The Room

Here is the smallest thing.

In the room I do not want to describe, there is a table. I am sitting at the table. My hands are on the table in front of me. They are my hands, which are the hands I have told you about. The thumb. The way the fingers bend. The way the knuckles sit. I know these hands. I have watched them for a life, and they have held a cup a particular way, and they have touched a braid, and they have rested on the top of a son’s head at a supper I have already told you about, and they have held a daughter’s small shoulder while she drew at a kitchen table. They are the hands I brought here.

There is nothing in them now. They are empty, on the table, in the room, and I am looking at them.

I am going to tell you what I was going to ask for, and then I am going to tell you that I did not ask.

I was going to ask if I could have a cup. Not a specific cup. A cup. Any cup that could be held in the way I know how to hold a cup. I thought that if I could hold a cup in this room, one last time, I would know that the motion was mine, and I would know that the motion was real, and I would not need anyone to tell me whether the man who taught me the motion had been real. I would know by the holding.

I did not ask.

I did not ask because, sitting at this table, I understood that it did not matter whether they gave me a cup. If they gave me a cup, I would hold it the way I have always held it, and the holding would prove nothing to them that they are prepared to accept as proof, and it would prove nothing to me that I did not already know. I already know. My hands are the hands that know how to hold a cup that way. That is all I have ever known. That is all I need to know.

So I did not ask for the cup. I did not ask for anything else. I am going to tell you the only true sentence I have left, and then I am going to stop speaking.

I was given a wife. I was given two children. I was given a father. I was given a bell and a garden and a braid and a word I could not understand. I had a song that nobody gave me. I was given a life. I do not know who gave it to me. I am not sure it matters. The giving was the giving. The song was the song.

I would not be anyone else.

I am going to stop now. When I stop, they are going to ask me to begin again, and to begin again differently, and I will not know how to do that, because I have only ever known how to be this man, and this man is done speaking.

My hands are on the table.

I am going to put them in my lap.