The thought of a twenty-year program of Newman study filled her with unutterable happiness.
Now (3:45 a.m., breathing with the bus) she misses that happiness. She misses youth. She misses the youthful idea that a subject really might be conquered, that all the gorgeous order lying hidden under disorder could be unearthed like sacred bones, laid out in neat rows on pristine sheets, labeled in a neat hand. She misses the youthful delusion that conquering a subject would validate her existence. She has the impression that her father still has it, this belief, this happiness. And though she just now thought of it as a delusion, isn’t it true that if you still have it, then it does validate your existence, and therefore is not a delusion? An Epimenides paradox. She has the impression that her father doesn’t need anyone else. He has remained pure. Whereas she opened her gates, she welcomed disorder, she gave it a parade. She’ll never get it back, will she? Peace of mind. The thought fills her with a terrible fear.
She’ll be in Seattle in three hours and fifteen minutes. What then? A ticket back to New York would be to make the futility of her situation obvious. She could go on a random walk through the Seattle streets, let a dark alley decide. She could check into a hotel, pay two weeks in advance, decline all room service, nail the door shut. A simple burrow. She could go up and then come down from the Space Needle.
She’s been sitting on a text from her father that came in between Missoula and Spoke-ann. I guess I’m a little worried. Could you send me a note? It made her feel bad. It’s nearly 7:00 a.m. where he is, so he’s probably awake. She takes out her phone and forces herself: Please don’t worry. taking time to think. Life choices.
1984–2002
When she was a lonely and strange twelve-year-old, she wrote her autobiography, whose sole purpose was to convince its sole reader that her life had meaning. During its composition she happened to make a friend, a plot development so astonishing she decided to end her story on it: “And thus it came to pass that Saskia White and Jane Singh lived happily for many years, until the Last Days and the destruction of the world.” (Or something like that; she was enamored of Tolkienesque High Hokum.) The ink, as they say, wasn’t even dry when a note arrived out of the blue from her long-absent father, inviting her on a summer camping trip in Norway. Jane came along and terrible things happened, not a few of them Saskia’s fault, and the friendship was destroyed.
Saskia has thought about story endings ever since. There’s that logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, and she wishes her Latin were good enough (ha! she doesn’t really know any Latin at all) to know how to express an analogous idea (well, mainly, to show off her Latin): the emotional fallacy that later occurrences in life have more meaning than earlier ones. If you read a story about a person with a sad childhood and a happy adulthood, you tend to think of it as a happy story, n’est-ce pas? Whereas a life that begins happily and ends sadly seems like a sad story. But why shouldn’t all periods of a life have equally weighty—or for that matter, evanescent—meaning? If only the present moment exists, chronology is not important. (She has a feeling Epictetus talks about this somewhere, where’s her copy? Or maybe it’s Vonnegut.) However, people are addicted to narrative, and the last line of a story feels like a provisional title for all the blank pages that follow.
Starting when she was thirteen, she cultivated the habit of occasionally asking herself the question, What if my story ended here? It was a way of affirming that whatever was happening at that time, whatever she was feeling, no matter how brief or provisional, had its own validity, which subsequent events could not alter. She tried it for the first time when she returned home after having run away. (Long story short—her friendship with Jane destroyed, her revered father unmasked, her share of guilt undeniable, she jumped on a bus, clung for a few weeks to an ebb-tide reef in Brooklyn, discovered like so many others before her that she could not escape herself, floated back home on the flow tide like an unsinkable plastic bag, hey, jetsam, here comes flotsam.) She noticed, as her bus descended into Ithaca, that she was feeling kind of glad to be coming home. She was even glad to see her mother, Lauren, who had been more or less invisible to her during all the years she’d fabulated about the whereabouts of her heroic dad. So when she hugged Lauren in the cold winter kitchen, she thought, “The End.” This story was about reconciliation. Of course she and Lauren went right back to fighting and playing dirty—but that was a different story.
Since she could choose when to step back and announce “The End,” she preferred to wait for the rare good moments, so that her generally lonely, often miserable teenage years became a series of YA books with the kind of plot teenagers—hell, adults, too—prefer, beginning in angst and obstacles, sinking lower into destructive behavior and despair, then turning unexpectedly upward in the final pages, finishing on a quiet moment of connection, redemption, or awareness of wisdom gained. The quieter and more ambiguous that final moment, the more literary the YA, correct?, so her imagined row of books—let’s call it A Series of Saskia Events—were all
