Page 64 of After His Eulogy
“I think about her a lot.”
“I know.”
“I haven’t let myself think about her much. For two years. It’s been unmanageable. I’d sit down to think about her and I’d be sitting in a corner of my apartment for an hour without having moved. So I stopped. I let her be. Let her be a fact I knew about, instead of a person I thought about. And, Griffin. The Saturday with you. The kitchen. Something cracked. I’ve been thinkingabout her for a week. I can’t stop. The program doesn’t give you back your mother. There’s no category for that. There’s no version of the next move where my mother — there’s no version. She’s fixed. She’ll go to her grave thinking I’m dead. I’ve known this for two years and I’m only now letting myself know it.”
“Reed.”
“I am not telling you this because I want you to fix it. There is no fixing. I am telling you because you asked me to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
I turn my head. I look at him. He is looking at the wall across the room. His face is the still version. His eyes are doing the work.
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Don’t thank me.”
“Pick a different word.”
“I don’t have a different word either.”
“That’s okay.”
He turns his head. He looks at me.
“We can both not have different words,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
He keeps his hand on my knee. I keep my head back against the couch. We sit on my couch on Tuesday afternoon and we do not write papers and we think about a soup neither of us has eaten.
I email Hellman that night. The email says I am pivoting. The email says I will follow up with a new prospectus by Friday. Hellman writes back at six in the morning and the email is one line. Fine. By Friday. I open a new document on Wednesday morning. I do not give it a title. I write a sentence. I am thinking about a soup. I look at the sentence. The sentence is bad. The sentence is bad in a way the Sebald sentences were not bad. TheSebald sentences were too good. This sentence is too what it is. I write a second sentence. I am thinking about a soup my partner’s mother used to make, which my partner has not eaten in two years, and which is going to function in this paper as the things that disappear in private when a person disappears. I look at the second sentence. I keep it.
Wednesday and Thursday I work on the new paper. It’s on private mourning in narratives of disappearance — the things you can’t say in public about a person who’s gone, not the public eulogy, but the things that happen in kitchens. It has Sebald in it, but it has other things in it too. It has its own voice. The voice is mine, the one I haven’t been letting myself use because it would have been audible to Reed if I’d used it during the two years I’d thought he was dead. I’d been writing in a different voice for two years without knowing it. Now I’m writing in my own. The paper comes out of me in three days. Twenty-eight hundred words. Friday afternoon. I read it through twice and I send it to Hellman. Hellman writes back at midnight. Better. This is better. We will talk Tuesday. I close the laptop. Reed is on the couch. He has been on the couch for the whole evening. He has not asked how it is going. He has been reading. He looks up.
“I sent it.”
“Okay.”
“Hellman says it is better.”
“Okay.”
“It is better.”
“Of course it is. You are writing as the person you are.”
“Yeah.”
“Come here.”
I come there.
TWENTY-FOUR
GRIFFIN
