Lessons in Restraint

The lesson, when it came, did not announce itself as a lesson. This was, Iyla was learning, the Society's particular method: they did not, on the whole, sit a person down and tell her a thing. They arranged the room so that the thing was, in due course, the only thing left to notice.

It was Maro, in the end, who arranged it, although Maro would not have used the word arrange and would not, if pressed, have admitted to having done anything at all. She put her Middlemarch down, which was itself a kind of weather event, and she said, without preamble: "Tell me what you had for breakfast yesterday."

Iyla opened her mouth. She closed it. She opened it again. She had, she was almost sure, had toast. She had also, she thought, had an egg, but the egg was attached, in her memory, to a Tuesday she now realized had been Sunday, and the toast was sitting, in her recollection, on a plate that belonged to her grandmother, who had died in 2009 and whose plates were in a box in her mother's loft.

"Toast," she said, after a moment, with less confidence than the word deserved.

Maro nodded once, as if this were the answer she had been expecting and also the answer she had been hoping not to receive. "How many times have you gone in, this month."

"Eleven," Iyla said. She had counted. She had counted in the notebook. She had been pleased with herself for counting.

"Eleven," Maro said. She said it without inflection, the way a doctor says a number that the patient has just offered as a small triumph. "And how many of those times did you go in alone."

"All of them."

"And how many of those times did you tell anyone in this world where you were going, or what time you expected to be back, or what to do if you weren't."

Iyla did not answer.

"Stand up," Maro said.

Iyla stood. Penn, who had been pretending to write footnotes, had stopped pretending. Kettle had set down the biscuit.

"Close your eyes," Maro said. "Tell me the colour of your front door."

"Blue," Iyla said. Then, after a half second she did not like the length of: "Dark blue. With — there's a brass knocker, the previous tenant left it, it's shaped like —" She stopped. The shape of the knocker had been, until a week ago, a thing she could have drawn from memory. It was now a thing she could see only in the way one sees a face in a dream, which is to say with great vividness and no detail.

"A hand," she said, after a moment, because that was what came; and then, because she was being honest in a way the room was making her honest, "I think. A hand. Or a — I don't, just now, remember."

"Open your eyes," Maro said. "Sit down."

Iyla sat.

"That," Maro said, "is the tax."

Penn, who had clearly been waiting for the cue and was visibly annoyed that Maro had got to deliver the line, leaned forward. "Every trip," he said, "costs you a small piece of the thing you came from. Not memory exactly. Not, anyway, the kind of memory that goes when one is old. It is more — the grip. The grip one has on the small unimportant things. The knocker. The breakfast. The name of the man at the corner shop. The order in which one's own days have happened. One goes in, one comes back, and the world one came back to is, in some immeasurable but real sense, half a degree further from one's hand than it was."

"It restores," Kettle said, more gently. "Mostly. If you let it."

"It restores," Maro said, "if you anchor. It does not restore if you do not."

"Anchor," Iyla said. She had heard the word, from Saroya, at the table, in the lecture about Travelers and Anchors and Authors. She had understood it, then, to mean a person — a second person, who stayed in this world while you went into another, holding the rope. She had filed it away as a thing she would not, personally, need, because she had not, personally, told anyone.

"Two kinds," Kettle said. "The kind Saroya told you about is a person. The other kind is a practice. The person is better. The practice is what you do when you do not, yet, have a person, or when the person is, on a given afternoon, not available, or when you are an Author and you have decided, on principle, that you will not be the kind of Author who needs one." He said this last part with a small mild glance that was, Iyla understood, not at all mild. "The practice is a list of small specific true things you take with you and check, before you go and after you come back. The colour of the door. The breakfast. The knocker. The shape of the chip on the rim of the mug. The name of the person at the corner shop. You write them down before. You read them after. If, on coming back, you find that one of them has gone soft — that you can say the word but not, any longer, see the thing — you do not, that day, go again. You sit, and you drink a cup of tea, and you walk to the corner shop, and you look at the man, and you say his name, and you wait until the thing is hard again."

"And if it doesn't go hard again," Iyla said.

"Then you have gone too far in," Maro said, "and you need an Anchor. A person. Not a list. There is a point past which the list does not work, and the point is closer than people like to think."

"How close," Iyla said.

"For most Travelers," Penn said, "twenty trips. Thirty if one is careful. For Authors —" He paused, with the small theatrical hesitation of a man who knew the answer and wanted, also, to be seen knowing it. "For Authors we do not, actually, know. There have not been enough of you, over enough time, for anyone to have been rigorous. The guess, in the building, is that it is faster. The reasoning is that your worlds are stickier, because they are yours. They want you to stay. They are, in some sense, built to want you to stay."

Iyla thought, with a small clean dread, of the warm coin on the kitchen table. Of the loop at her cuff, in Lentar, waiting for what she would put in it. Of how, on the last visit, she had been at the bakers' alley for what had felt like twenty minutes and had, on returning, found that the kettle she had left on the hob had boiled dry.

"I have been in," she said, slowly, "for longer than I told my notebook."

Nobody at the table said anything. Kettle, after a moment, pushed the biscuit tin a further half inch toward her, which was the closest thing to absolution the room was going to offer.

For a while no one filled the silence, which Iyla was beginning to understand was the room's way of letting a thing be true without anyone having to own the saying of it. Maro picked up her Middlemarch again and found her line. Penn returned, with visible relief, to his footnotes. Kettle ate his biscuit. The lesson, having arrived, was being, in the manner of the room, immediately denied; nobody, now, would have admitted that anything had occurred.

Iyla took out her notebook. She turned past the page on which she had written, the previous Friday, what they want is the coin. She found a fresh page, and wrote the date, and below it: List of small specific true things. She thought for a moment. Then she wrote: The knocker on my door is a hand holding — and she stopped, because she could not, yet, finish the sentence; and she understood, sitting there with the pen above the unfinished line, that the stopping was the whole of it — that the word had outlasted the thing, that she could say knocker and no longer see it — and that she would finish the sentence tonight, if at all, by climbing the four flights to her own flat and standing in front of the door she had been coming home to for six years and had stopped, somewhere in there, actually looking at, and paying it the kind of attention she had lately been spending only on a city she had invented.

She closed the notebook. She put it in her bag. She drank, in three sips, the tea she had been brought without asking. Across the table Maro moved her finger, slightly, on the line, in the gesture by which Maro made room.

She was almost sure, walking back out past the door that was not green on the inside and into the ordinary cold of the street, that she would go home and look — that she would not let the knocker go the way the breakfast had gone, the way her grandmother's plates had gone into a box in a loft and stayed there. She was almost sure, at that moment, that she meant it.