She doesn’t even read it herself.
Instead she stares at Dean’s byline, his name, below the masthead of the obscure magazine to which he’s been reduced, though he’d never admit this finer point, never admit he threw away his glittering career for a principle, a scruple, a “boussole morale.”
He’d say he was committed to the truth.
In the emails she never answers, he maintains she could commit to it too.
In the emails she never answers, he says, “It looks like you found your place.”
* * *
—
But she’s unfaithful. Unfaithful, also, to the idea of self; that which, after careful analysis, has been diagnosed as the cause of her ills. So she has found equilibrium in these two years by embracing nothingness, a radical emptiness. She works hard at maintaining this uncharismatic shell. She makes sure to stick to the facts and nothing more.
* * *
—
It’s been a hard road. The first few months were the worst. Unmoored, adrift, in pain. Carrying a child. She drank herself almost to death. She doesn’t like to think of those months now. She manages to block them out. But they come back when she drinks. And today, February 24, she drinks.
* * *
—
It’s dark at four in the afternoon. She walks out of the Princess Louise four pints down, into the puddles and streetlamps, crosses the road and slips into the British Museum, past the busloads of tourists and the hot dogs and roasted chestnuts, through the throngs in the Great Court, through the back, down the stairs past the ancient Qur’an, and out to Senate House. A left toward Tottenham Court Road, doubling back and turning down the alleyway to Bradley’s. She descends to the basement, to the smell of stale beer and urine, and listens to the jukebox, sinking into a pint of Spanish beer. She’s crossing over the line. Inviting conversation. Fighting with herself. Why does she do it? As soon as she arrives, she wants to leave.
* * *
—
In these two years, walking has maintained her fragile stability. Walking with her Discman in her palm. Listening to the CDs she carried with her from home. Bj?rk. Talvin Singh. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Walking with nowhere to go, up to Hampstead Heath, Golders Green, out into the suburbs until she can’t take it anymore. East to Old Street, Bethnal Green, Hackney, Clapton, Lee Valley, until she can’t take it anymore. If she hasn’t been studying, she’s been walking. As long as she’s walking, she’s not drowning.
* * *
—
God, she misses Delhi. Misses roti and pickle and curd in the winter sun. Girls fussing over her in tiny, windowless salons. Golgappas in Khan Market. The crowds of Old Delhi. Sweet corn on the side of the road, dressed with chilli and chaat masala and lemon. Misses her dad so much just to think of him makes her cry. Misses her mum. But they barely speak. She doesn’t answer their calls, refuses to have them visit her. To go there herself is out of the question. She has cut herself off. She has agreed to be exiled. “I don’t understand what’s happened to you,” her mother writes. “I don’t know what changed. Maybe you were always this way. You hurt your father so much. You broke his heart, my love.”
* * *
—
Dean had been over to the house. He had written and told her so. “I’m not giving up on this,” he wrote. What had he told them? What had he asked of them? Where had they surmised the money was from?
* * *
—
Maybe she’ll just get up and vanish. Walk somewhere. Walk to Edinburgh, why not? Take her bank card, a backpack, a good pair of hiking boots, and walk. Walk from inn to inn, like in the olden days. Why not? Go up to the Highlands. Find a mountain hut. Live in a cabin by a loch. Speak to no one ever again. Why not?
* * *
—
She is swaying slightly with her eyes closed. A guy is shouting in her ear. Bradley’s. The jukebox, the steam of winter bodies in the enclosed space. He asked her where she was from, and she made the mistake of telling him the truth. He’d thought as much. Either that or Israel. He showed her the sandalwood bracelet he bought in Dharamsala. He was there two years ago. And Goa. “Have you been? I read the Bhagavad Gita there!”
“Good for you.”
“Once you’ve been to India,” he shouts, “you’re not the same. It gets under your skin.”
No shit.
He nods. “And the philosophy! It’s so much more profound. ‘Consciousness knows itself,’ didn’t Krishnamurti say that?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“You’re a funny one.”