She looks past the open page to see the other volume. “Non. C’est pas vrai!” She knows this book. Make Your Writing Come Alive. She reaches out with her left hand, afraid to touch the thing. She flips the pages at random. Ink annotations fill the margins-eager notes and glosses that now seem like the black box of a plane shot out of the sky.
She looks up, her eyes sparking. All might still be well. Yes may yet have the last word, even from across this uncrossable chasm.
“It’s not mine,” she says. “Give it to Russell. He will need this.”
I will need much more. Endless, what I’ll need. But I’ll take what I’m given, and go from there.
She slips the book back across the space between them. But just as Schiff takes it, the text disappears. Neither woman, I guess, will even flinch. The next to vanish off the table will be the camera, then the poems, leaving only their two half-finished teas, a condiments rack, and a menu.
As the two look on, the menu’s French fades. The Arabic follows it into white. So, too, do the sounds from the air around the café, until the only language running through the nearby streets is the one that existed in these parts long before the arrival of writing.
Then the menus and the tea and the condiments dematerialize. Then the filmmaker’s bag. Then the filmmaker herself vanishes back into documentary, banished to nonfiction.
And I’m here again, across from the daughter of happiness as I never will be again, in anything but story. The two of us sit sampling the afternoon’s slow changes, this sun under which there can be nothing new. She’s still alive, my invented friend, just as I conceived her, still uncrushed by the collective need for happier endings. All writing is rewriting.
The air here is tinged with new scents, or old ones I’d forgotten. These smells are the reason I’ve traveled out here, alone. And I am, for once, ready to try on anything the story might permit. What else can I do for her, except defy my type? Happiness, the scientist says, is not a reward for virtue. Happiness is the virtue.
She looks across at me. She always knew it would end like this, that I would follow her into this next new place. She smiles and shakes her head, as if to claim once more that fate has no power over anything crucial. Which it never really does, if I could just remember. What we have been is as nothing; what we will be is ever beyond us. But what kind of story would ever end with us?
The time for deciding is after you’re dead. I have no choice; delight pours out of me. “How are you?” I ask. “How do you feel?” She answers in all kinds of generous ways. And for a little while, before this small shared joy, too, disappears back into fact, we sit and watch the Atlas go dark.
Richard Powers
