What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(68)

Why I don’t like to talk anymore, you read, and then avert your eyes and turn to the page that touches the back cover. There’s an address there, and there’s a good chance this address is current, since it’s written on a scrap of paper that’s been taped over other scraps of paper with other addresses written on them. You copy the address down onto a different piece of paper and then stare, wondering how it can be that letters and numbers you’ve written with a black pen have come out violet-colored. Also—also, while you were looking for pen and paper the diary has been unfolding. Not growing, exactly, but it’s sitting upright on your tabletop and seems to fill or absorb the air around it so that the air turns this way and that, like pages. In fact the book is like a hand and you, your living room, and everything in it are pages being turned this way and that. You go toward the book, slowly and reluctantly—if only you could close this book remotely—but the closer you get to the book the greater the waning of the light in the room, and it becomes more difficult to actually move, in fact it is like walking through a paper tunnel that is folding you in, and there’s chatter all about you: Speak up, Eva and Eva, you talk so fast, slow down, and So you like to talk a lot, huh? You hear: You do know what you’re saying, don’t you? and Excuse me, missy, isn’t there something you ought to be saying right now? and You just say that one more time! You hear: Shhh, and So . . . Do any of you guys know what she’s talking about? and OK, but what’s that got to do with anything? and Did you hear what she just said?

—

IT’S MOSTLY men you’re hearing, or at least they sound male. But not all of them. Among the women Eva can be heard shushing herself. You chant and shout and cuckoo call. You recite verse, whatever’s good, whatever comes to mind. This is how you pass through the building of Eva’s quietness, and as you make that racket of yours you get close enough to the book to seize both covers (though you can no longer see them) and slam the book shut. Then you sit on it for a while, laughing hysterically, and after that you slide along the floor with the book beneath you until you find a roll of masking tape and wind it around the closed diary. Close shave, kiddo, close shave.

—

AT THE WEEKEND you go to the address you found in the diary and a gray-haired, Levantine-looking man answers the door. Eva’s lover? First he tells you Eva’s out, then he says: “Hang on, tell me again who you’re looking for?”

You repeat Eva’s name and he says that Eva doesn’t actually live in that house. You ask since when, and he says she never lived there. But when you tell him you’ve got Eva’s diary he lets you in: “I think I saw her on the roof once.” His reluctance to commit to any statement of fact feels vaguely political. You go up onto the rooftop with no clear idea of whether Eva will be there or not. She’s not. You look out over tiny gardens, big parking lots, and satellite dishes. A glacial wind slices at the tops of your ears. If you were a character in a film this would be a good rooftop on which to battle and defeat some urban representative of the forces of darkness. You place the diary on the roof ledge and turn to go, but then you hear someone shout: “Hey! Hey—is that mine?”

It’s Eva. She’s on the neighboring rooftop. She must have emerged when you were taking in the view. The neighboring rooftop has a swing set up on it, two seats side by side, and you watch as Eva launches herself out into the horizon with perfectly pointed toes, falls back, pushes forward again. She doesn’t seem to remember you even though she only left a few days ago; this says as much about you as it does about her. You tell Eva that even though it looks as if her diary has been vigorously thumbed through you’re sure the contents remain secret. “I didn’t read it, anyway,” you say. The swing creaks as Eva sails up into the night sky, so high it almost seems as if she has no intention of coming back. But she does. And when she does, she says: “So you still think that’s why I locked it?”