He sees the timber yard the way he could never see the university: from inside. He sees her at seven in the morning walking the rows of stacked pine, her breath visible, her hands in her coat pockets. He sees how she looks at the wood the way he used to look at columns of figures, with a kind of hunger for the pattern to be right. He did not know she was capable of this. He thought he had known her.
He was proud of her position at the university in the way a man is proud of a thing that reflects well on him, and he understood this only after he died, which is when you understand most things. The tenure track. The publications. He told people about her at dinner parties for years, and what he told them was a story about himself. He sees this clearly now. Clarity is one of the few things this side offers without limit.
She straightens the ruler on the desk before she goes out to meet the truck. He has watched her do this for two years. The ruler is a small wooden one, the kind she used for schoolwork when she was nine. He does not know if she kept it deliberately or if it simply followed her the way small objects do, slipping from apartment to apartment, accumulating years. He would like to ask her. He cannot ask her anything.
This is the specific grief of this side: not absence, not loss, but total presence without the possibility of speech. He watches her work and he understands her and he cannot say so. He cannot put a hand on her shoulder. He cannot say: I see it now. The yard, the accounts, the frost on the planks in the morning. I see what you are doing here. I was wrong about what you needed and I am sorry and I see.
She lifts her face toward the truck coming through the gate. He watches her face. He will watch it for as long as she is alive, and he will know everything about her, and she will know nothing about what he knows, and this is the complete shape of the thing he has become.