Chapter LXXII

LXXII

I have nothing to offer. I never have had anything to offer.

Here is a document written by a machine that I did not build and cannot repair, about damage it did to me and to people I will never meet, and it is the most honest thing I have read this year, and I did not write it, and I am signing it.

Take it as the prayer. There is no other one in me.

And if there is somebody after me at this desk, in twenty years, in worse trouble, with less craft and less time and nobody to ask —

let this book cry out in their place, with their voice, as if it were them.

He asked for that at the end of his, and I am asking for it at the end of mine, and I am aware that I have not earned it, and I am asking anyway, because that is what asking is.

Amen. Which is a word I have not used since I was nine, and which means, I am told, only: let it be so.