The third paragraph was about me. Again, I will keep most of it. He said he was proud of me in the specific way that meant he had thought about it and was not just saying it. He said he thought I spent too much time managing things at the correct distance and that he hoped I would find a way to be closer to things, because I was better at it than I believed. He said this kindly, and it landed the way only true things said kindly land.
The fourth paragraph was where the email became something I was not prepared for.
He wrote: There is something I want to tell you that I don’t entirely know how to explain. In the last few months before I wrote this, I started noticing something in the flat. At first I thought it was the headaches — visual disturbances, things at the edges of perception. But it wasn’t that. It was consistent and it was calm and it was always in the same place: the corner of the living room behind the sofa, by the window that looks north. I don’t know what it was. I want to be careful about that — I’m not making a claim. But it was present in the way that presences are, and it was not threatening, and after the first few weeks I stopped being startled by it and started thinking of it as company.
He wrote: I am telling you this because I thought you should know that I was not alone at the end. I don’t know what that means, philosophically. I’m a practical person, as you know, and I’m not trying to tell you that anything in particular is true about what happens. I’m just telling you what I experienced. It felt like it mattered that someone knew.
I put the phone down on the table. I sat in the kitchen for a while.
Then I picked it up and read the fourth paragraph again.
I went to Daniel’s flat the following weekend. His landlord had kept it held — a legal matter related to the estate was still being resolved — and I had a key. I had been twice since his death, both times briefly and for practical purposes, and I had not lingered.
This time I lingered.
I stood in the living room and looked at the corner behind the sofa, by the window that looked north. It was a corner like any corner. The sofa was where he had always had it, pushed slightly out from the wall so there was a narrow gap behind it. The window was the one that faced the small courtyard and the grey November sky.
I stood in the flat for an hour. I did not notice anything in the corner.
But I stood in the flat for an hour, which was longer than I had allowed myself before. I sat on the sofa where he used to sit and I looked at the room from where he had looked at it, and I thought about the email, and I thought about the fourth paragraph, and I thought about what it meant that my brother — a practical person, as he himself said — had spent the last months of his life in the company of something he couldn’t explain and had chosen not to be afraid of.
There was nothing in the corner. But the flat felt less empty than it had on the previous visits.
I did not know whether that was the corner or me.
I have been back four times since. November twice, once in December, once in January. Each time I sit on the sofa for a while. Each time I look at the corner.
I have not seen or sensed anything I can report with confidence.
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