The Eyelid

Hugo

Chapter One

Come autumn, the eyes reap colour against the lengthening shadows and the night that seals them closed, as if nature, having already given spring to love and summer to leisure, made a season especially for dreamers, its days hazy and heavy-lidded, its evenings haloed and smudged by rain, the hours’ hypnotic passage sleeping all who, dazed and doubled in themselves, fall leaflike under its spell.

Men we take to be awake seem not quite so. Presentable, bright-eyed, facing the day, possibly in the habit of retiring already groomed for their appointment with tomorrow, they come upon us in our fog of somnolence and, reminded of rest, let their head sink back into the sky’s great pillow, forgetting their progress. As for those with nowhere to go, or in no particular rush, they seem to have only just climbed out of bed, their clothes creased, as if yester-dusk’s circadian sign had them give up their undressing, and the crack of dawn took away the reason to go on. Drowsy, practically dozing on their feet, they let their lids droop low enough to screen their dreams, with half an eye still on the noir of reality. In autumn, such absences and bifocal vision come naturally, spreading like an insuppressible yawn.

Chapter Two

I no longer remember the day we met. Unemployed for going on a year, pondering a future set agape by idleness, I had slipped by degrees into a not unpleasant state of semi-consciousness, leaving time to erode in peace what little remained of my savings. As my thoughts hewed ever closer to my surroundings, cocooned in ambient noise and newsprint, I rustled through the daily papers and, nursing a tall glass, looked out at the street teeming behind the windowpane. Childless and sans disciple, I had a corner of tedium to myself, but no life, no occupation, and no prospects to speak of, save for a standing invitation from a retired bookbinder and a psychoanalyst, an elderly couple, to visit their country estate.

I drew as much mileage as possible from this offer I could never in reality bring myself to accept. Imagining a house with its wings and empty guest rooms, a surrounding garden, and galleries stretching beneath all the way to Paris to join a mycelium of abandoned mines and catacombs, kept me going even when I myself was in no mood to budge. To languish in the capital as I did was simultaneously to while away the days until I could see myself boarding a southeasterly train sure to disembark where the air was clearer, crisper, where the grass was grizzled by frost, where the wine tasted of humus and my much-awaited hibernation could commence without further delay. My hosts, quite wrongly, presupposed in me a readiness to keep them company in their passing-house, in which time, reduced to whispers, ticked off, on a list as long as life, the varieties of pain. I had promised them nothing of the sort.

It was on one of those wet afternoons, steps fugacious on decaying matter, that my constant reverie opened wider than usual. Intoxicated by dreams of romance in a primeval forest, I had settled down on a park bench and, for all I know, had been asleep for a good half-hour, when suddenly the boards shifted beneath me, as loose or rotted ones do if another sits upon them, leading my confused mind to conclude it was the superb creature I pursued barefoot through knee-deep underbrush who, having yielded at last, came to rest, light as swan down, right beside me. I was about to discover its face.

Chapter Three

That fall, I must have seemed unusually tired. I could have slept anywhere, even slung over a rope, as they used to for three sous on Rue des Trois-Bornes. The going was no harder, although humidity and worsening pollution made it more wearisome and disagreeable, than in years past. Smog clung to my hair as to my thoughts, and I do not rule out its effects on my biography.

The day I was let go began like any other day, by the end of which nothing would be different except the headlines and the date on the calendar, were it not for that eventful loss of stability which papers over the routine of an orderly life. The post that had been mine until then suited me, and I could have sworn I had given it my all. The complaints against me cited negligence, sleeping on the clock, contagious yawning, and, by far the worst, lack of esprit de corps. What at one time required conscious effort had, I admit, become automatic, and I felt, not without reason, as if I could almost do it in my sleep. The air of inattention precipitating my dismissal was proof that I had learned to do my job too well. Having no more rules to follow with eyes closed drained me more. My bad habits, their expression capped by work, returned.

The sacking itself did not roil me enough to contest it, nor did it rouse me to put on a saving act. It was more or less expected, and perhaps desired more than less. Badly in need of rest, I received the news tranquilly, relieved rather than crestfallen. After years of blinkers and checks, a rare grade of freedom stretched out within me, my mind unsaddled by a blind emancipating hand of what I had not the strength to throw off on my own.

It was less the levitate freedom of spirit than the gravitate one to fall off the map, to let everything go, imprimis myself. Unsupported, no longer holding on, I took to sliding and falling, and the more I slid and fell, the heavier and wearier – objectively heavier and wearier – I became as I sank deeper into blessed sleep.

With so much latitude, my imagination, until then confined, grew bold, vivid, and complicated. In a matter of weeks, the dreamlife where I would soon pass night and day so dilated that, with the first snow, it found the last of the channels by which I still traded with reality. As white silence fell around me in flakes, taken now for poplar pollen or cotton, now for the petals of cherry blossoms, I blundered seemingly without purpose or end, as one enchanted, while underneath my lids crystallized parallel landscapes and hours lengthened to years. In this somnambulic languor, my spirits, after brief repose, became preternaturally active, as though poised on the cusp of a life-altering discovery which, I still had the sense to tell, was no more than a trick of the mind.

Chapter Four

It was by its weight, not warmth, that I first sensed the presence beside me, on a bench of wood so damp and tender as to sag toward the soil on which it stood. I raised myself and opened my eyes to a view of the pond with its two swans, a black one and a white, whose to and fro had the puissance of a pendulum to send me into a trancelike state, deepened by the water’s glimmering.

Again I felt the boards move beneath my ischium, thinking myself on the scales of justice, or else on a kind of seesaw, matched against a stranger whom some unknown force, amusing itself at my expense, had placed across for counter-weight to make slapstick of my efforts to touch the ground; stranded in mid-air, a sitting butt, feather-light and risible; none of it visible except, perhaps, to the two swans, which, in their ceaseless slow motion, might have registered with one eye at a time what went on ashore – so slight was my actual displacement. For a short while I struggled, fancying I could hold my own before this mute ocular quartet as it floated by. When finally I turned my head, I saw a small, unimposing man gazing out at the water.

Chapter Five

We were coated in fresh snow. Nearly awake now, I kept the silence, which seemed to envelop us, isolating me from my earlier pursuit and the drollery I had just imagined. Looking ahead at the darkening lake, I contemplated the stranger’s appearance. He had the features of a child, and grey hair tousled like that of a schoolboy on recess.

My eyes, exposed to the waning daylight, adjusted to the crystals floating all around us as particles do in the liquid air of a snow globe. They wandered the length of the water’s placid surface, where the swans, bowing gently toward each other, now sat motionless, the one with black feathers powdered white, the white one a dusky cast. Dubious birds of passage, these. Watching them, I was seized by a violent chill and glanced down at my overcoat to see if it was buttoned. The stranger, who stayed still the entire time and must have noticed this sudden concern with my physical condition, was more warmly