The One Who Follows

There is a logic to dread.

I have given my better years to its study,

charted its progressions through the long accountancy

of sleepless rooms,

while the house breathed its old indifference around me

and the lamp held on by will alone.

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I know solitude.

Solitude has a density all its own,

a pressure against the eardrums like deep water,

and I have learned to read it

the way a sailor reads a changed sea.

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This is something else.

It began as a thinning,

a quality of the space behind me

that shifted in ways I lacked the instruments to measure.

A subtracting.

A held breath that belonged to no lung I could locate.

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I did not turn.

To turn is to acknowledge

that the sensation has a source,

that the source has a shape,

that the shape has been moving toward me

with the slow, unhurried confidence

of something that has outlasted patience entirely.

Something for which waiting is not suffering

because it does not experience time the way I do.

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I did not turn.

I counted instead

the interval between my step and the sound that followed.

Too irregular for settling wood,

too consistent for coincidence,

holding to a rhythm that only volition produces.

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The philosophers have argued

whether a thing unobserved can be said to exist.

I have ceased to find the argument interesting.

What gathers behind me

requires no philosophical resolution.

It requires only my continued walking,

my continued refusal to look,

my continued performance of the belief

that the cold accumulating at the back of my neck

is a matter of season.

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There is a presence.

I will not give it a title.

Titles are agreements,

and I have grown careful about what I agree to.

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But I will record this:

it moves when I move.

It stops when I stop.

It has learned, or always understood,

the precise location of my uncertainty.

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Perhaps it has tracked me for years

and I only now carry the raw sensitivity to detect it.

Perhaps prolonged grief dissolves

the ordinary insulation of the mind

and leaves a man receiving signals

he was constitutionally unfit to receive.

Perhaps.

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Or perhaps the world has always been this way,

a long corridor with something at the far end of it,

and we advance toward what we can see

because the alternative

is to turn and reckon with what we cannot.

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I reached my door.

I set my hand upon the latch.

Behind me, the street, if it remained a street,

held a stillness of the wrong variety,

a stillness too total for any city I had inhabited,

a stillness that leaned against my back

like a second intention.

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I went inside.

I turned the lock.

I stood in the dark and listened

to whatever occupied the other side

arrive at its conclusion

with extraordinary composure:

that it could wait.

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It has always been suited to waiting.

That is the central fact of what follows a man.

It carries no urgency,

harbors no grievance against time.

It knows where I am going.

It has known considerably longer than I have.

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And it is certain, in the way that only the inevitable can be certain,

that I will open the door again.