Free A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer Dubois Page A

source of some secular comfort, if only you discounted the eighteen years that had preceded this moment. My mother and I stood there, our tears strangled somewhere back in our throats because we breathed only when he did. And he died sometime after that last breath, sometime after that last pulse, though it would be hard to say precisely when. Dying for two decades takes something away from life, but it takes something away from death, too. Death itself becomes a dim asymptote, ever approaching, ever unreachable. Until, at long last, it is reached.
    I thought of Jonathan—I thought him of pointing to my father, to his skittering hands and carved-out eyes. He asked if that would be me, and I’d said no, not if I could help it. Which reminded me of Lars’s saying, “But she never can, she never can.”

    Jonathan came to the funeral, and he held my hand and bowed his head with the appropriate amount of sober reflection. Still, even then, I was starting to feel a chasm between us, crumbling into enormity. It’s true that we are all mortal, but maybe it’s also true that some of us are more mortal than others. The cemetery was almost lovely—full of the mild green of new buds and grass shyly beginning to assert itself, the cool wind blowing the trees’ shadows across the graves in a way that was a little beautiful and a little unnerving. And Jonathan regarded everything—the coffin, the grave, the green Astroturf laid out to conceal the exposed dirt—with the expression of a spectator.
    I look back now, and I tell myself that in this, as in all things, there are advantages. So we don’t marry, have children, grow old together. This is what we miss. We also don’t stop sleeping together, divorce, come to see each other as strangers, look back in bewildered grief to these early days and try to unravel how it all went so wrong. Those days—that last spring in Boston—were the only days. There is something to be grateful for in this, I think.
    But at the time, I wasn’t grateful yet. I looked at the sky; I looked at the ground. Everything was fragile and raw and acute. I looked at Jonathan. We are not the same, I thought. And you would not wish for us to be.

    A few weeks after my father’s death, I went to clean out the house, and that was when I found the box. My mother had kept the house through my father’s illness—partly because she wanted a place to stay when she returned for semiannual visits, partly because it was the only asset that the state couldn’t claim after we relinquished my father and his savings to a publicly funded facility. After the death, my mother was free to sell the house, and she’d asked me to handle the posthumous categorizing and cataloging and investigating that comes with a completed life. I was given an afternoon to reduce my father to the elements we would most want to remember him by: the wittiest letters, the loveliest souvenirs, the most flattering photographs. Everything else would be thrown out.
    The box was in my father’s study, shoved between a stack of withered postcards and his creaky, outdated globe. When I looked inside, I found a mess of snarled newspaper clippings, curling from age and multiple handlings, and I nearly stepped away, closed the box, and left the mystery alone.
    Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t nearly close the box. I am not the kind of person who would close the box. I kept the box open, and I started to riffle. And inside the box I found pictures and clippings of Aleksandr Bezetov, the chess champion.
    The first clipping was a 1980 article from
Literaturnaya Gazeta
, detailing an early success of Aleksandr’s at that unpronounceable Leningrad chess academy of his. In the picture, he’s heartrendingly young and nondescript—he never did look like a person who’d amount to much, even when he already had—and he appears slightly chagrined at being photographed. The clippings then follow him to regional and nationwide victories in Russia to