HIS BEST FRIEND OF MANY YEARS, who had been living for as long as either could remember across the country from him, had told him a secret which he had promised never to reveal; and now she had died. He had known her parents only slightly, having stayed at their house once during a visit many years ago when he and his friend had still been in college, and though he was sure they knew who he was, well enough to be invited to the funeral in any case, and knew something of his longstanding friendship with their daughter, he was not considered, by them, to be part of the inner circle. In any case towards the end of her life she had not been close to her family. The funeral was in the family church, which she had refused to set foot in after college, after a falling out with her father, a minister, the details of which he had never fully understood. They had made her up in a way she never would have made up or dressed herself; he felt like he was looking at a completely different person, the adult version of the little girl whom she had told him her parents, and particularly her mother, had always wanted her to be. The secret she had told him was nothing scandalous or horrifying, nothing that would destroy lives or cause a reassessment in anyone’s mind of his friend were he to reveal it; it was the sort of thing, in fact, that if it had been said casually, without the preface of swearing one’s listener to secrecy, probably would’ve passed unnoticed. Perhaps this was why she had insisted it was a secret: because she had wanted to underline it, to give it the power of secrecy which it otherwise would have lacked. Or perhaps, he thought, as he made his way back to his seat following the viewing, the secret she had told him was a sort of placeholder for another, more terrible secret, one she had been working up the courage to tell him and which would now, with her death, go untold. But this smacked of a melodrama which would have made his friend laugh at him. He felt protective towards the secret he did have; he did not like the thought that with his own death, whenever it might come, the secret she had told him, which she had cared enough about for whatever reason to call a secret, would disappear from the world. And yet who, with his friend’s passing, could he share it with? Oh, he knew his friend had an entire life apart from their friendship, that she had other friends, naturally, and affairs which she—unnecessarily worried about arousing a jealousy in him which he’d never shown—had kept hidden from him except in passing comments, often long after the affair in question had concluded. It was possible she had shared this secret with others, equally sworn to secrecy; there might have been a half-dozen of them in this room, a secret collective unknown even to each other, each feeling the same strange, sad burden of believing him- or herself to be the guardian of a secret now known only to him- or herself alone. But to believe this, he thought, was to put into question the entire basis of their friendship, which, whatever her life outside of their friendship, must have been, mustn’t it, absolutely unique? He knew nothing, for example, about the man sitting next to him, approximately his age, who happened (they had both noticed and commented on it, in appropriately solemn voices, before sitting down) to be wearing the same tie he was, which he had bought the week before for the occasion, and with whom he would surely, at the end of the service, shake hands and never see again; who would likewise make his way from the church following the service back to his hotel room, where he would eat something purchased from the convenience area in the hotel lobby and pack his suit back into his suitcase before spending a night awake, listening to the air conditioner like a throat clearing and contemplating those worlds inaccessible though glimpsed, perhaps, in moments such as these, when the pallbearers lift the casket and the congregation rises. •





James Tadd Adcox’s work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Granta, and is forthcoming in The Dodge. He's a founding editor at the literary magazine Always Crashing and is author, most recently, of Denmark: Variations, a collection of sixty sets of instructions for variations on the play Hamlet.

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