21. Thomas
Thomas
Iwoke up on Thursday doing somebody else's arithmetic.
Not a metaphor. I surfaced at six in my own bed in Corbett with numbers under my tongue, a whole column of them, and the column had opinions: the interval bottoms in the last week of term.
Forty heads at the standing rate will not carry.
The column does not care what I protect.
Complete sentences. No contractions. I lay there in the dark being fluent in a language I'd been failing all term, and then I got my own head back and sat up and said it out loud to the ceiling: that's his.
Verbatim. The man dreams in ledgers, and now so do I. He's leaking.
For the record, the new list, which started with magic is real and is only six days old:
Item five: we dream in each other's paperwork. I got tithe columns. God knows what he got. He got the diner, probably. He got the sundae I didn't order.
Item six, paced off Monday and re-walked Thursday morning as a controlled experiment, because I am still a researcher even when the research is me: the pull has a radius, and Thursday gave me Monday's numbers to the yard, which annoyed me both times.
I walked away from the Lodge across the quad with a notebook, like a surveyor with a personal problem.
At ten yards, nothing. At twenty, a lean, the kind a candle does.
At forty, a flat steady ache behind the sternum, ignorable the way hunger is ignorable.
Corbett to the Lodge is forty-one yards; I measured.
We live at the exact radius of the ache.
Somewhere in the doctrine there's probably a word for that. In my notebook the word is rent.
Croft kept me company both times, sweeping the same ten feet of gravel on Monday, watching Thursday from the gatehouse, and said nothing either day, because "Sir" covers everything and he wasn't going to waste one on me pacing.
There was a card in my pigeonhole that morning, cream, tidy, upright: Glad you're back on your feet.
The kettle survived your absence; the coffee did not.
Monday, if you're able. — K.B. Ballard. I stood there holding it and got, briefly, extremely close to crying in a mail room, because it had been a term of masks and needles, and here was one human sentence about coffee.
I put it in the notebook, flat against the rubbing and the photograph, in the pocket where I keep the things that are true.
* * *
The General Purposes Committee met Friday at two, last meeting of term. I want what happened there in the record, because it's evidence of the mechanism, and also because if I don't write it down I'll never stop being the only one who has to know.
Item three on the agenda was the library binding budget.
The rebinding of the periodicals. Binding.
The word came up eleven times; I counted; you bet I counted.
Three seats away, at the head of the table, the Headmaster of this college moved through the item with a face like a closed door, and behind my sternum, every single time the word landed, there was a dry flicker, like a man in a dark theater enjoying himself alone.
I leaned over during the shuffle of papers. "You're laughing."
"I am chairing a meeting," he said, not looking up.
"Behind the sternum you're laughing."
"Item four," he said to the room. "Drainage."
And it would have been fine. Drainage is the Provost's aria; the room settled in for the long haul; I was taking actual notes with an actual pen. And then, somewhere between the culvert survey and the schedule of costs, with no warning of any kind, Adrian Thorne thought about my mouth.
I need to be fair here, because I've had time to review the incident and fairness matters: he didn't do it on purpose.
The horror landed on him a half-second after the thought did, a man grabbing for a dropped glass.
But by then the thought had already crossed the three seats and arrived with my name on it, fully staged, and I can report that it was specific.
There was a table in it. The table was this table.
My notes were in it, and they went somewhere notes have never gone in the history of committee, and the cuffs I'd been idly looking at all meeting came into it in a supervisory capacity, and the whole thing arrived in my chest at the temperature of the man's actual want, which he keeps banked the way the college keeps the boiler.
I knocked my agenda to the floor. Picked it up. Sat through ninety more seconds of culverts with my ears roaring, then stood, held my notes at waist height like a hymnal, said the word "essays" to no one in particular, and left the room at the speed of a man who has remembered a stove.
Elena caught me in the corridor, because of course she did. "You left the Provost mid-culvert. You look like the stove was real."
"Marking," I said. "Term. You know."
"Uh-huh." She looked at me the way she counts. "Whatever's been going on with you since last week, you're going to tell me eventually. I'm putting it on the calendar."
Behind me, through a shut door and eight inches of Victorian wall, the chair of the meeting burned with the purest mortification of his administrative life, and underneath it, way down, the flicker.
Item seven: faculty meetings are no longer safe.
Nothing is safe any longer. We are two open doors facing each other in a drafty house, and the college thinks one of us had the flu.
* * *
He came to the flat at eight, which was itself a first. The Headmaster of Ashgrave College, in my doorway under the slope of my ceiling, holding a plain folder the way other men hold hats, and the room immediately too small for the amount of him, and the want on both sides of the bond banked and roaring like weather off the sea while we stood there discussing whether he should take the good chair.
He'd brought the cold in on his coat, iron and damp wool, and under it the ghost of his study, ink and wood polish, and my kitchen smelled of both of us before either of us had said one true thing.
The anger got there first, though. It had been simmering since Sunday, since he'd sat me down at his own kitchen table and read me the six sentences of the ruling in a voice like a man reading his own charges: registered.
Custody. Liability. Entered upon the schedule of the station's holdings.
I'd made him show me the ledger Monday. There I am, in an ink nobody bought, between the chapel plate and the doctrine press.
My whole life I've been overlooked by institutions, and the first one to fully commit lists me under the silverware.
"Sit down," I said. "Before anything else happens, and I'm aware of what's trying to happen, I need the thing in my chest to answer a question.
Because here's my situation. I want you.
I've wanted you since a handshake in September, I'm done lying about it, you can literally hear me not lying about it.
But as of last Thursday there's a machine in me with your name on it, and I've read about machines like this, every bad novel has one, and I need to know the want is mine.
Not the bond wanting through me. Mine, on my own paper.
And 'the doctrine says so' is not going to cover it. "
"No," he said. "It is not. The doctrine is one sentence: the bond amplifies; it does not compel. Six centuries believe that sentence. I believe it. And you have no reason on earth to take six centuries' word or mine, so we will not use words."
"An experiment," I said, and my chest turned over, because he'd arrived carrying the exact thing I was about to ask for. "You first, or me?"
"Me," he said. "You will know the difference between the bond's signal and wanting only if I stop rationing the signal.
So: I am going to want you, on purpose, with the tap open, which I have not permitted since the third of September.
And you are going to refuse. Say no, and keep saying it, and watch what the no does.
If the bond compels, you will feel your feet argue.
If it amplifies, you will feel everything and your feet will remain yours.
Either way you will have your answer, and it will be data, not doctrine. "
"And if my feet argue?"
"Then I sleep at the Lodge tonight and every night," he said, "and we learn to live at forty-one yards, and I ask the office for nothing, because there is nothing honest to ask for."
So we ran it. He sat in my bad chair with his hands flat on his knees, and he stopped rationing.
I'm not going to be able to do this justice and I'm going to try anyway, because it's the most important data of my life.
It was like standing in the doorway of a furnace room.
It was a term of it, September through the storm, the storm through Thursday, the whole banked archive un-banked at once, and it was specific, it had my laugh in it and my ink-stained fingers and my too-loud seminar heard through a wall, it was want with a bibliography, and it rolled through the bond and lit me up like a struck match, and I stood in the middle of my own kitchen and said, "No. "
The no held.
I said it again, walking away, to the window, which is the opposite direction from the chair.
My feet went where I sent them. The want ached, God, it ached like standing water aches a tooth, and it moved my feet nowhere, and I stood at the window with my back to the most wanted I have ever been in my life and counted to thirty, and every second of the thirty was mine.
The ache was information. The feet were mine. I did the science. The science held.