What They Want From Her

She walked home the long way, because the long way had, since Tuesday, become the way she did her thinking; and by the time she let herself into the flat and put the kettle on for the third pot of tea of the day — sleep having been abandoned as a near-term project — she had arrived at the question she had not, in Mr. Behr's chair, quite let herself ask out loud. It was not the question of whether Saroya had been telling her the truth. That question was, as Mr. Behr had said, the one to hold. It was the smaller and meaner question that sat behind it: if the Society had spent a hundred and fifty years building a vocabulary and a building and a Sunday afternoon and a green door and an envelope with no surname on it, all of it in order to find people like Iyla — what, specifically, did they get when they found one. Not the company. Not the colleagueship. Not the elegant pleasure of having identified, at last, another of one's kind. Those were the things one said over the first cup of tea. The question was what was got over the second.

She set the coin on the kitchen table while she waited for the kettle. She set it on the wood, not on a saucer, because she wanted to see, again, the fact of it: that it was a coin, an actual coin, with a milled edge and a small wear at the rim where a thousand thumbs in a city that did not exist had rubbed it, and that the man on its face was named Aren the Second, and that nobody — nobody, anywhere, in any registry of any thing — owned him. He had not been minted by a country. He had not been struck by a treasury. He had not been declared, by any government, to be legal tender. He had been brought, by Iyla, out of a notebook, into a kitchen, where he now sat on the wood beside a stain from a teabag she had put down too quickly six months ago.

She thought about the apple. She thought about it for the first time in some days, with a new attention. The apple had come out of a children's book she had read at nine. The apple had been imagined first by a woman named — she went and got the book down, because she was being rigorous now — Margery Whitlock, in 1962, in a small house in Dorset, with the assistance of her editor. The apple in the kitchen was, in some sense she could not quite untangle, Margery Whitlock's apple. If a person could be said to own a fictional apple — and this was exactly the kind of question lawyers had been arguing about for centuries with respect to less interesting fruit — then Margery Whitlock, or her estate, or her publisher, owned that apple. The apple had a provenance. The apple had a paper trail. The apple, in the language Saroya had so carefully laid down at the table, had a patina. It belonged to the road that had been walked to it.

The coin did not. The coin had no Margery Whitlock. The coin had no estate, no publisher, no Dorset, no 1962. The coin had Iyla, and a notebook, and four pages, and an afternoon. The coin was — and she watched the word arrive and settle and refuse to leave — unowned.

This, she understood, sitting at the table with the kettle now whistling and ignored, was what the Society wanted. Not her company. Not her ethics. Not her Sunday afternoons. They wanted the coin. They wanted what the coin was an example of. They wanted access to a category of object that no one, anywhere, in any human institution, had a prior claim on; a category of object that could be brought, by a particular kind of person, out of a particular kind of attention, into a kitchen, and set on a table, and picked up, and carried out the door, and sold, or kept, or studied, or given as a gift, without any of the questions that attended ordinary objects ever being asked. They wanted the eight. They wanted the eight because the eight were the only people in the world who could produce, on demand, things that no human being had ever made and that no human institution had ever claimed.

She got up. She made the tea. She made it badly, because her hands had gone clumsy the way they did when her mind was running faster than they could keep up with, and she scalded her thumb on the spout, and she said a word she rarely said out loud, and she sat back down. The coin was still there. It had not, while she made the tea, become any more or less the thing it was.

She thought about Lentar. She thought about the baker who had given her bread for a story about her grandmother. She thought about the scrivener, with his book where the stories were kept. She thought about Aren the Second on the coin and the man who had named him, who was not her, and who lived somewhere in Lentar she had not yet walked to, and who had a face she had not yet seen, and who was — and here the small clean cold arrived, the colder cousin of the cold she had felt at Saroya's table — a person. He was a person in the sense that mattered. He was a person Iyla had a relationship with, the way one has a relationship with anyone: incomplete, biased, partial, unfinished, and real. He was a person who, in Saroya's careful phrasing, had not asked to exist. He was a person who, if Iyla understood what she now understood, was — along with the bread, and the coin, and the bakers' alley, and the dust-gold light at three in the afternoon — an unowned artifact.

She put her hand over her mouth. She did not, particularly, know she was doing it. She sat for a long minute like that, with the tea cooling beside her and the coin on the table and her hand over her mouth, and she thought, with a clarity she would have refused if she had seen it coming: that Saroya had not, today, told her the worst part. Saroya had told her, with the lightness of a woman delivering a fact she knew would land later, that the worlds were not, on the whole, considered by the Society to be the Author's property. She had said this lightly. She had said it the way you say a thing you want absorbed without quite heard. She had said it because she could not, today, on the first afternoon, say the next sentence, which was the sentence Iyla was now saying for her, here, in her kitchen, with the kettle whistled out and the tea undrunk: that if the worlds were not the Author's property, then the people in the worlds were not the Author's people; and if the people in the worlds were not anyone's people, then they were available; and if they were available, then the question was not whether someone would, eventually, go and get them. The question was who, and on what terms, and with what story told about it afterward.

She thought of the baker. She thought of him with a specificity she had not, until this moment, allowed herself, because to be specific about him was to admit she had made him, and to admit she had made him was to admit she was responsible for him, and to admit she was responsible for him was to admit that the decision she was about to make on Sunday, or not on Sunday, about a green door on a street she had walked past six hundred times, was not, in fact, a decision about her own life. It was a decision about his.

She picked up the coin. She held it in her palm. It was warm, which it should not have been — it had been on the wood for an hour — and she did not, for the moment, try to explain that to herself. She set it back down. She got out her notebook. She turned to a fresh page. She wrote, at the top, in the small upright hand she was developing, against her will, in imitation of a hand she had now seen three times: What they want is the coin. What they want is the baker. What they want is everyone in Lentar who does not, in the world's registry, exist, because what does not exist cannot be stolen, and what cannot be stolen can be taken.

She underlined taken. She underlined it twice. She closed the notebook. She drank, in three sips, the tea she had made badly, because she had decided, in Mr. Behr's chair, that she would not be the kind of person who let a strong tea go cold; and then she sat in her kitchen, with the coin on the table and the letter in her bag and the brass key under her jumper, and she let herself feel, for as long as it took, the specific shape of the thing she had not, until tonight, understood she had been recruited into. The Society did not, she thought, want to harm her. The Society wanted to be standing next to her, in a friendly and well-lit room, on the afternoon she decided what Lentar was for. The Society wanted to be the voice in her ear when she answered the third question. The Society wanted, in the most literal and most patient sense, to be the conscience of an Author, because an Author who had no conscience was a thing the Society could not afford to allow into the world, and an Author who had her own conscience was a thing the Society could not, in the end, control.

She did not yet know which kind of Author she was going to be. She knew, sitting at the table at half past nine on a Friday in October, that the question was no longer whether she would walk through the green door. The question was what she would be carrying when she did, and what she would refuse, on the threshold, to put down.