Anomaly

"You didn't sleep," said Beatrix.

"Neither did you, I expect."

"I don't sleep well anywhere. It's not specific to the house." She had found him at the breakfast table before anyone else had come down, the two of them alone at one end of it, the household's places still empty, the twelve's own chairs half-filled and filling. "You have a particular look when you haven't slept. Your sentences get shorter. I've been keeping track."

"Have you."

"See. Shorter."

Neiman almost smiled. "What would you like to talk about, since we're the only two awake enough to talk properly."

"I'd like to know what kind of story you think this is," said Beatrix. "You're the one among us who reads them for a living, or near enough. I'd like your opinion before the rest of them come down and start offering theirs, because I find opinions arrive in this group like weather, and I'd rather have yours unmixed with anyone else's."

"That's flattering."

"It isn't. It's efficient."

"Gothic household," said Neiman, after a moment. "A silent matriarch, a dead son nobody names, a house that's stopped ringing. It has all the furniture of the genre. Whether it's actually that genre is a different question. Genre's a promise about what kind of ending you're owed. This might be keeping the promise. It might not."

"What would break the promise?"

"If the mystery isn't really the mystery. If we solve who and why and it turns out that was never what the house wanted from us." He looked at his coffee rather than at her. "I'd be surprised if it were that simple, given where we were yesterday morning."

Beatrix considered this with her usual flat attention, and then set it aside, the way she set most things aside once she'd recorded them, and asked instead, without any change of tone at all: "What sort of character do you write?"

"Badly, mostly."

"That's not what I asked."

"Selfish ones," said Neiman. "If I'm honest, and you seem determined to have me be. I like a character who wants something for himself and says so, even if only to the reader. I've never had much patience for the noble ones. A man who wants nothing but the good of everyone else is either lying to the author or the author's lying to the reader, and either way it's tedious to sit through three hundred pages of it."

"Why selfish, though. Not merely honest. You could have said you liked honest characters."

"Selfish is the harder honesty," said Neiman. "Anyone can admit to a small vanity. It takes a particular kind of nerve to let a character want something and get it, at cost to someone else, and not apologize to the reader for having let it happen. Most writers flinch. They let the selfish character suffer a little, right at the end, so the reader isn't made to sit with the discomfort of him simply winning. I've always thought that was a kind of cowardice dressed up as morality."

"Do you write it that way? Without the flinch?"

"No," said Neiman. "I flinch as much as anyone. I only notice myself doing it, which isn't the same as not doing it."

Beatrix looked at him for a moment in a way that suggested she'd filed that answer somewhere particular, and then changed the subject as abruptly as she'd raised it.

"Why do people admire them," she said. "Fictional people. I've never understood it, and I think you're the only person at this table who could actually tell me, rather than simply feel it and call the feeling self-evident."

"That's a large question for breakfast."

"You have time. Nobody else is down yet."

Neiman was quiet for a moment, turning the cup slowly in his hands, and when he began speaking it was in the unhurried, considering voice of a man who had, in fact, thought about this question a great many times before, alone, and had simply never before been asked it by someone who wanted the whole answer rather than the polite fragment of it.

"I think it's because a fictional person is the only kind of person you're ever allowed to see completely," he said. "Every real person you meet, you meet from outside. You get the face they've decided to show you, and the words they've decided to say, and you spend the whole of the friendship, if you're lucky, guessing at the rest from the outside, the way Emeric guesses at a room from its echo. You never get in. Not really. Not even with the people you've loved longest — you get better guesses, over years, but you never get the thing itself. A character in a book, though. You're handed the thing itself. You're let inside the skull, and told what's actually being thought while the mouth says something else entirely, and it's the only intimacy of that particular kind that's available anywhere. People don't admire characters the way they admire real people. They admire them the way you'd admire a window that, for once, actually let you see through it."

"That's the seeing," said Beatrix. "You said admire. Seeing isn't admiring."

"No. You're right. I'm getting to it." He set the cup down. "I think the admiring comes from somewhere else — from the fact that a fictional person is allowed to complete their sentence. Do you understand what I mean by that? A real person, in a real crisis, rarely says the thing they meant to say. They stammer, or they say the wrong thing, or they think of the right thing four days later in the shower and it's no use to anyone by then. Grief makes people say strange, small, useless sentences, because grief doesn't leave enough of the mind free to compose a good one. But a character — a character gets the sentence right. The author sits with it for however long it takes, and drafts it eleven times, and hands the character the version that actually says what the moment demanded. And I think when people read that, some old, buried part of them recognizes it as the thing they never got to say, or never got to hear said to them, and they don't experience it as watching a stranger. They experience it as being handed, finally, after a great deal of waiting, the correct ending to an old unfinished sentence of their own."

He paused. Beatrix said nothing, which he had learned, by now, generally meant she wanted him to continue.

"That's part of it, I think, but it's not the whole of it either," he went on. "There's also the fact that a fictional person gets to matter in a way most of us privately suspect we don't. Every reader knows, however much they'd deny it if you put the question to them plainly over breakfast, that the world will go on almost entirely unmarked by their own death — a few people will grieve, briefly and genuinely, and then the world will simply continue, indifferent, the way it continued before they were born. But a character in a good book — nothing happens to a character by accident. Every small thing that befalls them means something. The rain that falls on the day of the funeral isn't weather, it's grief given a shape you can point to. The stranger who says the one useful sentence at the one useful moment isn't a coincidence, he's been placed there, with care, by someone who wanted that character's life to add up to something legible. I think people admire fictional characters because fictional characters live in a universe that's paying attention to them, and real people, on the whole, do not get to live in that universe, and never entirely stop missing it."

He looked, for a moment, faintly uncomfortable at having said so much of it aloud, and reached for his coffee again as though the cup might give him somewhere to put his hands that wasn't the conversation.

"And then there's the last part, which I think is the real engine underneath the other two, though it's the ugliest to say plainly. People don't only want to be seen completely, and they don't only want a universe that notices them. They want proof that it's survivable. Every good character goes through the worst thing that could happen to them — the thing the reader is secretly afraid is waiting somewhere down their own road — and they come out the other side of it still recognizably themselves, sometimes better, sometimes merely intact, but there, on the last page, having lived through it. I think that's the actual transaction underneath all the admiring. Not I wish I were her. Closer to: if it can happen to her and she can still be standing at the end, then perhaps, when it happens to me, I'll still be standing too. Fiction is a very old, very patient way of rehearsing survival before the real thing arrives and asks something of you that you were never quite ready to give."

He stopped there. It seemed, by the length of the silence that followed, to be genuinely the end of it, though Neiman himself looked faintly surprised at having reached one.

Beatrix considered all of this for a long moment, her eyes on the middle distance in the way they went when she was filing something down into its smallest, most storable shape.

"So," she said, finally. "It changes people's lives. That's the whole of it, condensed."

"That's a brutal condensation of several minutes' work."

"I don't have room for the ornamental version," said Beatrix. "I keep the fact and lose the phrasing. It's not a criticism of the phrasing. The phrasing was very good. I simply can't carry all of it forward, so I keep the part that will still be true after I've forgotten the rest." She looked at him with something that was, for her, almost warmth. "It changes people's lives. I'll keep that. Thank you."

"You're welcome," said Neiman, and found, to his own mild surprise, that he meant it more plainly than he usually meant such things.

It was at that moment, with her eyes still on him and her mind, evidently, still turning over the last of what he'd said, that Beatrix went suddenly, completely still — not the stillness of listening, which he'd seen from her before, but a different one entirely, the stillness of a woman who has just noticed something and is deciding, in real time, whether to trust that she's noticed it correctly.

"What is it," said Neiman.

"The table," said Beatrix. "Last night. I counted eighteen places set, six empty, two of the six with candles lit. I recorded it exactly, the way I record everything, and I didn't think further about it because I had nowhere yet to put the number." She was not looking at him now. She was looking past him, into some private ledger only she had access to. "There was a photograph in the hall. Small, silver-framed, on the sideboard nearest the stair. I only glanced at it on the way up last night — a family gathered at this same table, an old photograph, the kind households keep out for guests to admire. I didn't count it properly at the time. I'm counting it now, from memory, and I don't like what I'm arriving at."

"Go on."

"Eighteen people in that photograph," said Beatrix. "Eighteen, at this table, seated in this room. And I'd swear — I want to check it before I swear it fully, but I'd swear even now — that the arrangement was the same. Cassian at the same place he sat last night. The doctor at the same place. Six empty chairs in the photograph as well, though I didn't count them properly the first time, because a photograph doesn't announce its arithmetic the way a room does."

Neiman set his cup down very carefully.

"You're saying last night's dinner wasn't a dinner," he said. "It was a reenactment."

"I'm saying I don't yet know what I'm saying," said Beatrix, which was, from her, an admission of real uncertainty, rare enough that it landed with its own particular weight. "I'm saying the numbers matched, once, in a glance, and I want to go and look properly before either of us decides what that means."

"What kind of story does that make this," said Neiman, half to himself, and Beatrix's eyes came back to him, sharp.

"That's what I keep asking you," she said. "And you keep not answering directly. You did it again just now."

"I don't have the answer yet. I have the shape of several possible ones, and I don't like any of them enough to commit to saying it aloud before we've looked at the photograph properly."

"That's not a satisfying response."

"No," Neiman agreed. "It generally isn't."

They found Emeric and Rafaela already near the sideboard by the time they reached the hall, and it was clear, from the flat set of Rafaela's shoulders and the careful, pleading angle of Emeric's, that they had arrived at some disagreement of their own before Beatrix had a chance to raise hers.

"I'm not asking permission," Rafaela was saying. "I'm telling you where I'm going."

"You're telling me you intend to break the one direct instruction we were given," said Emeric, "on the first morning, before we've any idea what enforces it."

"Nothing's enforced it yet. That's the point. A rule nobody's watching isn't a rule, it's a suggestion with better posture."

"Beatrix," said Emeric, turning, visibly relieved to have arrived reinforcements, "tell her. You of all of us understand the cost of moving before you've counted properly."

"I do understand that," said Beatrix. "I also understand that I've just found a reason to move rather quickly myself. There's a photograph on this sideboard I need to look at properly, and I suspect, once I have, that whatever Rafaela finds in that kitchen is going to matter considerably more than either of you currently think it will."

Rafaela's head came round.

"What photograph."

Beatrix did not answer at once. She crossed to the sideboard, and lifted the small silver frame from its place, and studied it for a long moment in silence while the other three waited, and when she finally spoke, her voice had lost none of its flatness, though something underneath the flatness had gone, unmistakably, cold.

"Eighteen people," she said. "This table. Same arrangement, chair for chair, so far as I can match it. Same six empty places." She turned the frame slightly, toward the window's grey morning light, and went very still again. "There's a boy at the foot of the table. Fair hair. I'd guess thirteen, perhaps fourteen. He's smiling at whoever's holding the camera."

"The portrait," said Neiman, quietly.

"The portrait," Beatrix agreed. "Same boy. I'd stake the whole of my count on it."

Rafaela looked between the two of them, and then at the door that led, somewhere beyond the hall, down toward the kitchens, and something in her face hardened into a decision that had clearly been building since long before breakfast.

"Then I'm not waiting for daylight to get better," she said. "Whatever's happening in that kitchen right now, it's happening whether we watch it or not. I'd rather watch it."

"Rafaela," said Emeric, and there was real strain in it now, the strain of a man who has spent a lifetime trusting rules to hold and is watching, in real time, someone he's begun to genuinely like decide to test one. "Wait. Just — wait one moment, and let me say why, properly, before you go, and then go if you still mean to."

Rafaela stopped, one hand already on the door, and did not turn around, which Neiman understood to be, for her, a considerable concession.

"Say it fast."

"It's not that I think the rule is right," said Emeric. "I don't know whether it's right. That's precisely my objection. We don't know what that kitchen is protecting, or from what, or whether the protecting runs in the direction we assume it does. You're walking toward a door on the strength of a photograph and a hunch, and I understand the hunch, I share a version of it myself, but a hunch isn't the same as knowing what you're walking into."

"Nothing's ever the same as knowing," said Rafaela. "You wait for knowing, you wait forever. That's not caution, Emeric. That's just fear wearing a better coat."

"Perhaps," said Emeric, and did not flinch from it, which surprised her enough that she finally turned. "I've been called worse, and by people I trusted less. I'm not asking you to stay. I'm asking you to let one of us come with you, so that whatever's on the other side of that door, you're not the only witness to it, and it's not only your word against a house that's shown us, all evening, how skilled it is at making the truth sound like something else."

Rafaela looked at him for a long moment.

"Fine," she said. "You. Not because you talked me into anything. Because you're the one who can hear a room before we're in it, and I'd rather have that than not."

"I'd come as well," said Neiman, "though I suspect I'd only be useful for noticing what kind of scene we'd walked into, which is a narrower use than either of theirs."

"Stay with Beatrix," said Rafaela. "Somebody needs to finish counting that photograph properly, and somebody needs to be standing in this hall, looking ordinary, if anyone comes down before we're back."

"That's a fair division of labor," said Beatrix, without looking up from the frame still in her hands.

Rafaela nodded once, and opened the door, and Emeric, after one last glance back at Neiman — not quite an apology, not quite a request for one — followed her through it, into the dim stair that led down, and the door swung shut behind them with a soft, final click that seemed, in the quiet hall, considerably louder than it had any right to be.

Neiman looked at Beatrix. Beatrix looked at the photograph.

"Eighteen," she said again, quietly, mostly to herself. "Same arrangement. Same boy." She set the frame down, very precisely, exactly where it had stood before, as though the house might notice, and mind, if it were returned even slightly askew. "I don't like not knowing what kind of story this is. I don't like it at all."

"Neither do I," said Neiman, and found that, for once, it was the plain truth, offered without a single flinch behind it.