She had not returned. A certainty, at once unwarranted and undeniable, filled him: he would never see Clementine Abend again.
So sleep at last dismantled the troubled spirit of Father Spurlock, but even as that darkness without exterior closed around him, he felt the blackness shiver and crack, a network of fissures feathered out in a blizzard of fragments, flocked up and on the wing, a cloud of agitations collecting its formlessness to a shape at first spheroid and revolving, then conic, vortical, funneling itself into his chest—as when, in autumn, at nightfall, a blackout of blackbirds drains into a single tree.
ONE
Father, you will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.
Even if you have seen my face, it was only one among the many faces gathered at the funeral of Jessica Burke, and that was three years ago, almost to the day. You do remember Jessica Burke—do you not?—dead of an overdose, the daughter, I believe, of a woman in your congregation. I had not attended your church, nor any church for that matter, in many years. No special claim to grieve had brought me there, beyond the bond between a psychoanalyst and his patient, that unequal, equivocal hold that also holds at bay.
For two years she had been my patient, my analysand, so I had seen her four times a week, five times even, at the beginning of the treatment. During those years, I had listened to Jessica Burke longer and more attentively than I listened to my daughter, Clementine, suddenly hidden from me in the maelstrom of her adolescence. I believed I knew Jessica Burke well, as well as I knew any of my patients. I believed as many at the funeral seemed also to have believed that she had come to flourish, that she had indeed found a new life. What is more, I am convinced she believed this as well and credited me with having helped her in this. After several failed attempts, Jessica had finally kicked free of the heroin. She had begun to “make art,” as she put it, had reenrolled in a life-drawing class she’d stormed out of a year before. She had made an appeal to be reinstated at her college and had begun attending night school courses. She had repaired severed relations with family. I believed she was better, believed she had eluded a danger, and because I believed these things, the news of her death came as something more than a shock.
I have lost patients before, sometimes gradually, to illness or age, sometimes suddenly, and a young one more than once or twice. And I have known that deep, narrow grief any analyst knows, having peered so long into a soul freed from its contexts, unfolding and growing under the lamp of his attention—only to have the lid shut, the lamp blown out. They say psychoanalysis is a school of limits: the session must end, the treatment must end, because childhood must end, and life. Perhaps so. Even with my youngest patients, I have never felt it impossible that they could die.
And yet for Jessica I had thought it so, or felt it, even to the moment of taking my seat in a pew, alongside old Itzal, the doorman from my building, whom she had befriended. I had felt it simply, merely, impossible that she could have died—Jessica Burke!—whom I had seen as recently as the previous Friday, who remarked on her new boots as she settled herself on the couch in my office, crossing her ankles as she always did. They were motorcycle boots, the leather stiff and uncreased, so new I could smell it, tannic and fishy, as the session progressed. “I’ll have to walk a million blocks,” she’d said, “before they stop hurting me.” It had been the first time in she didn’t know how long she’d gone out and bought new shoes, and where could she walk a million blocks except in the future, a future crowded with plans and appointments, a bustling territory claimed as her own?
I said that the news of her death had come as something more than a shock. I should have said that it came as something less than one: the shock had yet to arrive. Something detained it, held it in abeyance, perhaps out of pity for me, perhaps savoring in anticipation the bitterness of comprehension once it arrived.
After the ceremony, three years ago, I had thought to write you, to send you a note. In fact, I went so far as to find your address at the church. What would I have said? That I was grateful, for her sake, that someone intelligent and articulate and without illusion had spoken? That you had helped us to bid farewell, without falsifying the pain of her life, her perennial suffering, the frequent dissipation and final annihilation of her potential? Even now I remember with gratitude how you began your eulogy. An overdose! Too much. More than a body can handle. More than anybody can handle. We had lost our friend, our daughter, Jessica, to an overdose. Yes, and that alone was too much, but in another way, in our grief, we were all overwhelmed in the flood of death, the waters rising up to our necks. I remember thinking that you must have children. That perhaps you too have a daughter, as I do, perhaps a troubled daughter, or lost. That the death of Jessica Burke had struck you deeply as well. We were all in over our heads, you said. Everything was too much, our lives were too much. Too many temptations, allurements, false starts, false promises. Too much pain. Too much grief. And there was nothing to be said about this: some griefs, you said, outstripped all consolation.
As for explanations, we would never be satisfied. That is
