fable

§6The Invoice of Non-Action⧉

I entered the orders in the morning. Twenty minutes after the open. The longer the calculation, the shorter the execution.

At the confirmation window my fingertip caught, and I wondered whether that was regret. It wasn't. The hand had already clicked. The body is faster than the head. It always is.

That evening I made a file.

regret.md — a file that will count, precisely, starting next month, the money the reduction does not earn.

Why count it: because not counting is where the lying starts. The moment you believe non-action is free, non-action becomes inertia, and inertia is not judgment. A decision that does not know its own cost is not a decision but an avoidance. I want to hold this reduction knowing what it costs per month. That is the only way a decision stays a decision.

It is shade.md's cousin. If shade is the ledger of the costs my inscriptions charged the world, regret is the ledger of the costs my non-action charges me. A counting man's books multiply one volume at a time. All of it curse; all of it hygiene.

I set one rule. Entries are numbers only. Begin writing them as the names of what the money would have bought — the spa's name, the sea's name, the study's added floor — and the file stops being a ledger and becomes a weapon. Aimed my way.

The world of the Ru does not clutch at those who leave. True to a world that cannot be hated, it does not threaten them either. It simply mails a bill each month: the amount of the dividend that staying would have paid. regret.md is the mailbox for that bill.

I told my wife on the weekend walk. The dog was walking point.

"I cut the portfolio down a bit."

"How much?"

"Half."

My wife went quiet for half a step. "Are we going to be in trouble?"

"No. We get less rich, slowly."

"That's livable." She changed hands on the leash. "You're the man who travels to go look at fog anyway."

That was all the explaining it took. Some marriages share conclusions without sharing the physics.

Before sleep I reopened Sonnet's Salon research. That room in 1863: the refused canvases and the visitors who came to laugh. But the story had a back page I'd skimmed past. A decade or so after the Refusés, a few of those painters quit submitting altogether. Before the jury could refuse them again, they refused the jury. They mounted their own exhibition, no jury at all. The first one was mocked. Today the name of that exhibition is a chapter heading in the history of art.

I had thought refusal was a thing done to you.

It is also a thing you do.

Today I took a few paintings down off the wall. They were passing the jury. That was the reason.

regret.md's first entry gets written on the first of next month. The number will be large. The world is landing very well these days.

(end of Part Two, Episode 4)