It struck me last night while I was talking to Elle that I have been writing this account, at least in part, in order to find out what being dead is like. I know it’s a futile gesture. As the character of Death says in the film which my white boss, the chair, seemed to think too good for my black students: I have no secrets. I have nothing to tell. There is no place in the world for us, I think, and no world after this one, even if such a world may be suggested by the strange reality enacted in our dreams. A few weeks after the funeral I dreamed that I stood smoking a cigarette with my grandfather’s brother. We stood in late afternoon light on the north side of a dream street in a small town on the plains in the north of the state where we both were born. My grandfather’s brother said something and I laughed. He went through a door into the building behind us, and when he did I turned and saw, standing alone on the south side of the street, in deep shadow, alone, my grandfather. He did not seem pleased to see me. A few years later he would again visit me while I slept, twice, and both times he would swell and both times he swelled he would burst. I still do not know if, in the opinion of the pastor, my grandfather’s act of throwing my grandmother to the floor and kicking her mercilessly, or any of his many other similarly violent actions committed over several decades, caused him my grandfather to forfeit his robe and crown, which he in any case did not have with him in that final forlorn room into which my father and I moved him. I think it is fair to infer—since he the pastor kept my grandfather the abuser on as a deacon at the church long after he knew the treatment to which he, a so-called pillar of the community, subjected his wife in the long darkness of those nights in his red house on the high bluff above the river — that ultimately it did not.

I’m writing now on Saturday morning, 13 November, at the wrought-iron table. The air is perfectly cool and crisp; a few scattered clouds whitened by sun are slowly ambulating across the blue sky. Elle has just taken the boy to the drug store to get a shot. Today we will watch football and I will make us biscuits and sausage gravy to eat. Once the sun has gone down I will watch football with my father at his house. Afterward, my plan is to go to the house of ill repute, as Elle earlier this week suggested I do, and pay for the hospitality of a woman who is not my wife. That is my plan, but as the Son of Man somewhere in the Gospels says, Say thou not that thou will do this or that on this day. In eight days I plan to drive west with Elle and the boy and stay for a few nights in the house where I was raised and where much later, almost exactly a year ago now, I began writing the initial versions of the opening pages of this account on the night after hunting with my papa in one of his several white pickups, my first time in close to fifteen years, the truck crawling from pasture to pasture, rising and falling through mauve mare’s tails and reddish sage grass, from open hayfield to darkened thicket at the speed of three or four miles an hour, dark coming on, his green-stocked 6.5mm Creedmoor placed barrel-down against the floorboard between us. I hope to see him and my granny who called me ornery and walk in the cemetery again, and go down to the place beside the river where I once thought I would one day like to end my life. Everything seems possible to me now, here at 11:03am at my wrought-iron table, where I am currently facing not the Christ-trees but a large live oak, in which ten thousand or more droplets of sunlight are caught in the dark orange and yellow and yellow-green leaves that remain, all of which are likely to fall by the end of the month or perhaps even by the time of our return. To my right I can see the tops of the Christ-trees. The one to my left and in the center bear no pinecones, but the thief who denied his maker is laden with them. This, like a naked woman on a stage, or familiar mountains glimpsed from far off, or even the sight of the masterwork of a melancholy Norwegian painter, pleases the eye. That which pleases the eye in turn soothes the spirit and eases the heart. I have not felt this happy in weeks.

Clarity of vision produces definition and definition produces meaning. This, or so I wrote last fall, is not always desirable. I no longer know if the second half of the first part of this statement is true. Definition provides clarity, yes, but clarity produces the illusion of certainty, and certainty, even though it may have everything to do with one’s attitude toward it, has little to do with meaning itself. Certainty is nothing more than therefore. My grandfather loved me. My grandmother loved my grandfather. And feared him. I love Elle, and on Saturday night I went again, as predicted, to the den of iniquity and ran my hands up and down a young black woman’s thighs, and asked her what constituted a good night on the stage. She said: When I get a lot of tips. I fear being found out, but I am also writing these words with the aim of being found out, in part because of my experience of the doubled life in others and in myself, and my corresponding belief that this life, the life of running down the hill headlong, leads only to darkness, and I, for my part, have had enough of darkness. I want human touch and human thoughts and a human life, which is to say both this life and not this life. She loved him and he beat her. One day when I was twelve I did a poor job of raking leaves and my father, who was apparently suffering a great deal of tension in his spirit, likely because of the actions of his own father, was able to find relief from that tension only by taking a two-by-four from the woodpile and striking his only son with it. More than two decades later, when my boy throws a fit and screams at me and hits me in the face, there are times when I grab him far too hard by the arms or shoulders and I know this hurts him and that it is ridiculous for me, a thirty-one-year-old adult man, to take hold of a child in such a way, but my hands move quickly and forcefully, as if they are not my own, though of course I know they are. If Pascal were alive today, I believe he would make the reverse of his famous wager: we may as well act as if there is no God in heaven, for if there is a God worth going to after we die, He will not mind the fact that we did not believe in Him.

I do not expect my skin cells to thank me for their brief time alive on earth when I slough them off. I do not expect them to worship me or to sing for me or to fear me. It is I who fears them. (This remains the great loss of dignity contained within the loss of faith: once one feared God. Now: cells.) I fear their perversion, the onset of cancer of the bowels, rectum, lungs, and if I returned to the old way of being, the fear of the Lord, I believe I would not fear so for my bowels, rectum, lungs—instead of death it would be hell I saw leering at me from the periphery of my vision or manifesting itself as a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach when I’d stayed up far, far too late and stood in the bathroom before the mirror, not looking at the mirror but rather at the faucet running into the unclean sink, terrified by the only certainty the future holds for me: water down a pipe into the dark. Go over there my voice says, my friend writes, but he can’t go over there. In his journals Cheever writes that the idea is to get away from one place, but I never get away, he writes, I never reach another place. In the first month of last year I began writing a manuscript called The Open Marriage. I was so afraid of and for this manuscript that I set a password on the file, something I had not done since I set a lock on my diary when I was fourteen. Early that March I wrote my will. During the previous summer I’d begun talking with my wife about my desire and discussing some ways in which that desire might be fulfilled and though there were times when these conversations did not seem damaging to our relationship, there were other moments, increasing all throughout that fall, when it seemed like nothing else. By the time February rolled around— the February of the year in which I began writing this account, my daybook, and in which the world itself shut down—I was beginning to see the extent of the damage these conversations had wrought, were wreaking, on our life together. I continued to write The Open Marriage all throughout the days when it seemed like our marriage would not open but rather die. (Why this impulse to bear witness to my own destruction? If nothing else: the desire to remain alive implied by the indestructibility of the impulse.) Indeed, I continued writing it up until the day when it seemed like the death of our marriage could come at any hour, writing even on the very day following the one on which my wife threatened to leave with our son and go spend an indefinite amount of time with my parents—she said a week but I knew in my heart that any separation would be permanent—and I told her that under no circumstances could she leave with our son to go stay with my parents. If anyone was going to take our son and go stay with my parents, or so I then said, it would be me. This day, to which I referred many pages earlier in this account, was the crucial one. Everything would be over by the next day. On a video call my mother said: both of you come. You two are going insane in that house. And I said: We can’t. We can’t come. And my father’s face appeared on the screen and he said: Try it. And I asked my wife if she wanted to try it and she said yes, let’s try it, and that was the first thing we had agreed on in many days together alone with our son in that house. The next evening, the third of April, after she finished work, we got in the car with little baggies of paper towels soaked in rubbing alcohol and left the gray house and drove all through the night until we came to this city in the state where I always swore I’d never live. There, everything changed.

To this day I have no explanation for this, except to say that when we changed our context, when we were around people who loved us regardless of our struggle with ourselves and with each other, we began to talk again. Now, for the first time in months, when she spoke I heard her speaking, and when I spoke she heard me speaking, and when she touched me it was her touching me, and when I touched her it was me touching her, and not some monster, and it seemed as if the touch was our touch and the words were actually our words, which had not been the case for so long that it was actually frightening, and remains so, to think how close we came to pulling completely apart the lives we’d begun together. She’d been afraid I was trying to replace her. I’d been afraid that I was becoming a living falsehood, and that this falsehood would eventually replace my selfhood, and that this, with regard to who we were to each other, would end by replacing both of us. I could no longer not allow myself to know that I knew what I knew about myself. Now she was no longer the woman often referred to in these pages merely as my wife. Now she was Elle: herself.

Two months later she and I pulled back into the driveway of that gray house to pack up the things we’d left behind. The moment we opened the door I saw we’d abandoned there more than I’d imagined. Stepping into that house again felt like entering a room where an excruciating and lonely death has occurred—which, in a sense, was what had happened there. The air was rancid with dust and decay. Everything lay exactly where we’d left it in April. The last cup I drank coffee from before we fled the house still sat out on the green table on the back porch, full of tepid rainwater. The brown husks of a dozen cigarette butts moldered in the blue glass ashtray. A sock lay on the dining room floor. Dirty laundry almost two months undone listed in the hamper—slack sheets on our bed twisted in the manner of a strangled corpse—the whole house had become an echoing, airless vacuum. The dead air: a living metaphor for the purgatorial existence we’d endured the last two months we’d lived there, where the hatred we felt for each other, once we left, did die. That carcass of our hatred, it now strikes me, was precisely what we could smell. It was as if, on the second of April, we’d actually decided to flee the death of our love and now, on the twenty-fourth of May, we’d come upon its cadaver. Only a few moments passed before we found ourselves standing in the corner of the backyard furthest from the house. Barely able to breathe, I lit a cigarette. So did Elle. We agreed we could not stay there. Half an hour later we checked ourselves into a hotel. Earlier in this account I posited that the characters in both fictions and dreams are in fact living ghosts. In that house we found a dead one. It was us.