Page 18 of Close Reading

The metaphor is structural, not decorative, but you’re right that it’s leaning decorative in the third section. The root network passage needs to earn its weight; right now it’s beautiful but not doing enough work, and beauty without function is just ornamentation. (I say this as someone who has three unfinished grant applications and a dog who ate my reading glasses, so please understand that I am not in a position to lecture anyone about function over form.)

Also: have you read the Tsing piece on contamination as collaboration? It might solve the framing problem. The argument about productive ruin maps onto what you’re doing with the Lorde section; the idea that damage can be generative, that the broken system produces more interesting growth than the intact one. Your third paragraph is already doing this without knowing it. Trust the paragraph.

Also also: why are you awake? Go to sleep. The grading will still be there tomorrow. It is always there. It is eternal. It is the heat death of the universe in paper form. Go to sleep.

I read the email twice.

The first reading is for content. She is right about the Tsing piece; the gap is professionally embarrassing. She is right about the root network passage. She is right about the third paragraph, and the instruction—trust the paragraph—tells me she has read it more carefully than any paragraph of mine has been read by a colleague in a very long time. She saw what it was trying to do before I did.

The second reading is for everything else. The parenthetical about the dog. The also also, which is not a construction I would ever use and which is, despite this, exactly right. A small, unnecessary, perfectly Priya thing to put in a pocket and carry.

The instruction to go to sleep, delivered with a casual concern that assumes the right to be concerned. It has never occurred to her that warmth might be unwelcome.

Go to sleep.

As though she has the right to tell me when to sleep. As though we are the kind of people who tell each other when to sleep.

I laugh.

Out loud. Alone. In my kitchen. At 11:14 on a Tuesday in October.

The laugh surprises me. I do not laugh in this kitchen. I drink tea in this kitchen. I grade papers. Sophia makes me laugh, daily, with impeccable timing. But that is collaborative laughter. This is a woman standing alone in a kitchen at 11:14 laughing at the phrase heat death of the universe in paper form, and the laughter is solitary and spontaneous and warm and I do not know what to do with it.

I do not respond with anything beyond the professional. I write: Thank you. I’ll read the Tsing. Goodnight. I do not add the sentence that forms in my mind and that I delete before it reaches the screen: Thank you for being awake.

I close the laptop. I wash the mug. I stand in the kitchen. The house is quiet. Sophia is asleep upstairs.

Two sentences in one evening. Sophia’s: I like it when the house is loud. Priya’s: Go to sleep.

Both of them tender. Both of them simple. Both of them aimed at a woman who has been standing alone in rooms for twelve years and who has been told, tonight, by two different people she loves in two different ways, that the quiet is not working.

I catch the thought. Two different people she loves in two different ways. I catch. I do not love Priya Anand. I misspoke, even in the privacy of my own mind. The correction is noted.

I go to bed. I lie in the dark. The sheets are cool.

I do not think about the laugh. I do not think about go to sleep or the Tsing piece or the paragraph she told me to trust.

I think about these things anyway. My mind is a sieve, and the thoughts pour through it, and I am too tired to stop them. The thoughts are warm. They settle in the dark the way the laugh settled in the kitchen, uninvited, undeniable, changing the temperature of the room.

I fall asleep with the warmth still there.

In the morning I will put the wall back up. In the morning the system will hold.

But tonight the warmth is here, and I am too tired to send it away, and the last thing I think before sleep is the sentence I deleted from the email.

Thank you for being awake.

10

PRIYA

It is a Tuesday in late October. The drizzle has started. It’s not rain exactly, but something lighter, mistier, the Pacific Northwest’s default setting. It does not require an umbrella. It is simply there, beading on the ground-level window, softening the quad outside into shapes and smudges, making the research space feel like the only room in the world.

We have been working for three hours without stopping and the work is good. It is 7:15. The boys are at Vikram’s. I have been staying late the nights they are at his house. The fluorescent is off. Margot turned it off an hour ago and turned on her lamp, and the lamp casts a warm circle across her desk and leaves the rest of the room private. The room has narrowed to two desks and two people and the warm light and the smell of the Chemex and the particular silence that exists between people who have been working together long enough that the silence has become its own form of conversation.

We are close to the end of a section. Tonight it came together, the passage about root networks clicking into the passage about literary silence, and the satisfaction is shared. I can see it in the way Margot is sitting, slightly less upright than usual, her shoulders an inch lower, the blazer unbuttoned. She looks, in this light, more at ease than I have ever seen her.

“Read me the silence section,” I say.