The Tower

The tower was going to fall. How could you look at it and think otherwise? It leaned into the frame of the picture like someone trying to lean into a family portrait. Or, depending on how you framed the picture, like it was trying to lean out of it. It was a wonder. No one knew how to stop it. It was too old, too precarious. Closed permanently to visitors. So Ingrid looked at it from a distance, holding her mother’s hand, and squinted through one eye. Everywhere people took pictures, forced perspective snapshots of themselves holding the tower up with their backs or their hands or their shoulders. When no one was looking she took a picture, her finger held out in front of the disposable camera, pushing the the tower against the wrong side. Push, she said to herself. Push it over. She thought she could do it. She knew she could. It would only take a little shove.

If this were true, and she pushed and sent the tower toppling, then she would be a very bad girl. That night she listened to the soft breath of her sister sleeping next to her, the quiet of the old hotel room, and imagined creeping out of bed and through the nighttime toward the tower, closer, closer than anyone had ever dared to go. As she lay in bed she could see the carved pillars adorned with flowers and shells made of stone, and she crept closer, her white nightgown grazing her bare legs in a gentle, guiding breeze, go on, go on, go on. Closer and closer as the stars and the moon looked down from their night watch, and God, asleep with his finger propped just so to keep the tower from falling in the night, would not wake up in time to save it if she gave it a good enough shove. The weeds and tall grasses around the base of the tower licked her legs with dry tongues and she wished she had thought to bring shoes, for there was no telling what she might put her foot down upon. But she picked her way through, feeling as brave as a soldier, looking back at the sleeping buildings, the quiet dark and the glowing stone painted silver by the moon.

Her hand touched a pillar. It was cold and she drew back, as if that butterfly’s touch could send the whole thing creaking, pulling, tearing toward the earth. She looked up. The tower cut a diagonal line through the black sky, bathed in white light and solid as an iceberg, a ship, a mountain, as anything that a little girl could not possibly push over with her small, soft hands. She touched the stone again, so smooth and cool, she wanted to put her cheek against it but did not. She considered going back to the hotel. What if someone had seen her and was running to get the police? She didn’t speak their language. What if a spotlight was about to blind her at any moment, dogs barking, men running, the hustle and havoc of saving her and scolding her all at once. She paused, waiting. Just the rustle of the breeze in the grass, pure thick silence of night. She moved forward, walking the edge of the stone step that led to the first level, a circular walkway lined with arches, rows of them all the way up to the top. There must have been a dozen levels. Pointing toward the moon, which hovered off to the west. Was that it? Was it not God that was holding the thing up, but the moon? But no, even the little girl knew that the moon was not always in the same place in the sky, but the tower always leaned toward the west. So the moon was just an observer. Although tonight, it seemed more directly involved.