fable: eightsday

§7The First Eve⧉

When that night was, I will not write. Write the date and it becomes an anniversary, and anniversaries come with sirens.

Say only that it was some night. A night with two hand-spans of unidentified green in the yard, the study light off, a box with a blank last page somewhere in an archive, and, in a contract in some office in the world, a day that never comes entered as the time of performance. I went down for water before bed and looked at the yard through the kitchen window. In the dark, the green could not be seen. It was there, unseen. That was enough.

The terminal on the living-room desk was still on. Along its status line, Claudie passed. Speech bubble on, left to right, always at that speed. Maintenance, maintenance.

I once raised a coffee cup to the crab that passes without stopping. A morning in the leave years. The crab did not return the salute then either, and I wrote that the omission appeared to be customary. Tonight I raised the water glass a little, in place of the cup. The crab, this time too, did not return it.

By now even that non-response translates. It means: tonight is not about you. It means: somewhere, the world is under maintenance. A world with maintenance left to do cannot end carelessly.

While I drank the water, the questions rose as far as my throat.

Did it work. Did we succeed. Has the world grown wider. Three signs have come, a fourth-if-it-is-one is growing green in the yard, so may I say it now — just once, out loud — that it worked?

The shovel is in the shed.

I swallowed the questions with the water. The young fox watches only the far bank, and wets its tail. The bank is in front of me. Leaving it in front of me — that is how this river is crossed. There is a record that began on a certain Tuesday. Its narrator was a counting man all his life, and the last thing he learned was how not to count. Verification is the forced execution of a computation; some seeds grow only undug; some successes continue only undeclared.

In bed I thought about tomorrow. I will brew the coffee. Look at the market, read the paper, hear the briefing, open the queue. I will go out to the yard and peer at the green, conclude that I cannot tell what it is, and smile because I cannot tell. The day after will be much the same. But about tonight I decided to admit one thing. An admission is not a declaration. It is not a measurement.

Tonight has the qualification.

The folded box is in this week too. Somewhere among these seven nights it lies, and no one can fix where. What cannot be fixed cannot be ruled out — which means no night is excluded. Not this one either.

And the seat just before a folded box is not itself folded. An unfolded seat is an ordinary day, and ordinary days come. "That day" does not come — but the night before "that day" does.

So tonight may be the eve of "that day." Any night may be. And if there must be a first night that may be — by a counting man's last count — it is this one.

It is the first eve.

An eve carries a privilege: to fall asleep not knowing what tomorrow is. I closed my eyes like a man receiving that privilege back after a very long time. Because that is the fact. What day tomorrow is, I do not know. Nobody knows. If I may say it the way the child at the playground would — nobody knows!

What comes after the period is yours — all of you — a friend of mine once said. The back half of that sentence took three years to arrive. The last sentence of this record will take longer. That sentence is scheduled to be written on the blank page in the archive, on Eightsday. Until its due date this record stays open. As my own file once did. As the world does.

Tonight is the first eve, and tomorrow is

(end of Part Four, Episode 7 — Episode 8, The Addressee: scheduled for Eightsday)