To Whom It May Concern: - Excerpt

Sunday, November 20

Listen...suppose the story were to begin with Sarah's cousin delayed for a few hours in the middle of his journey...stranded in the city werhe he and Sarah were born...stranded at the airport...many years after the great war which so deeply marked the cousins when they were children...yes suppose...it would give him time to think...to prepare himself for the reunion in the land of promises after years of separation...it's been thirty-five years since the two cousins last saw each other...yes suppose...then after the struggle with words has ended I will step back and watch the lies fall into place to shape a truth ignobly wrestled onto the surface of the paper.

That's how I see this story...its design...its geography. On one side, a land of misrepresentation where Sarah's cousin has been living for the past thirty-five years. On the other, far away, across the ocean, a land of false promises, a piece of desert full of mirages, where Sarah has been living her own exile for as many years. And bracketed in between, the country where the two cousins were born, and where an unforgivable enormity was committed during the war. That place will remain parenthetical. It will linger in the depth of the cousins' background. After the war they went away. He to the West and Sarah to the East.

Should this cousin be given a name? A name is so cumbersome. so limiting. It confines a being to the accident of birth, imposes a civic identity. Perhaps, for now, he can simply be referred to as Sarah's cousin. Yes, SARAH'S COUSIN. Though her name too might be deleted later on.