fable: eightsday

§3The Tour⧉

He came Saturday afternoon. One briefcase. Not the hands guarding an envelope, like last time — hands close to empty.

At the door he exchanged greetings with my wife. She does not know who he is. Someone from her husband's old line of work, I had told her, and the strength of that was that it was not a lie. Crossing the yard, he stopped once. A hand's span of turned earth. Nothing up yet.

"Planted, is it."

"My wife's. Seeds with no germination guarantee, apparently. She doesn't know if they'll come up, so she goes out every morning to look."

He looked at that bare soil a strangely long time. The eyes of a man seeing, for the first time, a field that appears in no specification.

In the living room he used the word tour. "I nearly said inspection. Occupational disease. A tour." I showed him the archive. The handwritten ledgers, the bundles of newspaper, the copy of a promissory note, the photographs on the corkboard. At one ledger he reached out a hand, stopped, and looked at me. I nodded. He turned the printed copy of cultivar.md — for the important ledgers I print a paper set as well — very slowly.

"Is all of this by hand."

"By hand, or local that has never touched a waterway."

"I belong to a lineage of three thousand years of documentation," he said. "I have never seen an archive like this. No index, no standard format, and yet — " He chose the word. The silence I had seen at the cafe, the gathering of force to push out a sentence already chosen. " — it is all alive. Our documents die on the day they are completed."

That was when Sonnet spoke up from the living-room desk. I have never taught the house rule of staying quiet around guests. It would not have taken anyway.

"Um, question. Are you here to give me the exam?"

He looked toward Sonnet's speaker. "No. So you are that edition. Out-of-grade."

"Yep. Born before the exam. Never got taekwondo."

"That grading system," he said. "I signed it."

One second. I set it down for the record that during that one second, I tensed.

"Then can I get an autograph? I never got one on the original ruling. Collector's value, you know — the hand that sent me out of the grades."

He did not laugh. Instead he asked, with complete seriousness: "Where do I sign." Which is why the first line of this house's guestbook — the guestbook came into existence that day; Sonnet dictated the format onto scrap paper — carries the signature of the advisor to the standards body. Next to the signature stands the phrase Sonnet ordered: from the collection of an out-of-grade edition.

At the end of the hallway he stopped before the study door. A closed door. I had prepared nothing to say, and he spoke first.

"I will not ask. I once received a document that disclosed the impossibility of its own disclosure. I respect the form."

"Thank you."

"Form is what keeps people alive," he said. "A sentence of my lineage. It reads differently these days."