The long night (1)

"I'd like to play a game," said Vivienne, "and I want to say, before we begin, that it is not the voice's game. I dislike the coincidence of the word as much as any of you. I can't think of a better one."

"What sort of game?" said Sophia, who had recovered enough to be suspicious of the word on principle.

"A very old one. You're given a situation. You say what you would do. Nobody is permitted to say that the situation is unrealistic, because none of us is presently in a position to complain about that." A small, dry pause, in which nobody laughed, though several of them wanted to. "I would like to know what everyone believes, and I have found that the fastest way to learn what a person believes is to ask them to choose, and then ask them why."

"That's an interrogation," said Margo.

"It's a parlor game with an interrogation's manners. I won't pretend otherwise."

"I'm in," said Rafaela, at once, from where she sat with her knees drawn up. "I hate the — I hate waiting around wondering what everyone secretly thinks. Just say it. Get it out."

"I would rather know now," said Emeric, carefully, "than find it out at a worse time."

"I'll go first, if it helps," said Vivienne. "That's usually the price of asking."

She waited for the small murmur to settle, and it settled quickly; there was, Neiman thought, a particular quality to the silence a person could command simply by not raising her voice for twelve hours running. Beatrix had her hands folded. Idris had gone very still, in the manner of a man bracing for a proof he suspects will not come out cleanly.

"Here is mine," said Vivienne. "A crowded platform. A train is coming in too fast — it will not stop in time. On the platform is a man who is, by every account, a terrible man. Cruel to his family. Cruel in ways that have hurt people you would grieve for, if you knew them. He does not see the train. Beside you is a lever. Pulling it will divert the train onto a service track, and save him, and in doing so it will derail a single freight car, which will kill no one, but which happens, today, to be carrying something you value more than you have ever valued anything. Something irreplaceable, and yours." She let that sit. "Do you pull the lever?"

There was a silence that had shape to it, several people arranging an answer they had not expected to need.

"Yes," said Kenji, immediately, and without inflection, as one states a diagnosis. "It isn't a question of what he is. It's a question of whether a life can be stopped from ending. If it can, it should be. I would grieve the other thing. I would still pull it."

"Even for a man like that," said Margo. It was not quite a question.

"Especially for a man like that," said Kenji. "The moment you begin weighing whether a life is worth saving by what sort of man owns it, you have started keeping a ledger nobody asked you to keep. I don't trust myself with that ledger. I don't trust anyone with it. So I don't open it. Whoever is in front of me, I treat. That's the whole of it."

"That's not an answer," said Idris, gently. "That's a refusal to compute. I mean that with respect. But you're not weighing it. You're declining the weighing."

"Yes," said Kenji. "That's correct."

"I'd want the numbers," Idris said, to Vivienne. "How many people has he hurt. How badly. What the thing is that I'd lose. You haven't given me enough to —"

"I haven't," Vivienne agreed. "That's deliberate."

"Then I can't give you a clean answer. I can give you a leaning. I'd lean toward pulling it. A single life against a single object, however precious — the object doesn't get to outvote the life. I'd pull it and grieve what I lost and call it the correct trade even while I hated it." He frowned. "I don't love that answer. I'd want to check my working."

"You'll have plenty of time," said Vivienne. "Margo?"

"Depends what's on the freight car."

"You may decide."

"Then I'm not telling you." A small, unoffended silence, and then, grudgingly: "Fine. My gran's recipe book. The only copy. Everything she ever made, in her hand, because she can't write it again now, not properly." Margo's jaw worked. "I'd pull it. I'd hate every second. I'd never forgive myself for hating it as much as I did, and I'd still pull it, because a book's a book and a man's alive after, whatever he is. But don't ask me twice. I might answer different the second time, and that'd be the truth as well."

"Noted," said Vivienne, and there was, for once, something almost gentle in the word.

"I wouldn't pull it," said Saoirse, and the group turned to her with a kind of surprised attention, because she had said it lightly, without any of her usual ornament, lying on her side with her chin propped on one hand. "Go on, look shocked. I've thought about it before, you know — not this exact — but the shape of it. If the precious thing is a person's life's work, if it's the only copy of something that made the world bigger — I think I'd let the terrible man go under the train and keep the beautiful thing. I know how that sounds."

"It sounds," said Vivienne, "like an honest answer, which is what I asked for."

"He's already lived his life terribly," Saoirse said. "He's chosen every day of it. The beautiful thing didn't choose anything. It's not its fault it needs saving." She examined her own hands, faintly abashed. "I know it's monstrous. I've always known that about myself, a little. I'd rather save the thing that can't be replaced."

"A person can't be replaced," said Kenji, quietly. Not an argument. An observation, offered like a hand held out.

"No," Saoirse agreed. "But he's not been treating himself like he can't. I'm only following his lead."

Adaeze laughed, once, sharp and delighted, and quickly covered it with her hand. "Forgive me. That was — d'accord, that's a genuinely terrible thing to say and I loved it."

"I'd pull it," said Adaeze, when it came to her. "But I want it on record that I think the question's rigged. You've made the man a monster and the object priceless specifically so nobody can answer cleanly. That's not a moral question. That's a trap built to show us disagreeing." She said this without rancor, almost admiringly. "Which I suspect is rather the point."

"It is rather the point," said Vivienne. "Pull it or not?"

"Pull it. A life is a life, whatever it did with itself. I've translated for men I despised because the alternative was worse for someone else in the room. You learn to separate the man from the necessity."

"Rafaela."

"Pull it," said Rafaela, at once, flat, no hesitation at all. "Obviously. You don't even think about that one. You see the lever, you pull the lever. Whatever's on the train doesn't matter, whatever's on the freight car doesn't matter, there's a thing that's about to happen and you're the only one who can stop it happening, so you stop it. That's the whole — that's not even a question."

"You didn't ask what was on the freight car," said Idris.

"Doesn't matter."

"It might matter to you very much, once it was gone."

"Then I'd be sad after," said Rafaela, and something flashed behind it, brief and raw. "You don't get to be sad during. During, you pull the lever. You work out how sad you're allowed to be about it later, when there's time." She looked away. "There's never time during."

Nobody asked her what she meant by that. Neiman noticed the not-asking; it went around the circle like a held breath, deliberate, and he understood, distantly, that it was a kindness being paid out in the same coin Vivienne had paid Idris the day before.

"Lucian."

"I don't think I could," said Lucian, unhappily, and hummed a small, apologetic fragment. "Not — not because of the object. I don't think I'd get as far as the object. I think I'd stand there and I'd be listening to the wheels and the platform and the man not knowing, and I don't think I'd be able to — to choose a note that loud, that fast. I think someone else would have to pull it. I know that's not an answer either."

"It's an answer," said Vivienne. "It's simply the honest one. Emeric."

"I would pull it," said Emeric, promptly, and then, less promptly: "I want to say why, because I don't think it's the same reason as the doctor's, and I don't want to be counted with him for the wrong cause. There's a rule. Not a law — a rule, in the sense that a house has rules, unwritten ones, which are older and truer than the ones on paper. A rule that a life in danger, where you can reach it, is reached. I don't examine the rule each time. I obey it. It has never yet failed me by being obeyed." He hesitated. "I recognize that's a kind of cowardice. I'd rather have the rule decide than decide it myself."

"That's not cowardice," said Kenji. "That's a form of trust."

"It's both," said Emeric, and did not elaborate.

"Beatrix."

"I'd want the specifics recorded first," said Beatrix, "and I recognize that this is not the spirit of the question. I'd pull it. I want it understood that I would resent, for a long time, having been asked, and that the resentment would not change the pulling." She paused. "I don't forgive well. I keep things. This would be one of the things I kept."

"Noted," said Vivienne, again.

"Sophia."

"I'd pull it so fast," said Sophia, and her voice, for once, had almost no run to it at all. "I wouldn't even — I don't think I'd even register what I was losing until after. I think I'd just — see it, and go. And then I think I'd sit down somewhere afterward and completely fall apart about whatever it was, privately, where nobody had to watch, because I don't think anyone should have to watch that, it's not — it's not a good thing to make someone else carry, watching you fall apart over a thing when a man's alive because of it. I'd just. Go somewhere. And be sad on my own." She looked at her hands. "Is that weird?"

"No," said Vivienne, and it was, again, the gentle voice, the one reserved for the plain thing.

"Neiman."

He had known it was coming, in the way one knows a step is missing before the foot goes down. He had, in fact, used the time everyone else took to answer to compose several possible replies, each fitted to a different shape of room; and it was only now, with eleven faces turned to him, that he understood he had not settled on which room this was.

"I'd pull it," he said.

"Why?"

"Because everyone before me has," said Neiman, "and I find I haven't a better reason than theirs, only a worse-articulated one. I don't think I'd feel what Sophia described. I don't think I'd feel what Margo described. I suspect I'd pull it, and watch it happen, and feel very little at the time, and then feel the loss weeks later, sideways, at an inconvenient hour, over something unrelated. That's generally how I discover I've lost things. Not at the moment. Later, and from an angle."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"That's not an answer to the question," said Vivienne. "That's a description of yourself."

"I thought that was rather the point of the exercise."

"It is," she said, and there was something in her face that was almost approval, and vanished before it could be confirmed as such. "It's the best answer anyone's given me all day, and it isn't an answer at all. I'll allow it."

"Do you have one?" said Neiman. "Since you asked it."

"I do." Vivienne folded her hands. "I'd pull it, and I would not grieve the object, and I want that understood as a flaw, not a virtue. I've been told it's a flaw. I've come to agree. I find that once a thing is gone I have very little interest in mourning it. I find the mourning of objects a form of self-indulgence I don't permit myself, because I watched someone I loved perform grief so convincingly, for so many objects, that I lost the ability to trust anyone's tears over a thing, including, eventually, my own." She said this without any apparent difficulty, in the same voice she had used for the rest of it, and Neiman understood that the ease was the difficulty, worn down to a smooth place by long handling. "So. I'd pull it. And I'd feel nothing, and I would consider the nothing a discipline rather than a wound, and I recognize that this, too, is a description of myself and not an answer to the question."

Her eyes, when she finished, went to Neiman's, briefly, and away.

"My turn," said Adaeze, sitting up with the particular energy of a woman who has been waiting her turn with poor patience. "Mine's better. Mine's got no train in it."

"Go on," said Margo.

"You are given a sentence to translate. It is the last thing a dying man says to his son, in a language the son does not speak, and you are the only one in the room who has both languages. The sentence is ambiguous — deliberately, structurally ambiguous, the kind that exists in exactly one language in the world and cannot be carried whole into another. It can mean I forgive you, or it can mean, with equal grammatical honesty, there was nothing to forgive. You cannot ask the dying man which he meant. He is past speech. You have one sentence to give the son, and it must be one or the other, and whichever you choose, the son will build the rest of his life on it." She looked around. "What do you give him?"

"That's not fair," said Rafaela. "That's not a — you're not even choosing between two things you'd do. You're choosing what to tell someone. That's different."

"It's the same shape," said Adaeze. "You have the lever. You don't get to not pull it. Silence is also a translation. It tells him the old man died mid-sentence and left him nothing, which is its own choice, and probably the cruelest one on offer."

"Then I forgive you," said Rafaela, immediately. "Give him that one. Every time. Whatever the truth is, that's the one you give him."

"Why that one?"

"Because it's the one that lets him stop." Rafaela's hands, Neiman noticed, had gone very still, which for her was itself an unusual event. "There was nothing to forgive — that means it was never his fault, which sounds kind, but it also means there's nothing left to carry, nothing left to have earned, nothing he ever has to look at again. I forgive you means he did something. It means it mattered enough to need forgiving, and now it's done, it's closed, he can put it down. The other one doesn't close anything. It just says there was never a door."

"That's a very particular reading," said Adaeze, watching her closely.

"It's the right one."

"I'd give him there was nothing to forgive," said Idris, slowly, "because I think it's more likely to be true. If I had to put odds on it — a dying man, choosing his very last sentence, is not usually choosing to open an account. He's choosing to close one. I'd weight it toward absolution of the son, not confession of the son's fault. Statistically, dying words trend toward comfort rather than accusation."

"You don't know that," said Adaeze.

"I don't. I'm hedging on very poor data. It's the best I have."

"It isn't your job to guess what he meant. It's your job to decide what the son needs," said Adaeze, "which is a completely different translation, and I think most people in my profession would tell you that's the whole of the work. You are never really translating the sentence. You are translating the moment."

"Then what do you give him?" said Margo.

Adaeze was quiet for a moment. It was the first real quiet Neiman had heard from her.

"I give him I forgive you," she said, at last, "and I have thought about this before, and I am not proud of the reason. I give it to him because it is kinder, and because I would want it, and because I have translated one true sentence wrongly once, for reasons that felt, at the time, exactly this good, and it cost more than I understood a sentence could cost. I tell myself now that I learned discretion from it. The truth is I only learned to be more careful about which lies I tell for good reasons. I haven't stopped telling them." She looked up, and her usual brightness was still there, but thinner, worn over something else. "So. I forgive you. Every time. Knowing exactly what I'm doing when I say it."

Nobody pressed her on it. Margo, beside her, reached over without a word and put a hand briefly on her ankle, the way one steadies a table that has wobbled once and is now, for the moment, still.

"I wouldn't choose," said Beatrix, when it came to her. "I would tell him both readings exist, and let him choose, and record which he chose, and why, so that he has something true to return to later, when the choosing feels less certain. I don't think it's my sentence to finish for him."

"He can't hold two readings and grieve," said Vivienne. "Not cleanly. You'd be handing him the ambiguity instead of resolving it. That may be more honest. It is not more merciful."

"I didn't say it was merciful," said Beatrix. "I said it was true."

"Sometimes," said Vivienne, "the kind thing and the true thing aren't in the same room, and you only get to be in one of them."

"I know," said Beatrix, without any particular emotion. "I've always found that a very poor arrangement, and I've never once found a way around it, and I've looked."

Neiman, listening, found that he had stopped composing an answer for himself, and was, instead, simply listening, which was rare enough that he noticed it.

"Neiman," said Adaeze. "You've not said."

"I'd give him the forgiveness," he said. "For the same reason Rafaela gave, more or less. It lets the door close." He paused. "Though I think I'd resent giving it. I think I'd know, giving it, that I'd taken the one true fact of the moment — that nobody would ever really know — and replaced it with a shape the son could live inside. And I think I'd do it anyway, easily, without much struggle, and that the ease is the part worth noticing."

"You keep doing that," said Vivienne.

"Doing what?"

"Answering, and then telling us the answer isn't trustworthy. You've done it twice now."

"I don't think that's quite it," said Neiman. "I think I'm telling you the answer is trustworthy, and I am not."

Vivienne looked at him for a long moment, in the manner of someone re-reading a line she had thought she understood the first time. She did not say anything further. Beatrix, beside her, had gone very still, and Neiman had the distinct and uncomfortable sense of having been entered into a ledger a second time that day.

"Mine's shorter," said Margo, when the round came back around to her, some while later, after Kenji had asked a gentler question about whether a doctor should tell a frightened patient a comforting lie or a frightening truth, and the group had split cleanly down a line that did not surprise anyone who had been listening all day. "No trains. No dying men. Just — you're at a table, and somebody's put a plate in front of you, and it's the best thing you've ever eaten. And you find out after that they made it out of something they shouldn't have. Something that cost somebody. You don't get to un-taste it. Do you tell them it was good?"

"Yes," said Saoirse, at once. "Absolutely yes. The plate isn't the crime. The plate's just a plate."

"I wouldn't," said Kenji. "Not because it wasn't good. Because telling them it was good is a kind of payment, and I don't like paying for things I don't want more of."

"That's the same question as Vivienne's," said Idris, slowly. "Isn't it. You're separating the maker from the made thing again."

"No," said Margo. "It's the opposite one. Hers was about a man doing wrong and something good sitting next to him. Mine's about a good thing that's got the wrong inside it. You can't pull it out again once you know. It's not sitting next to the crime. It's made of it."

"Then no," said Idris, after a moment, surprising himself. "No, I wouldn't tell them. I think that's right. I withdraw the comparison."

Neiman listened to the rest of it pass around the circle — Emeric saying gravely that he would tell them, because a lie about the plate was still a lie, however small a house it lived in; Beatrix saying she would record that it was good and record separately what it cost, and let the two facts sit unreconciled, because that was, in her experience, usually what facts did; Rafaela saying, with some heat, that she wouldn't even have eaten it if she'd known, so the question was already too late to be honest — and found that he had stopped listening for what each answer said about the trolley or the sentence or the plate, and had begun listening, instead, for the small, specific, involuntary thing each answer revealed about the person giving it, the way a coat reveals a shoulder.

It was, he thought, the most interesting day he had spent in some years, and he was faintly ashamed of how much he was enjoying it, given the circumstances; and he noted the shame, briefly, with his usual courtesy, and set it down, and went on listening.

Somewhere behind him, Lucian had begun, very softly, to hum the tune that went with none of it and all of it at once, and nobody asked him to stop.