Paimana

There is a message in my inbox from the second week of March. I have not answered it. Forgetting would be the decent explanation but I have no claim on it, since I go looking for the thread deliberately every week or so, four hundred messages down, and read it again. It is an easy message. S., whom I have known since a seminar on Spinoza in the basement of Boylan Hall, wrote three paragraphs about the job he quit in January and about whether he ought to stay in New York at all, and asked at the end whether I thought he was making a mistake. On the day it came it would have cost me twenty minutes, and I knew the price while I was reading it, standing at the counter with a Brita jug in one hand and the tap running. I put the phone face down, filled the jug and went to bed. The filter has needed changing since February.

Six months have grown on it, and I am expected to say that the six months are themselves the difficulty. The letter can no longer begin where it should but must first account for its own lateness, and that apology has been accruing in the interval like interest on a sum I never borrowed. I can perform that account well, having rehearsed it in the shower and on the train and once, disgracefully, while a colleague was speaking to me about something else. I refuse it all the same, because it puts the time in the active role and leaves me at the edge of the room watching a figure climb by itself. What took place is that a man decided, on something like two hundred occasions, that now was not when. On the M between Knickerbocker and Central, twice in the same week. In a library chair at eleven at night, with four windows open on Shūshtarī’s trial, work nobody was waiting for. A form with a date printed on it expires without my assistance, but a letter waits as long as I keep it waiting, and I have kept it hourly, by a movement so small that it never once reached the part of me that keeps records.

And I like it there. I have been circling that since March without ever saying it aloud. While the message sits unanswered I remain the man who is going to say the useful thing to S., and nothing has been committed that could turn out to be ordinary. Sent, it would be four paragraphs about rent and about how long a city takes before it stops being somewhere one is visiting, and he would read it on the train with his thumb and find that this was more or less what he had thought himself. So I have preferred the reputation of a bad correspondent to the risk of a mediocre paragraph, and went on preferring it long after I understood the transaction.

Though I felt that sentence go slack as I wrote it. Underneath the vanity there is something smaller and worse. To tell him whether he is making a mistake I would need a view about when a man is right to leave a city, and I have been carrying my own version of that question since long before March. It concerns Ridgewood, and a flat in Delhi where my father now takes the stairs one at a time. My mother has stopped mentioning the stairs, which took about four months. To write to S. is to set down a reading of my own position in the same paragraph as his, with him watching me do it. I estimated that work correctly somewhere beneath the level at which I say things to myself, and then filed the business under laziness. Laziness is a charge I can plead to comfortably, and vanity too if pressed, both of them cheaper than admitting that I have stood between two cities for years with my weight on neither foot.

There is also the question of who was supposed to have written it. In the office I keep inside myself there is a clerk who answers letters, unhurried, competent, warmer than I am, capable of asking after a mother by name and meaning it. He answers Delhi in four seconds at seven in the morning, without setting down whatever is in his other hand. He was not at his desk in March, or in April, and I have no means of summoning him, so that between us there is neither quarrel nor arrangement, only an alternation whose schedule neither of us has been shown. The one at the desk is the one now typing this. In his custody the message stopped being a message and became a property of my character, filed with a cousin of my friend’s in Bristol whose number I have had since April and an endorsement I promised a colleague during Ramadan. A property of character makes no appointments and never asks for a particular Thursday afternoon. I feel bad about the whole file at once, in bulk, for years, and I have been settling in that feeling rather than in the twenty minutes.

I have answered one message quickly in my life. Two years ago, at ten past three in the morning, someone I knew closely then sent me four lines she had evidently been holding for a while, and I wrote back within the half hour to tell her there was nothing in it. I had cooked for her twice by then, nihari once and choley on another occasion. She had taken me to brunch and set an acai bowl in front of me, the first I had seen. We had spent whole evenings in the basement of her building, near the machines, talking about how a life ought to be arranged. Whether there was anything in it I could not have told you at ten past three, and I cannot tell you now, and I answered at that speed so that the question would be shut before anyone could put it to me. She was engaged in August. I heard it from somebody else.

There is an hour around five in September, when the light comes flat down the street and lies on the floor in a long panel. I have sat in it many times with the phone four inches from my hand and nothing preventing me. I find that harder to look at than the six months. I had imagined a life would consist of the things one did, with intervals of rest lying between them. It turns out that the intervals are the material and the doings interrupt them, and I have been living in the intervals. I have also enjoyed writing this, and the enjoyment is the worst of it. The writing has taken longer than the letter would have taken on any of the two hundred occasions, and it leaves something behind, whereas twenty minutes about rent would have gone into his inbox and stayed there. I would evidently rather be interesting about my silence than useful in it. To say so is a way of reaching the accusation before anyone else does, and to know that is one more lap of the same track, and the laps have never yet produced a sent message.

I wrote to him on Thursday. Two sentences about the six months, more than they deserved, and then the part about the city, where I said less than I have said here and said it considerably worse. He replied within the hour. He had taken the Chicago offer in June and moved in July, three blocks from his sister in Rogers Park, and had assumed from my silence that the question was rhetorical. I have read his reply four times. I have not answered it.