RECOVERED NOTEBOOK Copy Nine

11 Sept. Cape Vane. The padlock was open — hanging on the hasp like a finished argument. I was expected.

Under the lamp-room floor, wrapped in oilskin: a pad book. Grey boards, water-stained, the ghost of a courier stamp. Copy nine. Every leaf used, and every leaf annotated — not cipher work. Bookkeeping. Twelve names, each crossed through with a date beside it. Some of the dates are decades old, and the ink of the crossing is always fresher than the ink of the name. He has kept this ledger by hand, year after year, and read it out by lamp.

Between the last leaves, a photograph: the GREENGLASS briefing, June 1974 — eleven men around a table I have seen with my own eyes on the fourth floor. One face is circled in grease pencil. The face is turned half away from the camera, as if it had already decided to be difficult to swear to. On the reverse, block capitals:

HE CERTIFIED MY DEATH. I CERTIFY HIS ARITHMETIC.

And on the final leaf, alone on the page:

The lamp turns for the ships that cannot see the rocks. Thirteen flowers, and yours is seven.

Yours is seven. I sat on the floor of a dead man’s lamp room and could not breathe.

My father was lost at sea on the 25th of March, 1974. They gave my mother a folded flag and one word: misadventure. I joined this service to be near the kind of paper that might one day say otherwise. It seems the paper found me first.