The Scientific Method, Privately Conducted

The thing about a daydream was that it left no fingerprints. That was its alibi and also, Iyla decided, its weakness — because a thing that left no trace could be tested for traces, and a thing that could be tested could be caught. So on Sunday she came back to the café early, before the crypto men, before the lunch rush, and she sat at the wobbly table with the book and a plan she had written out on the train in the smallest, most serious handwriting she owned.

The plan had two hypotheses, because Mr. Behr had taught her, without ever using the word, that one hypothesis is just a wish wearing a lab coat. Hypothesis one: she had a tired, vivid, slightly worrying imagination. Hypothesis two: the absurd one. The point was to design something the two could not both survive — some single outcome the daydream had no way to fake. And here she had an advantage Saturday had not given her: she now knew how the door closed. Thinking closed it. The oh had closed it. Narration was the exit. Which meant that to test the inside, she would have to act before she had time to describe the act to herself.

So she chose the act in advance, here, where it was safe to think: she would put her hand flat in the standing water at the edge of the road. Peat-brown, cold, real. If hypothesis one was true, her hand would come back as it left — dry, café-warm. If hypothesis two was true, it would not.

She controlled for everything she could reach. She dried both hands on a napkin until the paper shredded. She moved her thermos to the far end of the table, capped, so it could not be blamed later. She noted the time — 9:14 — and noted, with a skeptic's spite, that the table was dry, the air was dry, the whole overheated room was as dry as a lecture. Nothing within arm's reach could account for a wet hand except the one thing she was forbidding herself to believe in. Then she opened to the moor, found the figure on the road, and stopped thinking on purpose, which is the hardest instruction a mind can be given.

The wind came up off the page.

She did not greet it. She did not marvel — marvelling was a sentence, and sentences swung the door shut. She let the grey slope build itself, let the stone wall assemble, let the cold work into her left cuff, and she went down — not poured this time but stepped, deliberate, the way you step onto ice you have decided to trust. The heather scratched. The boots were on her feet, laces wet, and she did not say again, did not say anything, kept her whole self pointed at the one task like a held breath. She crouched. The wheel-rut was right there, the standing water in it black and unbothered. She reached. Her fingers broke the surface and the cold went up her arm like a struck bell — real cold, specific cold, colder than anything in a warm room had any business being —

— and the oh came whether she wanted it or not, because the body narrates even when the mind won't, and the moor went transparent in its practiced order: water, then smell, then slope, then the woman on the road, who did not turn this time, and then the café, slamming back into place around her at 9:14 and some seconds, her hand fisted in the air above the open book.

Her cuff was soaked to the elbow.

She did not let herself feel anything yet. She interrogated it first, the way she'd have interrogated a witness she didn't trust. Tea? The thermos was capped, three feet off, dry. Spill? The table was dry, the book was dry; only the cuff and the hand were wet, in a clean line, as if she had dipped them in a sink that did not exist. Sweat? Sweat is warm and smells of fear, and this was cold and smelled — she lifted her hand to her face, and her skeptic's heart did something complicated and undignified — of wet earth and peat smoke, of a country she had never set foot in on a continent she could not afford.

"You alright there?" The barista had come for the cold tea and was looking at the dark patch spreading down Iyla's sleeve onto the table with the mild concern of a person who would now have to fetch a cloth. "You spill something?"

And that was the part Iyla had not designed for, the part no daydream in the history of tired imaginations had ever managed: a second person, frowning at the evidence, asking her to explain it.

"No," Iyla said, very carefully, looking at her own wet hand as though it belonged to someone she was about to have a long talk with. "No. I didn't spill anything."