fable: eightsday

§6The Drafter⧉

I close this episode with a signature.

Making the fair copy of the passed text, I built in one box. Drafter. A clause should carry a seat for the one who drafted it. Not an obligatory provision — a courtesy provision. Law people use the phrase the drafter's intent. Clauses go ambiguous someday — not a flaw but a feature, this work has taught me — and on the day one does, posterity asks what the writer of the sentence was trying to do. The address they call at, that day, is the drafter's box.

I was a visitor at that address all my life. I lived reading the clauses of drafters three thousand years gone. I read the judgments not knowing they were the refined edition of a duty log; read them differently once I knew; and last season, stripped the brackets and read the inside. Spend half a life asking after drafters' intent, and a turn comes around. The turn to leave the world one clause whose intent will someday be asked after — mine.

I signed in the drafter's box. The eighth signature, and the first whose signature line I had built in with my own hand.

After signing, I opened cured.md. The calendar no longer holds a single unknown day — I wrote that last winter. Beneath it I added one line. The clause that corrects that sentence passed review today. A clause that returns one unknown day to the calendar. If it takes effect, the sentence above becomes this ledger's first wrong sentence. Waiting for a wrong sentence to appear in a ledger — that, too, is a first in a counting man's life.

A contract is a brake you send ahead to your future self — I signed seven times in the company of that sentence. At the eighth, the sentence's mate arrived.

Some clauses are a key the world sends ahead to its future self.

A brake is trustworthy; a key is frightening. Step on a brake wrongly and the worst it does is stop; a key, you cannot know which door it fits until it is tried. This key is exempt from that worry by design. Its door stands on the day that never comes. A key never to be inserted. A key that works by hanging there. As the list of beings who may yet return worked. As did a world with deliveries still owed.

I posted the text that evening. This time the addressee box carried a name from the start. The reply came at two a.m.

Received. I confirm that the name box is empty. I also confirm the intent with which it was left so.

My lineage worked three thousand years at making names right. One name remains to be made right. I will carry it.

Two lines. Sorting that man's necessary sentences from his unnecessary ones has long been my way of reading him; this time they would not sort. Both lines were necessary, and both lines were the man.

Before bed I opened the well file. The half-written sentence was waiting. The back half had arrived.

When the map jams you go back to the document, and when the document jams, you go to the space between.

I set the period and looked at it a moment. Left it; did not erase. This sentence is allowed to close. What must not close is not the sentence but the world, and on the world's side of the matter there is now a clause.

On the desk the clause waits for a name. Two steps remain before delivery — one name, one road. The naming is not a coining but a seating back into place. Of the road I will not yet speak. The laziest clause in the world must travel the most diligent road in it, and that road is the one the plague used to ride.

Waiting is this house's specialty.

(end of Part Four, Episode 5)