Chapter 62: The First Sentence
I bought paper on the seventeenth of March at the pharmacy on Delacy.
A pad of white letter paper, fifty sheets, three dollars and nineteen cents. A box of ten envelopes, one ninety-nine.
I already had pens. Three, all the same brand, because a document written in two pens looks like two people wrote it.
The clerk asked if I wanted a bag and I said no.
Then it rained, and I walked eleven blocks holding the pad under my coat.
That is the whole of the physical action in this chapter and I am telling you now so you do not wait for more.
The rest of it is a woman sitting on a floor failing to write four sentences, for nineteen days.
I started the first draft that night at 9:20.
I wrote: “Dear Theo.”
I looked at that for a while and crossed it out, because I am not dear to him and the word is a lie in the first two syllables.
I wrote: “Mr. Okoro.”
That is worse. That is a collection agency.
I wrote: “Theo.”
I left it.
One word. Four letters. It took two hours.
Then I wrote the second line and the second line is where every draft died for nineteen days.
Draft one said: “I am sorry.”
I want to explain what is wrong with that, because it took me four days to see it and it is the whole problem.
I am sorry is a sentence that asks for something.
It is not a statement of fact. It is a transaction.
You put it down and the other person is now holding something, and what they are holding is a decision they did not ask to make.
Every apology is a bill.
The recipient has to pay it or refuse to pay it, and either way you have made them work.
He wrote six letters over six years and not one of them asked me for an apology.
Not one. I went back and checked, twice.
He asked for one thing, in the first letter, and it was that I not get to forget the date.
Draft two, on the nineteenth, was four hundred words long.
It explained.
It used the word confession and the word plea and the phrase two days, and it had a sentence that began “What I have recently discovered.”
I read it back at eleven o'clock at night and I felt sick in a specific way I recognized.
It was a pitch.
I had written a young man whose mother is dead a document arguing for my own innocence, and I had done it with headings.
I burned that one in the sink, which is theatrical and I do not recommend it.
The smoke detector in the hall went off and Mrs. Amuchie knocked through the wall and asked if I was all right.
I said yes and I gave her a coffee cake three days later.
She is seventy and she plays her radio all night and I have never once complained about it.
Draft three, on the twenty-second, was one line: “You are owed a fact I have.”
Too clever. He is not a puzzle.
He is a man who keeps a ledger. You do not hand a man like that a riddle.
Draft four said, “You were right.” He was not right about everything and I will not write a sentence I would have to take back.
Draft five, six, seven and eight all said some version of “I don't expect you to answer.”
That is worse than an apology.
That is an apology plus a performance of not wanting anything, which is wanting two things.
By the twenty-sixth I had nine crossed-out drafts.
I was working after midnight, which is when I do my worst work.
So I stopped writing and did what I should have done first, which is what I do at the desk under the lamp.
I made a list. I took a clean sheet and wrote a heading.
WHAT THE LETTER IS FOR.
Under it I wrote one line, and the line took me two more days.
The letter is for telling him one true thing that is not about me, and then getting out of the way.
Everything else was mine. The date, the file, the six years, the innocent explanations, the arithmetic.
All mine. None of it his.
I looked at the pad and counted the sheets I had used. Eleven of fifty.
On the twenty-eighth I threw all eleven away and started with a rule I wrote at the top of a clean page.
No sentence containing the word I unless it states a fact I did.
That rule cut ninety percent of the language I own. I read it about forty times over the next week.
What was left was four lines, and it took me six more days to find them.