The Death of the Book

1. This morning the nurse tested me for allergies. She said she’d test for “known allergies,” which seemed sensible. She wrote the numbers 1 to 35 on my back with a special pen, counting under her breath as she went. I wondered whether it was possible to be allergic to the pen. At some point she had to stop and erase some of the numbers with a cloth because she’d run out of space. I said this is what it must feel like to be a piece of paper. She didn’t reply. When she’d finished setting up her grid of numbers she handed me a laminated poster with a list of thirty-five things on it, things like tree bark and plastic swimming equipment and dust. She said that when she applied the irritants it would feel like I was being scratched by a cat very gently, thirty-five times, and I thought oh god yes please. When she was done she set a timer and left the room. While I waited I looked at my back in the mirror and saw that she had arranged the numbers in two columns, one either side of my spine. There was a faint red scratch through each number, like the crossed-off days of a calendar. When the nurse returned she looked at my back and said I didn’t have any allergies. Then she erased the numbers with the cloth and I thought, known allergies.

2. Sometimes, for a little while, clouds gather into the shape of an animal, and that’s you. There’s stuff, and right now one of the things that stuff is is your body, and over the coming years it’s going to slowly disband again, fraying at the edges until eventually it isn’t recognizable as you anymore and it goes on to be other things (ships, crickets, glycerine, laughter). The first time those clouds gathered into the form of a book was about two thousand years ago. But most of those early formations have long since come apart. There are a few that still look like books enough to be interesting, and there are people whose job it is to stop them from coming apart any more than they already have, and they do this by putting them inside glass boxes where there’s no wind. I have met people whose job this is and they are very interesting, because their job is to put old things in boxes and suck the time out. They have to make sure none of it slips back in before they can get the lid on.

3. A government form asks for my “mother’s current address.” I make multiple attempts at responding in the box. “N/A” is too sad. “She’s dead” is too wounded. “Heaven” is strong, but it reads like a joke. Likewise “underground.” Eventually I settle on “she’s no longer alive so has no current address.”

4. When one witness writes of my mum’s dead body, “she was wearing a green and blue flowery summer-type dress, which is one of her better items of clothing,” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

5. She’d been inside that body her whole life. Then she returned it, like a library book, disappointed.

6. This morning the nurse asked whether I had fallen in the last twelve months. I said I hadn’t, or not that I could remember. A sign on the wall, above a piece of medical equipment that looked like an old telephone, said firm toast. I wondered why that would be a thing. I stared at it while the nurse typed at the desk beside me and eventually the words changed to foam first. The nurse asked whether I had someone registered as my emergency contact. I said I wasn’t sure. She said there was a form I could fill in. I said in that case I’ll just die. Then she left to get the doctor. When the doctor arrived he was truly the friendliest doctor in the world. I thought we should have dinner together. We talked for a while, and when he left he patted me on the shoulder. He was going to get another doctor, his boss. I had made it to the end-of-level boss of the hospital. While I waited for her I looked around the room for something to notice.

7. According to this pamphlet, grief can cause difficulty breathing, tightness in the throat or chest, and muscular weakness. On the front cover there’s a photograph of a plastic lawn chair in the sea.

8. I am still grieving in this body. I am grieving it to death.

9. The worst part is the total indifference most days. The numbness. The heart pumps it out like milk. Heartmilk. Banana flavored.

10. According to recent studies, the average human body now contains so much microplastic that if you were to extract the plastic from all the human bodies on Earth and mush it together, you’d have enough plastic to build a life-size Lego model of Princess Diana.

11. Yesterday I stopped to pat a tree and accidentally put my hand through a nail. Vala said, that’ll teach you for patting  just any old tree. I said it wouldn’t. She said you have to look first before you put your hand on a tree. Later, in bed, we debated whether or not you’re allowed to look at the sunset. She said it permanently damages your eyes. I couldn’t accept this, because people have watched the sunset for thousands of years, that’s why it’s so famous. The sunset. Then I looked it up and she was right. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.

12. To say I have a memory like a sieve would be an insult to sieves. I have a memory like a basketball filled with glue. I have a memory like a plastic croissant on a windowsill that someone is pointing to and saying, it looks so real.

13. Sometimes, when I want to just sit and think, on a bench or the steps or whatever, I take out the book from my bag and pretend to read.

14. One of the items that came to me after mum died, amid the frantic repatriation of her stuff, was a slim book of poems written by my stepdad. The cover is a glossy mass of headachey yellow, the color they dye cheap lemons. On the front there is a drawing of a motorbike with a seagull perched on the seat, and above it the words Love, Life, and Seagulls on Motorcycles. The poems are mainly erotic odes to my mum. One is dedicated, “to Kathryn, for being my home.”

15. David played a twelve-string guitar and rode a Harley Davidson. He was an enormous man—laughably big-boned. Got some small parts in real TV shows. All bad guys. He had the face of a smuggler and the moisturizer of a genius. A saint in the kitchen and a camembert in the hallway. A hard-to-place man, he was impossible to miss. I miss him.

16. How can I possibly talk about that loss? Losing David, who loved me, and then losing mum, who killed herself. It’s a black hole eating another black hole. A desert in the air. A severed hand on the table that turns out to be just your hand.

17. I pick up a collection of Kafka’s short stories, hoping he can help me. I flip to a story at random. It’s narrated by a dog. I put it back.

18. Once I walked from Pisa to anywhere, and I knew it was Italy because of the happiness. The headache in my chest that I think, looking back, was mum, softened a bit in the miles of nothing between those little villages. In one village I stopped to get out of the sun and to deal with my feet. I sat in a covered alley and ordered something from an old man who emerged from a dark interior, through a waterfall of beads. While he was taking my order, a postwoman came by and handed him a bundle of letters, which he tucked into his apron. It was noon. Just after. I thought it was quite late for post. My marriage, when it comes, a couple of years from now, will fix nothing. But it will help me to see that the desire to be fixed is selfish and lonely. Like, we cherish the idea of ourselves as broken. It gives us the excuse we need to be nasty to ourselves, to punish ourselves, even while we insist on the inviolable goodness and sacredness of other people.

19. One of the central issues of our household, I would say, is Vala’s insistence on leaving her fruit stickers stuck to the edge of the sink. They amass like little trophies. Eventually I peel them up and put them in the bin. I love her.

20. Vala can’t throw away a jar of pickles that has passed its date; she has to open it and “free” the pickles first. She can’t bear the thought of them being inside the jar forever.

21. A few weeks after mum died I received an email from a police officer. It contained a zip file of witness statements made by friends and colleagues, people who’d seen her in her final days. Disgusted and excited, I pored over every word. I believed that one of these people had secretly murdered my mum, and that if I read the statements closely enough I would find the clue, the small but telling inconsistency. But all I found was a cast of bewildered and heartbroken strangers, a collection of short stories about oh fuck. I’m not sure which was worse, the repeated descriptions of her death from slightly different angles, like a 360-degree photograph of pain, or the fact that none of them had done it: their refusal, line by stupid line, to have secretly killed my mum.

22. The problem with the world is there’s only one of it. If something goes wrong there isn’t a backup. It just grinds on, full of the error.

23. Today Vala found an audio recording of a black hole. But she won’t listen to it, and she won’t let me listen to it while she’s in the room. I have a feeling that, somehow, hearing that sound would be like putting the pickles back in the jar.