The Character Who Talks Back, Again

Tev was waiting at the corner of a street she had not named, which was, she thought, characteristic of him; he had a way of standing in the parts of the city she had been careless about, as if to point out, without ever quite saying so, that the careless parts were where he lived.

He was leaning against a wall that, as she came closer, appeared to acquire a doorframe behind him, then a door, then the small iron boot-scraper at its foot — the city composing his setting around him as she arrived, the way a stagehand might compose a scene around an actor who had got there before the set was finished. He noted her noticing. He did not comment. He had, she had learned in October, a particular small economy with comment, in which the things he chose not to say were as legible as the things he said, and were sometimes more.

"You ran," he said.

"I ran badly," she said. "For about a minute. Then I ran better."

"I saw the bridge," he said. "The bridge was good work."

She had not expected the compliment, and she noticed, with the part of her mind that was now keeping a running ledger of such things, that she was pleased by it in a way that she would have to be careful about. Pleasing Tev was not, she reminded herself, the thing she was here for; and a person who began to write in order to be praised by her own characters had, she suspected, taken a step toward a kind of authorship she did not want to practice.

"Thank you," she said anyway, because the refusing of a compliment from Tev would have been its own kind of performance.

He pushed himself off the wall. "I am going to help you," he said. "I want to be clear about the conditions."

"Yes," she said.

"First," he said. "I am not your character. We established this in October. I am restating it because the people behind you appear to treat the citizens of this city as a resource, and I do not want, in the next hour, for you to find yourself bargaining with them in a way that includes me as an item. If you are going to bargain, bargain with what you have written. Do not bargain with what has agreed to walk beside you."

"Agreed," she said. She wrote it, briefly, in the margin of the open page: Tev is not an item. She wrote it not for him — he would not be reading her margins — but for the version of herself who would, in forty minutes, be tired, and who would need, when the bargaining came, to be able to glance down and see the sentence already there.

"Second," he said. "I will tell you things about the city that you do not know. Some of them you wrote without knowing you wrote them. Some of them the city filled in. I will not tell you which is which, because I do not, in every case, know; and because the asking of that question, in my experience of you, has not improved your judgment."

She laughed, despite the afternoon. "Fair."

"Third." He paused. He was, she saw, choosing this one. "If, in the next hour, you write a sentence that affects me, you will tell me the sentence before you write it. Not after. Before. I am willing to be written down. I am not willing to be written through."

"Yes," she said. "I remember."

"I know you remember," he said. "I am restating it because I have noticed that people under pressure forget the things they remember most easily in quiet rooms. I would rather repeat myself now than discover, in ten minutes, that I have been improved without consultation."

She wrote that down too. Under pressure, ask Tev first. She underlined it. She put a small mark beside it of the kind she used, in her annotations, to flag a sentence that was load-bearing.

"Fourth," he said, and here his voice changed, very slightly, into the register she had heard him use once before, when he had told her his mother's name. "I am helping you because I prefer the version of this city in which the doors are yours and not theirs. I want you to know this is not friendship. It may, eventually, be friendship. Today it is alignment. I would like us not to confuse those, because the confusing of them is a thing that makes people careless with each other later."

"Alignment," she said. "Noted."

"Good." He produced, from somewhere about his coat, a small folded paper, which he handed to her without ceremony. "This is a list of seven places in the city the Society has been entering from. I have walked all of them this week. Four of them are in districts you have named carefully and they had to work hard to get in. Three of them are in districts you have not bothered with, and they walked in as if through a curtain. I would suggest, when this is over, that you spend a month on the curtains."

She took the paper. She did not open it yet. She put it inside the back cover of the notebook, where the things she meant to honour later went.

"Why are you giving me this?" she said.

He considered the question with the small visible patience he reserved for questions whose answers he thought she should have worked out herself. "Because in October," he said, "when I told you I would not be written through, you stopped. You did not argue. You did not try one more sentence to see if I had meant it less than I said. You closed the notebook and you went home and you came back two days later and you asked the market woman her name. I watched you do that. I told three people about it. One of those people is going to meet us at the bend in the river in about four minutes."

She felt, at this, something she had not felt all afternoon, which was the small interior settling of a sum coming out right. She had thought, at the time, that the asking of the market woman's name had been a small private gesture, the kind a person made in their own kitchen for their own conscience; she had not thought of it as a thing that could be watched, told, remembered, and become, months later, the reason that a person she had been careful with would be careful back. She had read, in books, about how respect compounded — she had even, she thought wryly, written sentences about it in the margins of other people's novels — but the reading of the principle and the standing in it were, as usual, different rooms.

"Tev," she said.

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"Don't," he said, but he said it in the voice that meant he had heard it. He turned, and began to walk toward the river bend, and she walked beside him, half a pace behind because the streets here were his streets and she was, for the moment, the guest. "Tell me," he said, as they walked, "about the woman who is coming after you. The unhurried one."

"Saroya," she said.

"Saroya," he repeated, as if filing it. "Has she been told no, by you, in a sentence she could not pretend was something else?"

Iyla thought about this. "Not yet."

"Then that," he said, "is the sentence we are walking toward. The rest is geography."

She wrote, in the margin, as they walked: the rest is geography. She did not know yet whether it was true. She knew that Tev had said it, and that Tev did not, in her experience, say things in order to be quoted; and that the saying of it had, in the small permanent way such things did, made the next half hour slightly easier to stand inside. She kept the pen uncapped. She kept the notebook open. She walked, beside the man she had not exactly invented, toward the bend in the river where someone she had not yet met was waiting because of a kindness she had done in October to a woman whose name she had bothered to learn.