A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

quiet restlessness began to surface whenever he found himself alone at home in the evenings,

the present ceasing to be a void and becoming instead, for a short period of time, a place he could inhabit comfortably and securely.

There were few moods that could persist after all when one was in full view of earth and sky,

the peace at least of a brief inner extinction.

the body, one’s first, most intimate environment,

but he would feel guilty in front of her family members, none of whom he’d ever met before. He would feel guilty seeing the well in which she’d died and guilty for the fact he’d done nothing to prevent her death, which even if accidental he felt certain now had been foreseeable and even predictable somehow.

The warm, fragrant air of the countryside buffeting his face, he would look out at the wide expanses of farmland, brush, and forest, at the plains that went by for sometimes hours at a stretch without stopping, and he felt, at such moments, something close to a sense of liberation, if not quite liberation then the sense at least of being on the verge of liberation.

blissful but always vanishing space between desire and satisfaction,

whatever one considered the horizon of one’s life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.

a gathering place where people could show their faces and reassure each other that they continued to exist.

the power that human eyes had, their power not just to beckon other people silently from the distance but their power also to inquire, assert presence, and threaten, to enter another person with or without their will, the way they were used, by so many men, almost as a sexual organ, a tool of penetration and reception.

their tall figures turning into silhouettes as the sun began tracing the visible portion of its descent, as the afternoon moved toward its climax and the golden-yellow light began enfolding the land around them,

he finally felt the inevitability of their parting of ways coming home to him, a kind of sudden, silent shift taking place in the geology of his mind, a fact he responded to not with anxiety now or desperation, as he had in the past, but with the silent conviction that he too had a path ahead of him, that he too had a history and a destiny of his own.

buildings that contained within their small compartments tens of millions suffering and striving people from all across the country, a condensation of human life so dense and so rich that it was impossible to believe such a place existed till one saw it with one’s own eyes.

some part of him always resistant to going to sleep, as though going to bed was a kind of concession or surrender, as though by staying up something might happen that would justify having lived through the day.

was for this reason perhaps that ghosts and spirits and phantoms were so often depicted as silent presences in films and books, as beings we can glimpse but cannot hear, that can watch but cannot speak, as though to signify that while these beings are in some way present to us they cannot participate in our world, no longer have the power to act and affect us,

something more than just guilt, something like freedom, even if he could not say what exactly freedom was.

people also carried deeper, more clandestine trajectories inside their bodies, their origins often unknown or accidental, their modes of operation invisible to the eye, trajectories which were sometimes strong enough to push people in certain directions despite everything that took place on the surface of their lives.

dissipating, eventually, into the long wide arc of the world.

watched as the substantiality of a human life was transmuted, like a mirage or hallucination or vision, into thick clouds of smoke billowing up into the sky, thinning as they rose and then disappearing into the evening, a message from this world to another that would never be received.