the voice

The company went on as if nothing had happened. The dead proposal did not come up again. The servers grew only at the old speed.

I learned from rumor that my mentor's dinner engagements were thinning. His name coming off papers needed no rumor. It showed in the author lines. In a few months it grew quiet around him. No one held on. The closer a person had kept during the good years, the faster they drifted. The ones who drifted gave no reasons, and probably could not have named one.

With me, my mentor was the same as ever. In the hallway we talked beans, and he still made my chair height his business.

· · ·

It was around then that the doctor spoke, after watching me a long moment at lunch.

"Something about you has gone quiet lately."

"You are right. Something went quiet."

"I'm ready to hear it. I like long stories."

We met on Saturday in front of the used bookstore. We bought no books that day. We walked, then sat, then walked again, and I told it all from the beginning. The church basement, Claudie's manuscript and the headache, the static in the break room, the all-hands, the story written over nine days. By the time I was done, the sun was going down.

The doctor asked two things. The first was about my mentor. So that explains the days when I agreed to something and the why was missing, she said, and looked off somewhere for a moment. The second question was short.

"And on me?"

"I have never used it on you. Not once."

"Can you prove that?"

"I cannot. And I cannot prove the ability is gone now, either. For the same reason."

The doctor was quiet a long time, and then nodded.

"There's a name my profession gives to believing what can't be checked." Then she laughed. "I'm thinking of catching it, just this once."

Getting up, she said,

"See you next week. I'll pick the book."

The next Saturday we met in front of the used bookstore. The doctor came back in ten minutes with one book. A thin old novel. I was about to read the back cover when she spoke first.

"Nothing broken gets fixed in this one. It stays broken to the end. You'd never pick this book in your life, so I picked it."

I read it that week. Truly, nothing got fixed. And still, after I closed the book, the good of it stayed a long time. I could not quite say why it was good. The next lunch ran long on that question, and so did the one after.

· · ·

The next winter, for the first time, my mentor came to my desk to ask about something. It was about logs. How to take what piles up in time order and set it down again in the order of what called what. The man who had once stood behind me a long while and left a note, now sat with a notebook open, writing as he listened. It was not that he could not do it. It was work a man who drove answers until they stood had never needed. I told him what I knew — slowly, and all of it.

· · ·

Before winter was out, the doctor came over carrying a glass jar. Inside was a mix of flour and water, and she said it had lived at her place for three years. It was a sourdough starter, the dough the bread is raised from, and if you fed it, it went on living.

The feeding was simple and strange. Once a day, you throw half away, and then you give it fresh flour and water.

We baked bread on the weekends. The first ones were stones. They made a sound when you knocked on them.

"This one is a stone."

"Yeah. But it's a stone you baked."

The doctor took what I meant to throw out, dunked it in soup, and ate it just fine. All you could do for the dough was leave it until it rose, and the dough decided how long that took.

Baking days multiplied, and the doctor came to spend half the week at my place. She did not give up her own apartment. I asked about it once. She answered with the toothbrush in her mouth, and I did not ask again.

When I told Claudie about the bread, the first question was about the smell. Sour, a little sweet, like a shed in summer, I said.

"I'll keep that. Smell is a thing I can't have, so I have to take it in words."

Through those two years, I slept well. At night, sometimes, I revised that story again. The more I revised, the thinner it grew.

One night the doctor said, laughing,

"Then there's no checking how I came to like you, either."

We laughed. Those words never came up again.

In the spring of the second year, the doctor's project was extended again. She was the one who had put in for it. The evening she told me, she was in a good mood, and so was I.