In high school most classes were seated alphabetically. Because we were both in the vocational arts track and our surnames started with the same letter, this meant that James and I spent most of our days together in the late eighties.
Even when I refused to talk to him over some minor transgression, there we sat, furiously not talking. I refused to acknowledge his existence for an entire year after the accident; he was just the ghost at my left elbow. I worked in the photography lab with my injured arm held above my head, staring straight through James if he ever offered to help.
When we get along everything is brilliant; when we disagree it can be dreadful. Since 1986 it has been rather like having a sibling. We look after each other and bicker and hold communal memories. We are more than friends. James is a member of my family.
But even though he was present for more than half of the stories in the new book, either as a witness to the action or the salvage operation, he does not appear as a named character. I find this very strange; but the book is about danger, and James represents something else.
When I turned in the manuscript I wrote to apologize for the exclusion. I did not mean to write him out of the stories; he just didn’t fit in the schematic, and the book was never intended to be a traditional memoir.
James replied:
. . .i am in all your stories. but then i am not. right? even when i was involved, my role was to make sense of things. even if that sense was naive or stupid or simplisitic or even wrong. i was somehow innocent of the drama. even if my thoughts/ideas/saying complicated the drama. i somehow remain apart.