understood it. But I’ve come to think of the statement as hard-won truth, maybe a confession. And I’ve always wondered what it was, your single ambiguity.”
“I don’t recall saying that. And I can’t imagine what I meant.”
“So then it’s left to me to imagine. And you’re right, after all. I guess what I imagine has shaped me.”
They had never talked at such length about anything that mattered, not that he’d opened up newly for her. He was still the sly interlocutor, defending not just his positions (his colleagues found him suspiciously apolitical, at best; she knew some of themwere handy with polite recriminations) but something in himself, something she had never been able even to glimpse whole. And there it was again, the particular mystery of him. She could almost touch it.
The next morning he was gone. The day was clear, the light through the pines lined the cottage. Now that she was alone again the place felt not empty but pristine.
What she’d been waiting for was a line of address, and in the wake of Harold’s leaving it finally appeared. She needed to discover what she already knew.
She began with a blank computer screen, facing the windows and lake. The first pages covered the day of the attack. She found a space above the story from which to tell it, neutrally, in the first person but a little outside herself. She tried not to invent or speculate, and ignored moments that only seemed true and ironies she couldn’t have known at the time. She wrote of her ride to work that night. As she drew it out, as if to delay the occurrence, the moments began to build more acutely with each line, and she found that if she stayed in them long enough, there were returns. The rust on the panel above the rear wheel of a parked car she’d locked her bike beside, the way the door to the café stuck a little, the smell of the spilled mint tea she’d stepped in near the entranceway, and the wet tread prints from her shoes on the sidewalk as she looked back to see if she’d dropped a napkin from the tray. A man walking ahead of her in jeans and a fitted blue shirt. He entered a house and was gone.
Then, the moment when she’d passed by the door of the brightly lit improvised church and a chill fell upon her. She wasseeing herself on the page from a ground-level distance. She was seeing herself from the cold.
Every day she wrote to this point and no further.
One crisp morning when the fire wouldn’t catch, as she lined up the same moments the same way, a breakthrough. She’d made a mistake. There were tread prints, yes, but not hers. It was the night before the attack that she’d stepped in the tea. And this small error admitted the possibility of others. It showed up the deficiency of her method. On the night of the attack she would have looked back and seen the prints and known they were someone else’s and been reminded of her own on the previous night. She might even have felt an echo of the disjointed time she’d experienced minutes earlier when she’d pictured herself riding in the morning, going home in the opposite direction. And wouldn’t she then have felt an eeriness? If not consciously, then in some part of her? And mightn’t this feeling, and the footprints behind her, have prepared her for the sense that she was being followed?
She began over now, allowing for her interiors. The writing ran deeper, and though the account was sliding to speculation, she felt herself returning in the prose. If a misremembrance could lead her to a fact she’d overlooked, then maybe so could other variations from the narrow-seeming truth. And so she half remembered, half invented the night.
One morning she wrote,
I left dinner with my parents and rode south through the dark towards work.
She stopped. The words that made distances were wrong. She realized that the “I” itself was wrong, for whoever she was now was not who she had been, and one letter could not be them both.
Then she
“I don’t recall saying that. And I can’t imagine what I meant.”
“So then it’s left to me to imagine. And you’re right, after all. I guess what I imagine has shaped me.”
They had never talked at such length about anything that mattered, not that he’d opened up newly for her. He was still the sly interlocutor, defending not just his positions (his colleagues found him suspiciously apolitical, at best; she knew some of themwere handy with polite recriminations) but something in himself, something she had never been able even to glimpse whole. And there it was again, the particular mystery of him. She could almost touch it.
The next morning he was gone. The day was clear, the light through the pines lined the cottage. Now that she was alone again the place felt not empty but pristine.
What she’d been waiting for was a line of address, and in the wake of Harold’s leaving it finally appeared. She needed to discover what she already knew.
She began with a blank computer screen, facing the windows and lake. The first pages covered the day of the attack. She found a space above the story from which to tell it, neutrally, in the first person but a little outside herself. She tried not to invent or speculate, and ignored moments that only seemed true and ironies she couldn’t have known at the time. She wrote of her ride to work that night. As she drew it out, as if to delay the occurrence, the moments began to build more acutely with each line, and she found that if she stayed in them long enough, there were returns. The rust on the panel above the rear wheel of a parked car she’d locked her bike beside, the way the door to the café stuck a little, the smell of the spilled mint tea she’d stepped in near the entranceway, and the wet tread prints from her shoes on the sidewalk as she looked back to see if she’d dropped a napkin from the tray. A man walking ahead of her in jeans and a fitted blue shirt. He entered a house and was gone.
Then, the moment when she’d passed by the door of the brightly lit improvised church and a chill fell upon her. She wasseeing herself on the page from a ground-level distance. She was seeing herself from the cold.
Every day she wrote to this point and no further.
One crisp morning when the fire wouldn’t catch, as she lined up the same moments the same way, a breakthrough. She’d made a mistake. There were tread prints, yes, but not hers. It was the night before the attack that she’d stepped in the tea. And this small error admitted the possibility of others. It showed up the deficiency of her method. On the night of the attack she would have looked back and seen the prints and known they were someone else’s and been reminded of her own on the previous night. She might even have felt an echo of the disjointed time she’d experienced minutes earlier when she’d pictured herself riding in the morning, going home in the opposite direction. And wouldn’t she then have felt an eeriness? If not consciously, then in some part of her? And mightn’t this feeling, and the footprints behind her, have prepared her for the sense that she was being followed?
She began over now, allowing for her interiors. The writing ran deeper, and though the account was sliding to speculation, she felt herself returning in the prose. If a misremembrance could lead her to a fact she’d overlooked, then maybe so could other variations from the narrow-seeming truth. And so she half remembered, half invented the night.
One morning she wrote,
I left dinner with my parents and rode south through the dark towards work.
She stopped. The words that made distances were wrong. She realized that the “I” itself was wrong, for whoever she was now was not who she had been, and one letter could not be them both.
Then she
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