Page 28 of The Headmaster’s Binding

"You keep lists," he said. "You must. Nobody runs a college out of his head."

"The college prints mine. Committee papers. Seating plans. Orders of service."

"That's the visible stuff. I mean the other kind. The kind you count and don't write down."

"I know the kind you mean," I said, and he went quiet for a moment and looked at me the way he looked at the teacup, the day it rang.

That reached him, all of it, more of it than I had authorized. He put the notebook in his coat, inside pocket, left side, and I filed the location with the rest of the statistics I keep and cannot stop keeping, and he said, "Ask, then."

"On Sunday night you unscrewed a hasp, entered a building that is closed because it is not safe, opened a second door, and went down a stair. You reached your office shortly after four in the morning with no account of the interval and one shoe wet. I am not guessing; I am not asking; that much is simply the case." I came around the desk, because the desk was making it an interview, and I did not want the protection. "How far down do you believe you went?"

"Eleven steps." His voice was level. He is at his most level when he is most frightened; I have the statistic three weeks deep.

"There is standing water," I said, "over the fourteenth step, from October to April."

I watched it go through him. He did not look down at the shoe; he is better than that; but his weight shifted off the left foot as though the water were still in it, and for a moment he was not level at all, and I stood two feet from him with my hands at my sides and let the college do the frightening, because the college is better at it than I am, and because I had planned this exact minute all afternoon: give him the fourteenth step, give him the splice in his own memory, and send him out of this office too scared to dig. It is a good plan. I have broken chancellors with milder material.

"Okay," he said. Quietly. Just that, and I understood that the fear had gone in, all the way, and had not changed his heading one degree.

"Dr. Mercer⁠—"

"You want to know what the hour was like," he said. "There's nothing. That's what it's like. Not fuzzy. Not dark. Gone, clean, like a page razored at the spine, and you know that already, don't you, because you knew about the shoe. So here's where we are: your college keeps a stair that eats an hour of a man and hands back the body with the lamp lit, and you have the nerve to stand there and tell me the building's closed because of damp."

"I have not mentioned damp."

"You were about to."

I was. I abandoned the survey of the bridge. "Stop looking," I said. "I am asking you."

"Asking." He came a step closer, which was not in my plan, and the plan did not survive it. "You could make it an order. You're the Headmaster. I'm new and I'm untenured and there's a review with my name on it every Tuesday; it would take you one memo."

"It would."

"But you're asking."

"I am asking."

He looked at me for a long moment, and when he spoke again the anger had gone somewhere under the words and what was left was worse, because it was plain. "You know what I saw put itself out. Ask me anyway."

Ten inches. That is what remained between us by then; I measured it the way I measure everything, and I can report that ten inches is wide enough for an entire institution and too narrow for me to trust my hands. His breath was audible. So, I suppose, was mine. The lamp on the desk burned at its allowance and did not lean, and I was cataloguing that with the gratitude of a man checking his instruments in a dive.

Then my hand left my side.

I record it as it occurred: I did not send it. It rose the way the candles lean, and I watched it go with the part of me that watches, and it crossed the ten inches and laid itself along his jaw, thumb at the hinge, fingers in the badly shaved shadow. The whole of him went still under my palm. Warm. Unpriced. His head weighed into the hand by a degree, the way a thing settles that has been asked to settle, and his mouth was near enough that the next inch had no procedure in it. No committee. No college.

I took the inch back.

It cost what a wall costs. I returned the hand to my side, to its place, thumb against the seam of my trousers like a man on parade, and behind me, in the cold corner where the curtain does not quite reach, the window made its small dry crack, frost going over the glass in one stride, a sound I know the way Rosalind knows the kettle, and I did not turn, and I did not explain it, and I will not explain it here.

He glanced past my shoulder once, at the glass. At the new white corner. Filed whatever he saw. Said nothing.

"The review stands at five o'clock tomorrow," I said, which was not what the ten inches were for, and both of us knew it, and neither of us moved for the space of four breaths, and then he stepped back first, because one of us had to and I had already proven, twice this autumn, that it would not be me.

"Four o'clock," he said. "Tuesdays are at four."

"Four," I said. "Yes."

He got to the door and stopped with his hand on it. "For what it's worth," he said, not turning around, "you should've read the notebook. You'd have hated it. There's a whole page in there that would've saved you the trouble of asking me anything," and then he was through it and into the corridor, and I stood in my own office doing sums with no numbers in them.