The End
pages 245 - 246 (Graywolf Press, 2008)

Even today, sixteen and one half years after the fact, his sister dead, his store sold, his archive of Confederate correspondence donated to the county public library, his concordance burned, his flower garden on the bluff behind the house collapsing season by season into the lake, the house leaking rain in every room, the woman herself dead, surely - since how else has he for sixteen and one half years been denied the fulfillment that is his by right, of being called, in words spoken out loud not by himself but by somebody else, by a person living in the world out there, the thing that he is - even this afternoon, trapped in the throng of bodies in a street carnival not three blocks from the café where he had whiled away the hours, poisoning himself with sugar, ardently believing he would be found, he still casts his eyes about for the face that will know his face, for the woman who will recognize what he is and point her finger, opening her mouth to speak, and call him by his name.

The jeweler knows that the undiminished desire to be accused by name by this woman is the proof that he has failed. That gable roof with sides that are shallow in slope at the top and steeper below is a gambrel. The short sleeveless dress with a row of buttons up the spine that the little girl in front of him is wearing, against whose backside the force of the crowd is pressing his legs, is a pinafore. He has a name, too, that could save him from himself, that could turn him into a word if only she were to see him and call him by it. Then all would be lost at last. He could surrender the long-held hope to hold a thing, a thing in his hand, and leave it at that. He would no longer have a material hand in which to hold the thing. But she isn't here, surely, she's dead - the instrument of his salvation - he killed her, surely.

He's been coming to this carnival every August for five years, but she has yet to show herself, and his hope is waning.

He has stood at the washroom mirror calling himself by the name his father shared with him, but the words only stuck to the mirror. Another person was required. Look at these people, the girl in the pinafore with her pink legs, the ten thousand others forcing him up against her; they are at least not alone in having names, like the gambrel roof, or the samovar in the café. Only he is nameless, real, among them.