Chapter Twenty — — The Pencil

Chapter Twenty

The Pencil

He still had a pencil.

Not the original — he had not been the kind of fourteen-year-old who preserved things with that quality of foresight. But one of the same kind, found years later in a stationery shop and purchased without the ability to fully explain to himself why. He kept it in the drawer of his desk — not displayed, not placed where it could be seen. In the drawer.

He was not sure what it meant to him now. It was not a shrine. He was past the shrine stage and the pastness was genuine. It was more like a coordinate — a fixed point on the map of the interior that marked the beginning of the education. The beginning of the learning that the feeling is real, that the real feeling requires something of the person who carries it, that something can be made from the requiring even when the thing reached toward does not reach back.

He sat at his desk sometimes in the evenings with the drawer closed and the pencil in the drawer and the city outside conducting its things, and the knowing that the pencil was there was a background fact that accompanied the work without interrupting it. Like the knowing that the city was outside. Like the knowing that the people he had loved were somewhere in the world, doing the things they were doing.

Zakariya means: the one who remembers. He remembered everything. The pencil and the board switch and the refused proposal. The two days without explanation. The gold evening light in a garden and the book marked and set down. The fight at the wrong moment. The waiting that became the giving-up. The cold tea and the morning of the accounting. Omar's voice on the phone. The specific quality of being met.

He remembered everything.

He had stopped believing that the remembering was the problem.

The remembering, examined carefully with the honesty the examining requires, was the only way forward that was also the way through.

He remembered.

He continued.

This, finally, was the story.