That Friday Willem doesn’t come to him after all. But the next evening, as he is leaving the office to meet JB for dinner, he turns his head to the right and sees, sitting next to him in the car, Willem. This time, he fancies, Willem is a little harder-edged, a little more solid, and he stares and stares until he blinks and Willem once again dissolves.
After these episodes he is depleted, and the world around him dims as if all its power and electricity has gone toward creating Willem. He instructs Mr. Ahmed to take him home instead of to the restaurant; as he is driven south, he texts JB to tell him he’s feeling sick and can’t make it. He is doing this more and more: canceling plans with people, shoddily and usually unforgivably late—an hour before a hard-to-secure dinner reservation, minutes after a scheduled meeting time at a gallery, seconds before the curtain rises above a stage. Richard, JB, Andy, Harold and Julia: these are the final people who still contact him, persistently, week after week. He can’t remember when he last heard from Citizen or Rhodes or the Henry Youngs or Elijah or Phaedra—it has been weeks, at least. And although he knows he should care, he doesn’t. His hope, his energy are no longer replenishable resources; his reserves are limited, and he wants to spend them trying to find Willem, even if the hunt is elusive, even if he is likely to fail.
And so home he goes, and he waits and waits for Willem to appear to him. But he doesn’t, and finally he sleeps.
The next day he waits in bed, trying to suspend himself between alertness and dazedness, for that (he thinks) is the state in which he is most likely to summon Willem.
On Monday he wakes, feeling foolish. This has got to stop, he tells himself. You have got to rejoin the living. You’re acting like an insane person. Visions? Do you know what you sound like?
He thinks of the monastery, where Brother Pavel liked to tell him the story of an eleventh-century nun named Hildegard. Hildegard had visions; she closed her eyes and illuminated objects appeared before her; her days were aswim with light. But Brother Pavel was less interested in Hildegard than in Hildegard’s instructor, Jutta, who had forsaken the material world to live as an ascetic in a small cell, dead to the concerns of the living, alive but not alive. “That’s what will happen to you if you don’t obey,” Pavel would say, and he would be terrified. There was a small toolshed on the monastery’s grounds, dark and chilly and jumbled with malevolent-looking iron objects, each of them ending in a spike, a spear, a scythe, and when the brother told him of Jutta, he imagined he would be forced into the toolshed, fed just enough to survive, and on and on and on he would live, almost forgotten but not completely, almost dead but not completely. But even Jutta had had Hildegard for company. He would have no one. How frightened he had been; how certain he was that this, someday, would come to pass.
Now, as he lies in bed, he hears the old lied murmur to him. “I have become lost to the world,” he sings, quietly, “in which I otherwise wasted so much time.”
But although he knows how foolish he is being, he still cannot bring himself to eat. The very act of it now repels him. He wishes he were above want, above need. He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-ended arrowhead, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.
And then there is what he doesn’t like to admit to himself but is conscious of thinking. He cannot break his promise to Harold—he won’t. But if he stops eating, if he stops trying, the end will be the same anyway.
Usually he knows how melodramatic, how narcissistic, how unrealistic he is being, and at least once a day he scolds himself. The fact is, he finds himself less and less able to summon Willem’s specifics without depending on props: He cannot remember what Willem’s voice sounds like without first playing one of the saved voice messages. He can no longer remember Willem’s scent without first smelling one of his shirts. And so he fears he is grieving not so much for Willem but for his own life: its smallness, its worthlessness.
He has never been concerned with his legacy, or never thought he had been. And it is a helpful thing that he isn’t, for he will leave nothing behind: not buildings or paintings or films or sculptures. Not books. Not papers. Not people: not a spouse, not children, probably not parents, and, if he keeps behaving the way he is, not friends. Not even new law. He has created nothing. He has made nothing, nothing but money: the money he has earned; the money given to him to compensate for Willem being taken from him. His apartment will revert to Richard. The other properties will be given away or sold and their proceeds donated to charities. His art will go to museums, his books to libraries, his furniture to whoever wants it. It will be as if he has never existed. He has the feeling, unhappy as it is, that he was at his most valuable in those motel rooms, where he was at least something singular and meaningful to someone, although what he had to offer was being taken from him, not given willingly. But there he had at least been real to another person; what they saw him as was actually what he was. There, he was at his least deceptive.