Radio dead four days. Not silent — dead, no hiss, the way a thing is dead when the far end has stopped as well. I do not let myself think about the far end.
It is at the foot of the tower. I looked straight down the stairwell an hour ago and it was on the first step, tall enough that on the first step its face was not so far below mine as it should have been, and pale, and turned up, and I held it there with my eyes until my whole body shook and the lamp guttered and I understood the flaw in the only defense I have: I cannot look down the stairwell and watch the trees and write this line, and it lives in the arithmetic of exactly that.
I have propped the shaving mirror to show the stairhead. The old hand was right. It helps, and then you catch yourself watching the mirror instead of the dark it is meant to guard, and the mirror becomes just one more thing that is not the thing, and you have looked away without leaving your chair.
Seventy-four steps. I counted them a hundred times climbing up in June, bored, happy, alone the way I wanted to be alone. I am counting them again by the sound. It does not hurry. It has never once hurried. It does not need to, and that is the whole of what it is: it has simply understood, better than I can bear, that no one can look at one thing forever.
Each line I write here I write with my eyes down. I know what that costs now. I can hear the catwalk take a weight at the corner of the tower, out past the lamp, in the one direction I am not —
I looked up. Nothing. Held it. Held it. My hand wants the page and I cannot give it the page, and the wanting is exactly how the old hand said you know how close it is: by how badly you want to look away.
If you are reading this you found the book, which means you climbed the seventy-four steps, which means you came up into the tower and turned your back on the stairs to reach the shelf where it sits, and you have been reading, head down, for whole minutes now.
Do not finish this line. Look behind y