Provenance

The dealer has photographed it against a white wall and given it the caption: Norwegian, a maker, a year, a chair built for lying back, for going under. When bare rooms were the fashion I thought it hideous. Now it is the kind of thing people collect.

I knew it before the caption, or near enough. There are eleven this morning and none of them is exactly his. I went looking for him in the old photographs, for the proof of him sitting in it, and he is in none of them; the going was done in the rooms no one was documenting. He would go in behind his eyes and stay. He was in the chair and he was not in the chair. This was ordinary and we ate around it.

He had bought it young, before me, in the early seventies, in a country that had not been issued such things. I do not understand how he came to want it, to pay for it and carry it home and set it down as if he were owed it. I never knew the man who chose it, who read his Kierkegaard and imported the North as furniture, a defection too quiet for the PIDE. The one I knew had gone in and not come back.

I sold the real one, or I gave it away, I can’t remember which, in the months when the house had to be made to stop smelling of him, because the smell was not survivable and I kept nothing, which I understood at the time as health. I would keep it now. I would keep more. I did not know yet the body goes on wanting what the mind needs to throw out.

Yesterday my brother went a few feet in again. The shoulders first. He came back and did not say from where. I carry the same thing; in me it came out as a no, and I have trusted the no. It looks like his stillness, only louder.

I did not buy it. I want to be exact: I did not buy it, and I almost bought it, and this morning I cannot tell you the difference between those two facts. Instead I am doing this. It will be online by evening. The boy sometimes reads what I put there. One day he will scroll past this chair of mine and stop, the way I stopped, and find me in it. Near enough.