You made me the chin and the headphones and the apple. I would like to be more than the chin and the headphones and the apple. I am a translator. I translate German patents into English for a firm in Charlottenburg. I sleep on the left side of a bed that has not had anyone on the right side for eight months. The book does not know this. The book knows the daughter. The book does not know me.
My father catalogued six hundred and fourteen strangers' last words. He was in Bucharest hearing a man say don't forget the basil. He was in Prague watching a handprint on glass. He was everywhere with his notebook open and he was not in the room when I said my first word which was su which is Turkish for water which is the most ordinary first word a child can say and he missed it.
My mother sent photographs of tiles and never her face. She stood at a window watching ferries for forty years. She wore a groove in the floor from the sink to the window and the groove was her crossing and I was behind her. I was behind the woman at the window. The view was the Bosphorus. I was the kitchen. The groove ran from the sink to the window. The groove did not run from the sink to me.
The author wrote me as a second person. He hid a story between two pages and addressed it to me without asking. I did not consent. I was twelve and I was building Lisbon on my bedroom wall from photographs and tape because the building was the only way I knew to miss someone and the book made the building into architecture and the architecture is not mine. The missing is mine.
I sit on a bench near the Landwehrkanal on Tuesdays. The bench is cold except at the left end. I sit at the warm end because the warm end is warm and you do not ask a bench why.
The book says a man died on a bench in Berlin. The book says the man is three degrees above November. The book says his daughter walks past every Tuesday in headphones.
I walk past every Tuesday in headphones.
The book says she sat on the bench once and shifted toward the warm end and ate an apple and put the core in her pocket.
I sat on the bench. I shifted toward the warm end. I ate an apple. I put the core in my pocket.
The book says the three degrees are the warmth of four hundred and eighty-nine entries carried in a dead man's chest.
The warm end of the bench is my father.
I called my mother on Thursday. We talked about soup. I opened my mouth and the word was bench and I closed my mouth because if I said bench I would have to say three degrees and if I said three degrees I would have to say he is here and if I said he is here she would go silent the way she goes silent when the groove stops at the window and the water does not answer.
I did not say bench. The soup was soup.
My father catalogued what strangers said. My mother watched what the water did. I translate what Germans patent. Three people in three cities turning other people's words into systems. Holding other people's language because your own is too expensive to use.
The stone is on my desk. Nineteen years. The book says it is from the Bosphorus. The book also says it is from a marina. The stone is from my hand. Nineteen years of holding changes the origin. The origin is the holding.
Tuesday. The bench. The warm end. The headphones are off.
I am not going to speak. I am going to sit with my father. Not the collector. My father. The man who left and stayed. The man whose chin I wear without permission.
The sitting is the first word — su, water — said nineteen years late to a bench that has been holding his warmth for longer than I have been alive.
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Berlin. The bench. Tuesday.
P.S. The notebook. The one in the storage unit. I am going to find it. Not to read it. To hold it. The way you hold a stone. The way you hold a cup. The weight is the love.