Chapter Two
I said it. Answer me.
And the room answered.
Not in my voice. In the voice I had at nineteen, the one I have not heard since the first night I read this out loud. It came from the chair. It came from behind me. It came from the book on my knees, open to the last page, which I had still not looked at.
So I looked.
The last page has one line on it. It is in my handwriting. It is not my hand any more, but it is my handwriting, careful the way I was careful at nineteen, and it says:
Nobody remembers the book that ruined me.
I sat with that. Long enough for the lamp to start humming. Long enough for something to pass the window that was not the nine-forty, because the nine-forty goes one way and comes back at six, and it was neither.
Then I went and got the pen.
It was where I left it, in the drawer of the table, the one I took off the floor beside a dead woman's hand because I wanted to know what a hand reaches for at the end. Sixty-one years in that drawer. It has never written a card, a list, a signature. I sign with a biro. A pen that has been in a dead woman's room does not sign a delivery slip.
The nib was dry. I held it over the last page, over my own careful nineteen-year-old handwriting, and I did not write anything.
I did not have to. The second line was already there.
Nobody remembers the book that ruined me. That's why I'm telling you.
My sentence. The one I said to you at the top of the night, before I had opened the cover. I have never written it down. It is on the page anyway, in the same hand, still wet.
The dead woman's hand was out because it was not reaching for the book. It was reaching for the pen.
The last page is always the same page. It is the page where the keeper writes the first line. Every keeper writes it. I wrote mine my first night, and I have been reading it back to myself ever since without knowing.
I know what I am supposed to do. Close it. Put it in the stove, or the river, or the ground, and let it go back to being nothing, a brick with a soft spine. I have known that for sixty-one years. I have kept it on my knees instead.
You want to know why. Here it is, and it is not noble.
Because when I say it, it exists. And while it exists, so do I.
That is the trade. Not one night at a time. One sentence at a time, and I said yes every time, and if you put it in front of me now I would say yes again.
I have been the only one holding up my end of it for sixty-one years. I have been very proud of that. I am less proud now that I have seen the second line, because it means I was never holding it up. I was holding it out.
Now you.
You have been in that chair one night. That is long enough. That is all it takes. You have heard the whole thing and you have not got up, and I have been watching you not get up, and I know that stillness. I invented it.
So here is the last thing I do tonight, and it is not a kindness.
I close the book. I set it on the chair. Not on my knees. On the chair, where you are.
The lamp stays on. The window stays black. The nine-forty is gone and the six is a long way off, and there is nothing in this room but a book, and a chair, and whoever is in it.
I have never told it to anyone before.
Next: Chapter Three