12

“I’ve never been afraid of the dark.”

“Actually I’m never depressed. Actually I don’t believe in being depressed.”

“By the way. Marin and I are inseparable.”

Accept those as statements of how Charlotte wished it had been.

Charlotte also told me once that she and Warren Bogart were “inseparable.”

Charlotte also told me once that she and Leonard Douglas were “inseparable.”

Charlotte even told me once that she and her brother Dickie were “inseparable,” and adduced as evidence the fact that he had once given her a Christmas present no one else would have thought to give her: twenty-eight acres in southern Nevada.

Of course it had not been exactly that way at all.

Of course there had been the usual days and weeks and even months when Charlotte had been separated from everyone she knew by a grayness so dense that the brightness of even her own child in the house was galling, insupportable, a reproach to be avoided at breakfast and on the stairs. During such periods Charlotte endured the usual intimations of erratic cell multiplication, dust and dry wind, sexual dysaesthesia, sloth, flatulence, root canal. During such periods Charlotte would rehearse cheerful dialogues she might need to have with Marin. For days at a time her answers to Marin’s questions would therefore strike the child as weird and unsettling, cheerful but not quite responsive. “Do you think I’ll get braces in fourth grade,” Marin would ask. “You’re going to love fourth grade,” Charlotte would answer. During such periods Charlotte suffered the usual dread when forced to visit Marin’s school and hear the doomed children celebrate all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.

She would shut her ears.

She would watch Marin numbly, from the usual great distance.

She would hang on by the usual routines, fill in whole days by the usual numbers.

The problem was that Charlotte did not know that any of this was “usual.”

Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the “separateness.”

And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life.