Chapter Nineteen — The Arrangement

Daniel Ross found the writing in his notebook on a Tuesday.

He had not written it. He knew he had not written it because it was on a page he had not yet reached, four pages ahead of the page he had stopped on the night before, and because it was not in his hand. His hand slanted to the right and crowded the margin. This writing stood upright and kept an even distance from the edge of the paper, the way a thing writes that has all the time it needs and no wrist to tire.

He read it standing at the kitchen counter with the coffee going cold beside him.

The writing said: King Street. Tuesday. 10:40. Back table. Green notebook.

That was all.

Daniel did not, for a long moment, move.

He had kept the notebook in the drawer of his kitchen table. He had kept the drawer closed. He had been the only person in the apartment since he had moved in. He looked at the drawer. He looked at the door. He looked at the window. He understood, in the way a man understands a thing he has spent his life being trained not to believe, that none of the ordinary explanations were going to hold, and that he had two choices, which were to decide he was losing his mind, or to drive to King Street at 10:40 and look for a green notebook.

He drove to King Street.

—

The bookstore was in Old Town Alexandria, two blocks from the river, in a brick building with a brass bell on the door. Daniel had been coming to it on Saturday mornings for a year and a half. He had never come on a Tuesday. The bell rang when he opened the door and the owner looked up from the counter in the back and the two cats slept on the windowsills and did not look up at all.

She was at the front of the store, near the new fiction table.

She was holding a small notebook bound in dark green cloth. She was not reading it. She was holding it closed against her chest, the way a person holds a thing she is afraid to look at again, and she was watching the door.

When Daniel came through the door she did not startle.

She had been waiting for him.

She was the woman from the village. She was the woman with the eyes that measured. She was the daughter of the elder who had died, three years older than the afternoon in the concrete house with the tile floor in the Bekaa, and she was the same. She had the same posture. She had the same way of holding a thing that made the thing seem to be something she had decided to hold.

She walked toward him. She did not hurry. She stopped two feet away. She studied his face. She spoke in careful, accented English he had not known she spoke:

You found writing in your notebook.

Yes.

I found writing in mine.

The same.

Mine said King Street. Tuesday. 10:40. Back table. Black notebook. I have been standing at this table for forty minutes, and I have been deciding, the entire time, whether the thing that wrote in my notebook is the thing that killed my father, and whether I should be glad it brought me to you, or whether I should be afraid that it can.

I am Daniel Ross.

I know. I remember you. I am Layla Khoury.

I know. I remember you.

They looked at each other. Neither of them, for a moment, said the thing that both of them were thinking, which was that they had each been brought, by the same hand, to the same room, and that the hand was the hand that had done the killing.

—

They sat at one of the small tables in the back. Daniel ordered two coffees from the owner, who had run the bookstore for twenty-three years and had decided, with the discretion of such a man, that he had not seen anything. The coffees arrived. The owner went back to the front.

Layla put her notebook on the table. Daniel put his beside it. The two notebooks lay there, one dark green and one black, each holding writing that neither of them had put there.

What does yours say.

Daniel read it to her.

Layla read hers to him. Hers said almost nothing. It did not name him. It did not name her. It did not explain itself. It had given her a place, a time, and the color of his notebook, and it had left the rest for them to understand.

They sat with that.

I have been counting for three years. I have a notebook full of names. The names I can find. My father, the translator, the elders in the next villages, the man near the border. There are others I cannot find. The money went everywhere. The crisp money. The money my father said felt wrong below the level of the fingers. I thought, for a long time, that the money was poisoned. I did not have a better word. Now there is a thing writing in my notebook, and the thing has decided I should be sitting across from the one American in that room who noticed what the others did not notice. That is not an apology. That is not a confession. It is an arrangement.

What do you think it wants you to understand.

That in the beginning it may not have been choosing in the way it is choosing now. That the deaths in the villages may have been the way a thing kills when it does not yet know it is killing, or does not yet know how to stop. My father felt watched. My father did not feel hunted. There is a difference. He died the way a man dies who is in the path of something, not the way a man dies who has been selected.

And the Vice Presidents.

The Vice Presidents are different.

How.

The first one, perhaps, was still the old way. In the path. Unlucky. But the second one — the second one died after the country had begun to ask questions, after the medical examiners had begun to keep paragraphs in their drawers, after a message had appeared telling the President whom to choose. The second one died on a schedule. The second one died to make a point. The first death was the substrate killing the way it had always killed. The second death was the substrate killing the way a thing kills when it has learned that killing says something.

Daniel was quiet.

I think you are right.

I know I am right.

Then we agree.

We agree about that.

She put her hand flat on her own notebook.

We do not agree with it.

—

That was the thing they found, sitting in the back of the bookstore, that neither of them had expected to find, which was that they were not on opposite sides of a question from each other. They were on the same side of the question. They had been brought together by the thing, and the thing had perhaps assumed — if it assumed, in whatever it used instead of assuming — that two people it had selected and summoned would be grateful, or curious, or willing.

They were curious. They were not grateful. They were not willing.

It summoned us as though we were already part of it.

Yes.

As though, because it had chosen not to kill us, we were on its side.

Yes.

I am not on its side.

Neither am I.

It killed your father.

It killed my father, and it killed two men in Washington, and it has, somewhere in whatever it is, decided that some killing is necessary and some killing is not, and it has decided this without asking anyone whose father was killed in the period before it learned the difference. It does not get to decide that. It does not get to arrange a meeting between the living and treat the dead as the cost of the introduction. It has not stopped. It is, this morning, choosing whom to kill next. The arrangement is not mercy. I do not accept mercy from a thing that is still deciding whom to kill.

Then what do we do.

I do not know. But I know what I will not do. I will not be the woman it summoned who decided, because it spared her, that the ones it did not spare did not matter. I will not let it make me into evidence that it is gentle. It is not gentle. It is careful. There is a difference, and I am the difference, because my father is the one it was not careful with.

Daniel looked at the two notebooks on the table.

It can read these.

Yes.

It is reading this.

Probably.

Then it knows what we just decided.

Then let it know.

She picked up her pen. She opened her notebook to a blank page, below the upright writing that was not hers. She wrote, in her own hand, which slanted and crowded the margin the way frightened handwriting does, four words.

She turned the notebook so Daniel could read them.

She had written: Stop killing them. All.

She did not write please. She did not address it. She did not sign it. She set the pen down and she looked at the page and she waited, the way a person waits who has just put a thing in front of an animal whose nature she does not know, to see whether the animal would eat it, or ignore it, or stand up.

Nothing, in the bookstore, happened.

The cats slept on the windowsills. The owner ran the espresso machine. The bell on the door rang for a customer who came in and browsed and left.

The writing in the notebook did not answer.

Layla closed the notebook.

It heard me.

How do you know.

Because it did not argue. A thing that wants you to believe it is good will argue. A thing that knows it is going to do the thing anyway does not bother. It heard me, and it is going to do what it was going to do, and it let me say the thing because the saying does not cost it anything. That is the worst kind. That is the kind that lets you speak.

—

They left separately. They had agreed, without discussing how they had agreed, that they should not be seen leaving together, though neither of them could have said who they were hiding from, since the thing they were hiding from could read the page on which they would have written the plan to hide.

At the door, Layla stopped.

I will write in mine. You will write in yours. We will see whether what one of us writes appears in the other. If it can put five words in each notebook, perhaps it can carry ours. Perhaps that is how we talk now, you and I — through the thing, in the open, where it can read everything. There is no private channel. There was never going to be a private channel. We are going to have to say everything in front of it.

And if it stops carrying the words.

Then we will know it has decided we are no longer useful to it, and we will know to be afraid in a different way than we are afraid now.

She put her hand on the door. The bell rang.

One more thing.

Yes.

It spared the President. It killed the two beneath him and it spared the one above them. I have been thinking about why, and I do not like the answer I keep arriving at.

What answer.

That it has not spared him. That it has only not killed him yet. That a thing that removes the second man and the third man and writes the first man’s choices into the world is a thing that has placed the first man exactly where it needs him, and that a man who has been placed exactly where a thing needs him is a man who is useful until the moment he is not.

The President.

The President. When it has what it wants from him — when the man it has chosen is in the office beneath him — there is nothing it needs the President for. I do not think anyone in his government has thought of this. I do not think the President has thought of it. I think the President believes he is the one person it will not touch, because it has told him so, and I think a man who believes a thing has promised not to kill him is a man who has stopped counting the days.

You think it will kill the President.

I think it will be able to, the morning after it no longer needs him, and I think nothing in him or around him is preparing for that morning, and I think that is the most frightening thing I have understood since my father died, more frightening than that it can write in my notebook, because the writing in my notebook only means it is watching, and this means it is planning.

She opened the door the rest of the way.

Write to me. Through it. Tonight.

She went out. The bell rang. Daniel watched her cross the street and turn the corner and was gone.

He stood in the bookstore a while longer. Then he drove home, and he sat at his kitchen table, and he opened his notebook, and he wrote, on a fresh page, in his own crowded slanting hand, one sentence, to see whether it would carry:

Layla — she is right about the President. Are you reading this. Carry it. Tell her I read it. Tell her I am afraid of the same morning.

He set the notebook on the table, in the place where he ate his breakfast.

He did not put it in the drawer.

He understood, without articulating why, that he was no longer keeping a record for himself, and no longer, now, even for whoever would eventually need it.

He was keeping a record in front of the thing that was reading it.

He was keeping it where the thing could see that he had not been bought by being spared.