FIFTEEN

AFTER I GOT HOME THAT NIGHT, I went to bed but not to sleep. I kept starting texts to him and then not sending them, until finally I put the phone down and took my laptop out. I was wondering what had happened to Davis’s online life—where he’d gone once he shut down his social media profiles.

The google hits related to Davis were overwhelmingly about his father—“Pickett Engineering CEO Reveals in Interview He Won’t Leave a Dime to His Teenage Children,” etc. Davis hadn’t updated his Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or blog since the disappearance, and searches for his two usernames, dallgoodman and davisnotdave02, turned up only links to other people.

So I started looking for similar usernames: dallgoodman02, davisnotdave, davisnotdavid, then guessing at Facebook and blog URLs. And then after more than an hour, just after midnight, it finally occurred to me to search for the phrase, “the leaves are gone you should be, too.”

A single link came up, to a blog with the username isnotid02. The site had been created two months earlier, and like Davis’s previous journal, most of the entries began with a quote from someone else and then concluded with a short, cryptic essay. But this site also had a tab called poems. I clicked over to the journal and scrolled down until I reached the first entry:

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.”

—ROBERT FROST

Fourteen days since the mess began. My life isn’t worse, exactly—just smaller. Look up long enough and you start to feel your infinitesimality. The difference between alive and not—that’s something. But from where the stars are watching, there is almost no difference between varieties of alive, between me and the newly mown grass I’m lying on right now. We are both astonishments, the closest thing in the known universe to a miracle.

“And then a Plank in Reason, broke / And I dropped down, and down—”

—EMILY DICKINSON

There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way—one for every person who ever lived, more or less. I was thinking about that beneath the sky tonight, unseasonably warm, as good a showing of stars as one gets around here. Something about looking up always makes me feel like I’m falling.

Earlier, I heard my brother crying in his room, and I stood next to the door for a long time, and I know he knew I was there because he tried to stop sobbing when the floorboards creaked under my footstep, and I just stood out there for the longest time, staring at his door, unable to open it.

“Even the silence / has a story to tell you.”

—JACQUELINE WOODSON

The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.

“The world is a globe—the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.”

—TERRY PRATCHETT

Sometimes I open Google Maps and zoom in on random places where he might be. S came by last night to walk us through what happens now—what happens if he’s found, what happens if he’s not—and at one point he said, “You understand that I’m referring now not to the physical person but to the legal entity.” The legal entity is what hovers over us, haunting our home. The physical person is in that map somewhere.

“I am in love with the world.”

—MAURICE SENDAK

We always say that we are beneath the stars. We aren’t, of course—there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human—we are whos, other animals are thats—but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.

Eventually, a she showed up.

“What’s past is prologue.”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Seeing your past—or a person from your past—can for me at least be physically painful. I’m overwhelmed by a melancholic ache—and I want the past back, no matter the cost. It doesn’t matter that it won’t come back, that it never even actually existed as I remember it—I want it back. I want things to be like they were, or like I remember them having been: Whole. But she doesn’t remind me of the past, for some reason. She feels present tense.

The next entry was posted late the night he’d given me the money, and more or less confirmed that the she was me.

“Awake, dear heart, awake. Thou hast slept well. Awake.”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

I wonder if I fucked it up. But if I hadn’t done it, I’d have wondered something else. Life is a series of choices between wonders.

“The isle is full of noises.”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The thought, would she like me if I weren’t me, is an impossible thought. It folds in upon itself. But what I mean is would she like me if the same body and soul were transported into a different life, a lesser life? But then, of course, I wouldn’t be me. I would be someone else. The past is a snare that has already caught you. A nightmare, Dedalus said, from which I am trying to awake.

And then the most recent entry:

“This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine.”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.

It was only after reading every journal entry that I noticed the ones about me began with quotes from The Tempest. I felt like I was invading his privacy, but it was a public blog, and spending time with his writing felt like spending time with him, only not as scary. So I clicked over to the poems section.

The first one went:

My mother’s footsteps

Were so quiet

I barely heard her leave.

Another:

You must never let truth get in the way of beauty,

Or so e. e. cummings believed.

“This is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart,”

He wrote of love and longing.

That often got him laid I’m sure,

Which was the poem’s sole intent.

But gravity differs from affection:

Only one is constant.

And then the first poem, written on the same day as the first journal entry, two weeks after his father’s disappearance.

He carried me around my whole life—

Picked me up, took me here and there, said

Come with me. I’ll take you. We’ll have fun.

We never did.

You don’t know a father’s weight

Until it’s lifted.

As I reread the poem, my phone buzzed. Davis. Hi.

Me: Hi.

Him: Are you on my blog right now?

Me: . . . Maybe. Is that okay?

Him: I’m just glad it’s you. My analytics said someone from Indianapolis has been on the site for 30 minutes. I got nervous.

Me: Why?

Him: I don’t want my terrible poems published in the news.

Me: Nobody would do that. Also stop saying your poems are terrible.

Him: How did you find it?

Me: Searched “the leaves are gone you should be too.” Nothing anyone else would know to search.

Him: Sorry if I sound paranoid I just like posting there and don’t want to have to delete it.

Him: It was nice to see you tonight.

Me: Yeah.

I saw the . . . that meant he was typing, but no words came, so after a while, I wrote him.

Me: Do you want to facetime?

Him: Sure.

My fingers were trembling a little when I tapped the button to start a video call. His face appeared, gray in the ghostlight of his phone, and I held a finger up to my mouth and whispered, “Shh,” and we watched each other in silence, our barely discernible faces and bodies exposed through our screens’ dim light, more intimate than I could ever be in real life.

As I looked at his face looking at mine, I realized the light that made him visible to me came mostly from a cycle: Our screens were lighting each of us with light from the other’s bedroom. I could only see him because he could see me. In the fear and excitement of being in front of each other in that grainy silver light, it felt like I wasn’t really in my bed and he wasn’t really in his. Instead, we were together in the non-sensorial place, almost like we were inside the other’s consciousness, a closeness that real life with its real bodies could never match.

After we hung up, he texted me. I like us. For real.

And somehow, I believed him.