V
5 V Someone should tell Z’s story; I don’t disagree; but I won’t; how could I? There was no end, which is needed for stories; and I am no storyteller, I insist on this. I am a woman of sentences. Of semicolons. A woman who stops before going on. I shouldn’t be trusted with anything continuous: I am no salmon leaping up a long river. I am a woman of puddles, of nests. A perfect blue egg or a chaos of tadpoles. I sat in my corner of A’s living room as everyone talked, and I waited for the gaps, the depressions I could flow into, brim over. How loosely their logic was looped together, I thought. I would pull the knots tight at their most absurd. The ideas were enormous but the executions just wet explosions , a thump jarring the stomach, then nothing. This is what I thought then, Z at my side, his laughter whenever I desired it; I was victorious. 6 Z of course could defeat me, anytime. But he did it quite reasonably, a glance over the breakfast table. And then he died. Who would have known—isn’t it fair to ask?—that this was the direction, how we would conclude? Who would aspire to such divination? This is why I won’t tell a story, insist a prophecy play itself out. I will keep to my sentences; within the space of a sentence I can hold back. I can earn what I have always wanted: no more than Z’s checkmarks next to the best lines. The lines like small revolutions. So that even now I await Z’s applause, sudden and lovely, birds taking flight off a pond. In the space of my life I am algae and eutrophication. Then she was sick, as they say politely. In bed insane weeks passed. I recovered; Z waited for me; we went on. But there have been these pauses. But—weren’t we like anyone, a past no one had the right words for, a future we would not wish to know? We armed ourselves: A with her diligence and nostalgia. Ford—I think he chose to be handsome, swathed himself in good looks as I did in irony, then parried from behind, sharp quick jabs. Sara wanted to be merely useful, and after all she wasn’t wrong. And Z? Z. The times were violent. It’s true. If we tried to see this, which in our best moments we did, the mind opened into chasm, and reason slipped down, and love and hope followed after, though they were the best of ourselves— But that’s no story, end only, no beginning. This is what I mean, what I have been trying to say. ...
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