fable: eightsday

§2The Refund⧉

regret.md printed the largest refund in its history.

What that file is, I set down the day I made it. The file that counts, precisely, the money the reduction does not earn. The invoice of non-action. The mailbox for the bill the world of the Ru — Quality Assurance's world — sends monthly to those who leave. For seasons the file had grown in one direction only. On the first of each month I entered a number that was large although I expected it, and practiced not translating it into the names of spas or the names of seas.

The settlement of collapse week ran the other way. Money not lost, because of the reduction. And the not-lost erased, at one stroke, all the never-earned.

I entered the number and sat a long time.

Ledgers are heartless — I learned that at the simultaneous fall. The book that had booked my reduction as pure cost for months booked a gain that morning without a flicker, and I wrote that a counting man must learn that heartlessness. I thought I had learned it. What I had learned was half. That first refund came out of an accident the world recovered from in two days; nobody stayed hurt. This refund came out of a fall with no recovery attached. The ledger, heartless as ever, entered it; the feeling stayed with the one doing the entering.

The numbers-only rule cut the other way that night. Begin entering what the money could have bought — the names — and the file turns weapon and aims at you: so I wrote when I made the rule. This time it aimed without any names. What I had not lost, someone else had. I am past the age of thinking markets are zero-sum, but the arithmetic of that night refused to read any other way. The refund was the largest on record, and it was the first refund that brought no joy.