Goodbye
788 Words
FARAH
I do not fall apart in the car.
This is not nothing. I want to note it somewhere, in the small private ledger I keep of things I have managed, but there is no one to tell and I have long since stopped keeping score for my own benefit. I simply do not fall apart. I watch the frost-bitten outskirts of the town that used to be a different town recede in the side mirror, and I keep my hands flat on my thighs, and I breathe the way I was taught to breathe when the situation requires that your face not become a problem.
My face is not a problem.
Inside is a different accounting.
Caspian drives. He has not asked me how I am. This is one of the things I have catalogued about him — the absence of that particular question, which most people deploy reflexively and which I have always found difficult to answer honestly without saying something that stops a conversation entirely. He doesn’t ask. He simply drives, and occasionally his eyes move to the mirrors the way mine move to the exits, and the shared grammar of that vigilance is, I find, more steadying than anything he could say.
I look at the photographs on my phone.
The letter. The cramped slanted handwriting. The date. The name.
I have been carrying the name at the base of my sternum since four-thirty this morning, and what the letter did was not introduce it but confirm it, which is worse. Confirmation has a different weight than suspicion. Suspicion you can still move around inside of. Confirmation is a room with the door closed.
The name is Ismene.
Not a coincidence, I told him. Not an artifact. And he nodded in the way he nods when he already knew something and was waiting to see if I would get there too, which I find both reassuring and quietly maddening.
I have been trying not to think about what it means.
I have been thinking about almost nothing else.
Ismene, who I have been told is dead. Ismene, who I came here half-looking for without admitting it, carrying her the way you carry something you’re not sure is a wound yet or just a bruise. Ismene, whose name is in a footnote on a footnote in a secondary text that the man who cited it was running from, and in a letter dated November 1959, and in the lowest room of an archive in a town that doesn’t know what it is anymore.
Ismene, who knew exactly what it would cost.
And did it anyway.
“You knew the name,” I say. Not an accusation. Just something I have been sitting with since the reading room and need to put somewhere outside myself.
Caspian is quiet for a moment in the particular way that means he is deciding how much of the truth is useful right now.
“I knew a version of it,” he says.
“How long.”
“Long enough that I should have told you before we went in.” He says it without flinching, which I appreciate. I have no patience for people who hedge their admissions. “I didn’t know it would be in the letter. I didn’t know how direct the connection was.”
“But you suspected.”
“I suspected.”
The road unspools ahead of us, grey and straight and indifferent to what we have just learned. I look out at the flat winter fields and I think about the way she used to talk about the work. Not the specific work, she was always careful about specifics, but the nature of it. The cost-benefit of choosing a difficult right over an easy survival. She had a way of framing sacrifice that I found, at twenty-three, galvanising and now find, at whatever I am now, something more complicated.
She was not theorising.
She never was.
“She built it,” I say. My voice is very steady. I am doing the breathing. “She built the whole network and she knew what it would be used for and she knew what would happen to the people inside it.”
“Yes.”
“And she did it anyway.”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. Anyway is doing its work again, that word that keeps showing up at the hinge of every terrible choice this story contains.
I think about the last time I saw her. A train platform, because of course it was. Her coat. The particular quality of her attention when she said goodbye
- Writer
