After His Eulogy

Chapter 6 Griffin

SIX

GRIFFIN

I don’t go back to the coffee shop. That’s the rule I make.

There are other coffee shops. There’s one in the basement of Hartwell.

There’s a gas station on the corner that sells coffee in a brown cup with a brown lid.

The coffee is bad but it is coffee. I drink the gas station coffee for I don’t know how long.

A few days. More than a few. The first night I don’t sleep.

I lie in bed and I do the things you do.

Count backward from a hundred. Try to think about something else.

Try to think about the response paper, which is not due, which I have already turned in, which is not a thing that needs thinking about.

I think about it anyway. I revise it in my head.

I revise it again. At some point the light starts coming in around the edge of the blind and I get up because there is no point in continuing to lie there.

That’s the first night. The next nights are similar.

They start to run together. I stop tracking which night was which.

I don’t go to my eleven o’clock. I don’t decide not to go.

I am at home and then it is twelve and the class has happened without me.

I send Mendel an email that says I’m not feeling well, can I get notes from someone in the cohort.

She says of course, feel better. I don’t write back to thank her.

The next class I do go to. The class after that I don’t.

I lose track of which one I’m supposed to be at on which day.

Then I lose track of the days themselves.

The syllabus on my desk starts to feel like it belongs to someone else.

I keep seeing him. Not actually. The man in front of me at the gas station has a jacket like the one he used to wear.

For a second I think it’s him. Then the man turns around and his face is wrong and I have to look away.

A guy on a bike goes by and the back of his head is the right shape, the right hair.

I follow him with my eyes for too long and someone bumps into me on the sidewalk.

A laugh on the quad. A ha. I turn before I can stop myself and it’s a girl, a stranger, looking at her phone.

This happens, I learn, several times a day.

Enough that I start bracing for it. I stop looking at faces.

I make coffee in the small pot. I forget I made it.

I find it an hour later, cold, on the burner.

I switch to the gas station coffee for the apartment also.

The cohort thing is on a Thursday, or it was a Thursday, or it has happened by now.

Priya texts me. Come! with a heart. I look at the text for a long time and then I don’t answer it.

She texts again two hours later. Are you okay?

I write back yes sorry busy week. I look at busy week.

It’s a lie I’ve told before. It’s worked before.

I send it. She doesn’t text back. I’m relieved, and then I’m not.

Something is wrong with being relieved that someone has stopped trying to be your friend.

I sit with that for a minute. Then I put my phone face down on the desk and don’t pick it up for the rest of the night.

There is no one to tell. That is part of why I came here.

I came here because there was no one to tell anything to, no one who would look at my face and ask the wrong question.

My sister is in Chicago and we talk on Sundays.

She will ask how school is and I will say fine and she will say good and that will be that.

If I called her and said I think I saw him, she would — I don’t know what she would do.

I don’t know what anyone would do. There isn’t a script for it.

There isn’t a sentence for I think I saw the dead person, the one we buried, I think he is here.

So I don’t tell anyone. I sit with it. I get good at sitting with it. I get worse at sitting with it.

I take a different route to Hartwell. I don’t pass the coffee shop.

I add four minutes to the walk and I tell myself it’s because the path is drier.

The path is not drier. I take the route with the coffee shop on a Tuesday because I think this is stupid, I can’t avoid a whole block.

I walk past and I do not look in the window.

My whole body is angled away from the glass like a magnet pushed wrong.

After I’m past it I have to stop and put my hand on a parking meter for a second because my legs are doing something.

I go back to the longer route the next day.

At some point it has been a week, or it has been four days, or it has been ten.

I have stopped knowing. The days are the same.

I get up. I drink bad coffee. I go to class or I don’t.

I take notes. I come home. I sit at the desk.

I do not work on anything. I watch the squirrel.

The squirrel is still there. The squirrel does not know anything has happened.

I wake up at three a.m. and I am sitting up before I know I am awake.

I don’t know what woke me. The apartment is the same apartment.

There is no one here. I get out of bed and walk through every room.

There are two rooms. It takes a minute. There is no one here.

I sit on the kitchen floor, same place as last time, and I put my hands flat on the linoleum.

I can’t keep not knowing. I’m going to have to look at him.

Not through a window. Not from a sidewalk.

Look at him, with him looking back, and know.

I sit there for a long time. I do not cry.

I do not do anything. I sit there until the floor stops feeling cold against my hands and starts feeling like nothing, like part of me.

Then I get up and I go back to bed and I sleep until ten.

In the morning I drink the bad coffee. I sit at the desk.

I open the laptop. I’m going to find out where he is.