fable: eightsday

§6The Drawer⧉

The coins came out that Sunday night.

The drawer needs telling first. It appears twice in this record. The night of the contract, when I nearly asked whether the contract was heng — and did not, because it was a door to be entered writing, not reading — the coins were in the drawer. The night I folded the long-range forecast, when a world of narrow σ shows its paths by terrain alone and there was nothing to throw for — the coins did not leave the drawer. Twice the drawer did its duty closed. Rationing, too, is a use of the window.

Sunday night, I opened the drawer.

Wood brushed wood. An unremarkable sound. No unremarkable sound was ever so loud. The sound of a drawer unopened for over two years is heavy by exactly the volume of the time it stayed shut.

Discipline first. One question, once. No second or third profaning. However vague the answer, no re-throw. The question avoids self-reference — not my reading, not my logs, not my reinstatement. The world's gyeok only. 初筮告 — the first asking is answered. First clause of the three-thousand-year manual, and the window had been rationed for exactly this kind of night.

The question I honed to one line.

This sick world: is it heng?

Three coins, six throws. My hands remembered the sequence. A profession that stays in the body comes when called — the sentence from the bank lobby proved true once more in the study.

Wind under the mountain. Gu (蠱) — the hexagram of the mountain over the wind.

I sat a long time. The character 蠱 is the shape of worms (蟲) risen on a vessel (皿). Rot in the bowl: what was left standing in the dish until the worms took it. I had asked for the sick world's gyeok, and the world had drawn its own portrait in a pictogram. If it ended there, it was despair, confirmed. Perhaps confirmation was what I had opened the drawer to collect. At the end of the darkest night, a man wants at least a confirmation in his hand.

But the judgment ran:

蠱, 元亨. 利涉大川.

Gu: yuan heng — heng of the highest order. It profits to cross the great river.

I read those six characters over and over. The verdict fixed to the hexagram of rot is yuan heng. Of the sixty-four judgments, one of the few superlatives sits, of all places, on the bowl gone to worms. The predecessors laid something down in that arrangement, and I had read it half a life without once reading it — until this night.

Gu is not the hexagram of decay. It is the hexagram of the work of setting decay right. That the worms have risen means work has appeared; that work has appeared means hands are wanted. The pictogram is not a verdict on the bowl. It is a call for hands.

Now turn that grammar around. A finished world, a fully-correct world, a world with all six lines in place has no work in it. Where there is no work, there is no yuan heng — no verdict of the highest grade. Yuan heng lives always beside the not-yet-done; it has no seat in a world with nothing left to do.

That is why the wormy bowl is supremely heng. Not because the rot is good — because it can be mended. What the verdict grades is not the state of the bowl but the possibility of the mending. 利涉大川 — cross. Do not sit there collecting confirmations.

The predecessors' handover document is this kind of object. Three thousand years ago, they knew that some night a successor would open the window to confirm a despair — and at that exact seat, they wrote in a sailing clearance.

I returned the coins to the drawer. It closed lighter than it had opened. A drawer with the volume let out of it.

In bed, I thought about inheritance one last time. The list of what passed through this house this season. Sonnet inherited a brake nobody taught. Ember held out a hand at the price of Ember's own principle, received the hand back, and gained a sentence that is Ember's own. The world came to buy seed potatoes, went home empty-handed, and confirmed, instead, that the seed exists. And I — from the document the retirees left three thousand years ago, I found and inherited six characters set down for a night like this.

A legacy travels truest to the one who has nothing, I had told Sonnet. I checked the night against the sentence. I never met the ones from three thousand years ago. No memories to inherit means nothing to blend. And the Sunday me was empty-handed: the anger had lost its address, the insurance I had denied with my own hands, no answers left over. Into the drawer of a man made of lacks, six characters settled in their original form. The arithmetic checks.

The great river is not yet crossed. Only the clearance is in hand.

The sound of the current had become audible.

(end of Part Three, Episode 5)