The Hot Mess Collective, Vol. 2 Ch 14: An Unsent Draft

Sayo had always held that the worst cowardice was a sloppy retreat. This morning they were learning there was a worse kind, and it involved a keyboard.

The light through the floor-to-ceiling windows came in flat and silver, the light every overcast October morning brought to the nineteenth floor. It found nothing to land on. The floors were black oak, oiled twice a year by a man from Red Hook who charged by the board and never made eye contact. The air purifier in the corner showed a green 01 on its panel. The only smell in the apartment came from the kettle.

Sayo set the kettle to seventy-nine degrees. They weighed four grams of Silver Needle on the brass scale, rinsed the gaiwan, and started the timer on their phone at ninety seconds. Every morning for eleven years they had done this in this order. Every morning it had worked. They poured the tea into the white cup and drank it standing at the counter, and it tasted of hot water.

Kai sat behind every thought. Last night was supposed to have fixed that. The Incubus had arrived at eleven, as booked, and left at one, as booked, and had been everything Sayo paid for: beautiful, attentive, and finished the moment the door shut. Sayo had gone to bed expecting a clean slate. They woke at four with Kai's voice in their head, asking the same thing it had asked at the museum. The memory of the Incubus's hands only made the question louder.

It had worked for centuries. A stranger, a fee or a favor, a door closing behind them. Afterward Sayo would feel very far away from everything, and far away had always meant safe. This morning far away was a long hallway with nobody at the end of it.

They took the silk cloth from the drawer and wiped the obsidian scrying bowl on the sideboard. It was already clean. They wiped it again. In its black face they could see the ceiling, the recessed lights, the line of their own jaw. The walls of this life had cost them three thousand years and most of their friends. They had kept out the Court, two wars, and every lover who wanted more than a night. They kept the silence in just as well. Sayo turned the bowl a quarter turn on its stand and wiped the new side.

Does it ever feel like a lie?

Kai had asked it in front of a case of Edo netsuke on the museum's third floor, hands in their coat pockets, voice low enough that the guard by the door didn't look over. A small question. Sayo had answered it with eleven minutes on the philosophy of form, Plato through Butler, with citations. Kai had listened to every word. At the end they nodded once and said, "Okay." Then they looked at the little ivory hare in the case and did not look at Sayo again until the closing announcement came over the speakers.

On the steps outside, Kai had buttoned their coat. The second button from the top hung by two threads. Sayo had noticed it in September and said nothing, and noticed it again on the steps, and said nothing again. Kai said they had an early shift. They said it kindly. Then they walked toward the subway, and Sayo stood on the steps and let a tour group from Ohio part around them.

Sayo had won that exchange. They had replayed it forty times since and won it every time.

They put the cloth back in the drawer and went to the desk.

It was a single slab of honed black granite, eight feet long, with nothing on it but a laptop and a Blackwing pencil laid square to the edge. Sayo sat. They opened the lid. The cursor blinked in an empty search bar, and they watched it blink for a long time.

They wanted to write to Kai.

Not a text about the weather. Not a link to some exhibit as an excuse to say hello. They wanted to tell Kai what had happened in front of that glass case, and why. The want made no sense, and Sayo had spent three millennia not acting on things that made no sense.

The old voice answered first. It had kept them alive through the fall of four dynasties, and it never raised itself.

No, it said. You made a mistake and now you want to apologize for it. An apology is a surrender. You remember what surrenders cost.

The other voice was newer. It had woken the afternoon Maeve's magic tore through the garden on Bergen Street, the afternoon Sayo let their tail show in open sun for the first time in a century and nobody screamed. Maeve had only laughed and asked if she could touch it. That voice sounded younger than Sayo had ever been.

I can't sleep, it said. I drank the tea and tasted nothing. What are the walls for if I'm the only one inside them?

They're for this, the Keeper said. Explain why you built a wall and you've handed over the plans. Kai would know where the gate is. Kai would know which stones are loose.

Kai didn't attack us. Kai asked a question. They stood in front of a glass case in a wool coat that needed mending, hands in their pockets.

And you think they'd understand. You'd bet everything on how someone else feels on a Thursday. Wait a week. It will pass.

The second voice took a long time to answer.

It hasn't.

Give it time.

I gave it the Incubus. I gave it two hours and four hundred dollars and a bottle of Krug. It's still here.

The Keeper had no answer to that, and Sayo noticed it had no answer, and did not like noticing.

Sayo sat, palms flat on the cold granite. The Keeper was right. Sayo had the receipts. Every time in three thousand years they had shown someone the soft place, that someone had found a knife for it. A merchant in Sakai. A captain of horse. A woman in Vienna who sold the letters.

Sayo could still see that last one. A cold room above a bookbinder's on the Kohlmarkt, a stove that smoked when the wind came from the east. Sayo had written her nine letters in one winter. In March a man from the Court came up the stairs with all nine tied in blue ribbon and laid them on the table one at a time, reading the dates aloud. She had gotten forty florins for them. Sayo had looked it up later, out of a curiosity that still embarrassed them.

The Prisoner was also right. Sayo had not slept past four in two days, and this morning the tea had tasted of nothing.

So Sayo did what they always did when two good options cancelled out. They found the third door.

They would not send a message. They would write one.

The relief came at once, and it was a little shameful. The Keeper got its walls. Nothing would leave the room. The Prisoner got to speak. Sayo told themself it was research, an old document under examination, no different from the treaties and deeds they had translated for the Court in a dozen languages that no longer had speakers.

They did not open a word processor. They opened a program they had written themself in 2011 and never named, the one the Court's own spymasters had tried and failed to crack three times. It ran in memory only. Whatever it held would be gone the moment the window closed. Sayo made a blank file and left it untitled.

The cursor blinked.

Their shoulders had climbed toward their ears. Sayo lowered them. They typed one word and deleted it. They typed it again.

The writing on the screen did not look like theirs. Sayo wrote in long sentences, clauses stacked three deep, a scholar's voice trained first on Latin and then on peer reviewers. These sentences were short. Some of them were bad. Sayo let them stay.

To Kai,

Even that much turned their fingertips cold.

You asked me a question at the museum and I gave you a lecture. That was cowardly. You'll never read this. I'm writing it anyway, to give you a real answer.

After that the words came fast, faster than Sayo could judge them. They wrote things they had never said aloud, never said to themself at four in the morning, the purifier ticking in the corner.

You asked if the glamour feels like a lie. I don't know anymore what isn't one. I've been a moneylender and a courtesan and an adjunct professor and a soldier in somebody else's war. I've had more faces than you've had birthdays. All of them were me. None of them were. If there was a first face, I can't remember what it looked like.

The one you know is the one I like best. I picked it in 2009 because it looked like someone who would be hard to interrupt. You interrupted it anyway. Nobody's done that in a while.

They wrote about the nights like last night.

I book people like the one last night because there's nothing in it. We agree on a time and what happens and when it ends, and then it ends. Nobody can be disappointed. Nobody can ask me anything. I walk out of those nights empty, and empty is what I go there to buy.

You're the opposite of that. You don't want anything from me, and that's the problem. If you wanted something, I could negotiate. You just stand there with your hands in your pockets and wait to see who I am. Nobody has waited for me in a very long time. I don't know what to do with it.

They came close to the older story. They did not write the name. Drusick sat in the gaps between the sentences anyway.

I learned young that wanting someone was a kind of war. The first one I loved taught me that if you show someone the soft part, they'll go for it, and they'll think they were right to. What you met at the museum isn't strength. It's scar tissue. It grew thick because the cut went deep and nobody ever closed it.

Sayo's eyes went from the screen to the empty chair across the granite. They could see Kai in it. Kai would read slowly. Kai read everything slowly, the wall cards at the museum, the laminated menu at the dumpling place on Mosco Street where they had split a plate in August. They would reach the part about the faces and one corner of their mouth would tighten, which was what it did when they were thinking and not judging. They would not look up until the end. When they did, they would not say anything clever. They would stay in the chair.

Sayo's throat closed. They kept typing.

When you asked your question, I heard an attack. Some old part of me heard someone testing the gate. So I gave you a lecture, because a lecture is a wall with footnotes. It was rude to you and dishonest to me. You held out a key and I flinched like you'd drawn a blade, because for most of my life those have been the same thing.

The last line took them almost a minute.

I'm afraid.

Sayo took their hands off the keys. They were shaking. The document sat there, four screens long, the plainest thing Sayo had written since they first learned letters by lamplight.

There was a send button at the top of the window. Sayo had built it in years ago for another purpose and never taken it out. The arrow drifted over it. Kai's address was in their contacts. Three keystrokes. Sayo could see it going out, the small sound, the gray Delivered underneath, and somewhere in the city Kai's phone lighting up face-down on a table.

The Keeper spoke once.

You know how this goes.

Sayo did. Pity was how it went. Or a kind reply three days late, worded with care. Or no reply at all, and then Kai being very polite to them at Maeve's parties for the next forty years.

They dragged the file to the trash icon.

A box came up. Permanently delete "Untitled"? This action cannot be undone.

Their finger rested on the trackpad over Delete. They did not press it. They moved the arrow to Cancel and clicked, and the box went away, and the letter was still there. Still open. Still one closed window from gone.

They did not close the window. They lowered the lid until it clicked. The laptop would sleep and keep the letter in memory. It could sleep like that for days, so long as nobody pulled the plug.

Sayo changed into running clothes and took the stairs instead of the elevator, all nineteen floors. Hector at the front desk said good morning and went back to his crossword. Sayo went out through the revolving door, turned east toward the river, and ran.

They ran the esplanade south past the ferry slips and the Pier 15 benches and the yellow DO NOT FEED THE PIGEONS signs nobody obeyed. Their shoes slapped the pavement. A delivery cyclist with a Hungryroot box on his rack swore at them near the Seaport. They ran until their lungs burned and the burning was the only thing in their head. When it stopped, Kai's question was still there, patient as a dog at a door.

At the heliport they stopped and put their hands on their knees and watched a Blade helicopter lift off toward the airport, rotor wash flattening the water. A man in a Mets cap asked if they were all right. Sayo said yes. He looked at them a moment longer than he needed to, then went back to his phone.

They did not know what to do. It was the first time in roughly four hundred years they had not known what to do, and they ran another mile to see if that would change it. It didn't.

The apartment was as they had left it. The tea had gone cold in the white cup on the counter, a pale skin across the top. The purifier still showed green. Sayo took their phone out of the armband. No messages. The last thing from Kai was Tuesday, a photo of a pigeon standing on a Citi Bike dock, no caption. Sayo had not answered it. They did not answer it now. They put the phone face-down on the counter beside the cold cup and stood dripping on the black oak, which the man from Red Hook would not have liked.

The question was still in them. But it had edges now. It had sentences. Sayo could have pointed to the paragraph where it lived.

They crossed to the window. Below, the river was gray and crowded with ferries. In the glass they could see the room behind them, the long black desk, the bare walls, and themself standing in the middle of it in a sweat-dark shirt.

On the granite, the laptop's charging light glowed amber. Beside it, the pencil still lay square to the edge.

***

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