I write on napkins because napkins are honest. The coffee is getting cold. The pen bleeds through. You do not revise.
He was reading about rivers. I was in the doorway. He did not look up. The paragraph was more honest than I was. I left the room. The coffee went cold on the counter. I did not pour it out. I let it go cold because cold coffee is still coffee and a man reading about rivers is still a man in a room you can return to.
The 1987 guide to the Azores. He is in the shop recommending it. I can hear him from the kitchen. He trusts it because it is no longer available. Viktor trusts things that are no longer available. I am writing this on a napkin and the pen is pressing through and I can feel the table underneath, the wood grain through the paper.
He touched a book's spine yesterday and I recognised the gesture. Two fingers. Briefly. The same way I touched his neck in the shop on the Wednesday. He does not know he does this. He checks every book the way I checked him — to see if it is the one.
My hands held a book this morning. Travel Guides: South America. The book was the weight it has always been. But the hands were counting. The way hands hold things when the hands have started inventorying what they can still hold.
I walked home from the hospital on a Tuesday. The appointment was at 2. I was home by 3. I sat at the table and the napkin was there from breakfast and the coffee was cold and I wrote the word on the napkin because the napkin was there. The napkin did not flinch.
I stood between Geography and Memoir and I said it again, out loud, to the shelves. The books did not flinch either.
Viktor was in the back room. I could hear him cataloguing returns. The word was in the air between Geography and Memoir and he did not hear it and the not-hearing is the last gift I can give him and the most dishonest.
I said: ask me again in ten years.
I knew when I said it. Not the diagnosis — the shape of it. Ten years was the most honest number I had. Not a promise. An estimate.
The estimate has changed. The napkin is thinner than I thought.
The Wednesdays are numbered. I know how many. I will not write the number on a napkin because the ink bleeds and a smeared count is worse than no count.
I choose you with information you do not have. I choose you in a city where we sell books about everywhere else. The coffee is cold. The napkin is thin.
This one doesn't end. I lied. Everything ends. But the lying is the vow and the vow is the napkin and the napkin is honest because I wrote it at breakfast and did not revise.
He is shelving. Czech order. I can hear it from here.
— Mariana
Maps of Elsewhere. The coffee is cold. The books are in the wrong order.