In the Garden of the Fugitives
Given our history, Vita, I’m aware you may decide not to read this. I turned seventy this past May, though I don’t expect you to care. For me this long-anticipated leap year (mmxx, as the Romans would have written it) has brought unwelcome news. The rest of humankind advances bravely toward its future while I stew in sickness, and in my own nostalgia, as everybody warned would happen at this time of life. It’s the craven need for absolution that has taken me by surprise. My thoughts are tuned ever more to Kitty, and to you. I am not a religious man, yet here I am, stuck in religious mode, coming to you as a supplicant.
I have something to propose, but I need to know you’re still there, that you might be prepared to hear me out.
Yours, Royce
*
Since I broke off contact, I’ve thought about you often. Mostly unkindly. But there – I have thought about you.
You’ve timed your latest entreaty well, which I’m sure is no coincidence. I’m crawling towards the abyss of early middle age myself. In a few months I will turn forty, as you would know. I read your email and was reminded that you’re one of the strangest, most significant things that ever happened to me. I don’t just mean the money. It was the quality of your attention. The generous yet questionable nature of it. Nobody has ever been so invested in me making good on whatever raw talent I once possessed – not even my parents, for their love was always un- conditional.
Yours came with strings attached.
Vita
*
My dear, your reply is more than I deserve. It made me light- headed, poised somewhere between apprehension and happiness.
I’ll be clear about my proposal. Lately, I have begun excavating my memories of Kitty, a process that has been more than cathartic: it has been purgative, purifying. It has taken me a long time to look directly at all the images of her lodged in the undulations of my brain—for years I was stuck on a single, painful frame of her standing at the rim of Vesuvius, a fumarole within its core gently steaming behind her. That was the ending. In writing about her I am finally able to think instead of our beginning. All I need now is a receptive reader.
Perhaps you might like to do something similar for me and dig around in your own past, get rid of whatever it is that blocks you. Forgive me for saying it, but time is running out for you too. I have waited patiently until now for you to fulfill your early artistic promise. Under the right conditions, I believe it is still within your power to alchemize that potential into actual art. The rewards will be worth it; you know they always are with me. I am, if nothing else, an expert listener, something else we have in common.
Yours, Royce
*
My last voluntary contact with you, seventeen years ago—you could not have forgotten —was a letter saying I never wanted to hear from you again. A request you chose to ignore. I could not afford to vanish entirely, and risk losing those bonus cheques with your spidery signature that arrived every two years like clockwork. So there was never a clean break, you always knew where to find me. Once the cheques stopped arriving, exactly ten years after my graduation, the birthday cards continued, asking if I was flourishing.
You’re not of a generation to have these reminders automated. I imagine you still keep a paper diary, ordered from the alumni association of our alma mater, with a dark maroon cover and the crest discreetly embossed on the top right corner. Only those in the know would recognise it: three open books, the Latin for “truth” split into syllables across their pages.
These things mattered to you a great deal, I mean the signifiers of a person’s educational lineage. I recall your college class ring—class
