Suddenly I could see her just up ahead. A little thing in a black dress she was ducking & weaving in & out of streetlamps’ pools of light a willowy figure slipping into darkness and out again. Of course she’s crazy I know this I know she wants to kill herself in original fashion she’s been looking for. She’s running to do it- that makes sense. No one saunters to her own death. You don’t keep Death waiting like that. You don’t dawdle.

I lose her & then see her again running along bank of the Seine. Streetlamps cover the river in glitters. Boat’s chugging in. Above I see the Alaskan hiding behind a wall. He holds up a grenade w/ one hand and shoos me away w/ the other. Boat docks & our guys tie it up to the pier. Three Arab men come running down pistols blazing & grenades in hands. Astrid jumps on the boat. They yell at her but she ignores them & the killers don’t know what to do. They don’t want to kill a civilian, no extra money in it.

She’s on the boat refusing to move.

One of the men sees me. Takes a shot & I duck down behind the stone wall.

A siren.

The men consult each other in guttural screams. No time to lose. It’s now or never. I look up at Astrid & her face is small & colorless & braced for death. Her whole face contracted like expecting boat’s explosion to be nothing but loud pop.

– Astrid! Get out of there! I scream.

She looks up & smiles at me eloquently conveying the message that the lacerating misery of her life is taking its final bow. There was an adios in that smile, it was no au revoir.

A second later the boat went up in a series of little explosions. Just like Terry’s suggestion box. Astrid in the middle of it, a wholly unique suicide. Pieces of her everywhere. On the bank. In the Seine. She couldn’t be more scattered if she’d been dust.

People gaping, terribly excited to have witnessed my tragedy.

I walked home leaving Astrid in a million little pieces. No one looked at me. I was unlookable. But from every face I asked forgiveness. Every face was a link in a chain of faces, in one face broken up. Regrets came up & asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty-handed. NEVER would’ve imagined that the dénouement of our love affair would be Astrid blown up into bits. I mean metaphorically maybe.

Never imagined she would ACTUALLY EXPLODE.

Death is full of surprises.

Under the arch I stop & think The baby! Am now sole caregiver me cursed & unclean w/ soul like forgotten limb on battlefield. Thought for first time maybe I should go back to Australia. Suddenly & for no good reason I missed my sun-beaten countrymen.

Back in the apartment her smell everywhere. I told Eddie to go home then went to the baby in bedroom asleep, unaware that his mother’s head & her arms & her face were all in separate locations.

Just me & this grimacing baby.

He woke up screaming from hunger or existential angst. What am I going to do? It’s not like there are any breasts in the refrigerator. I opened up a carton of milk & poured him a cup & then took the cup back to Jasper & poured a little milk into his mouth thinking I’m a widow of sorts. We weren’t married but a baby is a fleshier contract than a flimsy piece of paper.

Found note taped to the bathroom mirror:

I know you will worry how to be a father. You only have to love him. Don’t try to keep him safe from harm. Love him, that’s all you have to do.

Rather simplistic, I thought folding the note. Now I see it was her plan all along even if she herself didn’t know it. To have this child & then dispose of herself.

Astrid dead. Never really knew her. Wonder if she knew I loved her.

Went upstairs & threw some clothes into a bag & then went back into the room & looked at the baby. That’s what I’m doing now. Looking at this baby. My baby. Poor baby. Jasper. Poor Jasper.

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry what terrible tomorrows we’ll have together what shabby luck your soul fell into the body of my son my son your father is love’s lonely cripple. I’ll teach you how to decipher all the confused faces by closing your eyes & how to cringe when someone says the words “your generation.” I will teach you how not to demonize your enemies & how to make yourself unappetizing when the hordes turn up to eat you. I’ll teach you how to yell with your mouth closed & how to steal happiness & how the only real joy is singing yourself hoarse & nude girls & how never to eat in an empty restaurant & how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain & how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. I’ll teach you how to know what’s missing.

We’ll go.

We’ll go home, to Australia.

amp; I’ll teach you that if ever you’re surprised you’re still alive to check again. You can never be too sure about a thing like that.

That was it. The last entry.

I closed the notebook, sick to my stomach. The story of my birth shattered into rubble in my brain. Each broken piece of debris reflected an image from the journal’s story. So, then- out of loneliness, insanity, and suicide, I was laboriously born. Nothing surprising about that.

The following year, on the morning of my mother’s birthday, Dad came into my bedroom while I was dressing.

“Well, mate, it’s the seventeenth of May again.”

“So?”

“You be ready to go after lunch?”

“I have other plans.”

“It’s your mother’s birthday.”

“I know.”

“You’re not coming to the grave?”

“It’s not a grave. It’s a hole. I don’t mourn holes.”

Dad stood there, and I noticed there was a present in his hand. “I got her something,” he said.

“That’s nice.”

“Don’t you want to unwrap it?”

“I’m late,” I said, leaving him alone in my bedroom with his sad and pointless gift.

Instead I took myself to the harbor to look at the boats. During the year that had passed, I thought against my will of all that was in my father’s journal. No piece of writing before or since has burned so permanently into my memory. Despite the clever tricks in the art of forgetting my mind knows, they have no impact here. I remember every frightening word.

I sat all day, watching the boats. Or else I looked down at the rocks and the slick, shiny coat of oil floating on top of the water. I stayed there a long time. I stayed until the moon rose and a curtain of stars was drawn across the sky and the lights on the harbor bridge shone out of the darkness. All the boats nodded gently in the dark.

My soul is ambitious and mercenary in its desire to know itself. Dad’s journal left this aim unsatisfied, and my mother’s story was more of a mystery than when I knew nothing at all. I had ascertained that my mother was probably insane and of unknown origins. Other than that, my investigation had led only to more questions. About my father, it didn’t surprise me that I had been violently unwanted. The only concrete thing I learned about her was that my birth was the final item on her to-do list, and once she’d checked it off, it allowed her to die. I was born to clear the obstacles on her pathway to death.

It got cold. I shivered a little.

The rhythms of the universe were perceptible in the way the boats were nodding at me.

A few years later I went back to the cemetery. My mother’s grave was gone. There was someone new there, wedged in between old Martha Blackman and little Joshua Wolf. Her name was Frances Pearlman. She’d been forty-seven years old. She left behind two sons, a daughter, and a husband.