Two Words

“Leaving was simple. He knew how — he’d learned to disappear before he’d learned to tie his shoelaces.” A bus, a town where nobody knows his face, a wall he can stand against without counting the steps. Jacob would stay who he had been. Staying means betting on Craig’s word and one day seeing “the lights go down in the cafeteria.” And a third thing, which he “didn’t think” — stepped around, “the way you step around something in the dark that you’ve already walked into once”: if he leaves, “no one would ever again say ‘I’m coming by anyway.’” He turns over “the two words he had. One saved Jacob and looked like the whole of his life. The other saved no one. He didn’t know yet which one he would say.”

Here the book honestly shows the logic of self-erasure: it always looks like the only act that saves anyone at all, and it always “looks like the whole of his life.” That is its power and its lie. For a person taught since childhood that his absence is the best gift he can give those around him, the choice to “vanish” feels responsible and the choice to “stay” feels selfish, when in fact it is the other way around: the first repeats the trauma, the second interrupts it. Note what holds Simon in this minute: not hope of rescue and not willpower, but one other person’s promise to come by after dinner. Sometimes that is enough to count to the next minute — and the next minute is enough for someone to dial a number.