I met Raf in Cambridge. We walked and did some bookstore browsing, walked on cobblestone streets of brick townhouses and row houses, many with wreaths on their doors; past rambling mansions and their snowy expanses of lawn; stands of pine, willow, and birch trees.

In Wordsmith, I watched as Raf wandered an aisle. He shambled spent, like a person who had been doing heavy lifting. He stretched, rubbed his arms in their coat sleeves. In his athletic periods I often saw him working kinks from his joints this way. I wondered if Raf understood what his last event had been.

“What’re we doin’ after this?” he asked me. He flumped an armload of paperbacks onto the cash-register desk.

I couldn’t decide what was next. The speakers in the place were sounding Beethoven, the Archduke Trio. I got lost listening, and thinking of an old Godard movie: of a man and woman in bed, in smoky sunlight, a couple with something enormous to lose.

Raf said, “You want to go for coffee or just quit? You seem kind of runover.”

“I want to go for a three-week drive.”

“I always want to do that,” Raf said.

“You pilot if you want,” I told him.

“I want,” he said.

He swung the smoke-colored car away from the Cambridge garage. He drove with a kind of weary aggression—kicking at the clutch, slugging the gear stick.

I talked about the streets in Cameroon, how some days they were full of sand, almost impassable from sand. People would sweep but more sand would come, covering and ruining everything.

We got on and off the Mass. Turnpike.

Raf plunged in the clutch pedal, let the car slow and roll onto the shoulder of the road. He braked. The headlights showed over lapping layers of mist slicking the twisting lane ahead. The windshield wipers slithered left and right. Their motor hummed.

He reached under his seat and tugged out a road atlas.

“Don’t worry,” he said, reading a map. He said “worry” with a tone of puzzlement for anyone who might.

I studied him. Below his black hair the fine bones of his skull were modeled by the white cabin light. His good eye was a pool of shadow. I thought: generic man, perfect man. I thought how even when Raf was dead-still, he had an intensity out of which someone could interpret a world.

About the Author

MARY ROBISON was born in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the 2018 Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She is the author of four novels—Oh!, Subtraction, Why Did I Ever, and One D.O.A., One On the Way—and four story collections—Tell Me, Days, An Amateur’s Guide to the Night, and Believe Them. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.