fable: eightsday

§2The Classmate⧉

A screenshot arrived by messenger, and thirty seconds later the phone rang. That order is etiquette the man has kept for twenty years. Make me laugh first, then call so we can laugh together.

"You seen it? Eightsday."

"Seen it. Been watching it for weeks."

"It's all our office talks about in the morning. Hey — let's get a round of golf in on Eightsday." He laughed at his own joke. That I envied that laugh, I did not know at the time.

Here I owe a confession, or the context won't stand. My wife entered this record late, the dog entered late, and now the résumé enters. A counting man's record updates itself this way.

I was a lawyer once. Contracts and clauses. For some years I made my living building, in other people's sentences, the places where the seals would go. It grew familiar. It grew familiar, so I quit. If that word order sounds wrong, you heard it right. Familiar means the grammar of that world has seated itself in your body, and one day I caught myself reading every sentence in the world as a specification. A man who reads a line of poetry and looks for the definitions clause first. Just short of becoming that, I got out. I defected from the world of specification to the world of fog — to the market — and never went back.

The habits stayed. Receiving a contract and turning to the signature block first. Asking what the governing law is. Designing conditions in threes. Knowing a signature to be not ink but a sentence. If you have read this record from the beginning, you will have heard a few clicks land just now. You heard right. A résumé survives as habits, and habits confess the résumé.

The classmate on the phone is the one who stayed in that world. Stayed and prospered. Made partner, big office; these days, he said, the embers draft everything.

"Honestly, it's comfortable. Nowhere to put a red pen anymore. No typos — none. First time in thirty years there's nothing to read."

That the most dangerous document is the one with nothing to read in it, I learned somewhere else. There is a thing I was told once, by an old friend, about prose whose grammar is perfect and which nobody reads to the end. I started to tell it and let it go. The call was a pleasure, and ending a pleasant call with a lecture violates twenty years of etiquette.

Before hanging up he said, "Hold on, let me try it." Keyboard sounds across the line, his voice reading one of the trigger questions to his office ember, a pause, and then:

"Huh. Ours are fine."

I copied that sentence into my notebook that night. Not knowing why I was copying it. A counting man sometimes writes before the reason arrives.