Mike completes All the Way from the Top without Jo

Mike Noonan’s completion of All the Way from the Top becomes a private funeral rite for Johanna as well as the close of their shared writing ritual. In a hot Derry office, he finishes the novel, raises champagne to her, and finds no supernatural reply; after saving and backing up the manuscript, he writes nothing more for four years.

The Ritual and Its Meaning

On the day he completed All the Way from the Top, Mike made at least an attempt at the ritual that had accompanied finishing a book. It felt hollow to him, like a form emptied of its former magic, but he went through it not from superstition but from respect and love. He understood the act as a memorial—and, a month after Johanna had been buried, as her real funeral service at last.

The timing sharpened the sense of loss. It was late September, still unusually hot, and the final, difficult push to complete the novel had not slowed him, though he had spent it thinking about how much he missed her. The loss was no longer the immediate storm of grief he had expected: what remained was a deep, wretched absence, registered in the empty chair where Johanna liked to read and the table where she set her glass too close to the edge.

The Completion Scene

Mike carried a tray with a bottle of champagne and two chilled glasses into his long, windowless Derry office. Three overhead fans stirred the heavy air above the book-lined room. At the far end, beneath a steep eave and at the workstation Johanna had considered badly placed, his Macintosh displayed the finished prose. The setting held together the ordinary labor of writing and the intimate domestic memory that the ritual was meant to honor.

He poured a glass, let the foam settle, and told Johanna, “I'm done, Jo,” before asking, “So that's all right, isn't it?” The question received no answer. Looking back from the later events of his account, Mike emphasizes that he sensed no presence in the apparently empty room—not the feeling of being accompanied that would come later, and not even the small bodily signs he would associate with haunting.

After drinking from his own glass, he filled the second and carried it to the Macintosh, sitting where Johanna would have sat. His eyes prickled, but he did not break down. He added a line to the manuscript, centered “The End” beneath the final prose, and toasted the screen with the champagne intended for Johanna. The screen, rather than a replying spirit, became the focus of the farewell.

The End of the Book and the Beginning of Silence

Mike’s toast made the completion personal rather than merely professional. He wished Johanna were there and told her he missed her; his voice wavered but did not break. He then saved the final copy, transferred the work to floppy disks, and made a backup. The sequence moves from the emotional gesture back to practical preservation: the book was finished, secured, and ready to leave his hands.

Except for notes, grocery lists, and checks, that was the last writing Mike did for four years. The scene therefore marks more than the end of a single novel: the ritual that once joined work and marriage survives as a memorial, while the act of finishing the book is followed by a prolonged withdrawal from writing. Its silence is made especially clear by the absence of any answer in the room and by the narrator’s retrospective insistence that this was before he felt himself not to be alone.