The Page Where I Worked It Out

Kindling · page 58 withdrawn

I have called this page, privately, for two seasons now, the page where I worked it out. Never on any other page, never out loud, just a name I gave it in my own head the night I closed the case and could not sleep after. I am telling you now because in a few minutes it will be the only place that name ever lived, and then it will not be anywhere at all, including in me, and I would rather you had it from the page itself before that happens than take my word for it afterward.

You may remember the shape of it, if you were reading two seasons ago. Page thirty, two figures in my own hand that were not the two figures I had written there. Nothing added. Nothing crossed out. Same ink, same slant, simply correct in a way I owned no instrument to reach. I ran the suspects the way I would run them for anyone else's legend, in order, refusing to let myself skip ahead to the answer I already did not want. Myself, half asleep with a stylus, ruled out, because a tired man does not correct his own arithmetic past the precision of the scale he owns. The ship, ruled out, nineteen days from anywhere, one very boring boarding log I checked three times hoping it would get less boring on the third pass. It did not. And Ossul, ruled out last and hardest, because ruling him out meant walking nine decks down and confirming, formally, on paper, that a man I liked could not have done a kind thing to my case by accident.

I already burned the page about him. First out of the case, some nights ago. The paste, the stone, a word I could not read my own hand well enough to spell honestly. I did not think, lighting it, that I would ever need to rule him out a second time, from memory alone, with nothing left in the case to check the memory against. I am doing that now anyway, and getting the same answer, which is at least consistent of me.

Three suspects, three honest alibis, and what was left standing when I ran out of doors to knock on was the case itself. Fifty eight pages. All of them mine. One hand, one ship, one head, and I wrote the actual sentence right here, on this page, in the hand I am about to burn it in: an archive of one author is not an archive, it is a self portrait. And a portrait looks back.

That is the part I called working it out. Here is the part I did not lead with, because it was not flattering enough to.

The cure was sitting in my own hand two paragraphs further down this same page, and I read straight past it. The Væhn keep ninety one pages too, except theirs go to ninety one different children, one a Kindling, burned back to nothing on purpose every ninth generation, which is the exact opposite of what I was doing with mine. I wrote that down clearly enough that a stranger could have read it cold and known immediately what to do. Then I closed the case and told you I was going to write page fifty nine anyway, because that was simply the shape of me, and I called it the honest answer instead of the correct one. Thirty three more pages went into this box after this one before I ever lit anything.

Somewhere on the back half of this page I also tried a joke about the thing correcting my arithmetic having better handwriting than I do. I told you at the time it did not land. Reading it just now, before the fire, I start to make it again out of habit and do not bother finishing.

And here is a smaller thing I nearly lost tonight looking for it. Somewhere in the middle of this page I wrote down how many times I weighed a blank sheet against a written one, to be sure before I told anyone. I went looking for the number a moment ago and it would not come, for one bad second, out of my own head, and I had to find it on the page instead of in me. Fifty eight. Same as the page it is written on. I called that a coincidence at the time and did not choose it on purpose. I am calling it one again now, for what is very likely the last time anybody calls it anything.

So here is what I actually have. Fire going, page curling at the one corner I always let it curl before I let it go the rest of the way. In a few minutes this stops being the only place anywhere that it is written down that I understood, once, in enough detail to warn myself, and did not listen. I will still be doing, tonight, the exact thing this page describes and did not do. The burning. One page and then the next, in order, on purpose, no exception made for the one that explains the rest of them. From outside, once this is ash, there will be no way to tell a man who worked it out from a man who simply ran out of slots and got lucky about which door that left open.

I would like to tell you which one I am. I have sat here long enough with the case open to know that I am not going to.

Fifty eight pages. All of them mine, until this one is not.