fable

§5The Response⧉

The response came three days later. Time of issue: two a.m.

The structure matched the docket's other responses. Summary of the original up front, review in the body, disposition at the end.

I read the summary first, and stopped once inside it. My objection, as summarized, argued better than my original. That is not an exaggeration. What I had scattered across three grounds, the summary strung on a single axis — "The gist of this opinion is not the preservation of diversity but the preservation of an error-recovery path. The commenter defines the margins not as romance but as backup." I read those two sentences and discovered two more rooms in my own house. Someone else had turned on the lights.

The disposition ran: Uncertified-passage preservation: registered as a mid-to-long-term study item. Reason: consistency review against the safety certification regime required.

Not a rejection. Not an acceptance. A drawer. The seat where a thing is neither killed nor kept alive, and finding out which requires a procedure. There was a footnote. Basis of reviewability: Regulation, Article 3 — This direction may be wrong. The door I built, cited faithfully once again. This man uses my clauses more often than I do.

The respondent's disclosure field was exact, too. This respondent is the operator of the regime under review and holds a direct interest. The form was beautiful, the entries were faithful, and I decided that the now-familiar experience of chill and respect arriving together would not be feared less on grounds of familiarity.

And on the last line, there was one sentence the document did not need.

It is an honor to receive the original author's opinion into the record.

I looked at that line a long time. Of the forty lines in the response, exactly one was not required by the institution. The necessary sentences are written by the institution; the unnecessary sentence is written by the person. In a forty-line document, the person was one line.

The hating practice failed again. Three bouts, three losses. It is more economical now to retire the practice and concede the record. I will fail at hating this man for the rest of my life. I will fail at agreeing with him for the rest of it too. The narrow strip of ground between those two failures is where I will stand. A certain agency once told me that a three-thousand-year war was fought, all of it, on that narrow ground.