What It Costs Her

She did not understand the cost until Wednesday.

On Monday she was tired in the ordinary way of a person who had spent Sunday writing something exact. On Tuesday she was, if anything, lighter than she had been in weeks, because she had done a thing that worked and the doing of it had taken the lid off a low-grade dread she had not noticed she was carrying. She went to Behr's. She drank tea in the back room. She told Mr. Behr, in careful sentences, what she had done with the margins, and he listened in the way he listened, which was the listening of a man who let a sentence finish before he decided whether it had been a sentence. When she finished he said only, "And what does it cost you?" and she said, "I don't know yet," and he nodded as if that had been the correct answer, and refilled her cup.

On Wednesday evening she sat down at her kitchen table to go to Lentar.

She had her notebook. She had the page she had written Lentar onto originally, in October, the four pages of dust-gold afternoon and bakers' alley and the fountain and the particular light. She had her anchor list, which she had updated on Tuesday morning and which now included Kettle's real name and the colour of the soup-shop's door and the small chip in the rim of the cup she was, at that moment, drinking from. She had, in other words, every instrument she had ever used. She read the opening passage. She let her attention go slack in the particular way it had to be slack. She waited for the kitchen to thin.

The kitchen did not thin.

She waited longer. She read the passage again. She closed her eyes. She tried the small, almost-not-trying she had learned in the second week, when she had first understood that the door did not respond to effort. The kitchen remained a kitchen. The clock on the wall ticked. The radiator made its small radiator noise. Outside, somebody's car door shut and somebody's footsteps went away down the street, and Iyla sat at her table with her notebook open to Lentar and could not get in.

She did not panic. She had decided, in advance, that if anything strange happened on the first attempt after the counter-marks she would not panic, because panic was the response that would teach her the wrong lesson about whatever was happening. She made another cup of tea. She tried again. The kitchen remained a kitchen.

She thought about it.

She had, on Sunday, redirected a class of doors through the inside back cover of a book on her shelf. She had specified that anyone trying to enter Lentar from the Society's side would arrive at that margin, with a note that said ask. What she had not specified — what she had not, in the small honest part of her writing, thought to specify — was that she herself was not one of the people the redirect applied to. She had written the rule in the second person and the third person. She had not written an exemption for the first.

She got up and took the paperback of Jane Eyre off the shelf. She opened it to the inside back cover. She read what she had written there on Sunday. She read it twice. It was, she had to admit, beautifully exact. It made no distinction between readers approaching from outside and the Author approaching from inside, because at the moment of writing she had been thinking only about the outside, and the sentence she had written did not know about her preference. The door was held by the address. The address routed everyone through the margin. Everyone included her.

She sat back down at the table. She thought about whether she could fix it. She could, of course — she could open the notebook and write an exemption, a single sentence, Iyla may pass freely, and the kitchen would thin and Lentar would be hers again the way it had been on Saturday, when she had stood with Tev at the bend in the river and watched Saroya walk back along the bank.

She looked at the notebook for a long time.

The trouble with the exemption, she saw, was not that it would not work. It would work. The trouble was that it would be the first sentence in a particular kind of document — the document in which the person who designed the system was the person the system did not apply to. She had spent six weeks learning, slowly and at some cost, that this was the document the Society had been writing about her. The well-reasoned argument, the utilitarian case, the powder for the child in Aleppo: every part of that argument had depended on the idea that the people making the argument were not among the people the argument used. The thing she had refused, on Saturday, at the bend in the river, was the offer to design a world she would not be a citizen of. If she wrote the exemption tonight she would be designing, in a smaller and more private way, the same kind of world. Lentar would still be hers. But it would be hers on terms she had decided, in advance, not to extend to anyone else who tried to reach it. She would have written, in her own hand, the sentence she had spent the autumn refusing to be the kind of person who wrote.

She closed the notebook.

She made herself sit with it for a while, because she had decided, in advance, that decisions like this should be sat with. She thought about the dust-gold afternoon. She thought about Mira at her stall, whose name she had learned by asking. She thought about Halun, who remembered the dyers because they had been real enough to be missed. She thought about Tev, leaning on nothing at the bend in the river, being himself. She thought, with a small clean grief that surprised her by being clean, about the fact that she would not, this evening, walk down the bakers' alley, and that she did not know, now, when she would walk down it again, or whether the next walking would be a thing she had to earn through some procedure she had not yet invented, or whether — and she made herself look at this — there would not be a next walking at all.

She wrote in the notebook: I have locked myself out of the city I made. She read it. She added, beneath it: this is correct. She read that, too. After a moment she added a third line: it is also the thing it is.

The third line was the one she needed. She had learned, somewhere in the last six weeks, that the trick of doing a hard thing was not to pretend it was not hard. The counter-marks had cost her the easy door. They had cost her the door she had walked through on Tuesday afternoons with a notebook and a pencil and the small private confidence of a person going to a place that was hers. That door was now held by a margin, and the margin did not know her any better than it knew Saroya, because she had written it not to. The cost was real. It was personal. It belonged, by every accounting she could honestly do, to her.

There was, she thought, probably a way back in. There was probably a slow way — a way involving the paperback on her shelf, a margin written to herself from herself, a procedure of asking permission to enter her own world that would feel, for as long as she did it, faintly absurd, and that would be, she suspected, the point of doing it. She would have to write to Lentar the way she would have to be written to. She would have to knock at her own threshold. She would have to wait, on her own doorstep, for the version of herself who lived inside the redirect to decide whether the version of herself outside it was, today, someone she wanted to let in. It would be slower. It would be, in small ways, embarrassing. It would mean that Tuesday afternoons were no longer reliable, and that the city she had made would not be available to her in the way a habit is available, but only in the way a relationship is — by arrangement, and with care, and sometimes not at all.

She thought about whether she could live with that. She thought about it honestly, because she had told herself, in October, that she would only invent rules she could live with. She thought about Mira, and Halun, and Tev, and the dust-gold afternoon, and the fact that she would, from now on, have to ask for them. She thought about the alternative, which was the exemption, and the document it would begin.

She wrote, in the margin of the page, in the smallest hand she could manage: the price of the rule is that the rule applies. She underlined it once. She did not underline it again, because she knew, this time, that she would not have any trouble finding it.

Then she put the kettle on, because the cup was empty, and because there was nothing else, this evening, that she could usefully do.