Eleven Days Read Online Free PDF Page A

perhaps she’d also taken him away from his father. What little he has known of David he has known from books: books on topics he knows his father loved, or books written by friends and colleagues of his father’s.
    Having exhausted those categories, Jason started reading stories he imagined his father might like, or stories his godfathers would tell him had been meaningful to David. Sometimes his godfathers would lend him things that David had lent to them; within their little group, they had an active system of exchange and borrow. You could tell a lot about a man from his library, perhapseven more than from the story he told about himself. Libraries don’t lie in quite the same way. David’s library seemed to be, like those of most people, aspirational as much as it was honest: it held the things he wanted to have read. But it was also romantic. Arthurian legend was a particular passion.
    When Jason read things he thought might be like the man to whom he owed so much, he’d underline a passage. He did know that David loved to travel, and he wanted to be a traveler, too. He knew that David did work he loved, and he hoped to find work he loved, too. And he knew David didn’t need anyone, or at least that was what his mother always said, and he longed not to need anyone either. Most of all, he longed to be far away from the familiar, far away from the kids who teased him about the fact that he had no dad.
    Now he reads poetry because if your reading is in ten-to-fifteen-minute intervals, eventually anything longer starts to feel like a waste, or a chore. Poems performed in the right amount of time, and then they left him something to think about. High ROI. He picks up the same poem or collection of poems again and again and again, until they are stuck in his mind. He likes war poems. He has memorized most of Wilfred Owen. He likes Wallace Stevens, too. He likes the poem “Sunday Morning.” It is part of a collection he stole from his journalist godfather’s library, because he had seen that the book was signed and dated by David and that the date was, by coincidence, Jason’s birthday. It had been sent from overseas.
    Apparently it was one of the last things anyone received from him. After April, David had stopped calling. After May, he stopped writing. In December, he was dead. David had circled lines from the poem’s first stanza:
        
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
        
Encroachment of that old catastrophe
,
        
As a calm darkens among water-lights
.
        
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
        
Seem things in some procession of the dead
,
        
Winding across wide water, without sound
.
        
The day is like wide water, without sound
,
        
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
        
Over the seas, to silent Palestine
,
        
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre
.
    Sepulchre
was underlined, and a definition for it was written in the margin: “burial vault, tomb.”
    He knows his mother thinks the navy was the death knell of any academic ambition. The thought wasn’t her fault. She grew up in the seventies; her parents were lapsed hippies, the kind who went to Woodstock too late, in their thirties, and didn’t take drugs. They adopted their era’s popular politics—anti-Nixon, pro-Kennedy, LBJ-agnostic—and raised their daughter for the first ten years of her life on a modified commune. They were against war, but their experience of war was an image in a newspaper. And when their parents died, they had no trouble absorbing the houses and cars—and ideas—that went with inheritance. Passionate without the education behind their passions to make them actionable, they sent Sara into the world a kind of rabid anti-romantic. As soon as she was old enough, she ran away, separating herself from them to the extent that she could. She wanted something normal. She wanted order. She took an internship working for the government. She surrounded