It was neither prudence nor fear that held me back. I will tell you even though you will not believe me: at the very moment, my direst apprehensions confirmed, what took possession of me was an utter stillness, an absolute coming to rest.
Do you remember how trains between Boston and New York used to stop in New Haven to switch engines, electric to diesel or diesel to electric? Do you remember how at that moment, silence upon silence would invade the train, each one deeper than the next, as the ventilation, hydraulics, generator, and engine each cut off one by one, until finally the lights themselves went out? What a total, unbreathing stillness that was. I used to think that death must be such a moment, an accelerating cascade of failures, the encroaching silences compounded as each unnoticed whir or whisper withdraws, making itself known only in its departure. As I stared at the cellphone, that was the sense I had: an arrival at a point of complete extinguishing.
—
During all the years of her childhood, how much I believed we belonged to each other, Clementine and I. Those were the years in which that bond stood immovable as the axis of our shared world. This must be true for all single fathers of only daughters, that link absolute and indefeasible. Nothing then was stronger, nothing more real than that conviction—real, yes, and yet I know now also utterly wrong.
It was precisely because she was my daughter and I her father that we belonged not to each other but to opposing dispensations: I to the past, she to the future. Her destination, her rendezvous, was ahead of us, in the future, while my rendezvous was with the past itself. Our mutual bond was nothing more than a temporary settlement. The distance between us now was a distance that had always been there. That gulf was vast, unspannable, but my terror poured out into it and vanished. And I tell you, as I stared into it for the first time, that gulf poured into me its own inhuman and absolute calm.
—
That calm held unperturbed even when, several days later, another photograph of Clementine appeared in box 5504. Like the others, this one had been printed on heavy stock, and as before, a ragged edge formed the upper border. The photograph had been taken at night, the camera even closer to her face than it had been for the picture by the kiosk. Clementine was seated with her back to the wrought-iron railing of a bridge, a bridge everyone in Paris knows, a footbridge over the Seine where the young people congregate in the evening. In the photograph, Clementine was smoking a cigarette. I had never seen her smoke, but she seemed perfectly at ease, holding the cigarette to the side as she exhaled and smiled at the same time, her mouth pursed a little as though about to speak. Her expression was unmistakably and uniquely Clementine’s, one I must have seen thousands of times and yet never noticed. But there was something different about the way she held her mouth.
Yes, I knew. I knew what it was.
Her lips were pursed and tightened at the corners of her mouth not merely because she was about to speak, but because she was about to speak in French. Her French had been excellent since attending the Lycée Français, but it had been a slick, synthetic, private school French, polished and expensive, made in America. In the photograph, however, her mouth formed itself effortlessly around one of the impossible syllables. I knew that shape of the mouth: I knew it from Miriam, from Miriam’s lips, smoky and muscular, whispering, brushing against my own.
And on the back, beneath the torn upper border of the photograph, the poem had been copied anew in the familiar, blocked-out handwriting:
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
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.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
Where there had been four stanzas at first, now the final two alone remained. The first two had been torn away. Beneath them, my correspondent had written:
Que ce soit avec toi, que ce soit avec la fille, je serai satisfait.
Je suis (tu comprends) miséricordieux.
Whether with you or with the girl, I will be satisfied.
I am (you understand) merciful.
The sentence pronounced. The verdict handed down.
EIGHTEEN
I have this exchange with Jessica Burke recorded in my notebook.
“But what if I am meant to be a junkie? What if that’s what I’m meant to be? Who’s to say it’s not?”
“You want me to say it. You want me to say it’s not meant to be.”
“I do. I want that. But you can’t say it.”
“I can say this—you are afraid that it might be true, also that it might not be true.”
“I was right,” she
