The Last Book

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 26: The Last Book

David had been reading The Pillow Book for three weeks. He had been reading it aloud to Lin every morning, sitting in the visitor's chair beside the bed in Room 6, the book open on his lap, his bifocals adjusted, the reading portion at the bottom of the lens, the words on the page magnified to the size his eighty-year-old eyes required, and the words passed from the page through the lens through the eyes through the mind through the voice into the air of the room, the air carrying the words the twelve inches from his mouth to Lin's ear, the twelve inches that were the distance of the reading, the distance the marriage had maintained for fifty-four years, the distance between the voice and the ear, between the reader and the listener, between the giving and the receiving.

They had finished Snow Country in November. They had read the last page on a Wednesday morning, the last sentence -- David reading Kawabata's final words into the room, the words about the Milky Way and the sound of the river and the snow, the words entering the air and being held by the room the way all words were held, and Lin had opened her eyes and said: "Good. That was good. That was the right book." And David had closed the book and placed it on the bedside table and the book had rested there for a day, the book finished, the book complete, the reading of the book complete, and the completion was a small death, the death of a reading, the end of a shared experience, the last page the last page.

Lin had chosen The Pillow Book next. She had chosen it with the librarian's precision, the precision that selected not any book but this book, this particular book, the book by Sei Shonagon, the eleventh-century Japanese court lady who had written a collection of observations and lists and reflections and opinions organized by category, the book that was a catalogue, a system of the world organized not by Dewey Decimal numbers but by headings: In Spring It Is the Dawn, Hateful Things, Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster, Elegant Things, Things That Have Lost Their Power. The book was Lin's kind of book. The book organized the world the way Lin organized the world, by naming the categories and placing the observations within them, the placing the understanding, the understanding the placing, the circular logic of the cataloguer for whom to know a thing is to know where it goes.

David read a section each morning. He read "In Spring It Is the Dawn" on the first morning, the section that described the beauty of the dawn sky, the mountain rim growing light, the purple clouds trailing across the sky, and the description entered Room 6 through David's voice and the room held the description and Lin lay in the bed and received the description through her ears and catalogued it, filed it on the shelf where the dawn descriptions lived, the shelf that held every dawn she had ever witnessed and every dawn she had ever read about, the shelf that was full, was comprehensive, was the accumulated collection of seventy-eight years of mornings.

He read "In Summer It Is the Night" and "In Autumn It Is the Evening" and "In Winter It Is the Early Morning," the four seasons described in four paragraphs, the year compressed into a page, the world organized by time, by the division of the year into quarters and the quarters into their most beautiful hours, and the organization was beautiful, was the beauty of system, the beauty of a mind that looked at the world and said: I can hold this, I can catalogue this, I can place the seasons on their shelves and the hours on their shelves and the beauty on its shelf, and the placing is the holding, and the holding is the book.

He read the lists. "Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster": sparrow feeding their young, passing a place where babies are playing, lying down alone in a room with incense, realizing that one's elegant Chinese mirror has become clouded. David read each item on the list and Lin listened, her eyes sometimes open and sometimes closed, the threshold state, the between, and each item on the list was received and each item was catalogued, filed on the shelf where the things-that-make-one's-heart-beat-faster lived, Lin's shelf of these things different from Sei Shonagon's, Lin's list being: David's voice reading aloud, the morning light through the east-facing window, Miriam's drawings spread on the desk, the smell of the tomato soup from the kitchen, the sound of footsteps in the corridor that meant someone was coming, the sound that meant the door would open and a person would enter and the person would be David or Miriam or Thea or Wei, the sound of arrival, the sound of presence, the sound of not-alone.

He read "Hateful Things." The list was long, was the longest section in the book, Sei Shonagon's hateful things more numerous than her elegant things or her beautiful things, the hateful things the largest category, the category that contained the most entries, the way the 800s in the Dewey Decimal System -- literature -- contained more books than any other category, literature being the largest holding, and the hateful things being the largest list, because there are more things to hate than to love, or because the hateful things are more specific, more particular, more individual, the hateful thing unique in a way the beautiful thing is not, the hateful thing provoking the precise, detailed, personal response that the beautiful thing's generality does not require.

David read each hateful thing and Lin listened and sometimes Lin smiled at the things Sei Shonagon hated -- a visitor who talks on and on when you want to be alone, a person who tells a long boring story when there are important matters at hand, a dog that barks at the wrong time -- and the smile was the recognition, the recognition of the particular, of the specific complaint raised to the level of literature, the ordinary irritation made extraordinary by the precision of its description, and the precision was the thing Lin valued, had always valued, the precision of the catalogue card and the subject heading and the call number, the precision that said: this thing is this thing and not another thing, this thing has its own number, its own heading, its own place on the shelf.

He read "Things That Have Lost Their Power." This was the section that made Lin close her eyes. Not from fatigue, not from the threshold state, but from the recognition that was too acute to be received with open eyes, the recognition that required the protection of the closed eyelids, the thin curtain of skin between the thing recognized and the eyes that recognized it. Things that have lost their power: a large boat which is high and dry in a creek at ebb tide. A woman who has taken off her false locks to comb the short hair that remains. A large tree that has been blown down in a gale and lies on its side with its roots in the air. David read these and Lin listened and the listening was not the listening of the previous sections, not the cataloguing listening, not the filing listening, but a different listening, a personal listening, the listening of a woman who was herself a thing that had lost its power, whose body had lost its power the way the boat had lost the water and the tree had lost the ground, the power gone, the thing that had sustained the thing removed, and the thing remained -- the boat remained, the tree remained, Lin remained -- but the thing that had given the thing its purpose, its function, its power to do what it was designed to do, was gone.

David's voice did not change when he read this section. His voice maintained its steadiness, the steadiness of eighty years and forty-one years of engineering and fifty-four years of marriage, the steadiness of a structure that held because holding was what it did, and the voice was steady and the hands shook and the words entered the room and the room held the words and Lin lay in the bed and received the words and did not open her eyes.

They read for three weeks. Three weeks of mornings. Three weeks of David arriving at nine o'clock and sitting in the chair and opening the book and finding the page and reading, the routine unchanged, the routine the structure, the structure the marriage, the marriage the reading, the reading continuing through the decline, through the body's diminishing, through the threshold state's expansion, through the November that became December, the days shorter, the mornings darker, the east-facing window holding less light and more dark, the ratio of light to dark shifting as the solstice approached, and the shifting was the season, and the season was December, and December was the last month.

On a Thursday morning in the second week of December, David turned to the last section. He had read through the book systematically, section by section, the way he read everything -- methodically, completely, the engineer's approach to literature, the approach that did not skip, did not skim, did not jump ahead, the approach that followed the author's order because the author's order was the author's design and the design should be respected, the way the builder respects the architect's design, following the drawings, following the order, the order the intention, the intention the thing.

The last section was brief. Sei Shonagon's final words, the words that concluded the book, the words that were about the book itself, about the writing of the book, about the pile of notebooks that had accumulated in the court lady's quarters, the notebooks that held the observations and the lists and the reflections, the notebooks that were the book, and Sei Shonagon wrote about the notebooks with the awareness that the notebooks would be read, that the private observations would become public, that the catalogue of one woman's world would become a catalogue of the world.

David read the last words. His voice was steady. His hands shook. The words entered the room and the room held them and the words were the last words of the book and the last words of the reading and the last words of the last book David would read to Lin, though he did not know this, could not know this, the last being a thing that is known only after, never during, the last invisible to the person who is performing it, the last recognizable only in retrospect, only when the after has arrived and the person looks back and sees: that was the last time, that morning, that reading, that book, that was the last.

He closed the book. He placed it on the bedside table. The book rested beside the framed photograph of Miriam at twenty-two, the book and the photograph side by side on the walnut surface, the finished book and the frozen moment, the two objects that represented the two things the bedside table held -- the reading and the daughter, the marriage's practice and the marriage's product, the voice and the face, the book and the photograph.

Lin opened her eyes. She looked at David. She looked at him with the eyes that had looked at him for fifty-four years, the eyes that had catalogued every version of David from the young engineer at the library reception desk in 1972 to the old man in the visitor's chair in Room 6, every David on the shelf, every David cross-referenced with the events and the books and the buildings and the years that had accompanied him, and the looking was the catalogue, the looking was the system, the looking was the complete record of a marriage organized by the librarian who had lived it.

"That was the right book," Lin said. The same words she had spoken at the end of Snow Country. The evaluation. The librarian's evaluation of the reading, the professional assessment of the match between the book and the moment, the assessment that said: this book belonged here, in this room, at this time, with this reader and this listener, the book in its right place, the book on its right shelf, the book correctly catalogued.

"Do you want me to start another?" David said.

Lin was quiet. The quiet lasted longer than the usual quiet, longer than the quiet of consideration, longer than the quiet of a woman choosing her next book, and the length of the quiet was the answer, was the quiet's way of saying what the voice would not say, the quiet saying: there is no next book, the reading is finished, the last book has been read, and the last was not known to be the last when it was chosen but is known now, is known in the quiet, is known in the way the quiet extends past the point where the choosing should begin and into the territory where the choosing does not begin because there is nothing to choose.

"Read me the first section again," Lin said. "In Spring It Is the Dawn."

David opened the book. He found the first page. He read: "In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them."

The words entered the room. The same words that had entered the room three weeks ago, the first words, the opening words, the words that began the book, and the words were the same but the room was different and the listener was different and the reading was different, the words returning to the room the way the light returned to the room each morning, the same light but different, the same words but changed by the interval, changed by the three weeks of reading that lay between the first reading and this reading, the three weeks that had been a life's reading, a marriage's reading, the complete traversal of a book that was the complete traversal of a world, and now the return to the beginning, the return that was not repetition but completion, the circle closed, the reading ending where the reading began, the dawn.

Lin closed her eyes. She listened. David read. The room held them. The light from the bedside lamp fell on the page and on David's hands and on Lin's face, and the light was the same light, and the room was the same room, and the reading was the reading, and the reading was the marriage, and the marriage was the reading, and the reading was enough.