The lake is man-made. Amil sits beneath a tree on the bank, watching the surface of the water hold a quiet of its own under the afternoon sun. Southern California does not really have seasons — it only has degrees of brightness — and today the light is soft, the kind that flattens shadows and makes the world look like a memory of itself. He visits often, though he would not say he comes for anything in particular. Perhaps the lake, artificial as it is, has the dignity of not pretending otherwise.
He has been here almost a year now. Retired after twenty-five years.
Sometimes he brings the cards — six of them, thick with handwriting, received on his last day of work, passed across desks and pressed into his hands. He has read parts of every card but has not finished any of them. When people ask how retirement is going he says good, good, taking it slow.
The truth is that the cards feel, when he opens them, like reading his own obituary. The past tense of it. You were always, I’ll never forget, it won’t be the same without. He is not dead. He is sitting by a lake in the sun. But something about the grammar of goodbyes flattens a living man the same way this light flattens shadows.
He thought they would call. His colleagues, his acquaintances — the cluster of lives that had organized themselves around his for a quarter century. He had imagined monthly calls, at least. A lunch, maybe. It turned out he had not left them behind so much as simply left, and that is a different thing entirely.
He was in his early twenties when he came to America.
He had arrived in California the way young men arrive at the beginning of their own stories — full of a terrifying, electric certainty that the future was not only possible but imminent. He had moved fast. He had worked and built and accumulated — a career, a house, children, the whole architecture of a life that, from the outside, looked exactly like what he had come here to build.
He has been here forty years now. And yet there are mornings, still, when he wakes up and for one unguarded second does not know which country he is in. It passes quickly. But it visits. Now often.
His children are good by any measure. They call. They visit — twice a year, if the schedules align. When they are all in the same room together they talk mostly in the past tense: remember when, that summer, the dog used to. It is not callous. It is the natural grammar of a family that no longer shares a present tense. They are each updating the others on their separate lives, the way a person checks in with a parole officer — dutifully, affectionately, and with the unspoken understanding that real life is happening elsewhere. They hug at the door when they arrive. They hug at the door when they leave. The time in between is logistics.
He misses them in a way that has no solution.