The Empty Notebook

The notebook had been on the table the whole time, of course. It was the same notebook — the one with the bad drawing of a tap, and the rules she had written for herself in her seriously-meant hand, and the ledger of three weeks' marvelous, useless takings. What had changed was not the notebook. It was the way she had just reached for it. She had reached for it the way she had once reached for cold bog water, and once, in her own kitchen, for an apple that had no orchard around it: not idly, not the way a reader reaches for a book, but the way an experimenter reaches for the next item in a sequence she has been running for weeks and has no intention of abandoning now that it has gotten interesting.

She had a hypothesis. She had had it, she supposed, for about the length of time it takes a kettle to boil — ever since the question had arrived in her own ordinary handwriting and refused to be unwritten. What if the book were mine? A hypothesis, in her experience, did not improve with keeping. It wanted testing while it was still warm, before the sensible part of her, the part that finished its plate and distrusted grandeur, could talk her into filing it under ambitious, possibly absurd and turning the page on it forever.

So she sat with the hypothesis and made it say exactly what it meant, because a hypothesis you cannot state plainly is only a mood.

It went like this. Every world she had walked into had admitted her because it was an address, and she had learned the address well enough to arrive. But every one of those addresses had been written down by somebody else, and that — she was nearly sure of it now, with the slow cool click she had learned to trust — was the whole reason the chair would not move and the soldier got the same morning every time and the moor took her thumbprint the way a lake takes a thrown coin. A finished place let you visit precisely because someone had already finished visiting it. The door was real; the house was occupied, in perpetuity, by its author. She could be a guest forever. She could never be a resident in a room that was already, down to the last gull-feather, somebody's.

Which raised the obvious experimental question, the one she had been circling for weeks without letting herself say it: what would a place do that nobody had finished? What would a place do that was being written right now, ink still wet, the door not yet shut for the simple reason that she was the one standing in it?

There was exactly one way to find out, and it did not involve any book that existed. It involved the one address in the world that had never been written by anyone at all.

She turned to a clean page. The new page was blank. It was, in fact, comically blank; it was the kind of blank that blank pages get when they suspect they are about to be used. She looked at it. She put her pen down. She picked it up again — and this, she would later decide, was the moment she stopped being a reader of the phenomenon and started being something for which she did not yet have a word, the moment the experiment quietly changed from can I go in to can I make the thing I go into.

She wrote at the top of the page: A CITY.

That seemed too grand. She crossed it out and wrote, instead: a place. That seemed too small. She compromised, in the end, on somewhere, which felt accurate to her ignorance and committed her to nothing, and underneath it she began, slowly, with the seriousness she usually reserved for grocery lists and tax forms, to write down what was there.

A market, she wrote. Because the first thing she always wanted, in any place, was the market. A market in a square, and the square is not square but a long irregular shape because the streets that meet it were not planned, they were trodden, and a trodden place is never square. She liked that and underlined it. The stones of the square are pale and worn smooth in the middle and rougher at the edges where fewer feet go. There is a fountain but it is not running, because — she paused, considered — because the city is in a dry season, and the dry season here is important, and people measure the year by how low the fountain has gone. She wrote fountain in the margin and circled it, because she could feel it wanting to be a thing she would care about.

She wrote: the stalls sell — and stopped, because she did not, yet, want to fill in what the stalls sold; that felt like a decision that ought to be made on the ground. the stalls sell things, she wrote firmly, and moved on. the people are not tall and not short. they wear, and here she paused again, because she could see them, suddenly, with an inconvenient clarity, they wear layered things, light over light, the way people dress in a place where the temperature changes four times a day. their sleeves are interesting. their sleeves do work. She did not know yet what work the sleeves did. She wrote sleeves (?) in the margin and felt, obscurely, that the sleeves would tell her later.

She wrote: the city has a name. She put her pen down. She did not have a name. She picked her pen up. She wrote: Lentar. She did not know where that had come from. She tried it twice more on the page, Lentar, Lentar, in different hands, to see if she could shake it off, and she could not; the word had stuck itself to the place the way a name sticks to a cat once you have said it out loud in front of the cat. Lentar, she wrote a fourth time, and underlined it, and felt, with a small unscientific thrill, that she had committed something.

She wrote on. She wrote about a river that was not in the city but near it, close enough that the city was about the river even when it pretended to be about other things. She wrote about a hill north of the river with a single tree on it, because every city she had ever loved in a book had had a hill with a single tree on it, and she was prepared to acknowledge her influences. She wrote about a kind of light particular to the late afternoon there, dust-gold, the dust kicked up by the day's last carts. She wrote about a small alley where the bakers worked, because she could smell it, and she wrote about a particular wall in that alley that had a long crack down it in the shape, if you were generous, of a river, and she was generous, and the wall acknowledged this and chose to be generous back.

And here was the difference, the one her whole experiment turned on, and it stopped her pen for a moment when she noticed it: the wall answered. In every other house she had walked into she had pressed her thumb to the glass and the glass had stayed cold; here she made a crack be a river and the wall took the suggestion and gave something back. She was not visiting. She was building, and the building was a kind of visiting, and the visiting was, she was beginning to suspect, going to turn out to be the same act with two names — that to write the place well enough was to be standing in it, that authorship and travel were not cousins but the one thing, looked at from the page side and from the door side. She underlined nothing. She did not trust herself to say it out loud yet. She just kept writing, faster now, the way you walk faster when you realize the road is actually going somewhere.

She filled three pages. She filled four. She did not draw a map, because she did not yet trust herself to draw a map; a map would have committed her to distances, and she wanted, for now, to leave the distances negotiable. She drew, instead, in the bottom corner of the fourth page, a small unconfident sketch of the fountain — a low circular basin, three steps down to the water, a worn stone lip — and labeled it, with a smile she did not entirely approve of, fountain (currently dry).

Then she stopped. She had reached, she could feel, the natural pause of a person who has been describing a place she has never been to and has, somewhere in the middle of the describing, started to suspect that she has been there after all. Her tea — and this was almost reassuring, almost a relief — was cold. It was a Sunday afternoon in October, the light through the kitchen window gone the particular thin yellow of a year giving up, and she had filled four pages with a city that had not existed when the light came up that morning.

She read it all back. She read it the way she read other people's books, which was to say with a pen ready to argue, and she found, somewhat to her surprise, that she did not want to argue. She wanted to go. She wanted to walk down the alley of the bakers and put her hand on the river-crack in the wall and find out what the sleeves did. She wanted, she realized with a small jolt, the orchard feeling — the wanting that was also data, the same animal pull that had stood her in her kitchen with an impossible apple in her hand — and she wanted it now about a place that did not exist anywhere except in four pages of her own untidy handwriting.

That was the test, then. That was, she could see now, the experiment she had been arranging from the moment she wrote the question down: not whether she could enter a book, which she knew, but whether the address still worked when she was the one who had written it.

She closed the notebook. She held it for a moment in both hands, the way she had held the apple, and she felt — she would have sworn to it later, in court, if anyone had been so foolish as to put her on a stand — she felt the small distinct heat of a thing that had been turned on. Not the heat of a kettle; the heat of a lamp. The heat of something that was, very faintly, lit from the inside.

She set it down on the table in front of her. She did not, yet, open it again. She thought, attention without a fist around it — the same loosening that had carried her into the moor, the grip let go. She thought, the door is not the book; the door was never the book; the door is me, and it has been me the whole time, which is why it never mattered whose house I was visiting and why it is going to matter enormously now that the house is mine. She thought, if this works, I will have to invent a great many more rules very quickly, and I will probably resent every one of them, and she remembered the rule she had already written — that the rules she invented now were the rules she would be grateful for later — and was, briefly, grateful in advance.

She let her eyes go soft on the closed cover the way they had gone soft on Jane Eyre, the small particular slump of attention that was not giving up so much as setting down. The kitchen thinned. The distance between her and the notebook — the small accustomed distance over which a reader looks down at a thing she has made — thinned with it, until looking down at the page and standing in it were no longer two different directions. She felt, against her face, a warmth that was not the kitchen's, a dust-gold warmth, the warmth of a day's last carts.

Somewhere, not far, a fountain that had been dry for some time was, on the strength of four pages and a name she had not chosen, beginning to be a fountain.

She stepped through.