The Little Book of Revelations
Chapter One — After
I did not go looking for a lover. I went looking for a name.
I had brought James's little book with me. It was not in the hospital envelope and, as far as I knew, it had no opinions about Thailand. I had put it in my hand luggage for the same reason people take a photograph of a parent: to have someone with them who cannot reasonably be expected to answer back.
When I unpacked, it opened at a page I could not remember reading. There was a name in the margin, then a space, then a small ink mark like a comma with second thoughts. James had used a pen that bled through thin paper. So did mine. I shut the book before I could invent an explanation. I was quite capable of managing that without assistance from the dead.
The name was on a hospital discharge summary. I had read it on the flight home, then folded the paper along a line that ran through the letters as if that might make them less definite. At the flat I opened it again under the kitchen light. Christopher. The ink was no different for having crossed a border. I set the page beside my passport and tried to remember when I had first heard him give that name without being asked. I could not. That was the first question I wrote down, and it frightened me more than the name itself.
Ash was already gone by then. Properly gone — the winter of three words, the coat on the peg until the peg became a cleaner shape in the dust, the kind of silence that is not a pause but a decision. Whatever we had been, it had ended before Thailand and it stayed ended after. I did not ring him from Arrivals. There was no number left that would answer, and I had learned, finally, not to ask the empty line for comfort.
I had brought the hospital envelope home because I wanted an answer. What I found myself remembering instead was a Tuesday when Ash brought pears. It irritated me that my mind went there. It seemed to prefer a man who was gone to a name that was still on the table.
From a working edition. The final published text may differ.