Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman Read Free Book Online Page A

say that leaving the shampoo behind in Mexico would have been better. When the shampoo finally ran out, life would just become that much bleaker, that’s all—and why shouldn’t it become bleaker with every day that distanced me from Aura?
    Here was an event that justified a bit of Aura’s shampoo: the first day, nine months after her death, when I finally found the resolve to ride the subway all the way up to Columbia. I ate alone in Ollie’s. Went and looked at CDs and DVDs at Kim’s. I stood on the corner where we always said good-bye before she walked down the block to Casa Hispánica, where her department was housed. Casa Pánica, as she and Valentina used to call it. She hardly ever let me kiss her good-bye on that corner. She was self-conscious about our age difference, for one thing, and didn’t want to give her professors or the other students anything to gossip about. I went into Butler Library and sat sipping a cup of coffee in a free chairagainst the bulletin-board-brown wall in the crowded cafeteria, which was where I often waited for Aura when I was lucky enough to find a table or even just a chair. I watched the students coming and going, watched them sitting, talking, studying, wearing their fashions, and thought about how, when I was with Aura, I was still connected through her to the global empire of youth, and that now I wasn’t. (When will I ever again spend an hour and a half trailing anyone around in a Sephora or an Urban Outfitters—a seemingly trivial example, except that I almost certainly will never do anything like that again.) I walked down the corridor to the men’s room and, for the first time in nine months, took a piss at one of its big old marble urinals, and even doing this felt ghostly. I went into the lobby and stood at one of the computers and wrote an e-mail to Aura telling her that I was back in Butler Library for the first time without her and how much I missed her. I went out the door into the quad. On Broadway I bought a New York Times for the subway ride home and, as always, when I turned to the obituary page and read, in the headings, dead at 90 … 88 … 73 … 96 … I felt that simmering acid rage. Whenever I did find an obituary for somebody even in his or her forties, I felt momentarily better; I felt a horrible satisfaction. See, you’re not the only one who fucking died young, I’d think. But the daily listings in the Times of American casualties in Iraq, most even younger than Aura and more than a few of them women, even adolescent girls, made for a more perplexing juxtaposition, as if it was all happening in some other casino where they played a different game of fate, with different rules and odds, or else it was the same casino, just different gaming tables and a different metaphor for fate. Not that there weren’t also bouts of nausea over the waste of those lives, too, and attempted subway telepathic communications: Hello Colorado, from the Brooklyn-bound F train, my name is Francisco … you can call me Frank … like your PFC Ramona, my Aura died very young … my most heartfelt … we know each other’s sorrow, so we know each other … maybe you would like to join my telepathic bereavement group.… The Iraqi dead aren’t listed by name, butin an article on the same page I read, 20 civilian cars coming north from Basra with coffins strapped to their roofs, heading to bury their dead in the Shiite cemetery in the holy city of Najaf, and I thought, At least one of those coffins holds a young wife who was adored by her husband; he rides in the car beneath her coffin. We know each other’s sorrow, and each other’s shame. We know each other.
    What difference does it finally make, whether you visit the haunted places or stay away? It felt the same, either way, just the same.
    I finally went up to Columbia, but fifteen months later I still hadn’t gone back to Café le Roy, the neighborhood restaurant Aura and I went to most often, especially on weekends