What Iyla Will Not Do
The option arrived, as easy options often do, dressed as a thought she had already half had.
It came on the Wednesday evening, after Kettle had gone, while she was washing the two cups they had used. The voice said: you could write a door into Penn's flat. You could write, in the notebook, a door in the back wall of Penn's kitchen — she had stood in that kitchen on the Tuesday, the long window, the kettle on the left of the stove — and you could write the door to open only from your side, and you could write, on the other side of the door, a small empty room in Lentar with no exit; and you could, by writing this, give Penn, every time she opened her own kitchen cupboard, the small uncertain feeling of standing one inch closer to a place she had not asked to go. You would not have to do anything with the door. The having of it, written and held, would be enough; a quiet private knowledge of the kind a person carries against another person, and it would, the voice said, even the ledger by exactly the amount it needed evening.
She dried her hands. She sat down at the kitchen table. She wrote the option out in her notebook, because she had learned by now that refusing to think a thought was the surest way of keeping it warm; better to write it down in its most flattering form, with all its small seductions intact, and then to look at the writing.
She looked at the writing. As she read it the voice, which had not expected to be written down and did not enjoy it, began — the way such voices do when they find themselves on the page instead of in the dark — to argue back. The option had three features she wanted to name, because naming, she now believed, was how a person made a thing permanent enough to refuse.
The first was that it was elegant. It used the gift she had against the person who had abused it, which had the small literary symmetry her mind, trained on books, found difficult to resist. She wrote in the margin: symmetry. Underneath: suspect. Mr. Behr had taught her, fifteen years ago on a different subject, that any argument whose chief virtue was its shape was an argument it was wise to mistrust.
A shape is not a crime, said the voice, mildly. You are not obliged to make your justice ugly to prove it is sincere.
True, she wrote. But you reached for the tidiness first and the justice second, and you are hoping I will not weigh the order you reached in.
The voice went quiet in the way it went quiet when it was changing its approach rather than conceding it.
The second feature was that it would not, in any practical sense, be discovered. Penn would not know the door was there. No tribunal, no friend, no version of her own future self reading the notebook in ten years would be able to point at a moment in the world and say, there, that is where Iyla did the thing.
Which is the kindest part of it, said the voice, quickly. No one is hurt who does not know. The whole cost falls on you, and you are volunteering to carry it.
She wrote it down, because it was a good question. A thing I would only do because no one would see me do it is a thing I have already, by that fact alone, told myself not to do. In the margin: unwitnessed. Underneath: therefore.
The third feature took her longest to name, because it was the one the voice had been working hardest to keep her from naming. The third feature was that the option would change, in a small permanent way, what kind of Author she was. Not what kind of person — she was prepared to grant the voice that she would still, on Thursday morning, be recognisably herself —
Then there is no harm done, the voice put in, too soon, and she heard the too-soon of it, the small eagerness with which it had taken the concession and tried to bank it; and the hearing told her more than the argument had.
— but what kind of Author. To write a door for the purpose of holding a person uncertain on the other side of it would be to use the gift, for the first time, against a named person rather than for a named place; and the using-against, once done, would be a precedent, and precedents in a private practice were the load-bearing walls of the practice. She would have built, in her own notebook, a small room labelled this is a thing I do, and the room, once built, would be available to her on every subsequent evening when the voice came confiding into the kitchen with a new and slightly different idea. The voice did not argue with this. It had no rebuttal to a description of itself.
She wrote, under therefore, the word no. She wrote it small, because the writing of it large would have been a performance.
Then, because the no by itself was not yet a discipline but only a refusal, and because she had read enough books about people in her position to know that a refusal made in the heat of an evening was a refusal that lasted, on average, until the next evening, she turned to a fresh page. At the top she wrote, in the careful hand she kept for things she meant to be able to read later without flinching, Constraints, written before required. Underneath:
1. I will not write a door into the home, body, or kitchen of a named person, for any reason, including reasons that present themselves to me as just.
2. I will not write, into Lentar or any world I open after it, a room or condition whose purpose is the holding-uncertain of a person who has wronged me. I may write rooms for many purposes. I may not write rooms for that one.
3. I will not, with Saroya or with anyone who comes after Saroya, use the existence of Lentar's people as a threat — not by hint, not by implication, not by the careful silence in which a threat is most efficiently delivered. The people of Lentar are not leverage. If I treat them as leverage in a sentence, I will, by the next sentence, have treated them as leverage in fact.
4. I will not retaliate against Penn. Retaliation against Penn is the option that will be available to me for the longest, in the largest number of forms, with the most plausible justifications; for that reason it is the option I am ruling out first, and in writing, and tonight, while it costs me only the giving-up of a thought I have not yet acted on.
5. I will, when the voice comes again — and it will come again, in some new shape, with some new symmetry — read this list before I answer it, and I will read it out loud, because reading a thing out loud is the cheapest way I know of finding out whether one still believes it.
She read the list. She read it out loud, once, to the kitchen, because the kitchen was, for the present, her witness, and a witnessed constraint was the kind that held. The kitchen received the reading without comment, in the way kitchens do.
She thought, then, about what she had given up, because she did not want the giving-up to go unnoticed; the unnoticed giving-up of a thing was, she had learned from the tax, the way the thing came back later disguised as something else. She had given up a feeling — the small steady warmth of carrying, against Penn, a private knowledge that evened the ledger — and she would have to live, from this evening, with the ledger uneven, and with the unevenness being a thing she had chosen to leave standing because the evening of it would have cost more than the unevenness did. This was what people meant when they spoke of paying for one's ethics. She had read the phrase often, and had not, until tonight, understood that the paying was not a grand thing done in a public place with witnesses, but a small thing done at a kitchen table at half past nine on a Wednesday, in which a woman declined to feel better in a particular way and wrote down, in advance, that she would continue to decline.
She added one more line, at the bottom, separated from the others by a small space: I am choosing these constraints now, while I am not yet tired, because the version of me who will be asked to honour them will be tired, and she will need to be able to point at this page and say, the woman who wrote this was not under duress, and her judgment is the judgment I have agreed to be bound by.
She closed the notebook. She put it on the shelf above the table, not in the drawer where she usually kept it, because she wanted, in the morning, to see it from the doorway as soon as she came into the kitchen.
Then she put the kettle on, although she did not particularly want tea, because the putting-on of the kettle was, for her, the small domestic gesture by which she marked the closing of a conversation with herself. The kettle came to the boil. She poured the water into the cup, over nothing, and thought, with the dry small clarity that was now her working weather, that she had just done the easiest version of the hardest thing she was going to have to do this month; and that the easiness of it was precisely why she had had to do it now, because the harder versions, when they came, were going to come at moments when sitting down would not be available, and when the writing of a list would feel, in the moment, like a luxury she could not afford. She had afforded it tonight. You bought the discipline on the cheap evening so that, on the expensive evening, you already owned it.
She drank the water. It tasted of nothing, which was, on the whole, what she had wanted.