Chapter 24 Griffin #3
“I keep the same patterns. I don’t change my routes.
Changing routes is a thing that gets noticed.
I walk the way I walk. I come over the nights I come over.
I don’t check over my shoulder more than I’ve been checking.
I act exactly the way a person acts who hasn’t seen a car.
The way I’ve been acting since October.”
“Okay.”
I sit with this. I sit with the practical part of it, which is that he has thought about it on the way over, and the structural part of it, which is that he has come to me with it.
He has come to me with the thing he would have hidden in October.
The not-hiding is the new shape of the thing.
I have been told, by him and by Mendez and by my own three months of watching, what the new shape is supposed to look like. Now I am inside it.
“I want you to tell me if you see another,” I say. “Even if you decide before you get to my door that it’s nothing. Even if you’ve decided by the time you sit down on this chair that you’re pattern-matching from a place of nervousness. I want to know.”
“Okay.”
“Even the cars you do not think are cars. Even the things that are probably not anything. The things you would have sat with in October. I want them. I will sit with them with you.”
“Okay.”
He doesn’t say anything else. I sit on the couch.
He sits on the chair. The beans are quiet on the stove now that I’ve turned the burner down.
Outside the apartment a person walks past on the sidewalk and the sound of the footsteps goes by and goes away.
Reed has his hands on his knees. He’s sitting the way he’s sat for three months when something is hard — forward, elbows on his thighs, hands open.
I get up. I come around the coffee table.
I sit on the arm of the chair he’s in. I put my hand on the back of his neck.
He leans his head against my hip. We’re in the living room of my apartment in the way two people are in a room when leaving has been ruled out.
I haven’t said anything. He hasn’t said anything. The room knows.
After a while I get up. I go to the kitchen.
I stir the beans. He follows me a minute later.
He stands in the doorway and watches me stir.
We do not talk about the car for the rest of the night.
The not-talking is its own shape now, the shape of a thing we have already handled together, the shape of a thing that is going to come up again at the kitchen table tomorrow when Mendez has not yet called and the day after when Mendez has not yet called and the day after that when, eventually, Mendez does call, and Reed picks up the phone.
Mendez calls on day twelve, on Reed’s line.
Reed phones me from his apartment — come over, he’s calling back in twenty minutes.
I put on my coat and walk it in fourteen.
He is at the desk with the phone in front of him, the way he was the morning we called twelve days ago.
His hand flat on the desk. His face still.
His shoulders too high. I sit on the couch and don’t say anything. The phone rings. He puts it on speaker.
“Mendez.”
“Hi.”
“Reed. Griffin there?”
“Yes.”
“Hi, Griffin.”
“Hi.”
“Okay. Here is where we are.”
We listen. We listen for ten minutes. Mendez talks the way Mendez talks, which is in numbered points, and he goes through the points the way he went through them last time.
The decision has been made above him. The decision is that Reed is being moved.
The move is going to happen at the end of the term, late March, early April, to give Reed time to finish the academic year and exit cleanly.
The relocation is to be determined. Mendez does not yet know the destination.
The new placement will be in a town with no academic connection to either of us, which is going to mean Reed is not going to be in a graduate program in his new placement.
The program has decided that the academic-program placement was a mistake the first time and will not be repeated.
“Reed. You will exit your program with whatever cover story we agree on. Family emergency. Health issue. To be determined. Hellman gets a letter. The school gets a letter. You disappear cleanly.”
“Okay.”
“Griffin.”
“Yes.”
“Your decision still stands. Three options. Stay and have no contact. Stay and have specified-protocol contact. Or come.”
“Okay.”
“You do not need to decide today. You need to decide by the first week of March. That is six weeks. That is the window.”
“Okay.”
“Questions.”
Neither of us has questions.
“Okay,” he says. “Six weeks.”
“Six weeks,” Reed says.
“And Griffin.”
“Yes.”
“Whatever you decide. There is no judgment from this end about which thing you decide. I want you to know that. The three options are real options. People pick all three. There is no… the people in my office do not have an opinion about which one you should pick. We will support you in any of them.”
“Okay.”
“Decide for yourself. Not for him.”
“Okay.”
He hangs up.
The apartment is quiet. Reed is at the desk.
I am on the couch. Reed has not turned around.
His back is to me. I watch his back. His shoulders have not come down.
His hand is still flat on the desk. I get up.
I go to him. I put my hands on his shoulders.
I do the thing I did twelve days ago, which is press down, gently, until the shoulders come down.
They come down a little. Not all the way.
He puts his hand on top of mine. He does not turn around.
“Late March,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Six weeks for you to decide.”
“Yeah.”
“No Ph.D.”
“No Ph.D.”
He is quiet for a long time.
“Griffin.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d been telling myself the Ph.D. would be the thing that survived.”
“I know.”
“I’d been telling myself that whatever else changed, the Ph.D. would be the through-line. I’d been working on it. Doing the work. The seminars. The papers. The exams coming next year. I’d been doing it the whole time, since September, even when I was…“
“I know.”
“And now they are taking it.”
“They are.”
“They are taking the second thing.”
I sit with that. The first thing was me.
The second thing is the work. I do not say they are not taking me.
I do not say it because saying it would be making the conversation about me, and the conversation is not about me right now.
The conversation is about Reed losing the second thing, and my job right now is to let him lose it, on his own desk, with my hands on his shoulders, without me making it about whether I am the third thing. He sits with it.
“Griffin.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to come.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“I am not asking you to. I am going to lose the Ph.D. either way. I am going to be a guy in a town with a different name with no graduate school and a job I do not know yet. That is what I am going to be. That is what I am asking you to come to. If you come.”
“I know.”
“I do not want you to make the decision out of obligation. Or out of guilt. Or out of… Griffin. There is a version of the next two months where you decide to come because you cannot bear the thought of saying no. I do not want that version. I want you to make the decision because you have looked at the three options and you have decided what you want, and what you want is the third one. Or the second one. Or the first one. I want you to decide.”
“Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“I am going to decide. I am not going to decide tonight. I have six weeks. I am going to take the six weeks. I am going to think about it. I am going to actually think about it.”
“Yeah.”
“And when I decide, you are going to know that I decided. Not that I drifted into it. Decided.”
I nod.
“That is what I can give you tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Is that enough.”
He turns the chair. He looks up at me.
“Yes,” he says. “That is enough.”
“Okay.”
“Griffin.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever you decide.”
“I know.”
“Whatever you decide, I am going to be…“
“I know. Reed. I know.”
“Okay.”
I keep my hands on his shoulders. He keeps his hand on mine.
We stay like that for a while, in his apartment, with the desk and the laptop and the empty top of the dresser and the bed in the bedroom made flat.
We stay until I bend down and put my forehead against the top of his head, and he close his eyes. Six weeks.
I file six weeks. I file late March. I file no Ph.D. I file decide.
Outside, somewhere, a car starts. Somewhere a person is making dinner.
Somewhere my sister is at her kitchen table grading papers — waiting for me to call her again, waiting for me to tell her a date, waiting for me to be the brother I am, in whatever life I am about to have. I close my eyes. We stay there.