She goes around.
Three words.
That’s the format — every entry, for forty-six years: a date, a name, and the one true thing the person had told him that nobody else knew.
I sat in that car for two hours.
I read about ninety pages.
I’m going to put some of them here, because a summary of that notebook is a lie — the whole force of it is that it is the same three-part shape, over and over, for forty-six years, until the repetition becomes the point.
“March 2, 1981. Halvard Nyström. He was never in the Navy.”
“July 19, 1984. Bernice Cobb. The recipe is oregano, not marjoram, and she let her sister be wrong for forty years on purpose.”
“October 30, 1988. Wendell Pike. The girl’s name is Ruth and she was right about the house.”
“January 4, 1990. Anonymous, room 12. Would not give a name. Said: ‘Just write that somebody was here.'”
That one is written exactly like that.
There are nine of those.
Nine people, over forty-six years, who would not give him a name and who used their one true thing to make sure that a notebook somewhere recorded that they had existed on a specific night.
“Just write that somebody was here.”
“August 11, 1996. Odile Fontaine. She is not afraid, and she wants it said that she is not afraid, because everyone keeps telling her it’s all right to be.”
“May 2, 2003. Tobias Reyes. He is sorry about the dog.”
“February 28, 2011. Marguerite Halloran — different Marguerite. She taught 4,100 children and can name 60.”
“September 9, 2018. Dexter Sowande. He didn’t write the song but he named it.”
And then, three hundred pages in, the handwriting starts to change.
It gets larger around 2020.
Shakier by 2023.
And the last forty entries are in a different pen and slope down the page, and one of them — November of last year, four months before I met him — has a note in the margin that is not part of the format.
It says: “Getting hard to hold the pen. Ask Sato about somebody to finish it. No — don’t. Nobody finishes another man’s list.”
Nobody finishes another man’s list.
He wrote that at seventy-two with a heart that was failing, four months before a twenty-nine-year-old volunteer walked into his room, and then he put me on the last line himself, in that shaky pen, eleven days before he d*ed.
“March 14. Willa Brennan. She goes around.”
He’d asked me the question.
I hadn’t known I was being asked.
