Period Piece - § 4

They walked home the way they walked home, her hand in his. He carried the day behind a level face, the missing hour and the folder with the date in its corner, carrying it the way you carry a thing there is nowhere safe to set down. The evening had the same flat clean light the morning had, and the same people were out finishing the day as they had begun it.

He had passed them every day of his life that he could find and never watched them long enough to see. He watched now. He could not stop watching now. At the end of every street the gray line of the Wall stood and closed it off, near and far at once, and between the walls the people of the zone went home through the last of the light, each of them carrying a face, each face doing its small steady work of looking like a person who had a place to be and was glad to be going to it.

It was the thing the morning had left in him, worse than the missing hour, worse than the metal still faint in his teeth. He had learned to see the seams, and now he could not unsee them. A woman ahead of them laughed at something her husband said, and her face did the laugh a half-second before the rest of her caught up to it, the way a picture and its sound can slip out of step, and Alan saw the gap and could not make himself not see it. A face only holds if the man behind it still believes in it a little. He did not believe in any of it now. He wore it anyway. There was nothing else to wear.

Robin slowed at the mouth of a street where the Wall showed gray at the far end of it, slowed as she always slowed at the Wall, and looked up the length of it. His hand closed on hers and drew her on before he had decided anything, the small steady pressure he had been laying on her for as long as he could find, to keep her moving, to keep her from looking too long at what a person was not to look long at. He felt himself do it this time. He had taught her a hundred things this way and never once known he was teaching.

Where the avenue met the cross street stood the low brown building people did not talk about going into, with a sign on it that said nothing of what it was for. He knew, the way you knew things in here, that it was the place you went to ask. To put in the paperwork. To say you wanted out of this one and into another, a better one, one of the ones they said were better. A man was going up its steps as Alan came even with it, an ordinary man with his hat in his hands, and the door opened for him before he touched it, as the clinic doors had opened, and took him in, and shut. No one came out while Alan stood there. He could not remember anyone he had ever known coming back out of it to say what was inside.

His feet slowed without his leave and turned a few degrees toward the steps, and for three strides he let them.

Then he did the arithmetic, the one sum in here that always came out the same. If he climbed those steps and asked, one of two things was true. Either the other zones were better, and they would not give him one, because no one was moved from worse to better for the asking. Or every zone was this zone, the same drowned figures and the same warm men telling the same typed stories, and there was nowhere to go. He had watched men put in their paperwork, in the years he could account for. They climbed those steps with their hats in their hands, and they came back the same, or they did not come back, and either way the desks filled in behind them by the week's end and no one said the names.

He let his feet bring him back to the curb and his daughter's hand. He did not look at the brown building again. That was the choice, and he made it with his feet, a step ahead of the rest of him.

The crowd was thick where the avenue opened into the square, the whole zone going home at once, and it was there, in the middle of all of them, that Robin said it. She had been quiet a long way back, since the side street where she had looked down the length of it at the gray line at the end, turning something over with her face set in the small frown of a sum that would not come out, starting to speak twice and stopping herself, and he had felt each start come up her arm and into his hand and go still again, and he had not helped her and had not stopped her. Some part of him he would not look at straight had held still and listened, hungry to know, willing to spend her courage to get the answer he could not get any other way.

She looked up at him with the whole day in her face, and she said it, not low, not careful, in the clear carrying voice of a child who has decided to ask the true thing.

"It isn't really now," she said. "Is it."

The words went out of her small and clear and did not come back. He felt them leave, the way you feel a glass leave your fingers and know what it will do before it lands.

He felt the square hear her. He did not have to look to feel it, the small hitch in the rhythm of a hundred performances at once, the eyes that did not turn but slid, going to the very edges of themselves to take in a thing without being caught taking it in. Close by, a woman laughed, bright and sudden, like the woman at the school gate that morning, covering. A man told no one it was a fine evening. They were looking away on purpose. He knew the blindness they were giving him, because he had given it himself a hundred times, at the school gate and across the long room at work, turning his own eyes to their edges so another man could put his child right in private. It was the kindest thing the people in here did for one another. It was nearly the only thing.

He went down on one knee in front of her, there on the stone, as he had gone down to fix her sock at dawn, and his hands were already moving. He took her by the shoulders. They were steady, his hands, steadier than anything in him, the same hands that squared her collar and turned the coins all day. His thumb moved on the cap of her shoulder in the pattern it ran at the console, the jump, the climb, and he did not feel it start. The crowd went on around them, parting and closing, bags and feet and the smell of somebody's supper, performing not to see the man kneeling with his girl, seeing all of it.

He could have said yes. The word was right behind his teeth. It isn't really now, you're right, it never was, and tomorrow you and I will walk into that brown building and ask them to send us where it is. He did not say it. He had already not said it, three strides back, at the curb, with his feet. What he said came out lower than her voice had been, pitched to reach her and no one past her, and the thing he taught her was the only thing he had to give.

"Look at me," he said. "Not down there. At me." And when her eyes came up off the end of the street and onto his face: "When a thing like that comes up in you, the true thing, you let it go on by. You put your face like this." He showed her the face, the one he wore to work, the level eyes and the small ready pleasantness, the face he had not felt his own hands on in longer than he could find. "You smile like it's a fine evening. You ask about supper. You fold the true thing up small and keep it inside where it stays yours, and you do not let them see you carrying it." He smoothed her hair back from her face while he said it, gentling her, as a father does, and it was the same hand and the same motion he had watched another father use at the school gate that morning, flat and kind, laid over his son's mouth. "Do you understand me."

She looked at him. For a moment she was only a girl who had asked a question and been handed a rule, and her chin did something, a last small push of the true thing trying to get back out, and he watched it with everything he had. Because if she was his, only and truly his, it would fight him. It would not go down easy. A child fought a lie like that. He was nearly sure a child fought it.

It did not fight.

Her chin came level. Her eyes went still and pleasant. The gladness rose over her face clean and quick, no skip in it, no catch, the same gladness that had crossed the schoolyard at her that afternoon, and she smiled like it was a fine evening and said, "What's for supper," in a voice with nothing under it at all, and took his hand, ready to go on.

It was a good performance. It was better than his. There was not a thread out of place in it, nothing a man could catch and lift and say, there, that is where she folded the true thing away. She had it the first time, clean, as he had not managed in longer than he could say.

He could not tell. That was the whole of it, kneeling there with his knee gone numb on the stone. He could not tell whether he had just taught a frightened living child how to stay alive in here, or watched a made thing take an instruction and file it. And he never would be able to tell, because he had just seen to that himself, with his own hands, on his own knee, in the square. He had shut the one door that might have answered him. Something in his chest set like a joint going stiff in the cold, and he knew it would not work loose again.

He stood up. His knee held him. The square had gone back to its evening, the people moving, no one looking, all of them looking, the eyes running to the edges of themselves and away.

They climbed up out of the square toward the houses, and it was all still there to be seen now that he could not stop seeing it. The dry car and the swept porch were as he had left them that morning. The boy was at his step yet, striking the ball at the same height, the same sound, and would be at it still, Alan thought, when they came back tomorrow. Mrs. Dunlap stood on her step, still or again, her keys going around in her fist, and she lifted two fingers at them as they passed, the wave that was a way of being seen to wave, and Alan saw now that she gave it to every soul who went by and that her eyes did not warm by a degree for any of them. Robin lifted two small fingers back at her. He had not taught her that one. She had it already, or had got it just now from watching him.

At the corner his free hand went to the payphone's coin return without his asking, two fingers into the empty slot and out again, as it had gone there every day he could lay a hand on. Watching it do that, he understood he had no notion why. That there had never been a reason. That the gesture had been set running in him a long time ago and went on running, like the line of a song he could not stop and had never chosen.

He held his face level and his step even, and his thumb went into his pocket and started on the coins, counting them down by feel. He got a number. He counted again.

It came out the same. He counted a third time, as he had not been able to all week, all the years he could lay a hand on, and the number held, steady and certain and out of nowhere, and held again, and did not move. His daughter walked beside him doing her smallness, and the coins came out right, and the metal was long gone from his teeth, and the evening stood clean and still around all of it.

Their building came up ahead with its porch light on, the door he would open with the same two turns and the same try of the knob after, the apartment with its two bowls and its radio that would come on at six. Robin's hand was easy in his. He did not let himself wonder whether the ease was hers or only well made.

It came out the same the rest of the way home.

~End~

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