After a few days at home recovering from the head wound, Irrational Number thought some fresh air would do me good. He arranged everything, even packed my suitcases, and we headed out. It’s the longest trip I’ve taken since your death, you see, and we didn’t even leave the state of New York. After we drove nearly four hours, Irrational Number finally stopped at the Montauk esplanade, just at the tip of Long Island a little west of the lighthouse, the same place we went crab fishing that one time, do you remember? We’d gone out in the wee hours and came back around eight in the morning. Irrational Number rented a cabin there for a month, which is where I’m writing now, about two hundred yards from where the car is parked. The place is still famous for its remarkable marine landscapes, but what really impressed me when I got out of the car that Sunday, even more than the ocean, was how thick the grass is, and its light green color, which gave an impression of youthfulness. You bet—it was springtime again. After such a long time I could change seasons again, even if it was only a fleeting sensation of feeling the freshness of dew on my ankles. I expected my response to be short-lived, but in truth I was overcome all day long by the thrill of freshness, by a certain kind of joy. I tried to take a step forward, and though I couldn’t, I didn’t feel anguished. Just as he had promised, Irrational Number picked me up and put me on his back so I could straddle that huge lover again, the lover who cares for me in my feebleness, in my heartache over having lost you, Jim, and the never-ending pregnancy that is now scaring me, haunting my nightmares, incised with an image of Yoro. Irrational Number takes charge of everything and trots along with all the extra burden as if with his gait he was dusting off the layer of grime that has been settling over everything during my time of confinement.
We get up early every day. The dog goes out to wander about on its own and doesn’t come back until nightfall. We drink fresh milk for breakfast. Everything here seems green and new. Not only the grass everywhere, but also the fresh cow’s milk, the dark blue sea, and the sound of the birds. Even my name seems green to me, and so more alive, more sonorous. Irrational Number is my white horse during the day, my trotting horse at night. At times when we’re asleep, when a cracked window bursts open from a gust of wind, I take advantage of the moment to caress him and he doesn’t move, his sleep is so profound. He’s exhausted from carrying me on our walks. I’m so grateful to him. I love him.
Do you mind that I love him? It’s a different kind of love than the love I felt for you. I would never write to him after he dies because, to be honest, he’s a necessary crutch in my life, and if I wasn’t ill, I don’t know if I’d love him the way that I do now. It’s different, was different, with you. I loved you, Jim, in sickness and in health. Loving in health is what the priests say, as if it were something so easy, but it’s actually the more difficult of the two. Sickness, not health, is what bonds humans so intensely, and sickness is what is imprinting Irrational Number on me, like atomic shadows, the silhouettes of the victims that were carved onto the surfaces of things during the explosion. Like the friction of water that polishes a swimmer’s body, I noticed how my body was conforming to the space left by that man’s body whenever I dismounted. It’s as if my bones were beginning to grow again. Don’t they say that if a woman is young enough, she might grow an inch or two during pregnancy? I am not young, but it’s the feeling I get when I’m on him and he moves while I remain still, and there I am, growing on top of him. Maybe it’s a false sense of physical development, but when I look at my full body in a mirror, I can make out the shape of an absence between my legs. When we separate and I move around the cabin on my own as he rests or walks about a few hours unencumbered by me, I don’t feel solitary as long as I remember how the shape of his back remains impressed in the curve of my inner thighs. When he returns from his outing, I run to the door to welcome him. We put on or take off our pajamas, and I can smell the scent of the fields in his clothes, and all the aromas of my horse.
I’m happy. We’re happy. Who isn’t happy in the spring, even though it’s winter? But it is spring.
That’s what I was writing yesterday when I interrupted myself, because I saw him hanging his head. You might think it’s normal for such a tall man to hold his head like that when he looks at someone my size. But it was the ground he was looking at the whole time, just staring straight at the ground. I tried to justify his attitude, reason it away as if it was just a symptom of his bliss, looking down like that as something contrary to sadness. A downcast glance—I said to convince myself—is a way of noticing a fresh footprint, or the utmost present of all present moments, a blade of grass just sprouting up through the surface when two steps earlier it was still belowground. One looks up at the sky and there’s no birth there. An awakening, perhaps, but that’s something entirely different. The sun that rises again is an old man born millions of years ago. It takes focusing on small details to observe birth, and most often looking down at the ground—where a mushroom burgeons, or an ant colony—or hearing the little audible crack a butterfly makes when breaking out of the cocoon. I thought he was able to observe all of it and feel the joy of each new birth. I mounted him again, to live out yet another day on top of him. We were a few hours into a long walk by the time it occurred to me that my heft and I were all he had in life. It scared me to suddenly find myself thinking such a thing, how geocentric of me, what a narcissistic idea that another life needed to revolve around me, some obtuse medieval asteroid.
I fell asleep, my head resting on his shoulder, and when I woke up, we were passing through an area we hadn’t visited before. I realized that he was not celebrating anything at all. You have no idea what went down. He started walking in fits and starts like a blind person who hadn’t been born blind, but had lost his eyes for lack of use. The blindness of lassitude. His once blue and twinkling eyes were now hollows. Though I felt bad for him, I appreciated how despite his obvious despair, he was still willing to lug me around for the dose of fresh air that little by little was helping me recover. The landscape changed in a second. The day became night when the sun was still high in the sky. The roots of the trees became more visible. They rose up from the earth searching for light. The wind was light, yet trees were snapping, since the roots didn’t have the strength to sustain them. Trees fell over entirely. Fallen trees and trees tumbling all around till we reached the swamp. I suddenly realized I had to get off him or our combined weight would cause us to sink. Perhaps if I had dismounted when we entered the quagmire, if I had stood on my own two feet, things might have happened differently, but when I finally roused myself to try, it was without any luck. I was so completely fused with him we had become elements of a single centaur, and how could I separate the animal from the human without killing myself, without killing him? Neither did I detect in time that song of the equine siren whose melody lures horses bearing gratuitous burdens into the depths of mud. Blind and bemired in the muck, I got wind of the woeful music. From its invisible score sprang the fountain of eternal sludge. Writing this now, Jim, I can hear the same music, a circular melody like the vortex of mud that sucked him down. My trotting man. I feel him so close, as if he were somewhere down below. Might I be writing you from a few yards above his cross? How ghastly.