Part Five: The Funeral

Entry 36. 2042. The borrowed year. The boat.

The legal pad in Terrance's kitchen said, in Roman numerals, winter 2041–42. We missed the cornerstone by a year, and the record should have the reasons in their true order, because the histories assume the delay was tradecraft and the truth is that tradecraft was third.

First: I wanted one more Qingming. It is that simple and the record can survive the simplicity. The table had been kept exactly once by the new keeper. Once is not a custom; once is an accident that happened to go well. I wanted the second rendering, wanted to stand in the April backyard one more time as the man whose name the dead would recognize without footnotes, before the news I delivered to the smoke would have to begin, forever after, with an alias and an explanation. A man planning his own drowning discovers what he actually believes in, and it turns out I believed in the fussing: the twenty minutes east-southeast, the nine oranges, the cumin annotation. You may bury a name, I found, but you do not skip its holidays.