now I have entered the year without words

Adam held my wrists. He pushed me down on the bed. He knew the statue’s name, but he wouldn’t tell me—it was something that I had to find out for myself. As he pushed me down, I thought: Adam was made to know and I was made not to know. All I was made to do is endure. All I was made to do is listen and wait. I could be a sun-bleached statue standing in the ruins of a city. I could dream of that tower. That’s how I stand: as if I’m remembering something, as if I’m looking backward. I was made to be a body in mourning. I began that way and I’ll finish that way too. Everything else belongs to an interval. There is nothing that can be added to me because I am an interval between a beginning and an ending and both look the same; I am a line stretched between two fixed and stony points. The points cannot be moved. The line is inflexible. But Adam knows the name of the statue and the name of the city and possibly the name of the tower too—they all have the same name—and he whispers it in my ear so quietly that I cannot understand him, and I gasp with frustration, and this is the moment that—

My father was studying me in the old way, looking for a reaction that he could translate into his words, an expression he could set to paper. Nothing he had said had meant anything. He had told me another story, either the plot from one of his old books, one that I could scarcely remember, or the plot from a novel he had yet to write. Telling me was his way of beginning. His claim to be finished with writing was a lie, of course. My father would write books for as long as he lived. He had simply taken up another position, another pose. There was no truth in anything that he said. The only truth was that once there had been a staircase. But I had never been able to remember what had happened on it, nothing except a featureless expanse of shadow, a dark unholy shape. When I dreamed of that staircase, I only ever saw it from below. In those dreams I am lying on my back and staring up a dark staircase whose end I can’t see. The stairs had to have led to another floor, I reasoned. But the image of a landing eluded me. What I saw instead was a tunnel without beginning or end. If I could have turned my head I might have seen more steps behind me. In these dreams I was too weak to go either forward or backward. I didn’t know whether to believe my father or not. It was the same old story. They had pretended not to speak of it, but they did. It was the only topic of conversation. I couldn’t remember if anything had happened. I couldn’t remember anything but the stairs and the way they had once appeared before me. But maybe even this was only because just like me they were there in every one of his stories in varying degrees. It was only what happened on the stairs or around them that was subject to change.

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a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden transparencies through which one sees everything.

Sometimes at night I think of how we did It, me nailed in her like steel,