The Tax Comes Due

She went back across on the Monday because the lock, having been hung, was not yet — to her ear — finished; there was a thing she wanted to do at the green door that she had not done on the Sunday, which was to sit near it, for an hour or two, and watch who came. Not to confront. To witness. She had decided, somewhere in the long Sunday evening, that the letter she had pencilled into the wood deserved the courtesy of a reader, and that she was the reader most likely, on a Monday afternoon in Lentar, to be present when the envelope was opened.

So she stayed. She stayed past the hour she had planned and into a second hour, and then a third, sitting on the low stone wall opposite the green door with a cup of something a woman two houses down had pressed on her without asking, and she watched the door, and she let the city move around her in the small unstudied way a city moves around a person it has stopped, for the moment, finding remarkable. She had told herself, before she crossed, that she would come back at the second bell. The second bell rang. She did not move. The argument she made to herself for not moving was that the door had not yet been tried, and that having stayed two hours it was wasteful to leave at the moment a thing might happen; the argument had the small unwelcome shape of arguments she had, in other contexts, recognised as bad.

The light shifted. She noticed, somewhere around what would have been the third hour and was not really an hour at all because she had stopped tracking, that the woman two houses down had a name she knew, which was Hala, and that Hala had a daughter called Mish, and that the daughter had on a Thursday last spring fallen from a low wall and cut her lip in a way that had healed crooked; and the noticing arrived in her as a small soft pleasure of the kind one feels on remembering a thing one had been afraid of forgetting, and it was several seconds before she understood that she had no reason at all to know any of it, that she had not, in fact, written Hala or Mish or a low wall or a Thursday in spring, and that the pleasure of remembering was the precise warm shape that remembering takes when it is happening inside the wrong head.

She stood up. Standing up was a mistake, because standing up displaced the cup, which spilled, and the spilling was a small ordinary fact she should have catalogued cleanly as a thing that had just happened to her hand, and instead she found herself, looking at the wet patch spreading on the stone, unable to decide for a stretched second which hand had been holding the cup. She knew it had been one of them. She looked at both. Both were hands. Both were hers in the trivial sense that they were attached to her. Neither rose, in the small instinctive way one's writing hand will rise when asked, to claim the cup. She thought, very carefully, the sentence I write with my, and waited for the sentence to finish itself, and the sentence did not finish itself, it sat in her mouth like a coin she had not decided how to spend, and underneath the not-finishing she could hear, with a clarity that was the worst thing that had happened to her this year, a different sentence beginning to assemble itself, which was that she wrote with the hand Hala had bandaged for her last spring after the business with the low wall, and the sentence was finishing itself, smoothly, in a voice she recognised as her own.

She sat down again. Sitting down was the first correct thing she had done in some minutes. She put both hands flat on the stone wall, palms down, because the stone was cold and the cold was a fact that had nothing to do with anyone called Hala, and she said, out loud, in the small empty stretch of street, her own name. She said it twice. She said it a third time, and the third time it sounded, to her ear, like the name of a person she had once met. She felt, then, the thing she had read about in Maro's careful sentences and watched, from the wrong side, happen to Mara in the upstairs room at number forty-one — the thin pulling sensation, low under the ribs, of a self that was not, at that exact moment, certain it would, on being called, come.

She put her hand into her pocket. The right one. She put her hand into her pocket because there was, in the pocket, a thing she had not crossed without for a year, which was the small dried stem-end of the green apple from the children's book, kept in a twist of waxed paper because she had eaten the apple but had been, even then, frightened enough of her own pleasure to keep the stem. She had carried it, originally, as a souvenir of her first successful theft from a book; she carried it, now, as the thing in her pocket that no one in Lentar had written, that no character of hers had ever touched, that belonged to a Tuesday in her kitchen in a year Hala did not exist in. She got it out. She got it open. She put the stem-end in her mouth and bit, because biting was the sensation she remembered, and the bit of stem was bitter and slightly woody and tasted of nothing anyone in Lentar had ever cooked, and the bitterness was so specifically the bitterness of an apple stem in her mouth in her kitchen on a Tuesday in October that the pulling sensation under her ribs faltered, briefly, and she got, in the faltering, a foothold.

She used the foothold. She got the notebook out — the small one, the working one, not the one in which she wrote Lentar — and she opened it to a page near the back where, six weeks ago, in her own kitchen, she had written in pencil in a hand she could feel even now in the small muscles of her fingers a margin note to herself that read if S. arrives early on the 19th, sit by the door, not the window. She read it. She read it again. She traced the S with her finger because tracing was an action her writing hand would have to perform, and the right hand, the one with the apple stem still between its fingers, moved, and traced, and was — recognisably, in the small reluctant way a tool acknowledges its owner — her writing hand. The left hand sat on the stone, palm down, doing nothing, which was, she understood with a thin wash of relief that was almost worse than the fear had been, exactly what her left hand had, for thirty-one years, done while her right hand wrote.

She sat with that for a minute. She sat with the apple stem in her teeth and the notebook open on her knee and her right hand on the page and her left hand on the stone, and she did the small inventory Maro had taught her — breakfast (toast, no butter, the jam from the jar with the chipped lid), the knocker on her front door (brass, hand-shaped, slightly green in the webbing between the thumb and forefinger), the name of the barista (Iris, with the eyebrow), the name of the man at the till at Behr's (Mr. Behr, who that morning had said only I will be here) — and each fact, as it arrived, arrived with a small click she could feel, and after the click the fact stayed put, and Hala receded, not all the way, but enough; Hala became, in the slow recovery of the next several minutes, what Hala had always been, which was a woman two houses down whom Iyla had not invented and did not know, and the daughter called Mish became — Iyla noted it with care, because the noting itself was now an act of housekeeping — a fact she would, on getting home, have to write down somewhere, because the city was still doing the thing the city did, and Mish, whoever she was, was now in it, and Iyla would, going forward, be responsible for her in the way she was responsible for Tev and for Halun and for the boy whose aunt had been called Saba.

She did not, when she crossed back, run. She crossed slowly, because she did not, just then, trust the part of herself that made the crossing to do it well if she hurried it, and she came into her kitchen with the apple stem still in her right hand and the notebook still in her left, and she stood at the counter for a full minute before she did anything else, looking at the kettle, which was on the left of the stove, and at the knife block, which was on the right, and at the small green pot on the windowsill in which a basil plant was, slowly and against her competence, dying, and she let the kitchen be the kitchen for a while before she let herself be the person standing in it.

Then she sat down and she wrote, in the working notebook, under the date, in the small upright hand she had, all afternoon, nearly lost: Today I overstayed. I did it on purpose. I told myself it was witnessing. It was not entirely witnessing. The tax came due and I nearly paid it in the wrong currency. For the next thirty days I do not cross for longer than one hour, and I do not cross without the stem in my pocket, and I do not cross without writing, before I go, the sentence I write with my right hand, and reading it, on coming back, in my own hand, aloud. She read the sentence aloud. Her voice did the thing voices do when they are reading a thing the person has just written; it did not do the thing it had done on the wall, which was sound, briefly, like someone else's. She underlined right hand twice, because underlining was a small physical act of the right hand, and because she wanted, the next time she opened the notebook, to be met by the underlining before she was met by anything else.

She thought, then, of the empty case at the end of the C room — the small clean rectangle of felt with no object on it and no card beside it — and she understood, in a way she had not understood standing in front of it, that the case was not waiting for the coin in her drawer. The case was waiting for whatever object a person leaves behind when the person themselves has been, quietly, over a number of small overstayings, gentled. She put the apple stem back in its waxed paper. She put the waxed paper back in the right pocket of the coat hanging by the door, where it had lived for a year, and where, she decided, it was now going to live with a different job description. Then she made tea, with her right hand, in the kettle on the left of the stove, and she drank it slowly, and she did not, for the rest of that evening, open the door.