I BOUGHT A FEW newspapers after I came here, but all they can tell me is that ‘Sabon is recovering from a bout of exhaustion’. None of them mentions my role in her exhaustion.
And that is all I know, and all I want to know.
I HALTED ON the edge of an abyss when I left Mary, I think. I halted on the edge of a kind of Silence. I needed to write it down, try to make some sense of it outside my own head. Draw the poison.
But I’ve shed my last skin. I’ve no more skins to shed. I can’t start over again – I’ve started over too many times before. You won’t believe me. I won’t believe me, either.
Maybe all this was prevarication and excuses and not an afterword at all. Not an essay. Not a history. Not a pamphlet. Just an old woman’s ramblings. Maybe I don’t want to think about that hole in the ground behind me and the decision I have to make. But if so, at least it’s over now. I have told you everything I meant to tell you, and more.
As I sit here in the green light and review these pages, I see what Duncan saw when he wrote in this room – the sliver, the narrowness of vision, the small amount we know before we’re gone – and I realize that this account was a stab in the dark at a kind of truth, no matter how faltering: a brief flash of light against the silhouette of dead trees. This was the story of my life and my brother’s life, my brother and his Mary. (How could you think to tell such a story without me by your side, Janice?)
And, somehow, I have kept separate, hidden away in my mind, one single image of joy before disaster: my father, running across the unbearably green grass. And not what occurred after. Not what happened after.
I want that kind of joy, that epiphany, or a chance at it, at least, even if it kills me. (Must I echo to you your own words? That we are all connected by lines of glimmering light. How many times those words kept me alive, made me see approaching light in unending darkness? As Bonmot used to say in his sermons: ‘We are vessels of light – broken vessels, broken light, but vessels nonetheless.’ Fragments across the void. It’s time to find you, Janice, and see what you’ve got yourself into.)
But you’re free now, regardless of what this was – afterword, afterwards. I release you to return to what you were before. If you can.
As for me, it is time to abandon even this dim green light for the darkness. I’ve put as many words between myself and this decision as I can, but it hasn’t worked. There’s a space between each word that I can’t help but fall into, and those spaces are as wide as the words and twice as treacherous.
A shift of attention. Another place to go. That’s all it is. I’m not afraid any more. I’m not frightened. Everyone is dead or disappeared or disappointed. I ask you, who is left to be afraid of? This is After Dad Died. This is After Mom Died. This is an entirely new place.
I think it is time for one last walk outside. One last look at this crazed, beautiful, dirty, sad, glorious city. Sybel and Bonmot and my mom, and all the rest, are waiting for me out there in some form or another – a whisper on the breeze, the rustle of the branches, a shadow across a wall, and, perhaps, there will be time for one last lunch under the willows, my glasses safely in my pocket. Then I’ll come back and decide whether or not to seek out Duncan, whether to put on these glasses and face whatever Mary saw.
No one makes it out, Samuel Tonsure once said.
Or do they?