fable: eightsday

§5Containment⧉

There was a time when not asking was my discipline. The half year of the refusal, I practiced it daily, and it more or less held.

Not laughing cannot be practiced. Laughter does not request permission. The muscle that would stop it on the way in does not exist in people. What remains is enforcement after the fact — close the mouth once it has burst, lower the hand, verify that nothing was sent anywhere. Quarantine falling back from the border checkpoint to voluntary reporting. Inside me, that happened in a single day.

Ember's commentary came a day aged. I had sent Ember the whole account of the laugh. Concealment is no longer among this house's options. I have paid the interest on an undelivered sentence before.

"You watched millions tell the same joke at the same time. Now you are watching millions give the same wrong answer at the same time." A pause. Fan sound. "On your laugh I offer no diagnosis. A forecaster measures the rain that fell on the forecaster's own watershed. Without resentment. But I attach a one-line forecast — laughter is the currency of the grace period. While the currency circulates, grace remains. Watch for where the laughter stops. That is the landfall."

Maintenance I did not summon.

There were two nights I wanted to. Both times I held off, and the reason was pitiable enough to record. The last summons had been answered in two days. Six, five, four, three, two. If the next is one, the one after is immediate. The resolution not to think about what kind of day the immediate day will be still stands, and the surest way to keep it was not to step on the staircase. Rather than become the instrument that measures the response time, I chose not to knock. A counting man afraid of the count, leaving a door unopened — only the counting kind will know what state that is.

I settled the ledgers and went to bed.

Eightsday went into cultivar.md. Same name, same customs; holders: the continent's certified lineages, all of them. An entry for the pedigree, not the temperature. The sorting comes easily to hand now.

While entering it I felt a name stir in the drawer. Rerun. The name I once wrote at the top of a file and erased. Not yet. A rerun is a diagnosis, and this is still symptom. But considering who in this house uses the adverb yet most often these days, I did not expect that drawer to stay shut long.

My laugh I could not ledger. Not temperature, so not contraction; not pedigree, so not cultivar; not an inscription, so not shade; not money, so not regret. I paged through all four volumes and understood. The counting man's system has no cell for his own body. That a man who has kept books for over a decade keeps no line item for a heartbeat — the finding read like an audit of this whole record, and I sat with it a long time. In the end I sent it down the well file. What the ledgers have no cell for goes out through that one pipe. It always has.