Page 9 of After His Eulogy
“Sorry. What.”
“I said are you okay. You went weird.”
“I’m fine. Sorry. I didn’t sleep.”
“You always say that.”
“It’s always true.”
Dev laughs. Maya doesn’t. Maya’s looking at me like she’s deciding whether to push it. I am very close to telling herplease don’t push it, which would be worse than her pushing it. I pick up my coffee and I drink it. He was there. He was there, on the sidewalk, looking in. I know what I saw.
Stop. He’s three thousand miles away. He’s at his job. He’s in his apartment that I have never seen but that I have looked up the address of, once, eighteen months ago. From the first town the program put me in. The one I left when they moved me here for school. And then I made myself stop. He’s in his life. That’s the whole deal. He’s in his life and I’m in this life and the line between them is a wall and the wall does not move.
The wall just moved.
I have to leave. I can’t leave. If I leave now Maya will know something is wrong. Maya will ask. Maya will keep asking, because Maya is good. Maya is a good person. That’s the problem with good people — they don’t let you off the hook. I have to leave anyway.
“I have to…“ I start. Then I thinkdon’t say what. I say, “I have to go. Thing. I forgot a thing.”
“What thing?”
“Library thing.”
“On a Friday?”
“It’s a Friday thing.”
I push back from the table — the chair scrapes too loud. I put on my jacket. Maya says, “Reed, seriously…“
“I’m fine. Text you later.”
I don’t text people later. Maya knows this. Maya gives me a look that saysI am filing this for later. I take the look and I go. Outside the air is cold. Colder than it was an hour ago. I stand on the sidewalk where he was standing. Where I think he was standing. Where someone was standing. I look down at the concrete like it’s going to tell me something. It doesn’t. Because it’s concrete. Okay. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t there because he can’t be there. There’s no version of this where he’s here. He doesn’t know where I am. He couldn’t know. The whole thing, the whole point of the thing, is that he couldn’t know. Unless someone told him. No. No one told him. The list of people who know where I am is three people long and I have not met any of them in person more than twice. So. So he wasn’t there. I start walking. I don’t know where. Away from the shop. My apartment is the other direction but I am not going to my apartment, because if I go to my apartment I will sit on my bed and I will think. Thinking is the thing I am specifically trying not to do.
I walk past the bookstore. Past the bagel place. Past the bench where the guy who plays guitar plays guitar, except he’s not there today, which is a small relief because I don’t have it in me to nod at him. My phone is in my pocket. I take it out. I look at it. There is nothing on it. I don’t know who I thought was going to text me. I put the phone back. Two years. Two years, three months, eleven days. Although who’s counting. Me. I’m counting. I count every morning when I wake up. It’s the first thing my brain does, like a clock that won’t shut up. He looked good. That’s a stupid thing to think. He looked like himself. Thinner maybe. Tired. Or I’m making that up. I’m probably making that up. I have to figure out if it was him. If it was him I have to leave. If it was him I have to leave town. I have to call Mendez.
If it wasn’t him I’m losing it. Which would be… fine. Fine. That would actually be fine. That would be the better option.I am rooting, right now, for the option where I am losing my mind. That’s where I am. I start walking again. The deal was simple. The deal was: you go, you stay gone, you don’t look back, you don’t reach out, you don’t exist to him. He gets to keep being the person whose boyfriend died. That is the man gets to live. The other version, the one who knows, the one who has to carry it, that one doesn’t get to live. Because that one isn’t safe. Because anyone who knows isn’t safe.
It was supposed to keep him safe. At the time, that made sense.I made him safe by being dead— that’s the sentence I’ve used. I’ve said it to myself a hundred times. It’s the sentence I use when I want to stop wanting to call him. It works. It mostly works. It doesn’t work right now. Right now I am walking past a coffee shop where a man who looks exactly like Griffin was, possibly, standing on the sidewalk looking through the glass. The sentence is just words.
I check over my shoulder. I do it without thinking. The small turn of the head, the scan, the nothing, the keep walking. Habit. If it was him, I have to leave. I keep landing on that. I keep walking past it and coming back to it. If it was him, I have to leave. And underneath it, the thing I am not saying, the thing I have not let myself say in two years and change, sitting at the bottom of me like a stone:
I don’t want to leave.
SIX
GRIFFIN
I don’t go back to the coffee shop. That’s the rule I make. There are other coffee shops. There’s one in the basement of Hartwell. There’s a gas station on the corner that sells coffee in a brown cup with a brown lid. The coffee is bad but it is coffee. I drink the gas station coffee for I don’t know how long. A few days. More than a few. The first night I don’t sleep. I lie in bed and I do the things you do. Count backward from a hundred. Try to think about something else. Try to think about the response paper, which is not due, which I have already turned in, which is not a thing that needs thinking about. I think about it anyway. I revise it in my head. I revise it again. At some point the light starts coming in around the edge of the blind and I get up because there is no point in continuing to lie there. That’s the first night. The next nights are similar. They start to run together. I stop tracking which night was which.
I don’t go to my eleven o’clock. I don’t decide not to go. I am at home and then it is twelve and the class has happened without me. I send Mendel an email that says I’m not feeling well, can I get notes from someone in the cohort. She says of course, feel better. I don’t write back to thank her. The next class I do goto. The class after that I don’t. I lose track of which one I’m supposed to be at on which day. Then I lose track of the days themselves. The syllabus on my desk starts to feel like it belongs to someone else.
I keep seeing him. Not actually. The man in front of me at the gas station has a jacket like the one he used to wear. For a second I think it’s him. Then the man turns around and his face is wrong and I have to look away. A guy on a bike goes by and the back of his head is the right shape, the right hair. I follow him with my eyes for too long and someone bumps into me on the sidewalk. A laugh on the quad. Aha. I turn before I can stop myself and it’s a girl, a stranger, looking at her phone. This happens, I learn, several times a day. Enough that I start bracing for it. I stop looking at faces. I make coffee in the small pot. I forget I made it. I find it an hour later, cold, on the burner. I switch to the gas station coffee for the apartment also. The cohort thing is on a Thursday, or it was a Thursday, or it has happened by now. Priya texts me.Come!with a heart. I look at the text for a long time and then I don’t answer it. She texts again two hours later.Are you okay?I write backyes sorry busy week. I look atbusy week. It’s a lie I’ve told before. It’s worked before. I send it. She doesn’t text back. I’m relieved, and then I’m not. Something is wrong with being relieved that someone has stopped trying to be your friend. I sit with that for a minute. Then I put my phone face down on the desk and don’t pick it up for the rest of the night.
There is no one to tell. That is part of why I came here. I came here because there was no one to tell anything to, no one who would look at my face and ask the wrong question. My sister is in Chicago and we talk on Sundays. She will ask how school is and I will say fine and she will say good and that will be that. If I called her and saidI think I saw him, she would — I don’t know what she would do. I don’t know what anyone would do. There isn’t a script for it. There isn’t a sentence forI think I saw thedead person, the one we buried, I think he is here.So I don’t tell anyone. I sit with it. I get good at sitting with it. I get worse at sitting with it.
I take a different route to Hartwell. I don’t pass the coffee shop. I add four minutes to the walk and I tell myself it’s because the path is drier. The path is not drier. I take the route with the coffee shop on a Tuesday because I think this is stupid, I can’t avoid a whole block. I walk past and I do not look in the window. My whole body is angled away from the glass like a magnet pushed wrong. After I’m past it I have to stop and put my hand on a parking meter for a second because my legs are doing something. I go back to the longer route the next day. At some point it has been a week, or it has been four days, or it has been ten. I have stopped knowing. The days are the same. I get up. I drink bad coffee. I go to class or I don’t. I take notes. I come home. I sit at the desk. I do not work on anything. I watch the squirrel. The squirrel is still there. The squirrel does not know anything has happened. I wake up at three a.m. and I am sitting up before I know I am awake. I don’t know what woke me. The apartment is the same apartment. There is no one here. I get out of bed and walk through every room. There are two rooms. It takes a minute. There is no one here. I sit on the kitchen floor, same place as last time, and I put my hands flat on the linoleum.
I can’t keep not knowing. I’m going to have to look at him. Not through a window. Not from a sidewalk. Look at him, with him looking back, and know. I sit there for a long time. I do not cry. I do not do anything. I sit there until the floor stops feeling cold against my hands and starts feeling like nothing, like part of me. Then I get up and I go back to bed and I sleep until ten. In the morning I drink the bad coffee. I sit at the desk. I open the laptop. I’m going to find out where he is.
