Adam A7A: The Last Page
Adam set the last page down gently.
The show was over, the house lights coming up; and he would own it, here where owning it cost nothing — they had got him. He had stayed to the end, the lady sawn in the long box and wheeled apart and stood up whole, because some boy in him sixty years buried wanted to see it. And the boy was glad.
They had moved him. That was the plain fact of the matter, and he turned it over without troubling to dress it up: they had taken an old man who supposed himself well past moving — set in his frame, cured, finished, his opinions gone to furniture — and they had nudged him, and he had gone. Nudged him in a direction he had not known an old man still had it in him to be nudged.
He sat back into the chair. The old wood took his weight; his hands came open on the arms of it; his toes uncurled in his shoes; the breath went out of him, long and slow. He looked up. The green lamp-glass, and the warm brass beneath it. The spines in their old colours. The gold worn to amber under his thumb. The dust standing in the air. An old man in a chair, the evening quiet in the window. From his boyhood catechism came the old words: And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
So that was the end of it. The end of the ride. And already he had begun to look back on it the way one looks back, walking home, at the end of a day at the fair — a wonderful day, surely, but a day out all the same: not the life, only a holiday from it, and now over.
And at no point, on no page, had they given him a proof.