BooksBarbecue
Back The Presence of Absence
Chapters (40)
  1. also by simon van booy
  2. the presence of absence
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. Prologue
  7. the presence of absence
  8. Part One
  9. 27.
  10. 26.
  11. 25.
  12. 24.
  13. 23.
  14. 22.
  15. 21.
  16. 20.
  17. 19.
  18. 18.
  19. 17.
  20. 16.
  21. 15.
  22. 14.
  23. 13.
  24. 12.
  25. 11.
  26. 10.
  27. 9.
  28. 8.
  29. 7.
  30. 6.
  31. 5.
  32. 4.
  33. 3.
  34. 2.
  35. 1.
  36. [quick black]
  37. [scene change]
  38. Part Two
  39. acknowledgments
  40. a note about the author

You might be reading this book on the train to Gare du Nord; soaked to the skin in a jungle; sailing up some caramel river at dawn; in a Beijing hotel with the curtains drawn at midday; or at home in a chair as evening opens like a dark flower.

Maybe you are close to the moon on a vessel of sleepers in the breath of space, one stitch in the jeweled cloth⁠—those dead eyes of a living god.

Perhaps you are, like me, prostrate in a hospital bed.

Anyway, stop reading this book and look around for a moment.

Go on.

I mean it. Look around . . . now.

(If someone notices you and also starts looking, you have my permission to laugh.)

Do you see?

While out there in the world with this book, you are also here, mummified by these sentences in a non-physical universe. The body and the mind can travel independently of each other. Perhaps one day they’ll go so far as to be lost. I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying it’s possible⁠—and I, of all people, should know. For instance, I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us.

I might even be dead.

Yet, here I am.

Between the page and your eye.

Countless paradoxes like this redeem language.

But the voice cleaved in two during childhood is not a paradox of language. It’s a division of self, which is the multiplication of possibility. Don’t worry. Again, I’m not saying it’s bad. It might even ripen in us the appetite for love, the impulse to dab color onto stretched cotton, to make sounds that are beyond anything rational, but that sharpen rationality and make us see for the first time what we’ve been looking at our whole lives.

And so, as I said earlier, birth is a false start. It’s in the country of childhood where our lives really get going⁠—where the stage is set, the players readied, and the lines put down for everything that is happening to you right now.

21.

There was a television in the corner of my room in the early days. Before the pain was controlled, I used it as a tool to distract⁠—though I’m not going to tell you anything about the treatments, nor what my corpus has been through, because feeling sorry for me is not why we’re here, remember? I don’t want this book to be a distraction from life, but a way for you to go deeper.