ML12III90
These characters designated with merciless precision the coordinates of my own inescapable past, incised with the name of Miriam Levaux, the day of 12 March, the year 1990, inscribed in the very place where she died.
The body of Miriam Levaux was recovered from the river 400 meters downstream from the Pont de Loire. The medical examiner’s office has yet to release the autopsy report, but a source close to the police stated that suicide is the likely cause, and foul play is not suspected. It is believed that Levaux drowned sometime after midnight on Monday, 12 March. Levaux, 27, was a native of Nevers but had been residing in Paris.
And so I understood the message of the photograph. It said: This is where it happened. It said: Your lie, the lie you nurtured and refined throughout your daughter’s childhood, is for all that still a lie. No less than the scene of Jessica Burke in the bathtub, the event recorded here was also the work of hands, careful, painstaking, thorough. That is what this photograph had said. It said: Remember me.
With that recognition, abruptly, the terror was gone. I knew then, finally and without doubt, what the photograph had wanted me to know. Though I had lost my daughter, my daughter herself was not lost—not yet. She had been granted a stay. She had been suffered to remain in this world—for now.
How did I know this? I knew it the instant my eye returned to the opposite, upper border of the photograph, the rough edge where the paper had been torn straight across. I knew it as surely as I knew what I would find when I turned the photograph over, the lines of the poem from the very first letter I had received, transcribed as before, but with a difference:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand…
There it was, the same refrain, the same regular stanzas, copied in the same blocked-out hand, just as before, except that paper had been torn away at the top below where the first stanza of the poem would have been. What remained were the final verses. The four stanzas I’d first received were now three, and where there had been fifty-three lines, there were now forty-one.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
This foreshortening, I understood, meant that a clock of sorts had begun its countdown. The poem was shortened because the time remaining was shorter. I had no way to arrest the movement of this clock, but neither would the clock be hurried. This poem-clock afforded me a freehold, a shrinking freehold to be sure, but while I had it, it was absolutely mine. Just so, I thought, had Clementine fashioned her reverse calendar, the “countdown machine” that anticipated her thirteenth birthday, when she could pierce her ears. Both the poem and Clementine’s calendar were machines for marking time, time that could be neither stopped nor sped up.
I had been given time, a little time. Because I had been given time, I had been given a choice. I knew this, and I knew what I would choose. I knew what I would do in time—in time, but not yet.
SPURLOCK 1:07 A.M.
One night, not long after Luis had begun opening the church to the homeless, Spurlock had approached one of the men at random. “Hi, I’m Father Spurlock,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“King—John,” said the man as he squeezed the ash from the tip of a half-smoked cigarette and stashed the butt inside his jacket.
“Pleased to meet you, John King,” said Spurlock, extending his hand.
“King John,” said the man, making no move to accept the handshake. “I am King John.”
“My name?” said the next man Spurlock had approached that night. “Sprinkles, they calls me. So you going to call me Sprinkles too?”
“You’re welcome here,” said Spurlock, adding “my friend” to avoid calling the man Sprinkles.
He had learned his lesson. From then on, he would say nothing more than “Welcome” to the visitors, though most acknowledged even that greeting with obdurate silence, a silence that Spurlock understood to combine two simultaneous and incompatible replies: “Of course I am welcome here—are you?” and “You lie, you lie, you lie.”
You will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.
That was a name he hadn’t asked for. And yet it had found him, grabbed at him, as though it were his own name cried out in a crowd so that reflexively he had turned and said, “Here I am.” Finding no one, he had said, “Who is speaking? Where are you?”
—
Two phrases made the precious refrain of his first months with Bethany.
There you are.
Here you are.
Years before, waking together in her single bed in the law school dormitory, he would say, “There you are,” and she would say, “Here you are.” Back then, to be able to say that to one’s beloved seemed everything one could want.
The past, he had concluded, had been nothing but run-up. Wasn’t this how providence worked, how the obscure intelligence of surprise and accident gave the past its unchangeable shape? He could not have invented or imagined this Bethany, the line of her long wrists, her sharp rib cage, or how
