I often walked the city. On weekends or afternoons when I left work early, for hours, in all weather. At the beginning I used these walks ostensibly to look for Luna Hernandez. After the fight with Caroline, I gave up searching in any methodical, focused way. I used what was close to hand, what was free, what I could do myself. Perhaps Luna had come to New York, I thought. So many did. Why not her?
The walks, too, were part of my new project. After Joe’s accident I wrote nothing at all—not a blog post, not a poem, not a line—but after my fight with Caroline I began again. She was right: I did nothing of value, I cared deeply for nothing, no partner, no profession. Friends came and went; men, too, with the frequency of trains, loud and heavy, leaving behind only a blessed silence. And so, slowly, cautiously, I began to write again, not as a poet or a woman but as a sort of record keeper. A witness. The only thing I thought about was my brother, but putting words to paper about him was impossible. Too raw, too hurtful. And so I wrote around him. I began to record in detail the last world that existed when Joe was still alive. The last meal I’d eaten, the last book I’d read, the last pair of shoes worn, the last earrings. Soon it became a tic, almost an obsession, to document all these final occurrences. There were so many of them. Once you begin to precisely identify every action and event, every building, every tree from a particular moment in time, they become countless, they stretch on and on. And so it was with the Lasts.
At first I wrote them down not as poetry—I could make nothing beautiful then—but as simple lists. Items, colors, smells, sights, speech, weather: an echo of the lists I’d kept as a child. I fixed on paper every element of the old world so that I might remember and return to it when the present world—where my brother was gone, where things happened anew for the first time, and the second, and the hundredth—became too much. I created the old world in specific detail so that I might hide there.
Last breakfast:
Mushroom and Swiss omelet
black coffee
brown toast, one-half foil packet of butter
two sips water
New York Times, Arts Section
Counter, third stool from right
Uniform stitched with Paige
Old Adidas sneakers, blue stripes, hole in toe
White socks
I posted the lines first to Twitter, which was brisk and new then and provided me with the same sort of anonymous public platform as the blog. Later The Lasts became my first published work, but at the time I wasn’t thinking about career or recognition or art. It was catharsis.
On my walks I was always searching for a last. I carried a notebook, and I let Joe lead me. When a sight, a smell, an overheard conversation prompted a memory of Joe, I would follow it. Once I sprinted after a truck emblazoned with joe’s eats until I lost it to the BQE. For an hour I stalked a man wearing a T-shirt with joseph and the amazing technicolor dreamcoat splashed across the front. I’d followed him into the park, down an alleyway, in and out of a restaurant, until finally the man let himself into an apartment building in Carroll Gardens and I gave him up.
My brother was leading me, I believed, to Luna or to something else entirely. It was up to me to quiet down, to listen wisely and well so that I might hear him. Joe had seen our father—now I believed him! Of course he had seen Ellis Avery. After the disappointment of Mimi Prince, I became more, not less, convinced of this. Mimi was a hack, but the vibrations of love endured. My brother had tried to catch our father with drugs and alcohol, but these produced in me only a fuzziness, a blunting. I needed the brisk, brutal force of sobriety to catch the signs. I needed to notice, not to fade.
As I walked, I counted the rhythm of my steps to my brother’s name:
Joe, JOE, JOE, Joe. JOSEPH. JOSPEPH. JOSEPH PATRICK.
JOSEPH PATRICK SKINNER.
Joe
Joe
Joe
JOSEPH
Joe
Today, as most days, my last conversation with Joe played in my mind as a scramble of words and images.
Don’t, cheap, why, please, careful, someone, love.
Sunday morning. A hot wind blowing through my open window. Man #82 in the shower. Joe on the phone: “Fiona, have you heard of The Last Romantic?”
“Sure. I’ve heard of it. New feminism. I read it every week.”
“Who do you think writes it?”
“It’s anonymous. Who knows? It could be anyone.”
“I think I know who it is.”
“Yeah?”
“I think I know her pretty well.”
Pause. I twirled a curl around my index finger. Curl, release, curl.
“Fiona,” Joe said, “why are you doing this blog?”
“Me?”
“I hope you’re being careful.”
Curl, release, curl. “Who told you?”
“Those guys don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Of course they don’t. That’s the point.”
“It seems unfair. They trust you.”
“Trust? I’m the one at risk! I’m trusting them. I trusted you. You kept secrets from me. The knee injury, Sierra, Ace. Remember?”
“Come on, that’s different.”
“Not really.”
“Fiona, the whole thing is cheap, taking cheap shots at these guys. People make mistakes. It’s not right to punish them like this.”
“I’m not punishing anybody. I’m just telling the truth.”
“Well, I think it cheapens you.”
“You don’t understand the project.”
“I don’t need to.”
“How’s the coke habit, Joe?”
Pause. Curl, release, curl.
“I just want you to find someone you love.”
“Love? What would you know about it?” And the anger I’d felt mounting as the conversation progressed, my anger at Joe for leaving New York, for lying to me, for hiding so many parts of his life, rose up in my chest and throat, making it difficult to breathe. I couldn’t speak, and so I hung up on him. The last conversation I had with my brother ended when I pressed my phone to off and set it on the floor.
The shower stopped and Man #82 entered my room, towel around his waist, hair wet, skin flushed. “Who was that?” he’d asked. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I’d answered. “Family. Don’t you wish sometimes they’d just disappear?”
I began to walk very fast, only vaguely aware of my direction. I thought of the last words Joe had said to me and also of what had not been said. The sounds beneath the words. What had I heard? The in-out of a woman’s breath. A creak of floor beneath a slender, bare foot. A door closed, a door opened. Had Luna Hernandez been there with Joe?
I traveled deep into Crown Heights, arms flapping at my sides to keep myself warm. Down unfamiliar streets, past parks where children played unfamiliar games, past shops selling goods that seemed unusual and oddly specific: pet toys and carrier cases; dog food, cat food, birdseed; rabbit hutches, rabbit runs. Celeste?
I stopped. Joe? I asked, scanning the signage atop storefronts for something, anything.
Joe?
Joseph?
Joe—
Blam—a man ran flat into me and dropped what he was carrying. He spun around and looked at me, and despite my shock and pain—he quite literally knocked the wind out of me—our eyes held for a moment, and I saw that his were black, bottomless, containing an empty wildness.