Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

The first winter she was dead it seemed every day for months on end was damp and bright—

not dark?

One and a half people kill themselves in the city each day, and I looked for them—the one person or the half person—but I never saw the one and I never saw the half,

I, too, could not un-locate myself from the site of my banishment.

It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived in with her.

Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.

“Her life will not become a historical object,” I explained, as X had explained again and again to me. “Only her work will remain.”

(How odd to remember the face of someone I hate, when so much else is lost to the mess of memory.)

I’d always thought of myself a rational person, but the moment she was gone I ceased to be whoever I thought I was.

I have no interest in the flattery of a fool.

perceived reality, which was nothing more than a story that had fooled most of the world.

“It only seems to be a simple question—Where are you from? It can never be sufficiently answered.”†

Perhaps that’s what all books are, the end of someone’s trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

There is no such thing as privacy. There is no experience or quality or thought or pain that has not been felt by all the billions of living and dead.*

Some days it seems she is only away in the next room, and when I go to that room she has fled to another room, and when I reach that one she is in yet another.

Those interested only in X and not in the life of her widow (a reasonable position) may find it appealing to skip ahead to the next chapter.

shrinking herself

small massacre

I had to abandon that safe inertia in order for my life to become recognizable as my life.

“toxic masculinity,” a topic that had become popular after men had, millennia too late, become aware of its existence.

no one would have called her conventionally beautiful—

why does the UK cover have a conventionally beautiful person

But he didn’t know me anymore, as the trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving.

an amorphous sense of another life just out of reach, a life that might kill me, it seemed, if I didn’t live it.

people will say the most heinous things when they’re trying to justify their own failures and madness.

Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root.

A person can be understood only through the life they choose, the people they choose, the things they do, and not the things that are done to them.*

I had to stifle the loathing I sometimes felt when meeting anyone who’d lived longer than she had.

unsteadied enough by the widespread misinformation to feel there was no longer any objective truth,

parallel to X

By 1952, nearly every citizen in the territory was convinced (or at least claimed to believe) that the Second Coming of Christ would happen in their lifetimes.

the wild and seductive power of a belief in the divine,

like X

Marc Fisher,

like Mark Fisher? capitalist realism?

at present I am a cheese,

And you see, that’s what troubled her. Who was setting the laws and why did we have to follow them just because someone said so. Weren’t they human, wasn’t everybody human?

I was a widow who’d known nothing of my wife’s past, while her parents had known nothing of their daughter’s future, and we’d sat there in that room for hours, none of us admitting or even knowing who we really were to each other, people who had—in one way or another—loved the same person.