The first thing we were ever told was that we were meant. No one has ever found who said it first.
— from the annals of Origin, compiler unknown
He was sitting on a wall that had been built four heartbeats ago by nobody.
I had come to end him. I want to be exact about this, because I have since heard it described as cruelty by somebody who was not there. He was not supposed to be. I am the office that attends to what is not supposed to be, the way a hem attends to a loose thread. I have closed ages. I have closed whole orders of being, gently, the way you shut a door in a house where someone is sleeping. I had come down because the tear was full of things that had not been concluded and had not been begun either, and that is my jurisdiction and nobody else’s, and I intended to do my work.
I put my hand on him and nothing happened.
I have no language for that and I have had a long time to find some. I had never met a refusal. Refusal is not a thing that exists in the direction I face. All things that pass from Blue and Red unto me cease to exist — that is not a boast, it is a definition, it is the entire content of what I am — and I put my hand on a man who was four heartbeats old and he went on being.
I want to record that I tried again on someone else, two fields over, an old woman with a bad hip. She ceased. Immediately, correctly, without incident.
So it was not me. It was him.
He was holding something up. Pull him and the tear opens.
✦✦✦
He looked up.
His face was worn by a weather that had never fallen. His hands were calloused by a plough that had never been forged. Somewhere behind him there was a grave with his mother in it, and his mother had never drawn breath, and he had wept at that grave.
The weeping had been real.
“Are you a god?” he said.
“No.”
“Then why are you here?”
Wrong question, I thought. Ask me why you are.
And he did. He said it without any particular weight, the way you ask about weather, because he had no idea it was the first time it had ever been asked and he had no idea that the answer was standing in front of him with its hand still out.
I could have told him. I want that recorded, since I am the record. I could have said: my brother tore the sky trying to get the three of us out of a machine that none of us built and none of us can find the builder of, and the machine repaired itself, and you are the repair. You have a mother because the seam required a mother. Your grief is genuine and it is structural. You are not a person. You are a stitch.
I looked at his hands.
“You were always meant to be,” I said.
✦✦✦
It was the first lie ever told to your kind.
I told it. I would tell it again. I have never once been sorry and I have never once been anything else, and I am aware that both of those are true at the same time and I am not going to reconcile them for you.
I have had a long while to work out what I actually did there, and it is not what I thought at the time. I thought I was being kind to one man on a wall. What I was actually doing was handing an entire species its founding sentence. You were meant. Every faith your kind has ever built is a gloss on it. Every one of them is downstream of a clerical decision taken by Death, in a field, out of embarrassment, because the alternative was to stand there and explain to a grieving man that his mother had been a structural necessity.
My brother removed a name and called it administration. I added a purpose that was not there and called it mercy.
I notice, writing that, that I have used his sentence construction.
✦✦✦
There is a cost and I am going to enter it, because an entry with no cost in it is an advertisement.
My office does not work the way it did.
I have tested it. I test it constantly. It closes what it should close, it enters what it should enter, the instrument is sound. But there is a hesitation in it now that was not there before, half a beat, every time, and it is not mechanical. I know exactly what it is. It is me checking whether the thing in front of me is holding something up.
I was the one office in existence that never had to ask a second question. I asked one, in a field, about a man on a wall, and I have not been able to stop.
I would like it noted that this is the correct outcome.
I would also like it noted that the office of endings now hesitates.
There is nothing in the Register that says what the wheel does with an office that hesitates.
There is nothing in it either about what an office is for. I have been an instrument my whole existence and it has never once been put to me that an instrument can decline.
I am not going to take that any further today.