What Iyla Will Not Do

The option arrived, as easy options often do, dressed as a thought she had already half had.

It came on the Wednesday evening, after Kettle had gone, while she was washing the two cups they had used, and it came in the small confiding voice in which her own mind brought her, from time to time, ideas it knew she would like. The voice said: you could write a door into Penn's flat. You could write, in the notebook, a door in the back wall of Penn's kitchen — Penn lived above the laundry on Reston Street, Iyla had been there once for a Reading Room supper and remembered the kitchen, the long window, the kettle on the left of the stove — and you could write the door to open only from your side, and you could write, on the other side of the door, a small empty room in Lentar with no exit; and you could, by writing this, give Penn, every time she opened her own kitchen cupboard, the small uncertain feeling of standing one inch closer to a place she had not asked to go. You would not have to do anything with the door. You would not have to put her in the room. The having of the door, written and held, would be enough; it would be a quiet private knowledge, the kind a person carries against another person, and it would, the voice said, even the ledger by exactly the amount it needed evening.

She dried her hands. She sat down at the kitchen table. She wrote the option, in full, in her notebook, because she had learned by now that the way to handle a thought of this kind was not to refuse to think it — refusing to think a thought, she had discovered, was the surest way of keeping it warm — but to write it down in its most flattering form, with all its small seductions intact, and then to look at the writing.

She looked at the writing. She read it twice. She noticed, on the second reading, that the option had three features she wanted to name, because naming, she now believed, was how a person made things permanent enough to refuse.

The first feature was that it was elegant. It used the gift she had against the person who had abused the gift, which had the small literary symmetry that her mind, trained on books, found difficult to resist; and she noted this, in the margin, with the word symmetry, and underneath it the word suspect, because she had been taught by Mr. Behr, fifteen years ago and on a different subject, that any argument whose chief virtue was its shape was an argument it was wise to mistrust.

The second feature was that it would not, in any practical sense, be discovered. Penn would not know the door was there. The Society would not know. No tribunal, no friend, no version of her own future self reading the notebook in ten years' time would be able to point at a moment in the world and say, there, that is where Iyla did the thing. It was an option that could be taken in private and kept in private and never have to be answered for. She noted this, in the margin, with the word unwitnessed, and underneath it the word therefore, and underneath that, because she had been thinking, lately, about Maro's architecture and what it was made of, the sentence: a thing I would only do because no one would see me do it is a thing I have already, by that fact alone, told myself not to do.

The third feature was the one that took her longest to name, because it was the one the voice had been working hardest to hide. The third feature was that the option would change, in a small permanent way, what kind of Author she was. Not what kind of person — she was prepared to grant the voice that she would still, on Thursday morning, be recognisably herself, would still annotate her books, would still put the kettle on for Kettle — but what kind of Author. Because to write a door for the purpose of holding a person uncertain on the other side of it would be to use the gift, for the first time, against a named person rather than for a named place; and the using-against, once done, would be a precedent, and precedents in a private practice were, she now understood, the load-bearing walls of the practice. She would have built, in her own notebook, a small room labelled this is a thing I do, and the room, once built, would be available to her on every subsequent evening when the voice came confiding into the kitchen with a new and slightly different idea; and the voice, she had no doubt, would come again, because voices of that kind did not, in her experience, retire after a single visit.

She wrote, under therefore, the word no. She wrote it small, because the writing of it large would have been a performance, and she was, she had decided some days ago, no longer in the business of performances for an audience consisting only of herself.

Then, because the no by itself was not yet a discipline but only a refusal, and because she had read enough books about people in her position to know that a refusal made in the heat of an evening was a refusal that lasted, on average, until the next evening, she did the thing she had been taught, on the Tuesday at the soup place, was the small real form: she wrote the constraint down in advance of the next time she would need it.

She turned to a fresh page. At the top she wrote, in the slightly more careful hand she kept for things she meant to be able to read later without flinching, Constraints, written before required. Underneath she wrote, in a list:

1. I will not write a door into the home, body, or kitchen of a named person on my side of the boundary, for any reason, including reasons that present themselves to me as just.

2. I will not write, into Lentar or any world I open after it, a room or condition whose purpose is the holding-uncertain of a person who has wronged me. I may write rooms for many purposes. I may not write rooms for that one.

3. I will not, in conversation with Saroya or with anyone who comes after Saroya, use the existence of Lentar's people as a threat — not by hint, not by implication, not by the careful silence in which a threat is most efficiently delivered. The people of Lentar are not leverage. If I treat them as leverage in a sentence, I will, by the next sentence, have treated them as leverage in fact.

4. I will not retaliate against Penn. Retaliation against Penn is the option that will be available to me for the longest, in the largest number of forms, with the most plausible justifications; and for that reason it is the option I am ruling out first, and in writing, and tonight, while the ruling-out costs me only the giving-up of a thought I have not yet acted on, rather than later, when it would cost me the giving-up of a thought I have begun to enjoy.

5. I will, when the voice comes again — and it will come again, in some new shape, with some new symmetry, with some new argument from the small literary fitness of things — read this list before I answer it, and I will read it out loud, because reading a thing out loud is the cheapest way I know of finding out whether one still believes it.

She read the list. She read it out loud, once, to the kitchen, because the kitchen was, for the present, her witness, and a witnessed constraint was, she had decided, the kind that held. The kitchen received the reading without comment, in the way kitchens do.

She thought, then, about what she had given up, because she did not want the giving-up to go unnoticed; the unnoticed giving-up of a thing was, she had learned from the tax, the way the thing came back later disguised as something else. She had given up a feeling. The feeling was the small steady warmth of carrying, against Penn, a private knowledge that evened the ledger; and she would have to live, from this evening, with the ledger uneven, and with the unevenness of the ledger being a thing she had chosen to leave standing because the evening of it would have cost more than the unevenness did. This was, she understood, what people meant when they spoke of paying for one's ethics. She had read the phrase often, in books, and had not, until tonight, understood that the paying was not a grand thing done in a public place with witnesses, but a small thing done at a kitchen table at half past nine on a Wednesday, in which a woman declined to feel better in a particular way, and wrote down, in advance, that she would continue to decline.

She added one more line to the list, at the bottom, separated from the others by a small space, because it belonged to the list and also stood a little apart from it. The line was: I am choosing these constraints now, while I am not yet tired, because the version of me who will be asked to honour them will be tired, and she will need to be able to point at this page and say, the woman who wrote this was not under duress, and her judgment, on that evening, is the judgment I have agreed to be bound by.

She closed the notebook. She put it on the shelf above the table, not in the drawer where she usually kept it, because she wanted, in the morning, to see it from the doorway as soon as she came into the kitchen; the seeing of it from the doorway being, she thought, a small architectural choice of the kind Maro would have approved of, the kind that did not depend on her continuing to feel, tomorrow, what she felt tonight.

Then she put the kettle on again, although she did not, particularly, want tea, because she had noticed that the putting-on of the kettle was, for her, the small domestic gesture by which she marked the closing of a conversation with herself; and she wanted, tonight, to mark this one closed, properly, before she went to bed, so that she would not lie awake re-opening it. The kettle came to the boil. She poured the water over nothing in particular, into the cup, and watched the steam come up, and thought, with the dry small clarity that was now, she was sure, her working weather, that she had just done the easiest version of the hardest thing she was going to have to do this month; and that the easiness of it — the fact that she had done it sitting down, in her own kitchen, with no one watching, against an option no one was pressing on her — was precisely why she had had to do it now, because the harder versions, when they came, were going to come at moments when sitting down would not be available, and when the writing of a list would feel, in the moment, like a luxury she could not afford. She had afforded it tonight. That, she thought, was the whole of it. You bought the discipline on the cheap evening so that, on the expensive evening, you already owned it.

She drank the water. It tasted of nothing, which was, on the whole, what she had wanted.