Look In the Mirror

by Catherine Steadman

Death, it turns out, to those left behind, is an activity centered around the cataloging and dispersal of material objects.

That if I discovered more, I might lose the old idea of who my father was. That I might find out something out there that destroyed my memory of him and I might, in a sense, lose him again with even more permanence.

Maria knows bitterness is a pointless emotion.

Silence sets the imagination on fire.

The Darién Gap—a five-thousand-square-kilometer strip of rain forest connecting South and Central America, one of the most dangerous places on the planet—had almost killed them.

Eyes blurring, she takes in her space, her things, the pictures on her walls, her possessions, things she used to care so much about, each item now seeming alien to her somehow.

After all, who in God’s name gives, or receives, a copy of The Waste Land as a lover’s token? Nina knows the content of the poem, start to end, she’s even lectured on it recently, among other things. It is not a joyful poem, not a lover’s poem; it’s a poem about disillusionment, emptiness, and the garble of humanity.

Maria has noted that neighbors in this affluent area of London don’t appear to speak, know, or even acknowledge one another. They have priced themselves right out of the necessity for conversation.

In her hand she carried a copy of John Hepworth’s lesser-known and only work of fiction, Vauxhall Bridge in the Rain, a postwar Graham Greene–style doomed-romance novella. A work his publisher had clearly felt obligated to print given his otherwise brilliant nonfiction output. It wasn’t that it was bad, Lucinda reasoned—having read all 156 pages of it that morning after the courier had dropped it off—it was that it was too studied. There was no heart in it, as if the author had been too shy of showing any.

The house does go on, how far she does not know. But there is a limit to the physics of any house, she tells herself, and reality is not elastic.

He watches them for a moment, almost outside it all. It’s strange that the worst moments of his life are now so fused with the best.

Oksana has always considered analysis and therapy an idiot’s luxury, and she rarely indulges in that particular kind of narcissism.