Chapter 5: Arrival (fragment)

From the earliest of the notebooks. The hand here is larger than it later becomes — there is still room on the page. Undated except by loop; she counted in loops from the first, before she had anything else to count.

They tell you that you have arrived, which is a strange word for it, because arriving is a thing you do at the end of a journey and I remember no journey. I remember no anything. I have been given a bunk and a chit-book and a name that the clerk read off a list, and I have watched the clerk read it, and I know — the way you know a coat is not yours though it fits — that the name came off the list and not out of me. Roan. Della Roan. Very well. It is as good as another. A person must be called something, and I would rather be called this than be the woman in Forty-four who won’t answer to anything.

I have decided not to mind it. Minding it, as far as I can see, is what undoes the others. There is a man three bunks down who minds it terribly, who claws at the blank in himself as though there were a door in it he could get his fingers under, and there is not, I have felt for mine, there is no door, there is only the smooth place where a life was and is not. He will wear himself out on it. I have decided to leave the smooth place alone and attend, instead, to the things that are actually here.

There are a great many things actually here, once you look. That is the discovery. I woke with nothing inside me and I assumed, the first days, that the nothing was the whole of my situation — but the nothing is only me, and I am a very small part of what there is. There is the whole train. There is the country going past the window, which is never the same country twice and yet, I am nearly sure, comes round. There is the light, which arrives at a different angle at each stop, and the angle, I have started to notice, is a thing you could write down.

So I have started to write it down.

A later hand, smaller; several loops on.

I have been laughed at, gently, for the counting, and I do not blame them, because I cannot explain it in a way that does not sound like the man clawing at the door. It is not that. I am not trying to get back into myself. I am doing the opposite. A person who cannot furnish the inside of a house will, if she is any use at all, go and stand in the garden and learn the weather — and I have no inside to furnish, and so I have gone out into the only thing I have, which is the world, and I am learning its weather, and the weather of a train, it turns out, is where it goes.

Third loop, and I can feel the loop now, in my body, the way you feel a stair you have climbed a hundred times in the dark. We came round to the cold town again yesterday. I knew it before the window showed it. I knew it in my feet. That frightened me for an afternoon and then it stopped frightening me and became, instead, the first thing I have ever owned: I know this. Not remember. Know. It is mine because I built it, out of angles and days and the feel of a stair in the dark, and no one gave it to me off a list.

I am not looking for anything. I want to be clear about that, here, where no one will read it. I have no theory and no grievance and nothing I suspect. I am simply a woman who cannot stop attending, and attending is the one thing they left me able to do, and so I do it, the way water runs downhill, because there is nowhere else for it to go.

This last, out of sequence — a margin note, ink darker, the hand run very small, on a page otherwise given to figures. It sits years ahead of the entries above it, and there is no knowing why she set it here, among the beginnings, unless she went back one night and wrote it where it would frighten her least.

— closer than I thought, and it was never going to be the route that showed it. The route was only ever how I learned to look. It is the looking that arrives somewhere. I wish, tonight, that I had stayed the woman who couldn’t get her fingers under the door. She wears out. She is left alone.