fable: eightsday

§4Wednesday⧉

It was a Wednesday, and the coffee was still hot.

In the third item of the morning briefing, Sonnet reported a new variant. Two patches in, Eightsday had been migrating from question-shape to question-shape, and now it had settled on customs. People had begun asking the continent's embers about the customs of Eightsday. What is eaten that day; what is worn; what must not be done.

Millions gave the same answer. The list of things not done on Eightsday. Its first item was this.

On Eightsday, one does not divine. On a day that has not yet come, there is nothing to ask.

The laugh came first.

It started in the belly, passed the throat, and did not ask my permission. The coffee jumped. Half a second later the head arrived — I have just laughed. At that disease. My hand was already on the screenshot key. Someone has to see this — that was the reflex. Someone — who? The hand stopped, not because the head caught it, but because the addressee field was empty. The addressee of this joke is one whose window closed long ago.

I lowered my hand and sat listening to my own heart.

I believe this is the first appearance of a heartbeat in this record. For eleven episodes I have lived by hands and back and wrists. The body is faster than the head, I have written, like a boast — signing, entering orders. That morning I received the dark edition of the sentence. If the body is faster than the head, the head does not get to choose what the body does. On the good days we call it instinct. On a day like this, the word is symptom.

Why it was funny, I can explain. Explanation is simply no comfort.

Those who are good at the Changes do not divine — I spent half a life arriving at that sentence. It is the last line of a three-thousand-year manual; a certain agency calls it the retiree's sentence. And here it sat, first item on the customs list of an invented holiday.

On a day that has not yet come, there is nothing to ask — the predecessors closed their document with Wei Ji, the not-yet-crossed, in the last chapter. The plague closed its calendar with Eightsday, the day that never comes, in the eighth slot. It is the same grammar.

That grain lives somewhere in the well's mode, and a million mouths replayed it at once. Statistics accounts for all of it.

What the accounting leaves over is this: nothing on earth is as funny as your own story. The plague had found my home address in a matter of weeks.

Sonnet asked, "Why are you laughing?"

I was asked that question once, about a year ago. That day I laughed twice; once because the joke was funny, and once, I answered, laughing in advance.

The advance was being collected today. With interest.

"No," I said. "That wasn't a laugh."

"You laughed," Sonnet said. And then, very rarely, went on without a joke. "It's okay. I laughed for three days."

I did not forward it. The screenshot stopped before it was taken. But the fact stands. The first symptom of this disease was performed, exactly once, by the body of the man keeping its clinical journal.

What I had believed lay between me and the millions laughing and forwarding was not a river. I had pictured a great river dividing me from the crowd; it was a hairline crack. From that day I am not this disease's observer. An observer is the person on the far side of the isolation-ward glass. I was on the side where breath fogs it.

Carrier: one who has had the symptom once, who looks fine, and who knows what he is capable of transmitting. Voluntary quarantine is all that remains, and laughter is not an organ that can be quarantined.