Chapter 7 Griffin
SEVEN
GRIFFIN
I start with the registrar. Not the registrar exactly — the registrar will not tell me anything, I know that.
But the school has a directory. Most schools do.
You go to the website and you search a name.
If the person is enrolled and hasn’t opted out, the name comes up with a department and an email.
I sit at the desk with the bad coffee and I open the directory.
I type Reece. There are four Reeces. I read the four names.
None of them are his. None of them could be his.
His last name isn’t here, and even if he changed it, none of these first names are him.
Reece Patel. Reece Brennan. Reece Schwartz.
Reece Kowalski. I read them three times.
I close the directory. Of course he changed his name.
I sit with that for a minute. I have not, until this minute, thought the words he changed his name.
It’s a thing that arrives whole, like the squirrel did, like I buried him did.
He changed his name. He’s somewhere on this campus under a name I do not know.
Okay. I open the directory again. I think about what I am doing — briefly — then stop, because thinking about it is going to make me stop, and I do not want to stop.
I don’t know his department or his program.
I don’t know what he would have chosen, two years later, as a new life.
He could be anywhere. I narrow it by what I know: he was a year into a history program when he died.
When he died. When he did the thing that wasn’t dying.
I look at the history department directory.
There are forty-something names. I read them.
I look for ages where I can find them. I look at faculty pages with grad student listings. I look at photos where they exist.
There is no photo of him. I expected that.
He would not have a photo up. He would have asked them not to use one.
I think about how he would have asked. Privacy reasons.
A family thing. He has always been good at asking for things in a way that does not invite follow-up.
He used to do it with professors, with bosses, with my mother.
He could ask for an exception and make the person feel like the exception had been their idea.
I am thinking about him in present tense.
I do not stop. I cross-check the history department against the cohort lists for the program.
I find a roster from the prior year that someone uploaded as a PDF.
I read every name. I do not find him, but I do not expect to find his real name.
I read every first name and try to feel which one is him.
None of them feel like him. All of them feel like him.
I close the laptop and I go to the library.
I look in places I already know are wrong.
Dissertation databases. Recent publications.
Anything with a search field. I sit with the search results for an hour and a half before I admit none of it is going to work because he isn’t deep enough into his program to leave a trace.
I’m looking for him in the wrong layer of the institution.
He’s not yet in the layer where you can find people.
I sit there anyway, until the library starts to feel like a place I’m pretending to be in. Then I leave.
That night I do not sleep. At some point around two I open the laptop again and I search his real name on the open web.
Twice in one day. Before today I had not typed it in two years.
My fingers type it anyway, like they remember.
I look at the obituary. It comes up first, the way it has always come up first. I read it.
I have read it before. I read it again. I look at the photo on the obituary.
The photo is one his mother chose. I was not consulted.
The photo is from a wedding we both went to, the summer before.
He’s in a suit. His hair is shorter than he usually wore it.
He’s smiling the way he smiled when he didn’t want to be photographed but knew he was about to be.
I look at the photo for a long time. The laugh in the coffee shop was that smile’s laugh.
That’s the sentence that lands. It lands quietly, the way the important ones do.
The laugh I heard, the ha, belongs to the face in this photograph.
I knew this already. I have known this for days.
But the photograph is a thing I can look at, and the laugh was a thing I heard, and now they’re connected and there is no taking them apart.
I close the laptop. I sleep for three hours.
In the morning I go to campus and I sit on a bench across from the humanities building and I wait.
This is what I have decided to do. I don’t know if it will work.
I don’t know how often he comes through this building, or if he comes through it at all, or if I have invented an entire schedule for him out of nothing.
I sit on the bench. I have a book open. I am not reading the book.
I am watching the door of the building. People come and go.
Students, faculty, the guy with the tote bag from my Tuesday seminar.
A delivery person carrying a box. A woman walking a dog she should not be walking on this part of campus.
The door opens and closes and opens and closes.
I sit. The book stays open to the same page.
He comes out at eleven-forty. He comes out with two other people.
A girl and a guy. They are talking. They are walking the way friends walk, which is to say not in a straight line.
The girl is on the left, half-turned to him.
The guy is on the right, scrolling his phone.
They are coming toward where I am sitting and I do not move and I do not move and I do not move.
He is laughing. That’s the laugh from the coffee shop.
It’s the laugh from the obituary photograph.
It’s his laugh. I have heard this laugh a thousand times.
It used to come through the wall between his bedroom and his kitchen, when he was on the phone with his sister.
I would hear it from the other room and not look up from whatever I was doing, because there was no need to look up.
The laugh meant he was there. The laugh was always going to be there.
He passes within fifteen feet of me. He doesn’t see me.
He’s talking to the girl. Her face I see now: she has dark hair pulled back.
She’s the one Maya might be — although I don’t know why I think Maya, I don’t know any Maya.
The thought is not mine. I don’t know where it came from.
He passes. They keep walking. He’s gone.
I sit on the bench. I do not move for a while.
He has friends here, two of them at least. They walk with him.
He laughs with them. His hair is shorter.
He is wearing a jacket I have never seen.
He is alive. He has been alive here, in this place, building a life I have nothing to do with.
I close the book. I have not read a word of it. I get up and I walk home. I sit at the desk. I do not open the laptop. Tomorrow I’m going to wait outside that building. I want to see his face do something.