Not Now But Soon

3 MARY MEDLIN NOT NOW BUT SOON I n the four months since his fiancée’s death, it’s the small details , the tiny ironies that have remained the most vivid for Connor. The larger decisions he’s had to make—releasing or keeping her apartment, selling her things or shipping them back to her parents in Mashhad—haven’t been nearly as calamitous as the minor things he keeps remembering about Afshan’s accident . In fact, it’s the things that made it an accident that he remembers every day. How easily her jacket slipped off. He still feels the swift, terrible vacancy of the jacket, too big on her, as her arms slipped out of it. As he grabbed the back of it to keep her from falling. And even then, she didn’t fall right away. He remembers that too, how she hit the ground on all fours, a small grunt coming out of her. Afshan’s weight, which hadn’t ever been enough to fill a twin bed, a desk chair, an airplane seat, was somehow enough to dissolve the earth underneath her at the Eastern Fells overlook. She fell then, headfirst. But for a split second, holding that jacket, he really thought he’d saved her. He thought, Oh, nothing’s changed at all. It was just a scare. His friends and family have all said, “Why are you doing this to yourself?” or “This isn’t going to bring her back.” And in the most literal sense, that’s true. No amount of digging back into the cogs of the accident is going to reinflate her organs, repair her bones, make her spring back up out of the gorge. Literally rewinding the events is a positive feedback loop of reversals , each if only begetting another if only. He knows they’re right, that every step he takes prompts one if only bigger and worse than the last, and it just makes the silent, unacknowledged coast back into routine—keeping appointments, answering the phone, making small talk—harder and more shameful. But remembering isn’t hurting him. For now at least, he seeks shelter in imagining her, even imagining her accident. When he thinks about her, visualizes the days when she was still alive, even the really bad ones, those are the times during which she’s colorado review 4 still here, refracting into splinters that cut into him unexpectedly , each thought giving way to another, and another. It’s as if she’s coming back within him. He can almost hear her. He can almost feel her still here. She’s just somewhere that he can’t see. In another room. Downstairs. Just outside the door, and any second now, the knob will turn and she’ll walk in. The rent for Afshan’s apartment is due today. This will be the third time he’s paid it since her death. As he leaves his apartment , his roommates—three Tufts graduate students who advertised the fourth bedroom on Craigslist—fall silent when he passes through the living room on the way to the front door. It’s gotten worse since she died, but even before that they all felt obligated to fall silent around one another, as if the reminder that none could afford to live alone, while they all wished to, was a disappointment too great to be mentioned. Afshan never stopped trying, greeting each housemate by name, asking about their days while looking them straight in the face. It had more to do with her thinking it was ridiculous not to be involved with the people with whom you lived, than with actual interest. Her courtesy always put Connor to shame. He told her she was just wasting her time. “You’re right. What you do is so much easier ,” she said, leveling her gaze at him for exactly long enough before looking away. He’s never met her landlord, a distant friend of Afshan’s family. He can’t remember the name exactly; Amirapour something , maybe. Afshan liked him. She loved having someone with whom to speak Farsi and being able to pop downstairs for a new recipe for khoresht...