Джойс Оутс - Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars

Hugo would understand. You don’t reach the age of almost-sixty without enduring losses of your own.

The older, the more secrets. And the fewer you wanted to share, if they were disturbing. Why would you?

Life too short. Sorrow too long. Kiss me!

Holding hands, peering at the moon. Clouds blowing across the moon like stray thoughts. Appear, disappear. So swiftly.

Trying not to think that they will be, must be, punished for their happiness; it does not seem just, that they will be allowed even a modicum of happiness. Surely it was a mistake to travel so far with a man she scarcely knows—though now, astonishingly, this man is her husband. I will never return home. They will bury me here at sea. That is what I deserve. The widow feels that she must accept this fate though it would be a terrible fate—devoured by sea creatures.

Jessalyn would hope to be dead, at least. They wouldn’t toss her body overboard without determining that she was really dead—would they?

Hugo has been watching her. He asks what she has been thinking about?—“ Mi hermosa esposa, you’re looking so grim. ”

Jessalyn laughs nervously. Trying to sound amusing as she tells him, “I’ve been wondering, if a person dies at sea, do they lower him—or her—overboard? Is there ‘burial at sea’? The expense of shipping a body back to North America would be so high…”

Hugo laughs, startled. “Jesus! Nobody is going to die and be tossed overboard, this isn’t a pirate or a slave ship. Lighten up, darling!”

Hugo is startled, taken aback as Whitey would have been. Jessalyn relents at once.

“Oh, of course. What am I saying. Don’t listen to me, Hugo.”

Laughing together. Jessalyn recalls how the children used to laugh at her, their sweet silly mother who said the most unexpected things.

Dusk is deepening. In the windy air laced with an actual chill there is a smell of something like flowers.

Don’t listen. Nothing that I say matters.

Nothing that any of us says matters.

Amid a vast expanse of rolling, rocking waves. Occasionally there comes ocean spray like cold spit against their faces.

What do they matter, such miniature lives? The wisdom of the Galápagos is brute survival, for a time. But only for a time. And beyond that, death and extinction. There is comfort in this, that individuals matter so little, and yet are gripping each other’s hand so tightly.

Oh, Jessalyn will. She promises! She will lighten up .

The beautiful white-braided hair is stirred by the wind. Her eyes are moist from the wind.

Roiling, rocking waves in which the luminous moon is reflected like a mad face. Mesmerizing how, with each passing second, light reflected from this mad face breaks and ripples in the waves, forming new designs, like the murmurations of flocking birds, fleeting, dazzling, and gone. With each heartbeat all is changed, altered. That warm strong hand grasping yours to the point of pain.

Never let me go! I love you.

Hugo is excited by something he has just noticed. At the horizon, where the sun disappeared just a few minutes ago, there is something like an after-sun, a kind of post-sunset of muted light—“See? There? Or maybe it’s an optical illusion… D’you see it?”

“Y-Yes…”

Though Jessalyn isn’t sure what she is seeing, if anything. Her eyes blink away moisture in the chill wind.

For this fleeting moment you have (almost) forgotten the man’s name though you understand that he is your husband. Your hands are clasped together tight, this is a comfort on the rocking ship. It has happened, you have been (re)married, he is the husband who adores you and will protect you until that moment in the rush of time to come when he cannot any longer adore you and protect you and he will release your hand, and you his; it is that faint haze at the horizon lifting from the sea like a glimmer of hope, where moonlight ripples in the roiling dark water at which you stare and stare.

JOYCE CAROL OATESis a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

NIGHT. SLEEP. DEATH. THE STARS. Copyright © 2019 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.