The Souvenir Problem

She stood in the alley with her hand on the warm wall and the empty peg at her wrist and the taste of the green one still on her tongue, and she thought about her own city, the city she had come from that morning, where the surplus was hoarded into coin and counted, where a stranger who knew you was a stranger who had read your file, where the ledger of who owed whom what was kept by people you would never meet and could not, in any meaningful sense, argue with. She thought about the café, and the noise of it, and the way you could sit in it for three hours and pay for a single cup of tea and the only thing anyone wanted from you was that you not, in the end, take the cup. She loved the café. She missed, suddenly and absurdly, the café. But she saw, too, with the clarity of a person comparing two ledgers laid side by side, what her own city had decided a person was for, and she did not like, particularly, what the comparison turned up.

She walked on. She walked because if she stood any longer at the warm wall she was going to do something foolish, like cry, and she had a rule, somewhere in the notebook, about not crying in cities she had only just met.

She came back, eventually, to the square. The light had gone from dust-gold to a thinner, bluer gold, the gold of a day finishing rather than a day winding down, and the child on the lip of the fountain had been replaced by an old man who was not eating anything and was, instead, sitting with his hands flat on the stone on either side of him as if waiting for the fountain to remember him. Iyla sat down, three steps along from him, on the same lip, and put her own hands on the stone in unconscious imitation, and felt the stored warmth of the day come up through her palms.

She emptied her purse onto her lap.

Three coins. She had spent none of them; the cloth she had paid for in coin, but the woman at the cloth stall had given her change, and the change was — she counted — yes, three coins still, the same three, plus two smaller ones, the smaller ones thin and slightly bent as if they had been carried a long time. She turned the smaller ones over in her fingers. One had a fish on it. One had a kind of leaf, three-lobed, with a stem. They were pleasant in the hand, worn smooth, ordinary; they were the coins of any city anywhere that had been a city long enough to wear its money down.

She picked up one of the original three. Heavier. Newer-feeling, though not new — the edges had been handled but not yet softened. On one side, a building she did not recognize, a low domed shape with a colonnade, rendered in the spare schematic way coins render buildings, more idea of a building than building. On the other side —

She turned it.

On the other side was a face.

It was a man's face, in profile, the way faces went on coins. He had a long jaw and a nose that had been broken at some point and reset slightly off, and his hair was tied back with what looked, in the small stamped detail, like a ribbon, and his eye, the visible one, was rendered open and direct and faintly amused, as if the man being put on the coin had thought the whole business of being put on a coin was a joke he was, fractionally, in on. Around the edge of the coin, in letters she could read and could not read at the same time — letters that arranged themselves into sense when she looked at them and slid out of sense when she looked away — ran a short legend she eventually decoded as Aren the Second, by his own admission.

She sat very still.

She had not written a man. She had not written a king, or whatever Aren the Second had been; she had not written a second of anything, which presupposed a first, which presupposed a history, which presupposed the small unending architecture of a place that had been a place before she had decided to look at it. She had written a market. She had written a fountain currently dry. She had written sleeves that did work, without knowing what work. She had not written Aren the Second, by his own admission, and yet here he was in her palm, with his crooked nose and his amused eye, looking up at her with what she now had to call, because the word was accurate, confidence. The confidence of a man who knew he existed.

She felt the small distinct cold of a thing she had not accounted for in her rules.

She took out her other coin — the second of the original three — and turned it. A different face. A woman, this one, younger, hair short, no legend at all on the rim, only a small star in the place a legend would have gone, as if whoever struck the coin had not yet decided what to call her or had decided, on purpose, not to. The third coin: a face she could not see properly because the stamp had worn, but a face, undeniably, with the shape of a jaw and the suggestion of an ear, somebody she had not invented worn down by hands she had not invented in pockets she had not invented over years she had not granted the city permission to have.

She put the coins back in the purse one by one. Her hands, she noticed with a clinical detachment that did not entirely fool her, were not quite steady.

She did the thing she did, which was to make a list.

Items in this city I put here: the square, the fountain, the dry season, the bakers' alley, the crack in the wall, the hill outside with the single tree, the dust-gold light, the sleeves.

Items in this city I did not put here: the child on the lip of the fountain. The leaf the child was eating something out of. The woman who sold cages but not birds. The man who wanted a bird and would not be told. The brine. The green one and the turn it was coming up on. The needle woman's better needle. The books. The scrivener on the third street. Saturday. The loops in the cuffs and the slim wooden pegs and the small cloth pouches that hung from them. The old man beside her now on the lip of the fountain, with his hands flat on the stone. The fish on the small coin. The leaf on the other small coin. Aren the Second, by his own admission. The woman with no legend, only a star. The third face, worn past reading.

The second list was longer than the first. The second list was, she saw with a kind of clean dread, going to keep getting longer for as long as she stayed; the city was filling in, the way a sketch fills in when you put a wash of color over it and discover that the paper has tooth you did not know about, that the tooth catches the color in places you did not plan, that the result is a picture you partly made and partly received. She had thought, on the strength of four pages and a name she had not chosen, that she was going to be the one who built the place. She was beginning to suspect, sitting on the warm stone with three coins back in her purse and one of them bearing the amused eye of a man she had never met, that the place had been waiting to be built with her, and had brought, to the joint project, a great deal more than she had.

Lentar, she had written, four times, in different hands, to see if she could shake it off. She had not been able to shake it off because — she understood this now with the small clear bell-note of a thing recognized rather than invented, the same note she had heard writing I would like to be the one who built the place — because Lentar had not, in fact, come from her. It had come through her. The way, perhaps, the orchard had been waiting in the children's book for a nine-year-old to walk into it; the way the moor had been waiting at Thornfield for any reader patient enough to step sideways at the right paragraph. She had assumed, because she had picked up the pen, that she was the author. She was beginning to suspect she was, at best, the door.

The old man beside her, without turning his head, said, "First time?"

Iyla, after a moment, said, "Yes."

He nodded, slowly, the way a person nods who has been waiting to nod for a while. "Sit a bit, then," he said. "The fountain remembers everyone eventually. You'll want to be sitting when it gets to you."

She did not know what that meant. She did not, she realized, want to know yet; she wanted to take it home in her sleeve, on the empty peg, and look at it under the lamp of her own kitchen, where she still, just about, knew what the rules were.

She thought, I should go. She thought it the way she sometimes thought I should sleep, knowing she would not for another hour. She put her hand into the purse and closed her fingers around the heaviest of the coins — Aren the Second, by his own admission, with his crooked nose and his amused eye — and she did not, she noted, put it back. She kept it in her hand. She was going to take it with her. She was going to take it with her because she needed, suddenly and badly, a piece of the city that she could hold under her own lamp and ask, who are you, and how did you get into a place I thought I had made.

She let her eyes go soft on the dry basin of the fountain. The square thinned. The old man beside her did not thin; he stayed exactly where he was, with his hands flat on the stone, and she had the brief uncomfortable impression that he was watching her leave with the same unhurried patience with which the pickle woman had watched her think. The dust-gold light gave way, by degrees, to the thinner yellow of an October Sunday in a kitchen, and her tea was still cold on the table, and her notebook was still closed in front of her, and her hand was closed, in her lap, around something small and hard and warm.

She opened her hand.

The coin lay on her palm. Heavier than it had any right to be, here. Newer-feeling. The low domed building on one side; on the other, in profile, the long jaw and the broken-reset nose and the ribbon in the tied-back hair, and the open visible eye, looking up at her now from the kitchen table with what was, undeniably, the same fractional amusement, as if to say, yes. me. and?

She set him down on the table next to the notebook. She set him down carefully, face up, because it felt rude to put him face down, which was already, she noticed, a thought she would not have had about the apple. The apple had been a thing. Aren the Second was a person, or had been one, or was being one, somewhere, on the strength of a coin in her kitchen.

She did not open the notebook. She did not, yet, write any of this down, though she could feel the sentences arranging themselves in her, with the particular pressure of sentences that were not going to allow themselves to be unwritten. Problem, one of them was already beginning. The world is bringing its own furniture.

She sat at the table for a long time with her cold tea and her warm coin and a feeling she eventually identified, with the small grim pleasure of correct diagnosis, as the feeling she had had at nine, in the orchard, the first time, before she had known what she was doing — the feeling of having been let into a place by something that was, in some quiet way she could not yet see the shape of, also letting itself into her.

Outside, the October light went the rest of the way out. Inside, on the kitchen table, Aren the Second, by his own admission, watched her with his one visible eye and did not, for any amount of staring, blink.