The Barren Tone

I keep the format because it is the only grammar anyone ever gave me for what a person is. Brother Oresh wrote me down for seven years in this hand. Date, baseline, deviation, note. He was kind to me every day of it. He was also assembling a file, and I have both of those in me now and no way to set either down.

I have put my hands flat on it four times today. I do it the way you check a pocket you already know is empty.

Not resonance. I want to be exact, because exactness is the last thing I still own outright. Resonance has a direction. You feel it in the wrists and the jaw and you can turn your head and find the wall it is coming through. This has no wall. It arrived at the back of the palate, above the soft part, in the place where you taste a coin.

I have tested it. I plugged my ears and it was louder. I walked two kilometres west and it did not change. I held my breath to see whether it was the sound of my own blood, and my blood, it turns out, keeps a different appointment.

The Codex has a word for it. Article Twenty-Two, under afflictions of the unhoused. Symptom of separation. Prescribed treatment, return.

I have read that word back three times. I do not know what I meant by it. I have decided to leave it in, because the file is not for me.

It is not being produced at me. It has been produced continuously, for a very long time, and I have walked into the part of the world where it is audible. The distinction matters. Nothing has come to find me.

I arrived.

I wrote that with enormous relief and I have not been able to locate where the relief came from.

Lira lost her family to a Synod purge and wants the order dismantled. Goss wants it reformed and cannot say into what. The deserter wants human sovereignty and uses the phrase the way the faithful use a prayer, as something to hold rather than something to mean.

I have written them down. I have used the format on them. I did not decide to do this. I noticed I had been doing it on the fourth night and did not stop.

They eat better than the Citadel does. Goat, and a flat bread cooked directly against the stones, and a spirit distilled out of something nobody would name. They are kind to each other clumsily and constantly. Nobody in this camp has ever optimised anything in their lives.

They dry the laundry in the anomaly zone. The air holds warm there and the shirts come back smelling of copper, and the children are told not to go past the second post, and they go past the second post. I sat where the grid deposits run densest, where a Synod Hunter will not walk and an ARKTOS patrol adds ten kilometres to avoid, and I watched a woman take her washing off a line strung between two dead relay stanchions, and I understood that I have spent eleven years being taught to fear a place where these people hang their trousers.

Deviation: none observed. They will not do it. Not because they are weak. A grievance is not a plan, and eleven grievances in one tent is not eleven times a plan.

There is a second one.

Underneath the first, a long way underneath, something else is keeping time. I have tried on four nights to count it and I cannot, because I cannot find the end of it to count from. It does not answer. It is not addressed to me. It is not addressed.

When I attend to it, the one above it becomes busy. It fills. It offers. It talks the way a man talks more when someone larger has come into the room.

I have decided it is my own pulse, heard from an unfamiliar angle.

I have decided this twice now.

I will not kneel and I will not pray. Those are the postures of a man being handed something. I am not being handed anything. I am consenting to hear a thing that has been sounding since before there were ears to be inconvenienced by it, and consent is not worship. I want that recorded in my own hand, in the proper format, in advance, so that whatever is written about me afterward has to be written over the top of it.

I have re-read the last eleven days of this file. The hand is mine throughout. I have checked.

He was eating when it happened. He would like that in the file. He was sitting on a flat rock with a piece of bread in his hand, and forty thousand men changed hands, and he did not put the bread down. Not from coldness. He had no instrument for an event of that size, so it arrived as weather, and a man does not put down bread for weather.

Not toward me. I want that in the file. It moved the way a man crosses a dark room in his own house without putting a light on, and I was in the room, and he did not put a light on.

For less than a moment I was gone through. I have no better verb. Nothing touched me. Something arrived at the place where I am and continued past it, and on the way past it read what I am, the whole of it, faster than I could feel the reading happen, the way you learn the weight of a thing by lifting it rather than by studying it.

Then it went on, and there was no interest in it. There was no dislike in it either. It read me the way a man going down his own cellar steps reads the shelves, checking whether he has enough of a thing he already has enough of.

I have sat with this four days and I am going to write the true thing, which is that I was insulted.

Not frightened. I want the file accurate. I have been frightened and that was not this. I was insulted the way you are insulted when a man whose entire existence you have arranged your life in opposition to passes you in a corridor and does not know your face.

The other one was very busy afterward. It came up around me. It told me a true thing about my mother that I did not know and could not have known, and I have no way to check it, and it is the first time I have wanted to.

I am aware of the shape of what I have written. I am aware that a man ignored by one thing and comforted by another has an obvious diagnosis available to him, and that Brother Oresh would have put it in the margin in three words.

Being read is not the same as being seen. I will grant that much and no more. The thing that went past me wanted nothing, and a thing that wants nothing has never in the history of the world been on anybody's side.

File closed.