Adam
ADAM
T he days go fast at first. I am talking with a grieving Zoya, finally getting the full interview she promised to give.
I am driving to Alta, staging Roland’s place for the inevitable search once he is reported missing. I am putting kale in the fridge and waiting for it to start wilting. I am watching the last of the winter snow.
I am turning around and heading for Los Angeles, trying to shake off the uncanny discomfort of driving through Latter-day Saint country again: Lehi, American Fork, Orem. I stop in Provo for gas and see a young straight couple kissing on the temple lawn. Mormon kids are still coming off the assembly line, even now. Some of them will glide through life; others will be like me, catching on every piece of it.
I am boarding my return flight to Newark, triple-checking that my warped and tattered Moleskine is still in my carry-on bag whenever I sit down. The publisher has the scans now, but still. I leapt off a cliff for it.
I am managing Paul’s emotions as he processes news of the delay. Roland’s last-minute email worked; the publisher postponed the release until 2025.
I am home, bracing myself for Roland to be found. I am turning on push notifications for TMZ. Billie Eilish canceled a show somewhere, my phone informs me. I don’t care.
I am telling myself I will rest first, then start typing up my handwritten pages. The publisher won’t need the book for a few months. I have time to polish and redraft the version in my notebook. But the first morning I wake up in New Jersey, I open Word and start typing. The words don’t flow out of me; they crash like the waves that carried me to shore, sudden and hard, letters landing on the page by the thousands. I want to finish while it’s still fresh. While I can still hear his voice coming out from my chest.
I am watching TV during a break one night when I see Zoya on The Tonight Show . She is plugging the Z and Jimmy Fallon is blushing, bashfully repeating “Oh my gosh” like he’s never heard of a vibrator before. “It’s a family show!” he yells as Zoya keeps teasing him about it. She puts one of the Zs on his desk and they have to pixelate it.
The publisher is emailing me, telling me they’re “monitoring the news of Roland’s disappearance,” but really, they just want to know when they can see my pages. Along with the rest of the world, they are starting to suspect what I already know.
The day I complete the manuscript, the notification comes. For a second, I wonder if it’s Roland inhabiting my phone somehow. The timing is too perfect. But it’s real. It’s on every news website on the planet, in every alphabet known to man. They found him in a thawing snow drift, just like he said. And even though I believed Roland from the start—or near the start, I suppose—it’s strange nonetheless to confirm the facticity of the thing: I spent a month talking to a dead man, and I fell in love with a ghost.
I am fielding messages from the publisher that sound sorrowful on the surface but are suffused with excitement. They know they’re sitting on a gold mine now. They’re bound by the release date Matt negotiated, but they desperately want the draft. They’re salivating over it. Salivating sadly , of course. But I take my time and do another pass. They may have recovered Roland’s body, but no one knows his heart. Not truly. I want it to be right. Not perfect, but right , just like what we shared in that house.
Time only decelerates when I get the email. I’m sitting on my couch when it comes, with my cat on my lap, doing the Saturday crossword puzzle on my phone. It’s from Roland. For a second my heart thumps in my chest at the possibility that he’s found a way to talk to me still. But the first line explains that he scheduled it after we got him to the computer that last day.
“By now, you’ve written the whole book, I’m sure, and I’m also sure it’s fantastic,” Roland wrote. “But I tried my hand at a prologue while you were sleeping. Edit it as you see fit.”
My eyes flick down to confirm there’s an attachment, then I continue reading.
“I don’t know what’s waiting for me on the other side, but I do know this: you’ll bring beauty and goodness into this world with every word you write. Don’t stop believing that. And please keep jumping off cliffs—just not literally anymore, OK?”
I can barely read the rest of it through the blur of my own tears. “Thank you for loving me before I went, Adam. You saw me without seeing me. You touched me without touching me. If something good comes after this, I’ll see you there. Not for a while, though, OK? Promise me you’ll at least make it to forty-two.”
After I finish, I open a reply window. He probably can’t read anything I send him now. I hope there isn’t any email in the actual afterlife. But I have to say something back. What do I know? Roland might be able to read it somehow. Even after our month in Malibu, I’m still not any clearer on death or God or any of it.
I type: “I don’t know about beauty and goodness, but you’ll be in every word I write, Roland Rogers. Until we meet again.”
I hit send.