The New York Trilogy (40 page)

“That’s the one thing I’ll never understand.”

“Sophie?”

“How you could walk out on her like that. What did she ever do to you?”

“Nothing. It wasn’t her fault. You must know that by now. It’s just that I wasn’t meant to live like other people.”

“How were you meant to live?”

“It’s all in the notebook. Whatever I managed to say now would only distort the truth.”

“Is there anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so. We’ve probably come to the end.”

“I don’t believe you have the nerve to shoot me. If I broke down the door now, you wouldn’t do a thing.”

“Don’t risk it. You’d die for nothing.”

“I’d pull the gun out of your hand. I’d knock you senseless.”

“There’s no point to that. I’m already dead. I took poison hours ago.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You can’t possibly know what’s true or not true. You’ll never know.”

“I’ll call the police. They’ll chop down the door and drag you off to the hospital.”

“One sound at the door—and a bullet goes through my head. There’s no way you can win.”

“Is death so tempting?”

“I’ve lived with it for so long now, it’s the only thing I have left.”

I no longer knew what to say. Fanshawe had used me up, and as I heard him breathing on the other side of the door, I felt as if the life were being sucked out of me. “You’re a fool,” I said, unable to think of anything else. “You’re a fool, and you deserve to die.” Then, overwhelmed by my own weakness and stupidity, I started pounding the door like a child, shaking and sputtering, on the point of tears.

“You’d better go now,” Fanshawe said. “There’s no reason to drag this out.”

“I don’t want to go,” I said. “We still have things to talk about.”

“No, we don’t. It’s finished. Take the notebook and go back to New York. That’s all I ask of you.”

I was so exhausted that for a moment I thought I was going to fall down. I clung to the doorknob for support, my head going black inside, struggling not to pass out. After that, I have no memory of what happened. I found myself outside, in front of the house, the umbrella in one hand and the red notebook in the other. The rain had stopped, but the air was still raw, and I could feel the dankness in my lungs. I watched a large truck clatter by in the traffic, following its red taillight until I couldn’t see it anymore. When I looked up, I saw that it was almost night. I started walking away from the house, mechanically putting one foot in front of the other, unable to concentrate on where I was going. I think I fell down once or twice. At one point, I remember waiting on a corner and trying to get a cab, but no one stopped for me. A few minutes after that, the umbrella slipped from my hand and fell into a puddle. I didn’t bother to pick it up.

It was just after seven o’clock when I arrived at South Station. A train for New York had left fifteen minutes earlier, and the next one wasn’t scheduled until eight-thirty. I sat down on one of the wooden benches with the red notebook on my lap. A few late commuters straggled in; a janitor slowly moved across the marble floor with a mop; I listened in as two men talked about the Red Sox behind me. After ten minutes of fighting off the impulse, I at last opened the notebook. I read steadily for almost an hour, flipping back and forth among the pages, trying to get a sense of what Fanshawe had written. If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out. I can think of no other way to express it. Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. It is odd, then, that the feeling that survives from this notebook is one of great lucidity. It is as if Fanshawe knew his final work had to subvert every expectation I had for it. These were not the words of a man who regretted anything. He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again. I lost my way after the first word, and from then on I could only grope ahead, faltering in the darkness, blinded by the book that had been written for me. And yet, underneath this confusion, I felt there was something too willed, something too perfect, as though in the end the only thing he had really wanted was to fail—even to the point of failing himself. I could be wrong, however. I was hardly in a condition to be reading anything at that moment, and my judgment is possibly askew. I was there, I read those words with my own eyes, and yet I find it hard to trust in what I am saying.

I wandered out to the tracks several minutes in advance. It was raining again, and I could see my breath in the air before me, leaving my mouth in little bursts of fog. One by one, I tore the pages from the notebook, crumpled them in my hand, and dropped them into a trash bin on the platform. I came to the last page just as the train was pulling out.

(1984)