Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

Black birds. Disastrous lead-colored skies out of Egbert van der Poel.

I stood and snapped on the desk light, swaying in the weak, urine-colored glow. There was waiting. There was running away. But these were not so much choices as endurance measures: the useless scurries and freezes of a mouse in a snake tank, serving only to prolong discomfort and suspense. And there was also a third choice: since for various reasons I felt that a consulate member would be fairly speedy to return my call if I left an after-hours message stating that I was an American citizen wishing to turn myself in for capital murder.

Act of rebellion. Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever. Why not beat Fate to the punch? Throw the book on the fire and be done with it? There was no end in sight to the present horror, plenty of external, empirical horror to line up with my own endogenous supply; and, given enough dope (inspecting the bag: less than half left), I would happily have set up a fat line and toppled right over: great-souled darkness, explosion of stars.

But there wasn’t enough to be sure of finishing myself off. I didn’t want to waste what I had on a few hours of oblivion only to wake up again in my cage (or, worse: in a Dutch hospital with no passport). Then again my tolerance was down and I was pretty sure I had enough to do the job if I got good and drunk first and topped it off with my emergency pill.

Bottle of chilled white in the mini-bar. Why not? I drank the rest of my gin and uncorked it, feeling resolute and jubilant—I was hungry, they’d restocked the crackers and cocktail snacks but this was all going to work a lot better on an empty stomach.

The relief was immense. Quiet dismissal. Perfect, perfect joy of throwing it all away. I found a classical station on the radio—Christmas plainchant, somber and liturgical, less melody than a spectral commentary on it—and thought about running myself a bath.

But that could wait. Instead I opened the desk and found a folder of hotel stationery. Gray cathedral stone, minor hexachords. Rex virginum amator. Between fever, and canal water lapping outside, the space around me had fallen quietly into haunted doubleness, a border zone which was both hotel room and the cabin of a gently tossing ship. Life on the high seas. Death by water. Andy, when we were kids, telling me in his eerie Martian-boy voice that he’d heard on the Learning Channel that Mary protected sailors, that one of the protections of the Rosary was that you would never die by drowning. Mary Stella Maris. Mary Star of the Sea.

I thought of Hobie at midnight mass, kneeling in the pew in his black suit. Gilding wears away naturally. On a cabinet door, on the flap of a bureau, there are often a quantity of tiny indentations.

Objects seeking out their rightful owners. They had human qualities. They were shifty or honest or suspicious or fine.

Really remarkable pieces do not appear on the scene from nowhere.

The hotel pen wasn’t great, I wished I had a better one, but the paper was creamy and thick. Four letters. Hobie’s and Mrs. Barbour’s would have to be the longest, as they were the persons who most deserved an explanation and also because they were the only persons who, if I died, would actually care. But I would write to Kitsey as well—to assure her that it wasn’t her fault. Pippa’s letter would be the shortest. I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back.

But I wouldn’t say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart. The point was to let her know, briefly, how happy she had made me while leaving out all the more obvious part.

When I shut my eyes, I was struck by clinically sharp flashes of memory that the fever brought bursting up from nowhere, like tracer rounds going off in the jungle, lurid flares of highly detailed and emotionally complex material. Harpstrings of light through the barred windows of our old apartment on Seventh Avenue, scratchy sisal matting and the red waffled texture it left in my hands and knees when I was playing down on the floor. A tangerine party dress of my mother’s with shiny things on the skirt I always wanted to touch. Alameda, our old housekeeper, mashing plantains in a glass bowl. Andy, saluting me before stumbling down the gloomy hall of his parents’ apartment: Aye, Captain.

Medieval voices, austere and otherworldly. The gravity of unadorned song.

I didn’t actually feel upset, that was the thing. Instead it was more like the last and worst of my root canals when the dentist had leaned in under the lamps and said almost done.

December 24

Dear Kitsey,

I’m terribly sorry about this but I want you to know that it has nothing to do with you, and nothing to do with any of your family. Your mother will be receiving a separate letter which will have a bit more information but in the meantime I want to assure you, privately, that my course of action has not been influenced by anything that has happened between us, especially events of late.

Where this stiff voice, and unnaturally stiff handwriting had come from—incongruous with the cloudbursts of memory and hallucination crashing in on me from all sides—I did not know. The wet sleet pelting against the windowpanes had a kind of deep historical weight to it, starvation, armies marching, a never-ending drizzle of sadness.

As you well know, and have pointed out to me yourself, I have numerous problems that began long before I met you, and none of these problems are your fault. If your mother has questions for you about your role in recent events, I should urge you to refer her to Tessa Margolis, or—even better—Em, who will be more than delighted to share her views on my character. Also—completely unrelated matter, but I also urge you not to let Havistock Irving into your apartment again, ever.

Kitsey as a child. Fine hair straggling in her face. Shut up you goofballs. Cut it out or I’ll tell.

Last but not least—

(my pen hovering over this line)

last but not least I want to tell you how beautiful you looked at the party and how touched I was that you wore my mother’s earrings. She was crazy about Andy—she would have loved you too, and would have loved for us to be together. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. But I do hope things work out for you. Really.

Best love,

Theo

Sealed; addressed; put aside. They’d have stamps at the front desk.

Dear Hobie,

This is a hard letter to write and I’m sorry to be writing it.

Alternate sweats and frosts. I was seeing green spots. My fever was so high the walls seemed to be shrinking.

This isn’t about the bad pieces I’ve sold. I expect you’ll hear soon enough what it’s about.

Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time.

The effects of time, visible and invisible.

and, I don’t quite know how to say this but I guess what I’m thinking about is this sick puppy my mother and I found on the street in Chinatown. She was lying in a space between two garbage cans. She was a baby pit bull. Smelly, dirty. Skin and bones. Too weak to stand up. People just walking by her. And I got upset and my mother promised me that we’d pick her up if she was still there when we finished eating. And when we got out of the restaurant, there she still was. So we hailed a cab, I carried her in my arms, and when we got her home my mother made her a box in the kitchen and she was so happy and licked our faces and drank a ton of water and ate the dog food we bought her and threw it all right back up.

Well to make a long story short, she died. It wasn’t our fault. We felt like it was. We took her in to the vet, and bought her special food, but she only got sicker and sicker. We were both really fond of her by this time. And my mother took her in again, to a specialist at the Animal Medical Center. And the vet said—this dog has a disease, which I forget the name of, and she had it when you found her, and I know this is not what you want to hear but it is going to be a whole lot kinder if you euthanize her right now