Page 60 of After His Eulogy
“Sleep,” he says.
“Okay.”
I sleep. I sleep harder than I have slept in weeks. In the morning he is already up, making coffee in the small pot. He brings me a cup. I sit up in bed. He sits on the edge.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You said it.”
“I said it.”
“I want to make sure I did not dream it.”
“You did not dream it.”
“Okay.”
“I meant it.”
“Okay.”
He kisses my forehead. He goes back to the kitchen. I drink the coffee. The sun is coming in. Somewhere Mendez is in his office. Somewhere a flag is in a file. Somewhere, in three to six months, a decision is going to be made about what happens next. The decision is going to happen to us. I’m going to be in a kitchen with him when it does. I’m not going to leave.
TWENTY-THREE
GRIFFIN
The paper is due in nine days. It is on Sebald. The seminar I am writing it for is the modernism seminar, which is technically the wrong category for Sebald, but the professor, Hellman, has decided to bend the category for the second half of the term. We are reading The Rings of Saturn. I have nine days to write three thousand words on it and I cannot write any of them.
I open the document on Monday morning. The document has a title. The Disappeared Subject in W. G. Sebald. I had given it the title two weeks ago, before. The title is what I had thought I was going to write about. The title was a way of using Sebald’s hand to think about something else, which is what I have been trained to do. I look at the title. I do not write anything. I close the document.
Reed stays over Monday night. He has stayed over Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Three nights in a row, which is a thing we have not done before. We had been doing two nights at his and one at mine, alternating, careful, the way we have been careful. On Saturday after the diner he had said can I just stay, and I had said yes, and he has not left since.
He brings a small bag of clothes on Saturday. The bag stays on the floor by the door for a day. On Sunday I look at the bag and I look at Reed. I move the bag into the bedroom. I open the second drawer of the dresser, the one I haven’t been using because it has been the empty drawer. I put his clothes in it. He does not say anything. I do not say anything. He sees the drawer. He sees what I have done. He puts his hand on the small of my back when I stand up from putting his clothes away, and that is what he says. The drawer is half full. The half is something I am trying not to look at directly.
On Tuesday I sit in seminar. The reading was Pessoa. I have done the reading. I do the reading. The reading is one of the few things I have been able to keep doing. I sit in the seminar and Pessoa is talked about and I do not say anything for fifty minutes. Min looks at me twice. Reed does not look at me. Reed looks at his coffee cup, and at his notebook, and at Hellman, and only at me when somebody else is speaking and Hellman cannot see him. Reed has been making a thing of not making a thing. I had thought, after the diner on Sunday, that the seminar would be different. It is not different. Min walks me out.
“You okay.”
“Yes.”
“Griffin.”
“Yes, Min.”
“You did not say a word.”
“I had nothing to add.”
“You always have something to add.”
“Today I did not.”
Min looks at me. Min is a small woman with a sharp nose and a face that has read every face it has ever looked at. Min is not asking me to tell her. Min is asking me to know that she is asking.
“I’m fine,” I say.
