by John Haskell
I say something to her.
It doesn’t matter.
And that’s when I say goodbye.
I feel the fading now, and rather than fight it, I’m ready to fade. I’m ready now to fade away completely.
When I say the word “Goodbye,” more than actually saying it, I think it. To her. I think goodbye. I send some kind of feeling to her, and Linda senses that something is happening. She’s holding the marshmallow skewer in one hand, and she looks in my direction. One last time. I look at her face, the face of a person living in the world. And then she bends over the fire.
They say that the readiness is all, and when I leave the circle and walk to a deserted part of the beach, I’m ready. I can hear the ocean, the waves of the ocean, the gentle waves. I can hear the voices of the people at the campfire being replaced by the sounds of the ocean. I face the sky, which is filled with color.
I like the sunset, and not just because it’s the only time you can look directly at the sun. I like the light. I turn around and the side of the cliff is lit by the golden light. I see, near the base of the wooden stairs coming down the cliff, a shower, and someone washing sand off a boogie board.
They call it painful beauty because it’s only here so long, and then it’s over. Even when it’s here, even as we experience it, it’s over. And because I realize it’s over, I’m holding on to that beauty, and even the sense of beauty, as long as I can.
I walk down to where the sand is wet and firm, away from the fires and the light. I take off my shoes and socks. I roll up my borrowed pants and take a step toward the water. A small wave trickles over my foot and my toes can feel the cold.
I would have thought that, being dead, the temperature of the water wouldn’t affect me, but it does. So I stay where I am, ankle deep more or less, and just stand under the sky in the cold moving water.
Then I turn around. I face the cliff.
I see Anne, standing at the base of the cliff. She’s looking at me, holding her shoes in her hand. At first I don’t believe it’s her. But then she waves. I don’t wave, but I walk out of the water and go to her. And when I get to her, there she is. White pants, yellow shirt. And it is Anne. I follow her up the wooden steps along the side of the cliff.
She begins walking along the grass at the lip of the cliff until she comes to a railing. She stops. She puts one hand on the railing. Her face is reflecting the light of the sun that’s already set.
She’s looking at me.
“You made it out,” she says.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“I’m here.”
“It’s warm here.”
“It’s summer,” she says.
You wouldn’t be able to hear her voice, but I can.
I take a deep breath.
“It’s funny,” I say, “seeing you here. It seems normal.”
“Why not?” she says. She smiles. “Look at the stars.”
I look up at the sky, neither dark nor light. “It’s too early to see any stars,” I say.
“Some,” she says, and she points to one, about halfway up. She was always good at finding stars.
She sits down on a cement bench overlooking the water. I wait while she puts her shoes on. I watch her tie the laces, and then we’re walking again, side by side, not looking at each other. Occasionally a sentence or a word comes out of one of us.
“The air feels good,” she says.
“I know,” I say, and I feel the air, around me and in me, and—
7.
You probably can’t see us anymore, walking along the edge of the cliff. We’re invisible now, although we don’t quite know it.
We’re walking. We know that. Our footsteps are very quiet. Our voices are silent.
And it’s not a matter of accepting death. It doesn’t happen like that. “Accepting” is a word in a dictionary and what happens isn’t a word, just like clouds aren’t words, or the man driving by with his arm out the window isn’t a word.
But they happen. They all happen, and then they’re gone.
Clouds, people, buildings, laughter, darkness. It all happens, and then it’s gone. The piece of yellow paper in the street. The sounds of children in the distance. It fades away completely. The puddle in the sidewalk and the memory of the puddle.
And then it’s gone.
Additional Acclaim for American Purgatorio
“Haunting … It would have been easy for John Haskell to turn this novel into a mere literary trick, drawing in the reader with technical virtuosity. But the grace of it all is that he infuses this strange world with the sense of consequence, that as the novel progresses, we become more invested in the narrator’s life.”
—The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
“It’s what every writer strives for—an event both surprising and inevitable. American Purgatorio is a serious, admirable novel, well worth reading.”
—Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book World
“An excellent first novel … [American Purgatorio] is a testament to Haskell’s awareness that life, like fiction, is both inherently mysterious and inherently too vivid, too strange, too marvelous not to keep wondering about.”
—Rain Taxi
“Haskell, whose short-story collection promised the raw wit of thirtysomething passive-aggressive lit, now proves that he can keep it going for the novel, adding mystery and kindness to his palette.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Haskell has written one of the most interesting, intricate, and intimately nuanced novels of the season.”
—Flaunt Magazine
“Extraordinary … Haskell has become one of the most fascinating new talents in American fiction.… The narrative abstractionist has ever-so-carefully metamorphosed into a gripping storyteller; the theatrical monologist has been transformed into a novelist, both richly familiar and, somehow, newly minted.”
—The Buffalo News
“It’s more and more evident that Haskell is a writer to keep an eye on, if only for his ability to mix the fantastic and realistic in strange, compelling, and humane ways.”
—Ruminator
Also by John Haskell
I Am Not Jackson Pollock
John Haskell is the author of the short-story collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock. His work has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, Conjunctions, and Ploughshares. A contributor to the radio program The Next Big Thing, Haskell lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The author would like to express his gratitude to the MacDowell Colony, where parts of this book were written.
AMERICAN PURGATORIO. Copyright © 2005 by John Haskell. All rights reserved. For information, address
Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haskell, John, 1958–
American purgatorio / John Haskell.
p. cm.
EAN 978-0-312-42499-2
1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Married people—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.A79A83 2005
813'.6—dc22
2004020087
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
eISBN 9781466855106
First eBook edition: September 2013
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