We travelled three days through the yellow-pointed plains up a mountain road to the village where the saint lived. The village spread down a steep hill above a river confluence, one river milky and starry, the other glass. Earth and Sky, some said—some said one the Milky Way, the other the Earth. The houses on the slope looked like a landslide arrested: abandoned, growing weeds and weak-colored flowers.
We ascended with a group of pilgrims who sang the whole way—one melody, new verses each day—and did not speak with us. At every bend they clapped in unison.
The saint was an old woman who—miracle—did not sleep, who was always awake watching the sky from a window in her room, never allowing a break in her consciousness and therefore wiser than anybody, they said, wiser than all those who slipped into sleep and dropped the string of perception and had to go stabbing for it in the morning and lost their place. Her life was one continuous thought, growing vaster each minute, and she allowed an audience with pilgrims once a week. Some said she had been born, eyes open, an old woman, keeping her vigil as she does today—others that she had discovered the secret of sleeplessness on a terminal sickbed and flicked away death, the pure soul of sleep, with a laugh. Some believed the world was her dream, and if she ever slept the world would wash away, or pop like a bubble.
I had a question I wanted to ask.
I slept late the day of my audience—pilgrims sometimes had to wait hours and hours for their minutes with her. I stayed all through the night with the others outside her door, and when I was shown in by an attendant it was almost dawn—the first pulse of morning, a colorless relenting of the dark, a luminous gray, was enshrouding the hilltop that occupied her window.
Her chin was on her chest, and she was facing the window. “Good afternoon, Grandmother,” I said, as instructed. She said nothing, and I sat in the other chair in the room, beside and just behind her. The chair was small, gruesomely small, and made my lower back ache. After waiting what felt like days, I turned my stiff and heavy head to her.
A wisp of hair hung over her face, and she was quietly, rhythmically snoring. I stood up, pressing and screeching my chair on the floor. It sounded like thunder. She did not move, and I waited, watching. Her head was now illuminated—every stray hair lit like a bulb filament. It would be a cloudless, crystalline day. I left, easing the door shut as gently as I could—it sounded like a breath.
“She’s snoring,” I quietly told the attendant, “she’s sleeping.” He smiled, clucking softly. His eyes were full of pity and pillowed in cross-hatched wrinkles. “No, no, no,” he told me, “she is awake. She simply does not want to speak with you.”
Matt Levin is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared on the Paris Review Daily and in Blue Unicorn.
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