Provenance

The trouble with deciding to find things out, Cal discovered, was that the finding out started immediately, and did not stop, and could not be switched off at the end of the day.

She went back to work on the Monday. The library reopened; the enquiries resumed; the cursed journal was returned by the postgraduate, finally, with a look of a man handing back a haunted object, and Cal filed it and did not enjoy the small victory as much as she’d meant to, because she had spent the entire walk in reading the street.

That was the new thing. She read the street now.

She had walked that route for years, and she had walked it, she realised, the way everyone walks a familiar route, asleep, more or less, the eyes handing the legs a map they’d stopped checking. Now she checked. And the checking had a texture she had not been prepared for, which was that most of what she found was nothing, and the nothing was worse than a something would have been.

The postbox on the corner of her street was red.

She stopped in front of it, on the Monday, in the iron cold, and looked at it, and it was red, and it had always been red, obviously it had always been red, postboxes were red, this was the most ordinary object in the British Isles.

Hadn’t it, though.

That was the thing. She stood there and could not produce, from the enormous and meticulous archive of herself, the specific memory of this specific postbox being red on any specific previous day. She had walked past it perhaps four thousand times. She had never once looked at it, because there had never been any reason to look at it, because it was a postbox and it was red, and now she needed the memory and the memory was not there, and its absence proved nothing at all, because you do not file what you have no reason to file, and she knew that, she of all people knew that, and still she stood in the cold looking at a red postbox and could not make the cold feeling go away.

She made herself walk on.

The bakery was where the bakery had always been. She was almost sure.

It went on like that.

A woman at the returns desk mentioned the snow last week, and Cal thought, there was no snow last week, and then thought, wasn’t there?, and then could not reconstruct the week well enough to be certain, because the week had been an ordinary week and she had not kept the weather, why would anyone keep the weather, and the woman was already gone with her books and it would have been madness to run after her and demand a meteorological deposition.

Peter said something about the meeting on Wednesday and Cal was nearly certain it had been Tuesday, and let it go, because people misremembered days constantly, days were the most edited thing in any human life, and if she flinched at every transposed weekday she would flinch herself to pieces by Friday.

A regular, an elderly man she’d helped for years, gentle, methodical, entirely reliable, asked her for the sequel to a novel he’d finished, and described the novel, and the novel he described was not quite the novel she remembered. The ending was different. Only slightly. The character who had, in her memory, gone home, had in his account stayed, and she stood at the shelf with her hand on the spine and felt the floor tilt, because either an old man had misremembered the last page of a book, which happened, which happened constantly, which was the single most common thing in a lending library…

…or it hadn’t.

And there was no way to tell. That was the whole of it, standing there with the book in her hand: she could pull the novel and check the ending, and the ending would say whatever it now said, and that would prove nothing, because if the world had turned over an inch then the book had turned with it, and the printed page would agree with him and not with her, and she would be left holding the one uncorrected copy, which was in her head, which was exactly the copy she had stopped being able to trust.

She checked the book anyway. She couldn’t not.

The character stayed.

She stood very still for a moment. Then she filed it, under inconclusive, which was where everything went now, and helped the old man find the sequel, and smiled, and did not run out into the street.

Thursday, she did not go to the café.

She thought about him. She let herself do that much, once a week, on the day, at the hour, a controlled dose, self-administered, because refusing to think about him entirely had turned out to cost more than the small permitted ache of it. She pictured the back booth, and the tea started and left to pace against one that wasn’t coming, and the sugar in the middle of the table, and the notebook by his elbow holding everything he could afford to remember and nothing he couldn’t.

That much, at least, she did not have to wonder about. That much had not changed and would not, because it had never been written anywhere the editing could reach, it was just a broken thing continuing, quietly, two streets away, in a man who did not know what he had lost and could not be told.

There was a strange comfort in it, which she examined and did not like. Of all the things in her life she could no longer be certain of, the surest was a grief.

She saw Grigori once, that fortnight, and he did not stay.

The bridge, the flask, the grey coat, but he was different now, quieter, the way a house is quieter after a decision has been made in it. He poured her the cup. He asked how she was, and she said looking, and he nodded as though that were both an answer and a diagnosis, and they stood a while over the frozen canal and said almost nothing, because he had said his piece, and he was not a man who repeated himself, and the watching he was doing now was a thing that did not require words.

At the end he said only: “It’s tiring, isn’t it. The looking.”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t get less tiring.” He screwed the cup back onto the flask. “You get…”

He stopped. She waited, because his sentences were worth waiting for, and because she thought she knew, suddenly, exactly which word he was reaching for, and did not want to be right.

“You learn to carry it,” he said instead, which was not the word, and they both knew it was not the word, and he went off along the towpath into the dark, and nothing on the path looked at her.

She started keeping a record.

It was the obvious thing. It was the only thing, really, for a person built the way she was built: if the world was editing itself an inch at a time, and if her own memory could not be trusted to hold the line, then she would do what she had always done, what she was for, she would write it down. A fixed point. An anchor outside herself. A record the editing would have to come and find if it wanted her, instead of simply reaching into the soft unguarded archive of her head.

She bought a notebook.

She noted the irony, and set it aside, and did not think about whose habit she was borrowing, or from where, or why the shape of it fit her hand so well.

And she wrote things down. Carefully. Dated. In her own precise hand. The postbox is red. Peter said the meeting was Wednesday; I remember Tuesday. The man’s novel ends with the character staying; I remember him leaving. Small things. True things, or things that had been true, or things she had believed were true, she stopped trying to word it and simply recorded, day by day, the state of the world as she found it, so that later, if it moved, she would have the before.

She kept the notebook by her bed.

And a week in, she took it out to add an entry, and read back over the earlier ones, the way you do, to be sure of where you were.

And stopped.

The entry about the novel. The one she’d written so carefully. She read it, and read it again, and a small cold thing opened up under her ribs, because she could not tell.

She could not tell if it said what she had written.

It looked right. It was her hand, her ink, the date in the corner where she always put it. The words were the words she would have used. The character stays; I remember him leaving. It was almost certainly exactly what she had written, unchanged, untouched, precisely as she’d left it.

Almost certainly.

But she had written it a week ago, and a week ago she had trusted her memory, and now she was a woman who no longer trusted her memory, and so she looked at her own handwriting on her own page and could not do the one thing the page existed to let her do. She could not verify it. She had made the record precisely so she would not have to rely on her recollection, and to check the record against anything, to know whether it still said what it had said, she had only her recollection, and her recollection was the very thing she no longer trusted, and the snake had its tail in its mouth, and there was no floor anywhere in it.

The note was fine. The note was almost certainly fine.

She sat on the edge of her bed at one in the morning holding a notebook she could not use, and understood, at last and completely, what she was up against: not a thing that changed the world, which she could have fought, but a thing that had quietly removed her standing to say the world had changed. It had not touched the page. It had not needed to. It had only had to make her the kind of witness who could no longer swear to her own evidence, and it had done that weeks ago, in a warm café, with a single question, and everything since had simply been her finding out how far the damage went.

She was the most careful archivist she had ever known.

And she had just been made unreliable to herself, which was the one wound, of all the wounds available, that she did not know how to dress.

Cal closed the notebook.

She did not throw it away. That was something; she noted it, distantly, as the single intact thing in the hour, that she did not throw it away. She set it back by the bed, unusable and undiscarded, a record she could not read kept by a keeper who could no longer trust the keeping, and she turned off the light, and lay in the dark, and did not sleep, and did not, for once, try to.

Somewhere out in the city an inch of something moved, or didn’t.

There was, any longer, no way for her to know.