The rule is that you never explain it in writing and you never contact anyone but the person whose name is directly above yours. That’s why three of them hung up on me — I’d called out of order, from a number they didn’t know, asking about a book. The woman in Missoula told me all of it in one long stretch on a Tuesday afternoon, eighty-eight years old, in the voice of somebody who has been waiting a long while to be asked. It started in 1961 in a boarding house in Bakersfield with a man named Whit who was dying and had one thing to leave. He gave the book to the woman who’d been bringing him meals, signed the back cover, and told her that when she came across a person who needed to be told they weren’t finished, she should sign it and hand it on and say nothing about the rest. Fourteen people. Sixty-four years. A copy of a novel that has been to Bakersfield, Reno, Amarillo, Detroit, three cities in Ohio, and a hospital in Missoula, and has never once been mailed — it’s always been put into someone’s hands.
My aunt got it in 1974 from a man in Cleveland whose name is eleven lines up and who was dead before I was born. She was thirty-one and had just lost a child and had stopped leaving her apartment, and the woman in Missoula knew that, because number thirteen tells number fourteen the story of every name above them, out loud, once, and then never again. That’s the second half of the rule. My aunt held that book for fifteen years and never found the person, and when she got her diagnosis in 1989 she wrote 15 next to her name instead of a city, because she’d finally identified him and knew she wasn’t going to make it there. He was nineteen then. He’s fifty-five now, he lives four hours from me outside a town I’d never heard of, and my aunt tracked him for the last two months of her life and then died on a Thursday in November with the book in her nightstand.
The woman in Missoula told me who he is and how my aunt knew him, and I’m not going to put that part down. What I’ll say is that it’s not a family connection and it isn’t a coincidence, and that when I heard it I had to put the phone down on the table for a second. She said the book had failed once before, in 1968, and had sat in a garage for four years before somebody’s daughter found it and worked out what it was and got it moving again. She said books like that don’t get lost, they get delayed. She said thirty-six years is the longest delay it’s ever had, and then she said, Well. You’ve got a car, haven’t you.
I’m driving out on the ninth. I have no idea how this conversation goes. He doesn’t know my aunt existed, he doesn’t know a woman spent her last autumn finding him, and I’m going to knock on a stranger’s door and hand him a paperback with fourteen names in the back and try to explain sixty-four years of people passing along the same object without ever writing down why. The woman in Missoula told me not to over-explain it. She said everyone who’s ever received it has already understood before you finish the first sentence, and that’s how you know you’ve got the right person. Then she made me promise that when he asks what he’s supposed to do with it — and she said he will, they always do — I say the only thing anyone is allowed to say, which is: hold onto it until you know.
