Lessons in Restraint

The lesson, when it came, did not announce itself as a lesson. This was, Iyla was learning, the Society's particular method: they did not, on the whole, sit a person down and tell her a thing. They arranged the room so that the thing was, in due course, the only thing left to notice.

It was Maro, in the end, who arranged it, although Maro would not have used the word arrange and would not, if pressed, have admitted to having done anything at all. He put his book down, which was itself a kind of weather event, and he said, without preamble: "Tell me what you had for breakfast yesterday."

Iyla opened her mouth. She closed it. She opened it again. She had, she was almost sure, had toast. She had also, she thought, had an egg, but the egg was attached, in her memory, to a Tuesday she now realized had been Sunday, and the toast was sitting, in her recollection, on a plate that belonged to her grandmother, who had died in 2009 and whose plates were in a box in her mother's loft.

"Toast," she said, after a moment, with less confidence than the word deserved.

Maro nodded once, as if this were the answer he had been expecting and also the answer he had been hoping not to receive. "How many times have you gone in, this month."

"Eleven," Iyla said. She had counted. She had counted in the notebook. She had been pleased with herself for counting.

"Eleven," Maro said, the way a doctor says a number that the patient has just offered as a small triumph. "Close your eyes. Tell me the colour of your front door."

"Blue." Then, after a half second she did not like the length of: "Dark blue. With — there's a brass knocker, the previous tenant left it, it's shaped like —" She stopped. The shape of the knocker had been, until a week ago, a thing she could have drawn from memory. It was now a thing she could see only in the way one sees a face in a dream, which is to say with great vividness and no detail.

"A hand," she said, after a moment, because that was what came; and then, because she was being honest in a way the room was making her honest, "I think. A hand. Or a — I don't, just now, remember."

"Stand up," Maro said.

She stood. Penn, who had been pretending to write footnotes, had stopped pretending. Kettle had set down the biscuit.

"Walk to me," Maro said. He had moved, while she was not looking at him, to the far end of the table, by the window. "Say your own name, while you do."

She took the first step, and said Iyla, and took the second, and said Iyla, and on the third step Kettle, who had been told nothing and who had clearly been told everything, dropped his biscuit tin flat onto the floor.

The sound was not loud. It was the small flat tin sound of a small flat tin. It should not have done what it did. What it did was take the word out of her mouth between one syllable and the next, so that the I that began her name was hers and the second half was somebody else's, and for the small breath in between she was, with a clarity she would later be unable to describe to anyone who had not had the experience, not in the room. She was on a stone step she had not built, in a city she had, and she could not, for that breath, recall whether the step had a door at the top of it or only weather.

Penn had her by the elbow before Iyla had registered Penn moving. Penn's hand on Iyla's elbow was warm and dry and exact, the way her thumb on the card had been exact, and Penn said, into the side of Iyla's face, very quietly: "Iyla. Your kettle boiled dry last Tuesday. You had toast. Your knocker is a hand."

"My knocker is a hand," Iyla said, and was back, and sat down without being told to, hard, on the chair Maro had pulled out for her without seeming to.

"That," Maro said, "is the tax."

Nobody added to it for a moment. Penn let go of her elbow and sat. Kettle picked up the biscuit tin.

"It restores," Kettle said, eventually, more gently than the room. "Mostly. If you let it."

"It restores," Maro said, "if you anchor. It does not restore if you do not."

"Anchor," Iyla said. She had heard the word, from Saroya, at the table, in the lecture about Travelers and Anchors and Authors. She had filed it away as a thing she would not, personally, need, because she had not, personally, told anyone.

"Two kinds," Penn said. "A person. Or a practice." She did not elaborate. She picked up her pen, and put it down, and added, with the air of a woman issuing a receipt: "The person is better. The list, when there is no person, is small specific true things — the colour, the breakfast, the knocker — written before and read after. If a thing has gone soft when you read it back, you do not, that day, go again."

"And if it doesn't go hard again," Iyla said.

"Then you have gone too far in," Maro said, "and the list will not bring you back. The point is closer than people like to think."

"How close, for an Author."

"We do not know," Penn said. "There have not been enough of you to be rigorous. The guess, in the building, is that it is faster, because your worlds are stickier. They are yours. They want you to stay."

Iyla thought, with a small clean dread, of the warm coin on the kitchen table. Of the loop at her cuff, in Lentar, waiting for what she would put in it. Of how, on the last visit, she had been at the bakers' alley for what had felt like twenty minutes and had, on returning, found that the kettle she had left on the hob had boiled dry.

"I have been in," she said, slowly, "for longer than I told my notebook."

Kettle, after a moment, pushed the biscuit tin a further half inch toward her.

Maro picked up his book and found his line. Penn returned to her footnotes. Kettle ate his biscuit.

Iyla took out her notebook. She turned past the page on which she had written, the previous Friday, what they want is the coin. She found a fresh page, and wrote the date, and below it: List of small specific true things. She thought for a moment. Then she wrote: The knocker on my door is a hand holding — and stopped, because she could not, yet, finish the sentence.

She closed the notebook.