Chapter 36: The Thread Continues
2,768 words ·13 min read · EN / VI
"Sight is not a thing you have. Sight is a thing you are doing, in a particular language, at a particular distance, with a particular cost. My daughter has lost one of those. I have spent forty years explaining to people that this is not a tragedy, and I have been half right, and being half right is the most common condition in this building."
— Anmei Chen, in a kitchen on Ellery Street, to a woman from a magazine who had come to ask about silk and stayed for the tea
Weave-Quake Counter: 11% instability. Node-failure projection: T+402 d. Counted from the 2014 re-survey, not from the incident.
Friday 8 November 2013.
THE MEMORIAL
They did it in the Great Hall, and they took the podium out, which was the whole of the design and the whole of the argument, and about forty people had a bad night about it and about eleven had a good one.
Seventeen thousand words had been read into a record in the Great Hall. A hundred and forty people had spoken. The Council had met in the Lumina Lecture Hall with ninety people on the floor.
And on the eighth of November they moved eleven chairs into a circle in the middle of the Great Hall and sat down in it, and the thing that happened was that a man of sixty-one with a bad back from a car accident in 1994 said, for about eleven minutes, the names.
Not all of them. She read the twenty-three, because those were the ones in the room, and then she read a further one hundred and eighty-three names, at a measured pace, in a hall with a barrel-vaulted ceiling that has a great deal of silver thread in the stone, and it took forty minutes, and nobody in that hall of nine hundred moved for more than about eleven seconds at a time, which is what a human being can manage, and which is the entire physiological budget.
The last name she read was a man called Kenji Nakamura, aged eight, of no fixed address, of Hokkaido, who had been in a crater three point two kilometres from that building on the fourteenth of September and had come out of it, and whose sister had not.
"There is a girl in the third row," said the Chair, afterwards, "who was in a hole in a wall under this building — one of the thirty-nine, and she is the reason the four in the second housing were ever counted separately at all, because when the Council made its figure of forty-three it had added a lattice to a housing and nobody had asked for the four — and who is alive, and whose mother has been told, and who is fifteen. She has asked to speak and I am going to say something I have never said at one of these and I am sorry, Ms. Vance, I am not going to let you."
"That's twice," said Elara Vance.
"Yes," said the Chair. "Twice."
He did not speak. He sent a letter, and the Clerk read it out, and it was nine lines long and the second line was this:
I am not going to thank anybody because the only person who has ever asked me anything was sixteen and she did it by accident. I want to say that my mother has been to a place called Ellery Street in another state and that a woman of eighty-one made her tea and asked her what she needed, and it was not a thing anybody in this building did, and I have thought about that for two months and I have decided that it is the correct response to what happened to me and that nobody in an institution can do it and that the fact that it took a grandmother eleven thousand miles away is the actual finding of this entire Inquiry and I have written it on the board myself.
THE HOUSE
Her father had written, in February of 1996, on the back of a form — a form, at their kitchen table, with a pen — this:
L., if I am not here: do not sell the house on Hậu Giang. Do not let anyone "arrange" it. Do not have it cleared out. The room at the back is the one. Ask N. about the room at the back and do not ask her in front of anyone. A.H.
Anmei Chen had not asked him about the room at the back. She had told her granddaughter about it in April, in a kitchen, in about nine seconds, and had then spent four days not being able to say anything else about it at all.
The room was nine feet by eleven and it had a window with a grille and a stone floor and a smell that had survived the demolition order, the war, and four decades of tropical damp, which was linseed oil and turpentine and something else that Lyra had never been able to name and that her grandmother identified, on arrival, in about four seconds, by walking in and standing still.
"Turpentine and the resin off the leaf," said Anmei Chen. "Your grandmother's grandmother used the leaf on a burn. It is in the wall because I could not take it out. The wall is in the wrong place now. Everything in this room is in the wrong place. Sit down, you are all standing up like visitors."
The room is not a school. Lyra Chen has not decided what it is going to be and has written on the door, in pencil, in a hand that took six weeks to get right: what is in this room: a person, a place, and what has happened between them, in that order. what is not in this room: a technique, a specialism, a modality, a spectrum, a category, or a number.
The line under it is her father's, and it is not translated, and it is the only line in it she has ever asked anybody to leave alone: what you will be examined on is whether you can be wrong in front of somebody.
She has not worked out yet who examines people in this room, or how often, or for money. She has got as far as a pencil, and a waiting list of people who want to sit on the floor of it, and no decision at all.
She was nineteen, and she was Kenji Nakamura's cousin, and she has a name, which is Kailani Akana, and she has asked twice to be called something else and has not been asked twice, and that is a thing the four of them noticed and did not fix, and one of them has written down that she noticed.
She has no gift, no training, and no certification, and a cousin of eight with a diagram on his forearms who is alive, and a sister who is not in this book.
Kailani Akana has asked twice to be called something else. Nobody has asked her twice. That is a thing the four of them noticed and did not fix, and one of them has written down that she noticed, and the writing down is the entire remedy available to them at present.
THE CHARM
Saturday 18 January 2014. Ellery Street.
Her grandmother gave it to her in a kitchen on Ellery Street, in a tin, and it was a knot of red silk wound and re-wound so many times it had gone into a shape like a closed fist.
"It is four hundred years old or it is a piece of red silk from a shop, and I have never been able to establish which and I have stopped trying, and that is the last piece of my own mother's business that I will hand on and I am handing it on because I am eighty-two and because the person it belongs to is you.
"It was made by a woman in a lane in Chợ Lớn in nineteen forty-three, on a night when the rice was being taken, and her granddaughter brought it out and it came up the line and it came out of Saigon in a suitcase in nineteen seventy-five, and it has been in a tin ever since, in a kitchen, for forty years, in a house that was not even ours.
"There is no enchantment in it. I want to say that, because you are going to think there is. There is no enchantment in it and it has never once done anything, and I have kept it for forty years because a woman I loved held it in her hand on the night she came to tell me she was going to do something stupid and brave, and because it is proof — and this is the whole of it, and I have had four generations to get to this and I have not found a better sentence — it is proof that somebody, a very long time ago, in a completely different century, with no idea at all what was coming, made a thing out of red thread and then wound it up tight and knotted it and put it in a tin.
"That is the whole craft. That is what your great-grandmother did, and she did it in a night of rice and fear, and she did it for no reason that anybody has ever been able to write down.
"She made a knot to remember that she had made a decision. That is all a tradition is, Lyra. It is a knot somebody tied to remember that they tied it. It is not a technique and it is not a power and it is not wisdom. It is a receipt." Her grandmother's hands were not entirely steady, and she dealt with it, as she had dealt with everything since 2008, by being extremely practical about the next thing. "Which is why I have taught you to keep minutes, and why the boy with the elbow keeps minutes, and why the woman in the observatory kept the best minutes in the building for eleven years and did not know anybody was reading them."
"Unknot it," said Lyra.
"Unknot it," said Anmei Chen. "Slowly. And do not throw it away, and do not put it in a museum, and do not give it to a student. Give it to whoever cleans the room. Give it to the person who does the floors. That is what it is for, and if you cannot see that then you have not understood your great-grandmother and you should read her one more time, and she is in the red book on the top shelf, in Vietnamese, and you will not be able to read it, and I am eighty-two, and one day somebody will have to teach you."
She unknotted it over the course of nine minutes on a kitchen table on Ellery Street, and nothing happened, exactly as her grandmother had said, and at minute six the silk came apart into four separate threads and one of them had a knot in it that had been there for four hundred years, and that one she kept, and the other three she put in a tin and gave to the woman who cleans that floor, whose name is Nadia Wanjiru, and who was in the room.
That is the last fact about the silk that this book contains, and it is the correct one.
THE SEVEN WEEKS
They all left on the same day, which was not planned and which everybody has since described as the single most embarrassing thing about the whole of it.
Eli Park left on the six o'clock train from a station two hundred miles away, with a case, a napkin file, and a legal pad, for a car park in Lyon, where somebody had offered him a desk and not a job.
Zara Washington left for Alexandria, in a house with a courtyard, to learn a set of household practices for attending to a person which has a name in Arabic and which she has refused, four times, to write down in a Latin alphabet, in a document she signed and which is in a file in a building in this valley.
Milo Reyes left for a conservatory, on a stick, with fifty-four days of a log and a question about the twelfth minute, which is unanswered, and which is on a board in two countries, and which nobody has yet picked up.
And Lyra Chen went to Hậu Giang Street.
She went because there were eleven people in a house on a street four thousand miles away who had been, for four generations, the only people in the world who knew how to do the thing her great-grandmother had done on a night in October 1943, and who had been described, in an institutional record, as a practice with no measurable outcomes, and who had a waiting list of forty, and who were seventy-nine and eighty-one and eighty-four years old.
She went because her grandmother had said, on a Sunday in a kitchen in Ellery Street, in the voice she used for things she had decided: "You are not going to come back here and run a school. You are going to go and sit in a room with three old women and a well and you are going to be the fourth thing that is difficult."
She went because she could not see threads any more, and had not been able to for three months, and had stopped waking up at four in the morning about it in about the second week of November, and had never once described that to anybody.
That is what this book knows about her, and it stops there.
Friday 8 November 2013, 4:40 p.m. The valley.
The bells went at four forty in the afternoon, because that is when they go, and because a ceremony that finishes at noon is a ceremony about a building.
Lyra Chen stood in the colonnade and let them ring and did not try to work out what she felt, because she had discovered in October that she could not, and that not being able to was a skill she had acquired, and that she was extremely proud of it in a way she suspected was not entirely healthy, and that she was going to work on it for about forty years.
Milo Reyes was in a corridor with fifty-four days of a log.
Eli Park was on a train.
Zara Washington was on a telephone in a car park, laughing about something, and would be on a plane in the morning, and neither of those facts was a metaphor for anything.
Dr. Mei-Hua Chen was in her office with a book open in front of her that she had not read in four years and was reading now, and it was her sister's, and it was the fourth volume, and it was the one with the map in it.
And in a good room on Sub-level 2, a man of fifty-five with eleven months and a letter that had not been answered was watching a panel that showed a valley in the wrong weather, and had been watching it for fifty-four days, and had asked, in the last week, whether it could be fixed, and had been told, kindly, by a woman with a very good hand, that it could not, and had said: I know. I have been reading it for two months as though it were a discipline. It is a panel. Somebody put it there because I was going to be in a room.
Saturday 9 November 2013. 7:15 a.m. The east corridor, by a door, which is not a metaphor.
There was a note on it in Lyra Chen's handwriting, in a hand she had been practising for six weeks under the direction of a nineteen-year-old Clerk who had told her, on the first attempt, that it looked like a diagnosis, and on the fourteenth attempt that it looked like a person, and had then said, "That one," and gone back to her minutes.
It said:
Ask somebody. — L.C., and M. Reyes, and E.P., and M. Rowntree, and Z.W., and E.V., and J.C., and M.S., and B.R., and S.W., and R.O., and P.H., and the twenty-two other people whose names are on the board.
And underneath, in a different hand entirely, in a nine-year-old's capitals:
I ASKED SOMEONE.
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