1 00:00:11,199 --> 00:00:13,000 Speaker 1: I had been following the walls for longer than I 2 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:16,320 could name. It began as a practical tricken in settled years, 3 00:00:16,359 --> 00:00:18,920 when houses arrived and left, like weather, a finger to belong. 4 00:00:18,960 --> 00:00:21,960 The seemed to orient myself, a quiet counting of torn 5 00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:24,600 edges so that rooms would not swallow me. Howle, in 6 00:00:24,640 --> 00:00:27,719 the beginning it was a mnemonic, a private geography. The 7 00:00:27,760 --> 00:00:30,600 place were wall pepper bubbled, the place where was getting 8 00:00:30,640 --> 00:00:33,200 bored was scarred by chair I did not own, abbit 9 00:00:33,240 --> 00:00:35,200 hardened into ritual on the night the paper asked to 10 00:00:35,200 --> 00:00:38,520 be noticed. There was nothing dramatic about the corridor itself, 11 00:00:38,560 --> 00:00:40,640 a narrow blade of cold blue, lit by a single 12 00:00:40,640 --> 00:00:42,960 exhausted bulb whose light felt too tired to make dust. 13 00:00:42,960 --> 00:00:45,320 A shamed of shining, the bulb pommed with the small 14 00:00:45,359 --> 00:00:49,079 mosquito impatience. Film grains softened the edges of everything, and 15 00:00:49,119 --> 00:00:50,840 I moved along the wall as if I had always 16 00:00:50,880 --> 00:00:53,280 meant to. There are rules you learn on the margins 17 00:00:53,320 --> 00:00:57,119 of things, often half superstition, half practical. One such rule 18 00:00:57,159 --> 00:01:00,159 had accompanied me through more than one strange dwelling. However, 19 00:01:00,240 --> 00:01:02,960 you do don't look at an unaccountable mirror. I felt 20 00:01:02,960 --> 00:01:05,040 that rule like an old bruise across my sternham. When 21 00:01:05,040 --> 00:01:07,120 I entered the corridor and saw the long crack running 22 00:01:07,120 --> 00:01:08,959 through the glass like a river in a low grade 23 00:01:08,959 --> 00:01:11,560 post card, I kept my eyes away from it, because 24 00:01:11,599 --> 00:01:13,719 looking felt like an invitation to some honesty I did 25 00:01:13,799 --> 00:01:16,120 not have the strength to meet. I let my hand 26 00:01:16,159 --> 00:01:18,239 travel and stout finger tips follow in the seam where 27 00:01:18,239 --> 00:01:20,959 wallpaper cult away from pastor, tracing a pale fall whose 28 00:01:20,959 --> 00:01:23,519 petals had been granted by humid decades in the passage 29 00:01:23,519 --> 00:01:26,400 of indifferent bodies. A paper came apart under my finger, 30 00:01:26,439 --> 00:01:28,840 with the whisper of an old thing exhailing at the 31 00:01:28,840 --> 00:01:30,760 first slit. There a scale, and the wrongness that was 32 00:01:30,799 --> 00:01:34,319 also right rooftop suggested, rather than true proportions, a slit 33 00:01:34,359 --> 00:01:36,000 of light far too small to have been made by 34 00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:37,760 the bull, a glow like a candle behind a far 35 00:01:37,799 --> 00:01:40,799 away window. It was the precise intermid illusion of a 36 00:01:40,799 --> 00:01:43,359 model city, spies and bannos the size of staples. But 37 00:01:43,400 --> 00:01:45,280 what made the breath stop behind my ribs was the 38 00:01:45,319 --> 00:01:48,879 sense that the tiny architecture wanted attention. Curiosity in me 39 00:01:48,959 --> 00:01:51,280 is a quiet violence. It opens things I prefer to 40 00:01:51,280 --> 00:01:54,079 remain shut. I widened the tier with nails that always 41 00:01:54,079 --> 00:01:56,000 retained the scent of paper ink, and as the gap 42 00:01:56,159 --> 00:01:58,239 on in the wallpaper, the miniature street to range themselves 43 00:01:58,280 --> 00:02:01,239 with the punctuality that felt almost the act. A figure 44 00:02:01,280 --> 00:02:03,519 stepped into view at the lip of the tier. It 45 00:02:03,560 --> 00:02:06,040 was child shaped and doubtfully human, folded from the same 46 00:02:06,040 --> 00:02:08,800 flooral paper patches of printed bloom across a small chest 47 00:02:08,879 --> 00:02:11,240 hair the color of mold edges, browned as if by grief. 48 00:02:11,840 --> 00:02:13,960 It watched me with an indifferent chair, like a child 49 00:02:13,960 --> 00:02:16,680 who has never been taught discretion. Its head tilted with 50 00:02:16,680 --> 00:02:19,639 the stiff poppet angle of Oregomi made to mimic curiosity. 51 00:02:20,280 --> 00:02:21,800 A bell ta in with a note that might once 52 00:02:21,800 --> 00:02:24,120 have run, was tied about its wrists. It did not 53 00:02:24,199 --> 00:02:26,240 quite make sound, but the air seemed to look sharper 54 00:02:26,280 --> 00:02:29,000 around it. The seam across its temple had been mended 55 00:02:29,039 --> 00:02:31,599 with thread the color of all tea. I sat down 56 00:02:31,639 --> 00:02:34,280 without deciding to the corridor, shrinking until the dust motes 57 00:02:34,280 --> 00:02:36,479 between us hung like tiny planets in a private sky. 58 00:02:37,120 --> 00:02:39,360 The wall child turned the act of looking into an invitation. 59 00:02:39,919 --> 00:02:43,039 It made a small motion, half beckon, half demonstration, as 60 00:02:43,039 --> 00:02:45,199 if to say, come and see how small fortunes are kept. 61 00:02:45,840 --> 00:02:49,400 There was no childish language. Instead, it hums something almost 62 00:02:49,439 --> 00:02:50,919 like a lilla be and pull from a satchel a 63 00:02:51,000 --> 00:02:53,599 sliver of thread that shrimmeret under the bulb. It tapped 64 00:02:53,639 --> 00:02:55,840 the thread against its palm and tilted its head, offering 65 00:02:55,879 --> 00:02:57,879 me the possibility of exchange in the way adults off 66 00:02:57,879 --> 00:03:00,840 for small mercies. The kingdom inside the paper ask not 67 00:03:00,879 --> 00:03:03,199 for coin, but for proven its fragments of identity to 68 00:03:03,240 --> 00:03:06,840 reinforce its scaffolding. I should have left. I did not 69 00:03:07,599 --> 00:03:11,360 have it. And curiosity are not polite companions. Curiosity will 70 00:03:11,439 --> 00:03:13,240 keep the hand inside the jar, even when the adult 71 00:03:13,319 --> 00:03:16,360 voicays stop. My first rate was small, because I have 72 00:03:16,400 --> 00:03:19,000 been led there by the subtle arithmetic of possession. I 73 00:03:19,039 --> 00:03:20,879 had a ticket stub folded into the back of my 74 00:03:20,960 --> 00:03:24,280 leather notebook, a yellow rectangle from a show whose details 75 00:03:24,280 --> 00:03:26,879 had been leached by years. It smelled of some one 76 00:03:26,879 --> 00:03:29,199 else's louder a proof iquet because it smelled like a 77 00:03:29,240 --> 00:03:31,199 day surrender to some one I had once called friend. 78 00:03:31,800 --> 00:03:33,560 I sitted on the rim of the tier and watched 79 00:03:34,199 --> 00:03:36,560 they took it with a tactfulness that bordered on anatomical 80 00:03:36,680 --> 00:03:39,199 a corner folded and smoothed itself into a street, printed 81 00:03:39,240 --> 00:03:41,719 ink resolving into signatue, and a miniature carriage of folded 82 00:03:41,719 --> 00:03:44,680 pistrolled by as if summoned. The wall child watched with 83 00:03:44,719 --> 00:03:47,159 the neutral, pleased hunger of a creature that knows the score. 84 00:03:47,840 --> 00:03:49,960 When the ticket was absorbed, I expected to flourish in 85 00:03:50,000 --> 00:03:52,840 the court, leathing to retreat. Instead, internal to me, a 86 00:03:52,919 --> 00:03:55,280 dullness settled, not pain so much as a hushed window, 87 00:03:55,319 --> 00:03:58,120 being white clean A led. Your line in my life faded, 88 00:03:58,759 --> 00:04:00,159 the name of the street where I have won, once 89 00:04:00,240 --> 00:04:02,240 learned to whistle, thinned into a shape without its music. 90 00:04:02,879 --> 00:04:05,639 The trade had been made, the kingdom had eaten, and 91 00:04:05,680 --> 00:04:08,479 I had been left with less of myself. Small losses 92 00:04:08,520 --> 00:04:11,400 accumulate like lind in a pocket. The initial sting was 93 00:04:11,439 --> 00:04:13,599 almost comic in its domesticity, until the hunger of the 94 00:04:13,599 --> 00:04:17,279 court revealed itself. The wall child, cheerum ruffled, displayed the 95 00:04:17,279 --> 00:04:20,399 domestic misers of its miniature world. A collapsed roof that 96 00:04:20,439 --> 00:04:23,079 had once sheltered a child made of toweling, a market 97 00:04:23,160 --> 00:04:26,000 square with a single stole that sold invisible bread, a 98 00:04:26,079 --> 00:04:28,759 library with pages whose inc had been not thin. It 99 00:04:28,800 --> 00:04:31,040 demonstrated how a discarded name could be braided into a 100 00:04:31,040 --> 00:04:33,480 bridge or howl, half much shore, upper palace wall, prodding 101 00:04:33,480 --> 00:04:36,639 with a small silver thread. Each demonstration was a small 102 00:04:36,680 --> 00:04:39,399 tragedy and a clear, clean promise. Simultaneously, give more in 103 00:04:39,439 --> 00:04:41,839 the kingdom, will yield more light, order a softened hunger. 104 00:04:42,439 --> 00:04:44,439 I felt the first tightening in my chest, then, as 105 00:04:44,439 --> 00:04:48,959 if some internal mechanism calibrated itself towards sacrifice, argaining established 106 00:04:48,959 --> 00:04:51,959 a shape. What begins in vagueness must be given edges 107 00:04:51,959 --> 00:04:55,000 if one is to move in it. I understood immediately 108 00:04:55,040 --> 00:04:57,959 that these were not casual exchanges. To hand over a 109 00:04:57,959 --> 00:05:00,680 ticket was one thing. To hand over the The architecture 110 00:05:00,680 --> 00:05:03,480 of yourself, the cadences and edges that made you recognizably you, 111 00:05:03,600 --> 00:05:06,319 was another. I played out the rational arguments in my 112 00:05:06,360 --> 00:05:08,360 head and watched them mirroad, under the warmth of kinship. 113 00:05:08,920 --> 00:05:10,839 The paper queen for Beneath the larger tier there was 114 00:05:10,839 --> 00:05:12,879 a throne room folded like a pond. Did not pick. 115 00:05:13,600 --> 00:05:16,720 She cataloged needs as if reading a shopping list. Her 116 00:05:16,759 --> 00:05:18,920 hair fell and scades of ivory script, and her crom 117 00:05:19,040 --> 00:05:21,959 was a folded page. Her eyes were in blackfect with 118 00:05:21,959 --> 00:05:24,399 gold that never quite moved, like pimprick stars in dry 119 00:05:24,439 --> 00:05:28,839 paper around her quarters were thin as invitations, banners, bore motters, 120 00:05:28,879 --> 00:05:32,360 consumed by time. The sight stole detachment from me. The 121 00:05:32,439 --> 00:05:36,040 Queen's hand folded imprecise lifted the tiniest key suspended on 122 00:05:36,079 --> 00:05:39,160 a thread. The gesture had a grammar. I understood instantly. 123 00:05:39,160 --> 00:05:42,079 You may unbind them, or you may be replaced. Even 124 00:05:42,120 --> 00:05:44,360 as a human recoil at the idea of sacrifice bird 125 00:05:44,399 --> 00:05:47,800 through me who trays breath for scraps, a stranger tenderness 126 00:05:47,839 --> 00:05:51,120 unloosed itself. They were small and ROMed, and the romness 127 00:05:51,160 --> 00:05:53,439 pressed a human kindness so old I could not name it. 128 00:05:54,079 --> 00:05:57,079 Would I be the savior or the substitute? The question 129 00:05:57,199 --> 00:06:00,160 was violent in its simplicity. In the late hours, when 130 00:06:00,160 --> 00:06:02,000 the bulb hummed like an owl and the mire kept 131 00:06:02,040 --> 00:06:04,000 its council, I did a thing I had never expected 132 00:06:04,040 --> 00:06:06,040 to do. I put my palm to my throat to 133 00:06:06,040 --> 00:06:08,279 feel the name that lived there like a small beaten coin, 134 00:06:08,360 --> 00:06:10,759 counted its syllables like a private currency, and then I 135 00:06:10,839 --> 00:06:13,279 let it go. Saying it out loud felt less like 136 00:06:13,319 --> 00:06:15,639 speech than an offering a little paper both sliding into 137 00:06:15,680 --> 00:06:18,079 the dark slid of the tier. It was an emptying 138 00:06:18,160 --> 00:06:19,959 The sound left my mouth and folded away in a 139 00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:23,360 slip stream of the trade. The queen's fingers, patient and ancient. 140 00:06:23,399 --> 00:06:25,639 In the paperwork, lifted a scrap of wallpaper and placed 141 00:06:25,680 --> 00:06:27,000 it on the throne, in a motion that was both 142 00:06:27,040 --> 00:06:31,399 liturgical and domestic. The miniature realm inhaled windows, glowing faintly, 143 00:06:31,560 --> 00:06:34,560 Streets tightening like a nitsweat of finding its shape, relief 144 00:06:34,600 --> 00:06:37,519 pulse through the tiny city like a tie. For a while, 145 00:06:37,560 --> 00:06:40,439 I let myself believe I had done something noble. The 146 00:06:40,519 --> 00:06:43,680 exhilaration of rescue is an opiate, but the rescue at 147 00:06:43,680 --> 00:06:45,439 a cost that could only be seen from my side 148 00:06:45,480 --> 00:06:48,720 as absence. The sound of my name became a negative space. 149 00:06:49,480 --> 00:06:51,439 I could summon the faces of people who had called 150 00:06:51,439 --> 00:06:53,480 me by that name, remember the context in which it 151 00:06:53,480 --> 00:06:55,879 has lived, warm and casual. But when I reached for 152 00:06:55,920 --> 00:06:57,879 the sound with tongue and teeth, it slaid away like 153 00:06:57,879 --> 00:07:01,360 a fish. Memory tried to mend the by reassigning weights 154 00:07:01,360 --> 00:07:05,000 of photograph became another face. A street relinquish it's whistle. 155 00:07:05,040 --> 00:07:07,439 But naming is not only a social token. It a 156 00:07:07,439 --> 00:07:11,439 scaffolding for identity. The trade had been exact and merciless. 157 00:07:11,800 --> 00:07:13,879 It had taken what tethered me to myself and left 158 00:07:13,920 --> 00:07:16,519 me with an oath. The locket of my frot, brass 159 00:07:16,519 --> 00:07:19,160 and empty, became more than an ornament. I kept the 160 00:07:19,160 --> 00:07:21,120 cul scrap of wallpaper the queen had left pressed in 161 00:07:21,160 --> 00:07:23,800 my pocket, a token with a faint printer crown. I 162 00:07:23,800 --> 00:07:26,560 could rub with my thumb when Harlow's felt loud. The 163 00:07:26,600 --> 00:07:29,759 wall child watched me with a child's satisfaction. A paper 164 00:07:29,839 --> 00:07:33,240 queen watched with gratitude, whose ages were predatory. I closed 165 00:07:33,279 --> 00:07:35,600 the ripe, and the paper folded back into new geography. 166 00:07:36,199 --> 00:07:38,360 The kingdom inside the wall rearranged its off as to 167 00:07:38,399 --> 00:07:41,600 a moving furniture. After a guest had left, the corridor's 168 00:07:41,639 --> 00:07:44,000 noises came back around me, but the pitch had shifted. 169 00:07:44,600 --> 00:07:47,240 The mirror cruck seemed to watch with a more intimate malice. 170 00:07:47,759 --> 00:07:50,800 Whatever you do, don't look at the mirror. I obeyed, mostly, 171 00:07:50,920 --> 00:07:53,399 but I could not resist a sliver of glass. My 172 00:07:53,480 --> 00:07:55,680 reflection looked like me, but with a missing ledger entry. 173 00:07:55,720 --> 00:07:58,639 The eyes, tired, hair crooked behind one ear, A small 174 00:07:58,680 --> 00:08:00,879 paper scar on my right ind finger where I had 175 00:08:00,879 --> 00:08:03,439 tugged at the peel of wallpaper. The name that should 176 00:08:03,439 --> 00:08:05,680 frame the person was an absence, felt more than named. 177 00:08:06,360 --> 00:08:09,240 I did not sleep. Instead, I sat with my leather 178 00:08:09,279 --> 00:08:10,800 note beca on my knees in the empty, lock it 179 00:08:10,839 --> 00:08:12,920 against my skin, and tried to map the web the 180 00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:16,199 kingdom had thrown around me. The exchange had felt like kinship, 181 00:08:16,199 --> 00:08:18,800 and like theft and equal parts. It had given me 182 00:08:18,800 --> 00:08:21,040 a temporary rescue for hunger. I had not known until 183 00:08:21,040 --> 00:08:22,879 it was filled, and it had left me with a debt. 184 00:08:23,439 --> 00:08:25,279 The scrap in my pocket served as proof I had 185 00:08:25,399 --> 00:08:27,519 entered and engaged, but also as a tally that the 186 00:08:27,519 --> 00:08:30,240 price might not be finite. When the wolf child had 187 00:08:30,240 --> 00:08:33,000 tilted its head and shown possibilities of deeper exchanges, I 188 00:08:33,039 --> 00:08:36,240 had not believed it then. I believed it now. There 189 00:08:36,279 --> 00:08:38,320 is a slow violence to living with a missing name. 190 00:08:38,879 --> 00:08:41,200 The wall does not stop moving to accommodate your loss. 191 00:08:41,799 --> 00:08:44,559 People continue gestures that require things he can no longer offer. 192 00:08:44,639 --> 00:08:46,679 Old friends calling you by a nickname that no longer 193 00:08:46,720 --> 00:08:48,879 fits in the math, the maile of rest to a 194 00:08:48,960 --> 00:08:51,360 name that, when read aloud, rebounds off your teeth like 195 00:08:51,360 --> 00:08:53,840 a half remember tune I watched my hands at the 196 00:08:53,879 --> 00:08:56,120 sink and practice the sound until my mouth went raw. 197 00:08:56,759 --> 00:08:59,120 I tried every tactic of salvage. I could summon, whispering 198 00:08:59,200 --> 00:09:00,919 it into a cup so I could hear physics, keep 199 00:09:00,960 --> 00:09:03,399 it true, asking a friend to say it across a 200 00:09:03,399 --> 00:09:06,519 table so the syllables might anchor to air. Memory is 201 00:09:06,559 --> 00:09:10,039 elastic in repurposes itself. It will stretch to cover a hole. 202 00:09:10,720 --> 00:09:13,200 Sometimes the new shapes are convincing enough that you almost 203 00:09:13,200 --> 00:09:15,960 mistake them for repair. But the age of a missiness 204 00:09:15,960 --> 00:09:18,519 you cannot tag is a quiet, persistent companion, like a 205 00:09:18,559 --> 00:09:20,720 fingernail that will not stop catching the seam of thought. 206 00:09:21,279 --> 00:09:23,159 What I left the hazard felt like stepping away from 207 00:09:23,200 --> 00:09:26,200 an experiment I had chosen poorly. The air outside was 208 00:09:26,200 --> 00:09:28,600 blunt and ordinary in a way that made me feel naked. 209 00:09:29,240 --> 00:09:31,240 The scrap in my pocket smelled faintly of glue and 210 00:09:31,279 --> 00:09:34,200 eucolatus paste. At the coroner where the street fork, I 211 00:09:34,240 --> 00:09:35,799 paused and felt the weight of what it done, as 212 00:09:35,840 --> 00:09:37,840 one feels the drag of a raincut that clings after 213 00:09:37,840 --> 00:09:41,279 the shower. Choice becomes a burden once that is made. 214 00:09:41,360 --> 00:09:44,679 The kingdom inside the wallpaper would rearrange itself into better moods. 215 00:09:45,360 --> 00:09:47,440 It would eat other small things to maintain that mood. 216 00:09:48,200 --> 00:09:52,519 I had paid, Perhaps others would pay later, Perhaps I 217 00:09:52,519 --> 00:09:55,320 would be asked again to bring more. In the following weeks, 218 00:09:55,320 --> 00:09:58,320 I became more attentive to scenes. I traced other rooms 219 00:09:58,320 --> 00:10:02,000 and houses. I moved through, fingers running along plaster wallpaper, 220 00:10:02,120 --> 00:10:04,480 even the stubborn parts where paint had been layered like regret. 221 00:10:05,159 --> 00:10:08,039 Sometimes my hand meant nothing but stuckle, cold and dumb. 222 00:10:08,600 --> 00:10:11,000 Sometimes it encountered a faint trembling, as if a world 223 00:10:11,039 --> 00:10:13,840 under the paste was busy with domesticity and pleading. The 224 00:10:13,879 --> 00:10:16,120 discovery of one such court had changed the optics of 225 00:10:16,200 --> 00:10:18,600 rooms for me. A door in my periphery was no 226 00:10:18,639 --> 00:10:21,120 longer simply a door, but potentially a geography that could 227 00:10:21,120 --> 00:10:23,080 be fed. I found myself pausing in front of print 228 00:10:23,120 --> 00:10:25,240 shops and antique stores, tempted to slip a card or 229 00:10:25,240 --> 00:10:27,320 a photograph into a register and watch what levers in 230 00:10:27,399 --> 00:10:29,960 me gave way. People have asked me later whether the 231 00:10:30,000 --> 00:10:32,600 kingdom was cruel. It was not cruel the way we 232 00:10:32,720 --> 00:10:35,639 used a word for calculated malice. It was animal in 233 00:10:35,679 --> 00:10:39,399 its hunger, methodical in its needs. Paper Queen's eyes still 234 00:10:39,440 --> 00:10:42,039 glint when I passed a sheet of printed paper. The 235 00:10:42,080 --> 00:10:44,200 wall child's bell continues to ring in my chest when 236 00:10:44,200 --> 00:10:46,600 I walk a seam, silent to others, but loud as 237 00:10:46,720 --> 00:10:48,240 remembered the lilla bey to me. I lived in a 238 00:10:48,240 --> 00:10:51,519 subsidiary way with my missing name. I learned to introduce 239 00:10:51,600 --> 00:10:53,600 myself with a smile. It did not always match the 240 00:10:53,600 --> 00:10:55,919 person in the mirror. I learned to give the world 241 00:10:56,039 --> 00:10:59,159 enough signals to navigate its social transactions, and not at 242 00:10:59,159 --> 00:11:01,159 the right time, a careful laugh in the right cadence. 243 00:11:01,799 --> 00:11:06,120 People satisfied themselves with surfaces. They accept the gestures, They 244 00:11:06,159 --> 00:11:08,600 do not always ask for what holds the gestures in place. 245 00:11:09,279 --> 00:11:14,840 There were practical awkward consequences. Paperwork took time. Sometimes, bureaucrats 246 00:11:14,879 --> 00:11:16,960 about my file at me with the indifference of machines. 247 00:11:17,559 --> 00:11:19,440 An old landlord slipped up and used my name in 248 00:11:19,440 --> 00:11:22,000 attends and no longer possess, and I felt vertigo, like 249 00:11:22,039 --> 00:11:24,440 walking off a coba I had not seen. Once. On 250 00:11:24,480 --> 00:11:26,519 a bad day, someone I had lost spoke the name 251 00:11:26,519 --> 00:11:28,399 in the middle of a sentence, and I flinched, as 252 00:11:28,399 --> 00:11:31,279 if I had been physically struck. The syllables passed through 253 00:11:31,279 --> 00:11:33,360 the air like arrow had sized memory, but they did 254 00:11:33,360 --> 00:11:37,600 not find purchase. I confess a tried rituals. I tried 255 00:11:37,600 --> 00:11:40,720 to retrieve the sound by reconstructing contacts, childhood rooms, songs 256 00:11:40,720 --> 00:11:44,279 that mentioned my name, letters I had never mailed. Sometimes 257 00:11:44,279 --> 00:11:47,440 the attempt shared the rusted edges of rucker. Sometimes they 258 00:11:47,519 --> 00:11:50,919 only highlighted absence. The scrap in my pocket remained an 259 00:11:50,919 --> 00:11:53,759 honorable thing and a warning. I pressed it to my 260 00:11:53,840 --> 00:11:56,159 chests on winter nights when the bed felt too large. 261 00:11:56,639 --> 00:11:58,639 It was a talisman, a remnant of a bargain I 262 00:11:58,679 --> 00:12:02,559 neither wholly regretted, nor could hole celebrate. On certain afternoons, 263 00:12:02,600 --> 00:12:05,120 when vanity or the old impulse toward making a men's rose, 264 00:12:05,200 --> 00:12:08,120 I imagined returning to the tear and offering another souvenir laugh, 265 00:12:08,200 --> 00:12:10,279 the scent of a birthday cake, a memory the size 266 00:12:10,279 --> 00:12:12,919 of a joke shared under a street light. Each vision 267 00:12:12,960 --> 00:12:14,759 came with the same quiet hair, that some core of 268 00:12:14,799 --> 00:12:16,759 me would go slack, that the shapes that have made 269 00:12:16,840 --> 00:12:19,320 me myself would be folded into architecture and used prop 270 00:12:19,360 --> 00:12:22,320 towers that never stop being hungry. I do not tell 271 00:12:22,320 --> 00:12:25,279 this as confession so much as ledger trade was made, 272 00:12:25,279 --> 00:12:27,440 and the consequence settle like dust in a room one 273 00:12:27,480 --> 00:12:31,000 has left but cannot entirely forget. I escape the corridor, 274 00:12:31,080 --> 00:12:33,320 but something follows. A memory of the sound of a 275 00:12:33,320 --> 00:12:35,000 bell that does not rain, the echo of a child's 276 00:12:35,000 --> 00:12:37,559 puppet smile. If the house calls you one day and 277 00:12:37,600 --> 00:12:40,080 you feel the urge to answer, remember the rules it keeps. 278 00:12:40,799 --> 00:12:43,600 They are exacting and literal. They will not steal what 279 00:12:43,639 --> 00:12:46,440 you cannot be parted from in the abstract. They will 280 00:12:46,440 --> 00:12:48,480 take the very syllables and turns of phrase that let 281 00:12:48,519 --> 00:12:50,320 you stand in the world as a person they can name. 282 00:12:50,879 --> 00:12:53,600 It is a tidy theft at wors gloves. I live 283 00:12:53,639 --> 00:12:55,679 with the knowledge that rescue came at cost, and that 284 00:12:55,720 --> 00:12:58,039 the cost is not finite. There are days when a 285 00:12:58,039 --> 00:12:59,799 glance at the seam in a plaster and imagine the 286 00:12:59,799 --> 00:13:03,039 twy quarters re arranging allegiances, sharing whatever scraps of debt 287 00:13:03,039 --> 00:13:05,759 I have already paid. There are night when the hollow 288 00:13:05,759 --> 00:13:07,399 where my name had been seemed to listen to the 289 00:13:07,399 --> 00:13:10,039 house in a way that is almost companionable. The wall 290 00:13:10,120 --> 00:13:12,120 child's bell still echoes in my chest. When I pass 291 00:13:12,159 --> 00:13:14,240 a scene, the paper queen's eyes glinted across the thin 292 00:13:14,279 --> 00:13:17,279 distance of any page. I have learned the arithmetic of 293 00:13:17,279 --> 00:13:20,080 small exchanges. I measure what I can give now, not 294 00:13:20,120 --> 00:13:22,200 because I am miserly, but because I know how exact 295 00:13:22,240 --> 00:13:23,840 the ledger is. I escaped the whole the night I 296 00:13:23,879 --> 00:13:26,039 folded my name into scrap and turned away. But the 297 00:13:26,039 --> 00:13:29,120 corridor keeps to record. Its appetite is patient. I had 298 00:13:29,200 --> 00:13:31,559 learned one forbidding rule the horrid way. Never let the 299 00:13:31,600 --> 00:13:34,399 mirror witness you. The rule did not read like advice, 300 00:13:34,440 --> 00:13:37,159 but like a scar, thin white against the skin of memory. 301 00:13:37,159 --> 00:13:38,879 Something left but a house. The first time it took 302 00:13:38,919 --> 00:13:41,480 more than I was willing to give. The hallway held 303 00:13:41,519 --> 00:13:43,960 me like a lunghole's breath, narrow blue lit, lined with 304 00:13:44,039 --> 00:13:46,399 years of paper that had folded themselves into other things. 305 00:13:46,919 --> 00:13:49,039 At the first, here I had only wanted to see. 306 00:13:49,480 --> 00:13:52,559 At the second, the house demanded an account. I returned 307 00:13:52,559 --> 00:13:55,519 that late evening because curiosity had wait beyond reason. It 308 00:13:55,639 --> 00:13:57,600 earn h that settled behind the robs and pushed me 309 00:13:57,639 --> 00:13:59,559 back toward the place where paper began to pull away 310 00:13:59,559 --> 00:14:02,480 from places. A color I had left alone widened while 311 00:14:02,480 --> 00:14:04,200 I was away, as if the house had been drafting 312 00:14:04,200 --> 00:14:07,200 a map across the night. A sliver of moving landscape 313 00:14:07,200 --> 00:14:10,720 slipped between the cap and breathed like something waking tinny spires, 314 00:14:10,759 --> 00:14:13,639 scaled banners, a low horizon that remembered seasons I did not. 315 00:14:14,399 --> 00:14:16,320 The tear was not an absence but an aperture, and 316 00:14:16,360 --> 00:14:17,960 the well behind it had found a way to press 317 00:14:17,960 --> 00:14:20,440 its face against my reality. I kept my hands in 318 00:14:20,480 --> 00:14:22,320 my pockets at first, the leather of my cook ll 319 00:14:22,399 --> 00:14:25,519 under my palms. The strip of wallpaper revealed a horizon 320 00:14:25,519 --> 00:14:27,960 that seemed almost insolent in its smallness, a row of 321 00:14:28,000 --> 00:14:30,240 folded roofs like the serrated didge of a handmaid crown. 322 00:14:30,720 --> 00:14:32,879 The light that emitted from within the gap was not warm, 323 00:14:32,960 --> 00:14:35,559 but focused, paper thin and precise, coaxing my eyes to 324 00:14:35,600 --> 00:14:37,759 the scale where kings might seem like insects, and grief 325 00:14:37,759 --> 00:14:40,759 as tangible as thread. The edges of the wallpaper had 326 00:14:40,759 --> 00:14:43,200 the smell I could not name at once. It was 327 00:14:43,240 --> 00:14:46,200 not only glue and dust. There was eucalyptus paste and 328 00:14:46,240 --> 00:14:47,799 old ink, and beneath it was a room as a 329 00:14:47,799 --> 00:14:50,440 whisper of something like her gain breath. I traced the 330 00:14:50,440 --> 00:14:52,399 paper edge with the pad of my index finger without 331 00:14:52,399 --> 00:14:55,120 thinking feeling a microscopic give where the paste had weakened. 332 00:14:55,759 --> 00:14:58,759 The touch was a betrayal. The curl widened at one corner, 333 00:14:58,799 --> 00:15:01,159 as if in response to that con and the landscape 334 00:15:01,200 --> 00:15:03,960 inside edge toward me like a patient animal. It was 335 00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:06,440 then the wall child's slip free. It did not call 336 00:15:06,480 --> 00:15:09,320 from the paper so much as ntuck itself. One instant, 337 00:15:09,320 --> 00:15:11,159 the tear was a thing of flatness. The next it 338 00:15:11,200 --> 00:15:14,240 exhaled a child. It hovered there, small and bright eyed, 339 00:15:14,360 --> 00:15:16,519 adul stitch from the exact floor of the wall paper. 340 00:15:17,120 --> 00:15:19,399 The wall child had a smile that refused to show teeth, 341 00:15:19,399 --> 00:15:21,879 a tilt to the head like a hinge. It dangled 342 00:15:21,879 --> 00:15:23,759 a spool of thread the color of all tea, as 343 00:15:23,799 --> 00:15:26,240 if offering me a map. I had been careful with 344 00:15:26,279 --> 00:15:29,919 the first encounter. Caution had been my cloak. Curiosity only 345 00:15:29,960 --> 00:15:33,000 the inner lining. The wall child offered demonstrations that were 346 00:15:33,000 --> 00:15:36,039 all movement and no explanation. It used more fingers to 347 00:15:36,039 --> 00:15:38,000 cook a wind from a folded scrap of paper and 348 00:15:38,120 --> 00:15:40,279 set a spinning the miniature blaze, carrying a sound like 349 00:15:40,279 --> 00:15:43,000 a bell muffled and a velvet. It produced figures no 350 00:15:43,120 --> 00:15:45,559 larger than a thumb nail set them alarmed streets, and 351 00:15:45,559 --> 00:15:47,440 Cook's lamp light into them with the breath that brattled 352 00:15:47,440 --> 00:15:50,639 like dried leaves. Watching those tiny devices of life as 353 00:15:50,679 --> 00:15:54,879 the most dangerous part the kingdomandsed the attention. Every revelation 354 00:15:54,960 --> 00:15:57,720 seemed to be a transaction. The war child smiled and 355 00:15:57,759 --> 00:16:00,000 dulgently when af flinched at that notion, as if delighted 356 00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:02,799 itself were a kind of tax. Its eyes were amber 357 00:16:02,840 --> 00:16:05,120 and lucid, and its moll hands left tiny abrasions in 358 00:16:05,159 --> 00:16:08,559 the paper wad adrifted. It would giggle a soundless bell, 359 00:16:08,720 --> 00:16:10,799 and then tilt toward me, as if the next trick 360 00:16:10,840 --> 00:16:12,919 required something from the forehead of the world. A carrod 361 00:16:13,480 --> 00:16:15,840 peering deeper at the curve, unfolded like a secret letter 362 00:16:16,399 --> 00:16:18,200 from the holy gap. I could see a thrown low 363 00:16:18,200 --> 00:16:20,360 as a keepsake, a paper queen folded with the care 364 00:16:20,440 --> 00:16:23,039 of a prayer. In the fragility of her reliquary. She 365 00:16:23,080 --> 00:16:25,279 sat with shoulder's curt as if sheltering a out inside 366 00:16:25,279 --> 00:16:29,240 her reblss chest. Around her, banners drooped like exhausted promises. 367 00:16:29,840 --> 00:16:32,320 Shuttered windows blink paper, grease eyes, and in the open 368 00:16:32,360 --> 00:16:34,360 spaces people moved with the sow economy of those who 369 00:16:34,360 --> 00:16:37,120 had learned to ration motion. There was hunger there, but 370 00:16:37,159 --> 00:16:39,639 not the kind I had expected. It was a hunger 371 00:16:39,639 --> 00:16:42,879 that wanted exchange. The Queen did not leap like an animal. 372 00:16:43,480 --> 00:16:47,039 She negotiated. Her voice when it reached me was liking 373 00:16:47,039 --> 00:16:49,360 scraped on vellum breath, the informal, the curtons of an 374 00:16:49,360 --> 00:16:52,960 old ledger. She did not child. She unfoled a proposal, 375 00:16:53,000 --> 00:16:54,799 in the manner of her ruler, who counts coin with 376 00:16:54,840 --> 00:16:57,960 the fingers of law. The kingdom could widen and breathe again. 377 00:16:58,480 --> 00:17:01,360 It would be fair warm given the chance to uncrumple 378 00:17:01,399 --> 00:17:03,879 her court. The price would be a forefeature for me. 379 00:17:04,599 --> 00:17:08,640 She offered three patterns, memory, name, or breath. I tested 380 00:17:08,640 --> 00:17:10,680 the price first, as one might test a blade, by 381 00:17:10,680 --> 00:17:13,319 tapping the edge against a finger nail. I surrendered a 382 00:17:13,400 --> 00:17:15,920 memory that scene small at the moment, the scent of 383 00:17:16,000 --> 00:17:17,880 rain and the pavement from a childhood walked with a 384 00:17:17,880 --> 00:17:21,359 hand now absent. I told myself the trade was affordable. 385 00:17:21,920 --> 00:17:24,119 A paper took it without flourish, and exhaled warmth into 386 00:17:24,119 --> 00:17:26,880 the ministre streets. A window and latched somewhere, and a 387 00:17:26,960 --> 00:17:29,279 child there lifted a bonnet of folded newsprint, and laughed 388 00:17:29,279 --> 00:17:31,160 in a way that made my chest thin with relief. 389 00:17:31,640 --> 00:17:34,480 The loss was immediate, an intimate. Where that rain had 390 00:17:34,519 --> 00:17:36,519 once settled as a shelf of detail, there was now 391 00:17:36,559 --> 00:17:39,000 a hollow. I ran my fingers through my hair to 392 00:17:39,000 --> 00:17:40,759 find the trace of that day and met only a 393 00:17:40,799 --> 00:17:43,359 fog where the sidewalks had been. The world outside the 394 00:17:43,359 --> 00:17:46,599 paper did not notice, of course, my friends, the city. 395 00:17:46,680 --> 00:17:49,279 The calendar carried on only the parts of me that 396 00:17:49,359 --> 00:17:53,160 kept private. Cartographies felt the gouge memory had the property 397 00:17:53,200 --> 00:17:56,200 of making edits across a life. The removaleries not just 398 00:17:56,240 --> 00:17:58,079 the image, but its links, a tidy and threading that 399 00:17:58,160 --> 00:18:00,640 left to the small things wilting. That was the first 400 00:18:00,720 --> 00:18:04,279 unintended consequence. The kingdom full with a little more color 401 00:18:04,319 --> 00:18:06,640 and movement. But my past re arranged itself in ways 402 00:18:06,640 --> 00:18:09,400 that made me lose tiny footholds. Names of street to 403 00:18:09,480 --> 00:18:12,680 love became big sunds. Face of an old neighbor blowed 404 00:18:12,680 --> 00:18:16,279 at the edges. Those erasures were not only frustrating, they 405 00:18:16,319 --> 00:18:18,400 were precisely what the queen needed, a thinning of the 406 00:18:18,480 --> 00:18:21,559 human fabric in exchange for the kingdom shoring. The war. 407 00:18:21,640 --> 00:18:23,319 Child watched all of this with the patience that was 408 00:18:23,359 --> 00:18:26,279 almost cruel. It hovered at the scene between my world 409 00:18:26,279 --> 00:18:28,200 and theirs, picking up the edges of paper until they 410 00:18:28,200 --> 00:18:31,920 cal tighter in its fist. Its amusement was the only constant. 411 00:18:32,559 --> 00:18:34,559 When I balked, it would ring its silent bell and 412 00:18:34,599 --> 00:18:36,519 tap the spool of thread against my sleeve, as if 413 00:18:36,519 --> 00:18:38,559 reminding me that thread and name and memory are all 414 00:18:38,640 --> 00:18:41,440 kinds of tether. The court appeared earnest in its need. 415 00:18:41,920 --> 00:18:43,720 When I pressed my face closer to the ripe, the 416 00:18:43,799 --> 00:18:46,279 Queen's crown seemed to pulse, not with light, but with one. 417 00:18:46,920 --> 00:18:48,920 Anna's bristled, as if a wind had come down from 418 00:18:48,960 --> 00:18:51,920 insight paper to rustle them awake. I realized then that 419 00:18:51,920 --> 00:18:54,400 the Kingdom's life depended on the wiliness of outsiders to 420 00:18:54,400 --> 00:18:57,720 suture it to a human wall. Some bargains were mercantile, 421 00:18:57,880 --> 00:19:02,039 others were sacraments, and proposal escalated with the careful cruelty 422 00:19:02,039 --> 00:19:04,960 of a litany. She would accept either a memory of weight, 423 00:19:04,960 --> 00:19:07,519 the renunciation of a name, or the surrender of a breath. 424 00:19:08,079 --> 00:19:10,440 She promised that the court would expand that roofs would 425 00:19:10,440 --> 00:19:12,920 stand straighter, that the little people would wrinkle their sleeves 426 00:19:12,960 --> 00:19:15,839 and open their doors. She offered images of a palace 427 00:19:15,839 --> 00:19:18,000 increased and a kingdom that could raise a single banner 428 00:19:18,039 --> 00:19:20,720 without collapsing. It was the kind of rhetoric that makes 429 00:19:20,720 --> 00:19:24,000 martyrdom sound like maintenance. I tested the first trade, and 430 00:19:24,039 --> 00:19:27,079 watched pieces of my history slide like loose pages, thus 431 00:19:27,079 --> 00:19:29,079 stretching east the kingdom in the short term, and a 432 00:19:29,160 --> 00:19:31,519 lump later inside. The paper straightened his shoulders for the 433 00:19:31,559 --> 00:19:34,200 first time in seasons. But I could feel the cost 434 00:19:34,200 --> 00:19:36,400 as a private ac that reseted itself on my bones. 435 00:19:36,720 --> 00:19:38,960 When I reached for the leathern notebook that habitually lived 436 00:19:38,960 --> 00:19:40,720 in my coat, a paragraph I had written about a 437 00:19:40,799 --> 00:19:44,039 childhood fear had smudged into an absence, then refused to 438 00:19:44,079 --> 00:19:46,960 retain the sentence I had once folded into it. Small 439 00:19:47,000 --> 00:19:50,480 collapses multiplied quietly into a new architecture of self. Then 440 00:19:50,480 --> 00:19:53,359 the Queen invited me to consider the greater price. She 441 00:19:53,440 --> 00:19:55,759 unfolded the idea of a name like a ledger page. 442 00:19:56,240 --> 00:19:58,240 To relinquish a name was to watch the anchors of 443 00:19:58,279 --> 00:20:01,039 identity amore. She said that names like route to allow 444 00:20:01,079 --> 00:20:03,599 her court to bind itself cross scales. They were a 445 00:20:03,640 --> 00:20:06,480 latts through which paper and peruse and qultrate weight. I 446 00:20:06,519 --> 00:20:09,039 felt the concept like pressure in the hollow behind the teeth. 447 00:20:09,559 --> 00:20:11,359 To give a name would be to lessen to strangers 448 00:20:11,359 --> 00:20:13,240 call me by some other lack, and to find nothing 449 00:20:13,279 --> 00:20:15,880 inside that matched the sound. The choice at the age 450 00:20:15,920 --> 00:20:19,200 arrived like an incoming tie hands trembling, I rested my 451 00:20:19,240 --> 00:20:21,400 finger tips right on the ragged paper where the Kingdom's 452 00:20:21,440 --> 00:20:23,960 board as met my skin. Midnight had come and the 453 00:20:24,000 --> 00:20:27,319 hallway had become an instrument tuned for small sounds. The 454 00:20:27,359 --> 00:20:30,599 wall child had retreated a little, watching the queen sulwhit 455 00:20:30,680 --> 00:20:33,359 seemed straight and on her fragile throne. I felt like 456 00:20:33,400 --> 00:20:35,599 a litany of small clerties had sharpened into a single 457 00:20:35,599 --> 00:20:38,799 blade of decision. I considered withholding the sacrifice and let 458 00:20:38,799 --> 00:20:42,119 in a miniature court atrophy. I considered the selfish pleasure 459 00:20:42,160 --> 00:20:44,960 of safe ignorance. But the sight of the paper children 460 00:20:45,039 --> 00:20:47,359 living hand to breathe in their tiny houses twisted something 461 00:20:47,359 --> 00:20:50,079 in me. There was a stubbornness and rescue that carried 462 00:20:50,079 --> 00:20:52,359 the weight of a vice. In that pause, I was 463 00:20:52,359 --> 00:20:55,160 crueler to myself than any bargain could be. I made 464 00:20:55,160 --> 00:20:59,240 my choice. I renounced my name. The ruling was not theatrical, 465 00:20:59,759 --> 00:21:03,279 though it was no celestial trumpet or blotting up the heavens. Instead, 466 00:21:03,359 --> 00:21:06,279 the hallway seemed to inhale. The queen leaned forward, as 467 00:21:06,279 --> 00:21:08,039 if the very act of my naming her bargain had 468 00:21:08,079 --> 00:21:10,519 been a kindness. The crown on her had folded in 469 00:21:10,559 --> 00:21:13,880 an infinitesimal gasp, and then eeld within the paper. The 470 00:21:13,880 --> 00:21:15,920 streets straightened, as if someone had gone through with the 471 00:21:15,920 --> 00:21:18,759 broom and set them in order. Tiny hands came out 472 00:21:18,799 --> 00:21:22,000 to us small thresholds. The lamp lighter, who had once duoped, 473 00:21:22,000 --> 00:21:23,680 now stood with a poise that made the paper round 474 00:21:23,720 --> 00:21:26,200 him shine for a breath. The personal horror of it 475 00:21:26,240 --> 00:21:28,960 was an internal dissolving. I reached for the small brass 476 00:21:28,960 --> 00:21:31,279 locket I had worn habitually, and the metal felt colder. 477 00:21:31,880 --> 00:21:33,759 When I tried to summon the syllable that had tethered 478 00:21:33,759 --> 00:21:35,759 me to my father, the sound formed, and then slipped 479 00:21:35,759 --> 00:21:37,960 through my lips like a borrower coin. It would not 480 00:21:38,000 --> 00:21:41,319 cling in the mouth objects that bore my name, all receipts. 481 00:21:41,359 --> 00:21:43,319 A doggy of library book erased the inkers. If her 482 00:21:43,359 --> 00:21:46,160 mouth had eaten the letters, people who knew me, continued 483 00:21:46,160 --> 00:21:48,480 to recognize me. But the private architecture has allowed me 484 00:21:48,519 --> 00:21:50,200 to think of myself by a single word, had been 485 00:21:50,240 --> 00:21:52,559 altered into a whole way of echoes without a central voice. 486 00:21:53,039 --> 00:21:54,960 The Queen's smile was a fold that mid the corners 487 00:21:54,960 --> 00:21:56,720 of her face looked like the opening of a book. 488 00:21:57,400 --> 00:22:00,640 She kept her bargains as one might tend a ledger, precise, sorrowful, 489 00:22:00,759 --> 00:22:03,799 and efficient. The kingdom brightened and breathed, and for a 490 00:22:03,799 --> 00:22:06,519 period measured in minutes that felt like irons, all that 491 00:22:06,599 --> 00:22:09,440 paper had wanted was granted. I stood at the edge 492 00:22:09,440 --> 00:22:11,319 of the tiny court and felt an odd kinship and 493 00:22:11,359 --> 00:22:14,599 a new vulnerability. My sacrifice bought them a room of light. 494 00:22:15,240 --> 00:22:17,240 It left me third, bearing away that would complicate how 495 00:22:17,240 --> 00:22:20,559 I met myself for years to come. Immediate repercussion arrived 496 00:22:20,559 --> 00:22:24,799 as both relief and vertigo. The Queen straightened banners Unfeld 497 00:22:24,839 --> 00:22:27,559 a little straighter. The wall child laughed a noise like 498 00:22:27,599 --> 00:22:29,279 a wind up toy. But it was not the same 499 00:22:29,279 --> 00:22:31,960 inness and amusement I had seen before. There was the 500 00:22:31,960 --> 00:22:34,599 faintest undertow in that laughter now, the sense that something 501 00:22:34,599 --> 00:22:36,920 had large against its rops that had not been there earlier. 502 00:22:37,559 --> 00:22:39,759 It held a tiny metal button, perhaps a token of 503 00:22:39,759 --> 00:22:41,880 the bargain, and tilted it in the airs of to 504 00:22:41,880 --> 00:22:44,599 test how it connected me to the house. I retreated 505 00:22:44,599 --> 00:22:46,400 from the paper with the careful gait of someone who 506 00:22:46,440 --> 00:22:49,599 has learned to bear a new wound. The hall felt longer. 507 00:22:50,240 --> 00:22:52,119 The mirror at the end of the corridor, which had 508 00:22:52,119 --> 00:22:54,279 once reflected a name in the way a tax registrar 509 00:22:54,359 --> 00:22:57,640 would stowed back unhealthfully. It held a face that was 510 00:22:57,720 --> 00:22:59,799 undeniwably mind but missing the label I had worn for 511 00:22:59,880 --> 00:23:02,720 you years. I noticed how objects that had spelled the 512 00:23:02,799 --> 00:23:05,039 name now looked as though they had been rewritten. The 513 00:23:05,160 --> 00:23:07,880 name had been edited out of receipts. A faded embroidery 514 00:23:07,880 --> 00:23:10,519 on a knakin had softened into blank cloth. There was 515 00:23:10,559 --> 00:23:12,759 a small folded scrap of wallpaper in my palm, without 516 00:23:12,799 --> 00:23:14,440 my intending it to be there. At a press ground 517 00:23:14,440 --> 00:23:17,519 printer of faint and gold I thread fine aspondus seemed 518 00:23:17,519 --> 00:23:19,400 to pull toward the house with the patients of volume. 519 00:23:20,000 --> 00:23:21,599 With its scrap in my pocket, I felt a new 520 00:23:21,640 --> 00:23:24,920 tether that did not feel like rescue. It felt like claim. 521 00:23:25,240 --> 00:23:27,839 The bargain had not freed the house from want. It 522 00:23:27,880 --> 00:23:30,319 had enlarged the house's appetite and grafted a new strand 523 00:23:30,400 --> 00:23:32,400 on to me. I understood, dully, and with the kind 524 00:23:32,440 --> 00:23:34,480 of clarity that makes no so rise, that the rescue 525 00:23:34,480 --> 00:23:37,319 had come. With the long handled cast, I had eased 526 00:23:37,319 --> 00:23:39,200 the papers ache, and in doing so left to see 527 00:23:39,240 --> 00:23:41,880 me myself that would widen with time. The days after 528 00:23:41,880 --> 00:23:44,759 were small experiments in unremembering. I would be made with 529 00:23:44,759 --> 00:23:47,880 her familiar route and find that landmarks had shifted, not physically, 530 00:23:47,920 --> 00:23:50,640 but in a map my mind, one's trace. I discovered 531 00:23:50,680 --> 00:23:53,559 rooms in my own memory that had become glassy and unresponsive, 532 00:23:53,960 --> 00:23:56,880 like windows that refused to open. Facing friends became a 533 00:23:56,920 --> 00:23:58,960 negotiation where I had to learn to greet myself in 534 00:23:59,000 --> 00:24:02,319 you each time, a practice leaving blanks in conversation so 535 00:24:02,400 --> 00:24:05,480 that the gaps would not become cliffs. There was another change, 536 00:24:05,480 --> 00:24:08,279 to a new sensitivity when I passed houses and malls. 537 00:24:08,720 --> 00:24:11,079 The paper that the world seemed build afraid in certain places, 538 00:24:11,079 --> 00:24:13,839 now a whisper of patterns beneath wallpaper, a suggestion of 539 00:24:13,880 --> 00:24:17,160 other small kingdoms that might breathe of coaxed. Sometimes at 540 00:24:17,240 --> 00:24:18,799 night I would reach into my pocket and find the 541 00:24:18,839 --> 00:24:21,839 scrap there, folded and heavy as a promise. The thread 542 00:24:21,839 --> 00:24:24,519 attached to it was not a metaphor. It tucked toward 543 00:24:24,559 --> 00:24:26,319 the house with a gravity that made me aware of 544 00:24:26,319 --> 00:24:29,039 the line running between us. I do not pretend that 545 00:24:29,079 --> 00:24:32,279 my choice was heroic. Heroism wears the garb of myth. 546 00:24:32,839 --> 00:24:34,839 My aunt was messy, made of knight and the poor 547 00:24:34,839 --> 00:24:37,799 arithmetic of guilt. I had wanted to help a fragile corps. 548 00:24:38,359 --> 00:24:41,200 I had wanted to see if salvage was possible. Instead, 549 00:24:41,200 --> 00:24:43,920 I had become one of the Ledger's entries. The kingdom 550 00:24:43,960 --> 00:24:45,920 increased for a time, and the Queen straightened in a 551 00:24:45,960 --> 00:24:47,480 way that made me think of some one who had 552 00:24:47,519 --> 00:24:50,400 been carrying a secret bale for years. But bargains do 553 00:24:50,519 --> 00:24:53,279 not end with the moment of consummation. They continue. I 554 00:24:53,319 --> 00:24:55,559 can paid interest, and I could feel the slower cruel 555 00:24:55,559 --> 00:24:57,799 of claim in the marrow of my days. When I 556 00:24:57,880 --> 00:25:00,720 left that night, the house folded back into itself of content. 557 00:25:00,759 --> 00:25:03,480 For now, the mirror still smiled with a mischief that 558 00:25:03,480 --> 00:25:06,480 belonged to strangers. The wall child peered up from the 559 00:25:06,519 --> 00:25:08,359 tier and tied it spool around its wrist, as if 560 00:25:08,400 --> 00:25:11,200 to remind itself of measurement. The tiny guild to keet 561 00:25:11,200 --> 00:25:12,960 the Queen had presented before I left Tom, like a 562 00:25:12,960 --> 00:25:16,480 punctuation marked somewhere between our worlds. I pocketed the scrap 563 00:25:16,480 --> 00:25:18,359 of wallpaper and found it warm, as if holding a 564 00:25:18,400 --> 00:25:20,839 heat of a life other than mine. I walked away 565 00:25:20,880 --> 00:25:22,519 with a pocket full of paper and a head that 566 00:25:22,559 --> 00:25:25,039 felt like a book whose spine had been made. The 567 00:25:25,079 --> 00:25:27,480 smell of cold paper an old gluclon to my clothing, 568 00:25:27,519 --> 00:25:29,319 and the brass knife in my pocket felt not like 569 00:25:29,319 --> 00:25:31,720 a trinket from a life that had been revised. The 570 00:25:31,799 --> 00:25:33,920 corridors of the house had not given up their mysteries. 571 00:25:34,480 --> 00:25:37,279 They had simply shifted their terms. There was a sense 572 00:25:37,279 --> 00:25:38,759 that I had pulled a thread that stitched me to 573 00:25:38,759 --> 00:25:41,240 a place, and that place would continue to call for more. 574 00:25:41,920 --> 00:25:45,319 It is possible, perhaps that the Queen meant nomallevolence. She 575 00:25:45,400 --> 00:25:47,240 may have believed in a cause as pure and wary 576 00:25:47,279 --> 00:25:49,599 as a kagavr is. The small kingdom needed mending, and 577 00:25:49,640 --> 00:25:52,279 she chose the calculus she thought would mend it. Yet 578 00:25:52,319 --> 00:25:55,279 even the most sorrowful bargains are bargains They take and mark. 579 00:25:55,960 --> 00:25:58,000 They invite the hand into the seam, and then keep 580 00:25:58,039 --> 00:26:00,920 the hand. I am no say it. I am some 581 00:26:00,960 --> 00:26:04,279 one compelled by curiosity and a stubborn pity. I traded 582 00:26:04,279 --> 00:26:06,039 a name for a court and returned into the world 583 00:26:06,079 --> 00:26:09,160 with one less anchor. Scrap in my pocket bends. When 584 00:26:09,160 --> 00:26:11,640 I sleep in the bright hush of morning, I sometimes 585 00:26:11,720 --> 00:26:13,519 find at the edges of my thoughts have softened in 586 00:26:13,559 --> 00:26:16,720 ways that frightened me. The house has not finished its counting. 587 00:26:17,319 --> 00:26:19,359 I suspect now that the trade was not a settlement, 588 00:26:19,359 --> 00:26:22,039 but the damp payment on something broader. The thriad that 589 00:26:22,119 --> 00:26:24,440 pulls toward the house is patient and is learning how 590 00:26:24,480 --> 00:26:27,000 to tie nots. When I look at the crack mirror 591 00:26:27,039 --> 00:26:29,000 in the hallway now, the face that answers me is 592 00:26:29,039 --> 00:26:31,400 increasingly faceless in the place where a name used to rest. 593 00:26:32,079 --> 00:26:34,839 The reflection is mine, and yet not quite whole. There 594 00:26:34,920 --> 00:26:36,599 is a smile that might be the mirrors of mine. 595 00:26:36,599 --> 00:26:39,599 It is hard to tell. And sometimes when the light 596 00:26:39,640 --> 00:26:42,119 falls across the glass just so, the Queen's cram prince 597 00:26:42,160 --> 00:26:45,000 itself faintly on the surface, like a water mark. There 598 00:26:45,000 --> 00:26:47,880 are nights I think I realized the hole wey behind 599 00:26:47,880 --> 00:26:50,559 me had disappeared, and for a long moment the well 600 00:26:50,640 --> 00:26:52,720 tranked to the narrow strip of four beneath my boots, 601 00:26:52,759 --> 00:26:55,519 and the think owl of warpipper between my fingers. The 602 00:26:55,559 --> 00:26:58,880 thought did not arrive as astonishment first. It arrived as 603 00:26:58,880 --> 00:27:01,119 the quiet, sickening knowledge that the house decided when I 604 00:27:01,119 --> 00:27:03,680 could look away. The tier I had not made, weighted 605 00:27:03,720 --> 00:27:06,000 like an offered lip, as seen separating the known corridor 606 00:27:06,039 --> 00:27:08,119 from the tiny dusk lid avenue that washed me back. 607 00:27:08,839 --> 00:27:11,160 Fingers that had traced edges of paper three years went 608 00:27:11,200 --> 00:27:14,680 briefly numb. Habit and hunger braided together and pulled me closer. 609 00:27:15,319 --> 00:27:18,319 I had come expecting curiosities old paste pattern half kept 610 00:27:18,319 --> 00:27:20,240 by time, and and so found a map that rearranged 611 00:27:20,279 --> 00:27:23,319 itself whenever I blinked. The pattern under the curl moved 612 00:27:23,400 --> 00:27:25,279 like weather, as if a breath within the paper, and 613 00:27:25,319 --> 00:27:28,480 fell tiny banners and closed them again. Up close, the 614 00:27:28,519 --> 00:27:30,880 avenue was stitched from print and shadow spies of curl's 615 00:27:30,920 --> 00:27:33,839 grap a street lamp folded from a past advertisement, a 616 00:27:33,839 --> 00:27:37,519 bridge creased like a thumbprint. The scale was impossible and intimate. 617 00:27:38,039 --> 00:27:40,359 It wanted to be cradled, and equally to be commanded. 618 00:27:41,000 --> 00:27:42,720 I felt watched by a place that had never had 619 00:27:42,720 --> 00:27:45,359 eyes until I leaned over it. I had learned early 620 00:27:45,400 --> 00:27:47,880 that rules lived in the margins of this house. The 621 00:27:47,920 --> 00:27:49,720 first here I had found was a simple thing of 622 00:27:49,799 --> 00:27:52,359 letting in, and the second had counter price. I will 623 00:27:52,359 --> 00:27:55,839 carry an invisible ink in the time between us two discoverers. 624 00:27:55,880 --> 00:27:58,119 The house taught me to be careful, taught me to curiosity. 625 00:27:58,160 --> 00:28:01,240 Here was an economy. Each look, each tub, each grap taken, 626 00:28:01,279 --> 00:28:04,400 demanded a repayment. The wall child arrived like a page 627 00:28:04,400 --> 00:28:07,680 turning or small smiles and hollow cheer. It hovered at 628 00:28:07,680 --> 00:28:10,000 shoulder height, a dangling bell of a presence, eyes bright 629 00:28:10,039 --> 00:28:12,880 with a sort of curiosity that belongs to theft. The 630 00:28:12,960 --> 00:28:15,799 child did not speak in human caredance. Its voice was 631 00:28:15,799 --> 00:28:18,200 to till about without sound, and motion through the air 632 00:28:18,240 --> 00:28:21,240 that re arranged dust motes. It gestured with a thin hand, 633 00:28:21,319 --> 00:28:23,720 picking at the margin until the paper flared, like a math. 634 00:28:24,240 --> 00:28:26,759 It wanted me to go deeper. It wanted me to 635 00:28:26,799 --> 00:28:29,880 give more. In the child's eagerness, there was no cruelty, 636 00:28:29,960 --> 00:28:33,039 only the relentless arithmetic of a court running short of pieces. 637 00:28:33,480 --> 00:28:35,440 When it reached for the loose edge, its fingers left 638 00:28:35,480 --> 00:28:37,480 the faintest stitch seam across the margin, as if it 639 00:28:37,480 --> 00:28:39,960 were mending what I might rip away. I traced the 640 00:28:40,000 --> 00:28:42,119 new edges with trembling finger tips, and every time I 641 00:28:42,160 --> 00:28:45,000 looked away, the map shifted. Alene that had led toward 642 00:28:45,039 --> 00:28:47,279 a thrid b market upon the next glance become a 643 00:28:47,319 --> 00:28:49,960 narrow steril, leading down to a porcel in well. The 644 00:28:50,039 --> 00:28:52,440 kingdom beneath the pace responded to attention as a living 645 00:28:52,480 --> 00:28:55,759 thing responds to hunger. It rearranged itself to plead. I 646 00:28:55,839 --> 00:28:58,359 learned to look like a careful thief, measured slow, deliberate, 647 00:28:58,359 --> 00:29:02,000 because rapid movements here were invitations. Each tiny change I 648 00:29:02,039 --> 00:29:04,319 observed felt less like someone altering a set, and more 649 00:29:04,400 --> 00:29:07,759 like the realm, offering me a fresh need. It cultivated scarcely, 650 00:29:07,799 --> 00:29:10,839 like a garden cultivates vines. The larger gap I found 651 00:29:10,880 --> 00:29:13,119 later was jagged and deliberate. A teer that exposed to 652 00:29:13,160 --> 00:29:15,559 court folded small and solemn beneath dome that could only 653 00:29:15,559 --> 00:29:18,240 be felt and not named. From that mouth of paper, 654 00:29:18,279 --> 00:29:20,559 the scent of old glue and nucolytus based perfume. The 655 00:29:20,559 --> 00:29:23,119 paper queen wore like a shoal. She sat where a 656 00:29:23,160 --> 00:29:25,559 throne could be a miniature a carve scrap arranged into 657 00:29:25,559 --> 00:29:27,960 a seat. A folded crone of wallpaper scraps approched like 658 00:29:27,960 --> 00:29:30,759 a cocked hat around her. The recovered objects of the 659 00:29:30,759 --> 00:29:33,599 house arranged themselves as muriels. A chip cut balanced on 660 00:29:33,599 --> 00:29:36,640 a column, the child's marble embedded into a flagstone, the 661 00:29:36,680 --> 00:29:38,759 spoiled thread of a curtain loop like a belt. Each 662 00:29:38,759 --> 00:29:41,880 object was not returned for no reason. Each object had 663 00:29:41,880 --> 00:29:44,440 been remade into permanence for the Kingdom, and permanence meant 664 00:29:44,440 --> 00:29:47,359 something like taking. That was the revelation that split the 665 00:29:47,359 --> 00:29:49,519 middle of the night from me, where I had thought 666 00:29:49,519 --> 00:29:52,640 offerings repaid. I saw a ledger. The Kingdom preserved what 667 00:29:52,799 --> 00:29:54,960 entered it by making it essential to the court's architecture. 668 00:29:55,599 --> 00:29:58,799 A moug became a milestone, a bodon became a banister. 669 00:29:59,400 --> 00:30:01,200 The things we had loss were not lost, so much 670 00:30:01,200 --> 00:30:02,920 as made a part of the place that had been lost. 671 00:30:02,920 --> 00:30:05,599 First to give was to be remembered, and to be 672 00:30:05,640 --> 00:30:08,519 remembered was to be claimed. When a paper queen emerged 673 00:30:08,559 --> 00:30:10,440 from the folds, she gave the certainty of old ink. 674 00:30:11,200 --> 00:30:13,559 She was fragile and unafraid, like a thin crown about 675 00:30:13,559 --> 00:30:16,599 to curl with damp her features were scripped in tiny tears, 676 00:30:16,599 --> 00:30:18,680 eyes the color of spelldink with flecks of gold. There 677 00:30:18,680 --> 00:30:20,599 could have been hope, or the reflection of a lamp. 678 00:30:21,160 --> 00:30:23,079 She did not demand in the blunt way. A living thing, 679 00:30:23,160 --> 00:30:27,160 I she offered, like a ledger opens her bargain was precise, 680 00:30:27,200 --> 00:30:29,000 help enough, and a portion of the court could be 681 00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:32,319 free from adhesive bonds. Helped her briefly, and the relief 682 00:30:32,319 --> 00:30:35,200 would be cosmetic, a papering over of deeper need. The 683 00:30:35,240 --> 00:30:37,759 free what was trapped, she said, without speaking words, I 684 00:30:37,759 --> 00:30:41,160 could quote the kingdom required an exchange of something integral, 685 00:30:41,279 --> 00:30:43,480 Not a coin, not a trin gate, but an absence 686 00:30:43,480 --> 00:30:44,960 from the giver in a form that could not be 687 00:30:45,000 --> 00:30:47,599 taken back. I had come with small tools in a 688 00:30:47,640 --> 00:30:50,759 worn leather note book. Those things were familiar and safe. 689 00:30:51,240 --> 00:30:53,839 They could be left without much shore. A page could 690 00:30:53,839 --> 00:30:56,279 be lost in another page. May What I could not 691 00:30:56,319 --> 00:30:59,279 surrender without feeling the house itself taking breath was the 692 00:30:59,279 --> 00:31:02,079 brass locket the hung at my throat. It housed no 693 00:31:02,200 --> 00:31:04,440 photograph any more. Inside the hollow I had placed a 694 00:31:04,440 --> 00:31:06,079 scrap of torn was seating with the dress of a 695 00:31:06,119 --> 00:31:08,920 home I had once believed permanent. The locket was a 696 00:31:08,960 --> 00:31:11,559 hinge on my memory. Its weight at my chest kept 697 00:31:11,640 --> 00:31:13,799 names ancut, kept the sense of who I once was 698 00:31:13,799 --> 00:31:17,400 from folding away. The demand was both heartbreaking and terrible 699 00:31:17,400 --> 00:31:20,240 in its clarity. The wall child, whose mischief was also 700 00:31:20,319 --> 00:31:22,720 its earnestness, tilted its head and tapped the spool of 701 00:31:22,720 --> 00:31:25,680 thread at its wrists, trying to measure my hesitation. It 702 00:31:25,880 --> 00:31:27,960 like bargains, the way children like gained a thing to 703 00:31:28,000 --> 00:31:30,920 be played until someone cried. The queen's court shimmered like 704 00:31:30,960 --> 00:31:33,079 wet paper at dawn, and the strand of silver thread 705 00:31:33,119 --> 00:31:34,799 drifted down into my hand, as if to measure the 706 00:31:34,839 --> 00:31:37,319 length of what I might give. I understood then that 707 00:31:37,359 --> 00:31:39,440 the cost would not be some small identity I could 708 00:31:39,440 --> 00:31:42,119 stitch back later. The cost would be a hole where 709 00:31:42,160 --> 00:31:44,240 a name had been. I thought of the lives I 710 00:31:44,240 --> 00:31:46,480 had tried to keep outside this house, the thin, fragile 711 00:31:46,480 --> 00:31:49,680 fabric of identity in place, memories that had once been 712 00:31:49,720 --> 00:31:52,079 hulker come and done if the anchor that named them slept. 713 00:31:52,759 --> 00:31:54,440 I stood there with my fingers on the locket and 714 00:31:54,480 --> 00:31:55,960 felt the weight of two wells, the house that re 715 00:31:56,119 --> 00:31:58,720 arranged its rooms to cry for rescue, and the kingdom 716 00:31:58,759 --> 00:32:01,839 folded small beneath wall paper that asked for salvage. There 717 00:32:01,880 --> 00:32:04,200 was no calculation that would make eat a choice merciful. 718 00:32:04,759 --> 00:32:06,359 To leave would be to watch a quart of stitch 719 00:32:06,400 --> 00:32:09,200 people crumble into paste and shadow. To say it would 720 00:32:09,200 --> 00:32:11,240 be to step into a narrower life with a missing label. 721 00:32:11,799 --> 00:32:15,079 The decision settled like cold glue. I unclasped the locket 722 00:32:15,119 --> 00:32:18,000 and pressed its small, smooth edge into the tier. The 723 00:32:18,039 --> 00:32:20,000 metal warmed in my palm, as if it recognized that 724 00:32:20,039 --> 00:32:22,279 this was a different kind of giving than losing a page. 725 00:32:22,799 --> 00:32:25,440 I had known laws before. This was not that same, 726 00:32:25,519 --> 00:32:29,720 quite theft. This was something deliberate and ceremonial. When the 727 00:32:29,759 --> 00:32:32,000 brass crossed the seam, a paper queen folded a hand 728 00:32:32,000 --> 00:32:34,119 across her chest in the gesture that a miniature language 729 00:32:34,119 --> 00:32:37,400 meant gratitude and vare. The wall child, too near, tilted 730 00:32:37,400 --> 00:32:39,079 its head and let a whisper of thread fall through 731 00:32:39,079 --> 00:32:41,519 my fingers like a small blessing. There was a stitch 732 00:32:41,519 --> 00:32:43,440 of light that ran along the court's pathways, and a 733 00:32:43,480 --> 00:32:46,640 knitting sound like distant sewing. The architecture of the miniature 734 00:32:46,640 --> 00:32:49,119 realm we arranged itself, brightening a small district, as if 735 00:32:49,160 --> 00:32:51,440 a dark corner of a map had been rewritten. A 736 00:32:51,519 --> 00:32:53,839 lamp lighter made a fold. Its cripsteped into clearer light, 737 00:32:54,480 --> 00:32:57,480 but bridge mended its crease for an instant. The kingdom 738 00:32:57,519 --> 00:32:59,799 inhaled and held, and I felt against my ribs the 739 00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:02,960 follow the locke at once filled. Names do strange things 740 00:33:02,960 --> 00:33:05,279 when they are taken. They loosened, not as of cut, 741 00:33:05,279 --> 00:33:06,880 but as if this all leaving the shape of a 742 00:33:06,920 --> 00:33:10,039 parson with edges blurred. I found myself reaching for the 743 00:33:10,039 --> 00:33:12,319 syllable of my own name and catching only a shadow. 744 00:33:12,920 --> 00:33:15,160 Stepping back into the corridor. I expected the house to 745 00:33:15,200 --> 00:33:17,119 be the same, in the world to be different. The 746 00:33:17,160 --> 00:33:20,160 floorboard side with the same tire complaint, the narrow hallway 747 00:33:20,240 --> 00:33:22,920 kept its cold blue wash, and the cracked mirror along 748 00:33:23,000 --> 00:33:25,039 the east wall reflected my outline with the same film 749 00:33:25,079 --> 00:33:28,279 grain blaw. Yet something had shifted within the proportion of me. 750 00:33:28,640 --> 00:33:30,279 Where I had once kept a neat list of who 751 00:33:30,319 --> 00:33:33,039 I was, there was now blank space with a crown 752 00:33:33,039 --> 00:33:34,880 faint on its edge, scrap of wallpeper I had not 753 00:33:34,920 --> 00:33:36,960 planned to carry, but which had chosen to come with me. 754 00:33:37,559 --> 00:33:39,400 The scrap lay in the floor where my shoe had 755 00:33:39,400 --> 00:33:42,279 brushed it lose. A printed crown faintly visible in the 756 00:33:42,279 --> 00:33:44,799 curl was an imperfect sign of salvation. A piece saved, 757 00:33:44,880 --> 00:33:47,640 a cost paid for a moment. The paper scrap looked 758 00:33:47,680 --> 00:33:49,440 like proof of a victory to keepsake of a small 759 00:33:49,480 --> 00:33:52,440 kingdom resumed. Then the thought settled over me like dust. 760 00:33:52,519 --> 00:33:55,720 A rescue hero is never complete. If one thing becomes whole, 761 00:33:55,759 --> 00:33:58,680 another is hollowed. The queen's court had gained a street. 762 00:33:59,359 --> 00:34:01,319 I become less certain in the world beyond the peast. 763 00:34:02,039 --> 00:34:03,960 The wall child watched me go with a smile that 764 00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:06,319 did not belong to any one I could remember. It 765 00:34:06,400 --> 00:34:09,239 had the terrible cheerfulness of service accomplished, already moving on 766 00:34:09,280 --> 00:34:12,280 to bargaining with the next whirling hand. In that smile 767 00:34:12,400 --> 00:34:14,599 was the knowledge that this house, the kingdom, and the 768 00:34:14,599 --> 00:34:17,920 bargains between them were not finished. The house gives openings 769 00:34:17,920 --> 00:34:21,480 and demands payment. It repairs itself in units calculated from 770 00:34:21,559 --> 00:34:24,639 human pieces. The kingdom would remain revived in part, but 771 00:34:24,679 --> 00:34:28,000 not whole. I was a citizen of lost, now marked 772 00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:30,639 by a missing syllable. Morning did not arrive for the 773 00:34:30,639 --> 00:34:33,039 house in the way it used to. Light reached through 774 00:34:33,079 --> 00:34:35,239 the stained glass panes with less certainty, as if the 775 00:34:35,239 --> 00:34:38,360 windows themselves were considering what they wanted to show. I 776 00:34:38,440 --> 00:34:40,599 walked to corridor and found my palms continued to seek 777 00:34:40,679 --> 00:34:42,719 edges of paper, as if learning to trace a map 778 00:34:42,760 --> 00:34:46,199 was an addiction. The brass locket was gone, The hollow 779 00:34:46,239 --> 00:34:49,079 at my throat felt colder. I tested my reflection in 780 00:34:49,079 --> 00:34:51,360 the cracked mirror and found the stranger leaning against the glass, 781 00:34:51,400 --> 00:34:53,840 the pale ashen skin, shoulder, li and hair tucked back, 782 00:34:54,000 --> 00:34:56,800 the paper cuts scar on the index finger. The details 783 00:34:56,800 --> 00:34:59,559 were still true. The anchoring syllable of the name felt 784 00:34:59,559 --> 00:35:02,320 loose enough. I could remember how to form my own name, 785 00:35:02,400 --> 00:35:04,320 but saying it a lot felt like pronouncing a word. 786 00:35:04,360 --> 00:35:06,960 With the vells knocked out and the crack four near 787 00:35:07,000 --> 00:35:09,280 the mirror, the scrap of wallpaper waited like a trophy. 788 00:35:09,840 --> 00:35:12,000 Its printed crown was faint but real, and even as 789 00:35:12,039 --> 00:35:14,119 I examined it, the edges quivered with a possibility. I 790 00:35:14,119 --> 00:35:17,039 could not entirely watch without fear. In the distance, the 791 00:35:17,079 --> 00:35:19,480 house ansored me with its usual sounds, a whollwa hum 792 00:35:19,519 --> 00:35:21,280 that was almost breath, the faint hiss of wind for 793 00:35:21,360 --> 00:35:24,239 a broken sash, a tiny metallic ring that might have 794 00:35:24,280 --> 00:35:26,320 been a wall child's bell, or might have been nothing. 795 00:35:26,880 --> 00:35:29,079 When I turned to leave the corridor, the well beyond 796 00:35:29,119 --> 00:35:31,960 the narrow, blue litlane felt unchanged in dangerous and equal measure. 797 00:35:32,480 --> 00:35:34,320 A queen's bargain had stitched a piece of the court 798 00:35:34,320 --> 00:35:36,159 back together, and I had traded what had an cued 799 00:35:36,199 --> 00:35:38,360 me to the life I had known. I walked away 800 00:35:38,400 --> 00:35:40,599 with a new fragility and a small scrap folded in 801 00:35:40,639 --> 00:35:43,119 my palm. The house were called to other passers by. 802 00:35:43,800 --> 00:35:45,800 It would open and close, and demand in its fine 803 00:35:45,800 --> 00:35:49,000 papery way the kingdom beneath the wallpaper had been mended 804 00:35:49,039 --> 00:35:51,039 in part, and in that mending, a vacancy had been 805 00:35:51,039 --> 00:35:54,639 opened inside me. Some rescues are salvage, and some are ransome. 806 00:35:55,280 --> 00:35:57,039 I had paid a ransom for a court whose people 807 00:35:57,079 --> 00:35:59,679 would sleep a level easier for a season. The cost 808 00:35:59,719 --> 00:36:02,519 was dear, insensible, and utterly irrevocable. A name loosened, an 809 00:36:02,519 --> 00:36:05,800 identity trimmed, a voice with the missing vowel. My steps 810 00:36:05,840 --> 00:36:07,840 carried me past a mirror again, a reflex of the 811 00:36:07,840 --> 00:36:10,159 old habit. For an instant, I thought I felt the 812 00:36:10,199 --> 00:36:12,079 scrap in my pond t witch as if the little 813 00:36:12,119 --> 00:36:14,119 crown contained a tiny kingdom that would not let me go. 814 00:36:14,280 --> 00:36:17,719 Marked the house hum softly, pleased with its tidy arithmetic. 815 00:36:18,480 --> 00:36:20,679 I had given something whole to place the toned wounds 816 00:36:20,719 --> 00:36:22,719 into architecture, and now I had to live with the 817 00:36:22,719 --> 00:36:25,480 hole where my name had been. Outside the corridor, the 818 00:36:25,480 --> 00:36:28,440 rest of the house went unpretending out abandonment. It kept 819 00:36:28,440 --> 00:36:30,639 its shadows in its film green light and its narrow 820 00:36:30,679 --> 00:36:33,480 blue lit ethics. The wall child would find a new 821 00:36:33,480 --> 00:36:37,079 bargain to pitch. The paper queen, then imprinted, would set 822 00:36:37,079 --> 00:36:39,679 his pill beside a renewed street and watch the court breathe. 823 00:36:40,119 --> 00:36:41,800 I would leave with less to sign my days and 824 00:36:41,840 --> 00:36:43,800 a paper scrap that would not answer when I called 825 00:36:43,840 --> 00:36:46,599 it by name. When I closed the door softly behind me, 826 00:36:46,719 --> 00:36:49,800 the corridor remained obedient to its own rules. The house 827 00:36:49,840 --> 00:36:52,400 had taught me cost a measure again. I carried the 828 00:36:52,440 --> 00:36:54,880 faint crown in my pocket like an impossible coin, and 829 00:36:55,000 --> 00:36:57,119 kept walking, because going back would mean staying in a 830 00:36:57,159 --> 00:36:59,159 place that usked too much, and going forward would mean 831 00:36:59,199 --> 00:37:00,920 living with an absence that would let the rest of 832 00:37:00,920 --> 00:37:03,880 the world slept sometimes into the same thin parchment in 833 00:37:03,920 --> 00:37:06,280 the dark corner of my throat, where the locket had rested, 834 00:37:06,360 --> 00:37:08,400 the silence of a missing name echered and reminded me 835 00:37:08,440 --> 00:37:11,000 that survival Here it was always a narrow letter. I 836 00:37:11,000 --> 00:37:14,679 had paid the kingdom. Beneath the wallpaper had been partially saved. 837 00:37:15,320 --> 00:37:18,239 I had been partially erased. I do not tell this 838 00:37:18,239 --> 00:37:21,679 as triumph. I tell it because the house teaches were transactions, 839 00:37:21,880 --> 00:37:23,880 and because the paper rum stitched itself in you with 840 00:37:23,920 --> 00:37:26,760 fred that smelled of pace, an old lavender. The scrap 841 00:37:26,760 --> 00:37:29,480 on the floor is proof anomen. I escaped the hall, 842 00:37:29,599 --> 00:37:32,639 but something followed, a space where my name used to be, 843 00:37:32,639 --> 00:37:34,800 and a cren that belonged to a tiny court whose 844 00:37:34,840 --> 00:37:37,239 repairs were paid for in pieces of the living in 845 00:37:37,280 --> 00:37:40,559 this house. Rescue is seldom clean, is tidy only in 846 00:37:40,599 --> 00:37:43,519 the way debts always are accounted, balanced and quietly owed. 847 00:37:44,199 --> 00:37:46,239 It's a palace of paper asks again. And if a 848 00:37:46,320 --> 00:37:48,719 tier appears that watches me the way the avenue once watched, 849 00:37:48,760 --> 00:37:51,360 I will know the arithmetic. I will know what the 850 00:37:51,360 --> 00:37:53,159 house will offer and what it will ask in return. 851 00:37:53,679 --> 00:37:56,440 The decision will not become easier. The hunger of the 852 00:37:56,480 --> 00:37:58,880 court will not ease, but I will move through the 853 00:37:58,960 --> 00:38:01,400 narrow hallway, with my untry edges and my pocket cat 854 00:38:01,519 --> 00:38:04,239 safe because some things are repared only by deliberate calls. 855 00:38:04,760 --> 00:38:06,719 This was the final fold of this chapter, and not 856 00:38:06,840 --> 00:38:09,360 the end of the house's appetite. I left with the 857 00:38:09,360 --> 00:38:11,679 scrap and the fragility, and the knowledge that some places 858 00:38:11,760 --> 00:38:13,760 keep their repairs counted in pieces of people, and that 859 00:38:13,840 --> 00:38:16,159 when you save a kingdom is sometimes become a footnote 860 00:38:16,159 --> 00:38:18,920 in its history. The echoes of the house do not stop. 861 00:38:19,480 --> 00:38:21,599 They follow like dust, like a cold film over the 862 00:38:21,639 --> 00:38:24,159 memory of a name. The mirror in the corridor keeps 863 00:38:24,199 --> 00:38:27,760 its crack smile, The paper queen keeps her thread. The 864 00:38:27,840 --> 00:38:29,960 wall child waits with its tin bell and its bool. 865 00:38:30,599 --> 00:38:32,840 I keep walking less holl than I began, carrying the 866 00:38:32,880 --> 00:38:34,639 evidence of a bargain I will wear like a scar. 867 00:38:35,280 --> 00:38:40,039 Follow the echoes for the next episode.