The Cartography of Almost
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
She finds the coat on a Tuesday, hanging in her closet though she has never owned a coat like this—heavy wool, color of wet bark, pockets still warm. As though someone has been wearing it last winter, then hastily pulling it on again, and dropping it onto a hook, immediately turning back to a morning full of worries and tears.
It's worked its way into her body differently from the jeans that hung loose against her skin. There's a blood smell to the coat, a warped scent made more compelling by the impression of humanity; when she tries to imagine the person wearing it, the image comes apart, stitched together again from layers of memories, the fabric of déjà vu, a ghost. It's his coat.
She finds other signs of him too—the tumbles of crumpled notebooks and the two empty glasses by the bed. His passport, in the left pocket of her jeans, comes up to her lips in the darkness of their bedroom; she feels, for a moment, the gentle puff on her cheek of the breath of a stiff brown face in her pocket; the warm guilty gas of salty surprise.
There are other signs, too: the smile on his lips in the photo atop the dresser, the slight upward twist of a smile but the lack of a laugh, like he's sharing it only with her, secretly; the steep arc of his cheekbone cut by the line of his jaw.
In the end she hides the coat at the bottom of the wardrobe, returns the notebooks to the bedside table as though they are hers as well, and wears only the jeans. She'd like to take them everywhere but can't bear to put them on, not today. She lies in the dark, trying to think of lonely backs of necks and whiskers, of places where his eyes have been, holding her hand before she woke. Could this be somewhere he might be now, she wonders: gig alone from Moscow, back roads from Leningrad; festivals from the Balkans to China, a tatami on the right side of a window, or only a tenderness in the night?
After a while she takes out the passport and turns over her hand, drops it down into her coat pocket without looking.
The snow comes down more heavily into the streetlamps at four in the morning. She sees it falling, falling, getting thicker and slanting flakes falling over the last thin track of dust from the main road, getting thicker. She should get something for the pain.
She looks at the coat in her bedroom. It's impossible to say if he left it on purpose, and she doesn't have an explanation for any of this; it's just evidence of things that she doesn't know. The coat makes the street trees seem marvelous, distant promises that she isn't anxious about chasing anymore, that it's okay to sleep under the sky; she watches it fall.
"Road," says Annikin. "Lane, road, path. Pavement if it's in the city, village road wherever. There's just no real word for pavement."
She folds her coat back into the wardrobe, taking a bit of the coat with her into the next five days. She drives single-gear remote-lifts from boat yards, cleans warehouses, laughs with the clerk at the bicycle shop, switches people's mobiles from car to car in stifled hotels for eight hours and then shops for instruments: anything built before 1980, fills up half an empty bookcase. It's a week away from Christmas, she never stops being surprised when the won't-say-when comes, he's gone. For the first time she feels at home in her hometown, travelling the places where he would travel, far from any suggestion of the frost of the country. She is so far from home that she might as well be in Europe or in Beijing; she is so far from herself that she could be home or in a hut somewhere, might as well drink out of a palm frond.
At five in the◆ About the ending
❧ About the title