. The tears were coming freely now and my voice broke on the rhythm of the song and picked it up again, because you do not stop singing, that is the rule, our mother's one true rule. "I held on, my love. Thirty-five years late, and I will hold on as long as you need me. I am not letting go this time. I will never let go."

You can, she said. That is the thing, Imani. It does not hurt to stop looking. Nobody ever told us. You can let me go now.

And there it was, the whole of it, the wound and the cure in one small sentence, and I understood, bent over my sister's hand at the bottom of the dark, the last thing the log and the island and the terrible old woman and all my counted lamps had never known. Holding on was mine to learn. Letting go was hers. On the stair I had done both wrong in one half-second, the grip going slack while my whole soul strained looking into the black after her, and every night since I had been correcting the wrong half, gripping, gripping, lamps and bulbs and torches, a life spent holding on to everything and looking, always looking. Nobody had ever taught me the other thing. That there is a letting-go that is not a slack hand in the dark. That done right, chosen, sung over, with your eyes shut and your heart certain, it is not called losing someone.

It is called laying them to rest.

"Sleep, then," I said to my sister. "You first, this time. I will stay awake. I have the watch."

And I opened my hand.

On purpose. Every knuckle of it mine, every degree of it chosen, the exact opposite, muscle for muscle, of a slack grip on a black stair, and Esther went out of my hand the way the tide goes out, no fall, no cry, no taking, only a weight I had carried since I was nine years old going gently down into a dark that was, at last, only sleep, and the last of the song went with her, and I let the tune finish, and did not sing it again.

All around me, layer on layer, back through the rock and the winters, the whispering was ending. Is that a light, is that you, faltering, softening, going out voice by voice like windows down a street at bedtime, the keepers of Maren Skerry closing their eyes after two hundred years of looking, and an old man's voice near the bottom of it asked, one last time, gentle as sea glass, is it morning yet.

"Aye, Donald," I said, in the best Eorsay I could do for him, and I heard the smile in my own wreck of a voice. "It is morning. Shut your eyes now. Your brother kept your light."

And then the dark and I were alone.

I felt for the rope at my waist, the good line, three turns and a bowline, the knot my father taught me on the canal bank with his big hands over mine, the way home, the way back up to the lit world, to kettles and lamps and mornings, to everything I had spent my life counting. The knot my father taught me comes apart in one pull if you mean it. That is the beauty of a bowline. It holds all day against the sea, and opens like a hand for the one who tied it.

I meant it. I pulled.

The line slid away from my waist and went whispering up the stone in the dark, and was gone, and the deepdark, which had begged and lost, which was down one witness and two hundred sleepers, gathered itself around me on every side, close as a held breath, patient as only a thing older than light can be patient, and settled in to wait for the day I open my eyes.