The Man Who Saw Everything

by Deborah Levy

‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: the main subject is not always you.’ It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: you have made me the main subject.

I asked myself why he was so unlovable. I think this question was on my mind when I was tapping the wall with my fist. The answer was obviously because Jack himself was unloving.

Obviously, in his view, I was paddling in the shallow end of life’s problems.

I had never given much thought to a pearl belonging to a gender. If I had to fight in a war I’d have to take off my pearls, so obviously I was for world peace all round.

To my horror it seemed that my father was a kind man. He left small gifts by the side of my bed. A flask of soup. He had made it himself. The leeks and potatoes were so crudely chopped

One day he left a box of fudge called Cornish Clotted Cream. I held the box in my hands and understood he had remembered it was a childhood favourite. It made me feel faint to hold it. I drifted off and it fell from my hand.

a tiny shoe decorated with seashells from Wellfleet Bay, and when I looked more closely, I saw the shells made the first letter of Isaac’s name, I, and then the same I written with stones on the sand of the beach. The tide had come in and the I was slipping into the sea; another I drawn with a stick on the sand slopes of Marconi Beach, a single vowel that was being pecked at by a gull, as if it sensed a worm lurked under the sand on which the I was written. Jennifer Moreau gestured to the walls. ‘It’s not about you. It’s about me.’