The Trick With the Margins

She did not write it that night. She wrote it on Sunday morning, at her kitchen table, with the kettle on and the window open a finger's width so that the cold could keep her honest, because she had learned in the last six weeks that the sentences that mattered most were the ones she was tempted to write while still warm from the argument that had occasioned them, and that those were precisely the sentences she should make herself sleep on.

She had spent Saturday evening, after coming back from Lentar, doing two things in sequence. The first was making a list of every option she could think of for closing the Society out of her invented worlds. The list, when she finished it, ran to fourteen items. She read it back. She crossed out eleven of them. The eleven she crossed out were, she noticed, all the ones that involved doing something large — building a wall around Lentar in the notebook, declaring a sentence of expulsion, writing a chapter in which the Society's doors collapsed, inventing a guardian, inventing a fire. Each of them had the same shape, which was the shape of a person trying to win by being bigger than the thing she was facing. She had spent a week being chased by people who were bigger than her, and she had survived not because she had become bigger but because she had become more exact. She crossed out the eleven items and looked at the three that remained.

The three that remained were all small. One was a sentence. One was a mark. One was a habit. She looked at them for a long time. Then she went to bed.

In the morning she made tea and took down, from the shelf where she kept the books she meant to keep, the battered paperback of Jane Eyre she had been annotating on the afternoon the café first thinned around her. She opened it to the inside back cover, where she had, over the years, written small lists to herself in the way other people wrote shopping reminders on the backs of envelopes. She read the lists. They were the lists of a girl who had talked to books because there had been no one else to talk to in the way she wanted to talk. The handwriting was hers and not hers. She thought, briefly, about how Tomas had first noticed her at nineteen by the marks she had left in a book she had since forgotten, and how everything that had happened to her in the last six weeks had begun, in a sense, with the fact that she was the kind of person who wrote in margins.

That was, she thought, the trick.

The Society found Authors by reading their marginalia. Saroya had said it across a café table without quite saying it: Tomas had first noticed her annotations. Penn and Maro and Kettle had been brought in by similar means, each of them flagged, at some point in their reading lives, by the particular density of attention they had left in books that other people had then picked up. The doors into invented worlds were, in the Society's working theory, opened by Authors and entered by Travelers, but the doors were located by readers — by people who knew how to read the way an Author wrote in the margins of an existing book and recognise, in those marks, the signature of someone who could be followed home. The marginalia was the address. It was how they had found her. It was, she suspected, how they found all of them.

She thought about this for a while. She drank her tea. She wrote, on a fresh page of her notebook, a single sentence: the door is opened by the margin. She looked at it. She added, beneath it: and what opens a door can close one.

She had, she realised, been thinking about this the wrong way. She had been thinking of the Society's access to Lentar as a problem of geography — of doors in alleys, of districts she had not named carefully enough, of curtains she had let hang loose. Tev had said it on Saturday: spend a month on the curtains. He had been right about the curtains, but he had been right about a smaller thing than the thing she was now seeing. The curtains were the symptom. The address was the cause. The Society could enter Lentar because Lentar had been written, in part, by an Author whose marginalia in other people's books had taught them how she wrote. They had her hand. They had been reading her hand for years before they had ever known her name. They had built their map of Lentar's doors out of the way she had been writing in the margins of The Master and Margarita at twenty-three.

The defence, then, was not a wall. The defence was a different way of writing in margins.

She worked it out slowly, on paper, the way she had once worked out, on paper, that books were addresses to places. She wrote the rule first as a question — can a margin be made to refuse being read as an address? — and then, after some thought, as a method.

The method was this. She would, from now on, write two kinds of marginalia. The first kind would be the kind she had always written: arguments with the author, questions, small jokes, the marks of a person reading honestly. Those she would keep. Those were hers. The second kind would be a deliberate counter-mark, written into the margins of any book she handled, addressed not to the book but to the reader who might come after her looking for the signature of an Author. The counter-mark would say, in effect: the door you are looking for has been moved by the person who wrote this margin, and the only way to find where it has been moved to is to ask her, in person, in her own world, with her consent. It would not be a wall. It would be a redirect. It would route any attempt to locate an invented world from the margins of an existing book through the Author herself, at her kitchen table, with the option to say no.

She tried it. She took down a library copy of a novel she had read three times — a book by a writer she loved and argued with, whose margins she had marked freely — and, on the inside back cover, in her ordinary hand, she wrote a short paragraph. It was not dramatic. It looked, to any casual reader, like the kind of summing-up note a person made for themselves at the end of a book. To a Society reader, looking for an Author's signature, it would read as something else: as a notice, polite and unmistakable, that any door this Author kept was kept by invitation only, and that the way to ask for an invitation was not by following the margins inward but by writing back to her, in margins of their own, in a particular book she would name. She named the book. She chose, with some private pleasure, the same battered paperback of Jane Eyre on her shelf. The address for asking permission to enter Lentar would be the margins of the book she had been holding the first time Lentar happened to her. There was a symmetry to it that she liked, and a humility to it that she liked more — that the channel by which the Society could approach her invented worlds, from now on, would be the same channel by which she had first approached books at all: a girl writing in a margin, waiting to see who wrote back.

She tested the method, carefully, the way she had tested everything in the first weeks — privately, with safety rules. She wrote the counter-mark into three books. She waited two days. On Tuesday evening she went to Lentar, by her own door, and walked the seven places Tev had listed. Four of the doors — the ones in the districts she had named carefully — were as she had left them. The other three — the ones in the curtained districts — were not gone, but they had changed. They no longer opened outward. They opened, she saw when she examined them, only inward, and only when she stood in front of them holding a particular small object: the paperback of Jane Eyre. The door, in other words, was now held by the address she had specified. Anyone trying to come through from the Society's side would arrive, instead, at the inside back cover of a book on her shelf, and would find, when they got there, a margin that said: if you want in, write back.

It was, she thought, sitting on a low wall in the curtained district of Lentar with the notebook on her knees, an absurdly small solution. It involved no wards, no battles, no rewriting of the city's geography. It involved a paragraph on the inside back cover of three books, and the redirection of a class of doors through the same humble mechanism by which she had, as a lonely girl in a noisy café, first talked to anyone about anything she actually thought. The Society, which had spent a hundred and forty years building an apparatus for locating Authors through their marginalia, would now find, when it tried to use that apparatus on her, that the apparatus delivered them not to her worlds but to her threshold, with a knocker on it and a note that said ask.

She thought about Saroya, walking back along the riverbank on Saturday afternoon, and about the look on her face — the small re-calibrating look of a person discovering she had brought the wrong tool. Saroya had brought, on Saturday, the tool of the well-shaped offer. Iyla had answered with a story. Now, on Sunday, Iyla was answering the larger machinery of the Society with a tool that was, in some sense, even older than the offer: the tool of the marginal note. The Society had used marginalia to find her. She would use marginalia to set the terms on which she could be found. She had not built a wall. She had simply written, in the place they were trained to look, a sentence that said the route from here passes through me.

She closed the notebook. She tapped the cover, twice, the small gesture she had developed over the autumn for marking a sentence she meant to keep. Then she wrote, in the margin of the page, in the smallest hand she could manage: elegance is what's left when you stop trying to win. She underlined it once. After a moment, she underlined it again, because she knew already that tomorrow she would need to be able to find it.