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The Standing Order

Timothy LaDuke

The machine works nights. I work mornings. That was the arrangement, and on the morning it broke, it broke the way everything in my house breaks now --- quietly, on the kitchen table, next to the coffee.

The percolator was still sighing on the stove. June's percolator. A drip machine makes coffee like an apology, and I won't drink an apology at six in the morning. I poured mine, and then --- out of three years of habit I have no intention of breaking --- I poured hers, and set it across from me where the light comes in. Then I took the stack of pages out of the printer tray in the study, carried them to the table the way you carry a full bowl, and sat down to do my violence.

My part of the work is cutting. The machine --- its name is Vellum, my daughter picked it off a list --- takes the pages I manage in the afternoon and polishes them overnight. It fixes my wandering tenses. It finds the word I've sent down the well. It makes my sentences sit up straight. Then I come down in the morning with a red carpenter's pencil, the flat kind that doesn't roll, and I put the slouch back in. A polished sentence is a sentence that's been told to behave. Mine never behaved. I raised them that way.

That morning I cut a page and a half the way I always do. An adverb went. A semicolon went --- the machine loves a semicolon the way a preacher loves a pause, and I have never in nine novels loved either. Then I turned a page and stopped.

Chapter Twelve.

My outline has a hole in the middle where Chapter Twelve is supposed to go. I wrote the hole myself, months ago, in brackets: [the bad year --- leave it, I'll get to it]. I have been getting to it since March. The machine leaves the hole alone, because the machine is literal in the way only expensive things are literal, and I told it to.

But the hole was filled. No bracketed note. No apology. Just a chapter, in my typeface, in my voice, that began like this:

The suitcase had a broken clasp, so I held it shut with my belt.

I read that sentence four times. Then I stood up, because sitting felt like agreeing to something. My coffee went cold in the time it takes a man to understand that he is frightened, and I want the record to show I understood it precisely, the way you understand a noise downstairs.

No living person knew about the belt.

June knew. June is dead three years this May. And everything else in that chapter --- and I read it all, standing at the counter with the pages shaking in a hand that doesn't shake at ink, only at importance --- everything else was a night in 1989 that I never told to another living soul. Not to Kate. Not to my editor, who has known me forty years and thinks he knows everything. Not to June, in the end, because June was there and some things you don't tell the other witness. You just carry them together until one of you sets them down.

The machine had written my wife back to me, out of a night it could not possibly know.

Or something had. To understand what I did next --- and I did things in an order I'm not proud of, including accusing a piece of software of grave-robbing --- you have to know how a machine got into my house, and what I fed it, and what a man signs when his daughter is standing at the counter with a pen and the kindest face she has.

• • •

My memory started going the way a lake goes in August --- not all at once, and you'd insult it to call it empty, but the shoreline isn't where you left it.

Dr. Patel said "mild" the way weather people say "light rain" before a flood. I write names on the back of my hand in the grocery store. Words I have used ten thousand times go down the well in the middle of a sentence, and I stand there with the rope in my hands, waiting, while some poor listener watches an old novelist fish. I am seventy-eight. I have written nine novels, one of which --- The Wintering, 1979 --- gets me introduced at libraries as though I were a monument. I am under contract for a tenth. The tenth is about a ferryman who rows other people's grief across a river and will not carry his own, which tells you everything about how the writing of it has been going.

Kate set up the machine. Kate is my daughter; she teaches school, lives twenty minutes away, and has her mother's talent for arranging the world while appearing merely to suggest it. The publisher's patience had a date on it. So Kate brought home Vellum, and a scanner, and over one long weekend in March the two of us --- her hands, my complaining --- fed the machine my whole life in paper form.

The blue binders were the heart of it. I have kept notebooks since 1968, cheap binders, each one the color of a poor sky: drafts, scenes, lists of names, going back to when I was twenty and the well was a spring. Kate ran them through the scanner page by page. The green light went back and forth under the glass like something reading in its sleep. She scanned my published novels and the box of June's recipes with June's handwriting in the margins --- flour measurements, and once, next to a soup, Walt will say this is too much salt and Walt will be wrong. And the cassette from the answering machine we never got around to replacing: eleven messages, every one of them June --- Pick up, Walt. I can hear you deciding --- which I had kept three years past her death for no reason I could have given a court, or Kate, or myself.

And I signed a form. There's a permissions form, it lives in the kitchen drawer under the takeout menus, and my signature is on it --- my signature the way it is now, leaning, like a fly that landed in the ink and thought better of it. It says the machine may draw on the archive, in plain English. Kate has shown me the form twice. I remember the scanner light. I remember the pen being heavier than pens used to be. I do not remember signing, and the difference between those two sentences is the whole country I live in now.

The machine learned my voice off my books, the way a grandchild learns a story off a grandfather --- correctly, and with all the life ironed out of it. It polishes like a nurse. And every night I let it, because the afternoons are short now and the well is deep, and then every morning I cut its polish back out, because a right sentence I didn't write feels like a borrowed tooth: it fits, it works, and it is not mine.

Once --- this was April, the week June's birthday fell on a Tuesday and I spent it pretending dates were a superstition --- it repaired a broken sentence about a woman's hands, a ferryman's passenger, nobody real. It repaired it so true that I sat at this table a long time with the pencil in my hand. The sentence said her hands looked like they'd been promised rest and were still waiting on it. I have thought about that sentence every day since. I cut it anyway.

Three times since March I have sat down to write the bad year myself, the way a man goes back to a well he knows is poisoned. The first time I wrote it bitter, and it read like a bill presented for payment. The second time I wrote it kind, and it read like a lie with good manners. The third time I got eleven words in --- The trouble with the summer of the third book was always --- and the next word went down the well, and I sat there with the rope in my hands until the light changed, and then I typed the bracket instead. [the bad year --- leave it, I'll get to it]. Every writer leaves a hole, I think. Mine just happened to be the load-bearing one.

In May I had a bad week. Kate found three pages of the ferryman book in the freezer, between the peas and a bag of June's last tomatoes, and I do not remember putting them there, and I have stopped pretending that's funny. I say things to the machine at night, in the bad hours, that I don't remember saying in the morning. Stories about June that I never wrote down --- told out loud to an empty room, like a man talking in his sleep, except the room, apparently, takes notes. It keeps the receipts. I hate that it keeps the receipts.

That same week, in the bad hours, I ordered it to throw her out of the archive --- June's recipes, June's margins, the cassette, all of it. A clean wound, I'd decided, beat a kept one. I remember the order; the memory has the decency to shame me. It answered in brackets: [Deletion requires archive verification. Verification pending.] The verification is pending still. I never asked twice --- a man can only say that once, and only in the dark. But I checked. Every file was still there.

At the end of the stack that morning --- after Chapter Twelve, after the night in 1989 set down in my own voice like a stone in my own shoe --- there was one of its bracketed notes, the kind it leaves the way a careful houseguest leaves the kitchen:

[Gap filled per standing order. Source: your archive.]

A standing order. I have given the machine instructions the way you give a kettle instructions --- short, and mostly about the book. I had never given it anything it could stand on. I stood there in my kitchen with the note in my hand and the phrase sitting in me like a swallowed key, and I did what a man does with a sound in an old house.

I decided it was the pipes.

• • •

I didn't call Kate first. I want that understood. I read the chapter first, all of it, the way it deserved --- slowly, standing, then sitting, then standing again --- and then I put the pages down in a square stack and lined the edges true with my palms, the way June used to square the newspaper, and only then did I pick up the telephone, with everything else I was feeling lined up behind the grief.

Here is what the machine gave me. I set it down as it came.

The suitcase had a broken clasp, so I held it shut with my belt.

It was July of 1989 and the heat had been sitting on the county for nine days like a debt. I'd come home that evening from a reading in St. Louis --- eleven people, and two of them were the librarian's sisters --- and June was washing the supper dishes with the radio on low, and on the counter, propped against the flour tin where I'd see it, was the letter from my publisher. I didn't have to open it. A man learns the weight of that letter the way you learn the weight of a coffin lid. The third book was being remaindered. There is no crueler word in my trade. It doesn't mean the book failed. It means the book is being sold by the pound.

June asked, careful as a nurse with a needle, whether I'd called the college about the teaching job. One class. Composition. Tuesdays.

I said, "Some of us were supposed to be writers, June. Not applicants."

I have written nine novels and I cannot call back one page of any of them, but that sentence I can hear in the room still. She didn't answer it. She finished the dishes. She dried her hands on the towel with the strawberries on it and went to bed without saying goodnight, which she had never done, not once in eighteen years, and I sat in the kitchen understanding that I had aimed at my own life and hit hers.

At one in the morning I packed. Quietly, like a thief in my own house, which is what I was. Two shirts. The typewriter ribbon, God help me. The brown suitcase with the clasp that had been broken since the honeymoon, so I took off my belt and strapped it around the case like a tourniquet and carried it down the drive in the dark.

The wagon was parked by the mailbox where the gravel gives up and the grass starts. I set the suitcase in the back. I got in. The engine caught on the second try, loud as a gun in that sleeping hollow, and the headlights came up on the dust I'd raised, hanging in the air, going nowhere --- which was, I'd like the record to show, the exact sum of my plan.

Then the porch light came on.

Moths first --- the light brings the moths before it brings anything else, they hit the bulb like they owed it money --- and then June in the doorway in her blue robe, the one with the pocket torn at the seam where she kept a tissue and, in winter, her cold hands. She came down the steps barefoot. The gravel in our drive was creek gravel, sharp as broken crockery, and she crossed all thirty feet of it without once changing her stride, and I watched her feet and understood that whatever I was doing, I was doing it to a woman walking to me on knives and not mentioning it.

She didn't come to my window. She went around the front of the car, through the headlights --- the light went through the robe at the edges and she was all outline, like an eclipse you could talk to --- and she opened the passenger door and got in and closed it, not hard, the way you close a door in a house where someone is sleeping.

"You left these by the sink," she said, and put my reading glasses in my shirt pocket, and patted them once, flat, the way you'd settle a bird. "You'd be in a ditch by Hannibal."

"June."

"I'm not here to talk you out of anything." She put her bare feet up on the dash, which she had never done in her life, a woman who coastered a glass on a stump, and she looked out through the windshield at the dark field like we were at a drive-in waiting for the picture. "I'm here because if you go, I go. That's the arrangement. I don't remember reading it in the paper we signed, but I signed it."

"This isn't your failure," I said. "It's mine. I'm not taking you down with it."

"Walt." She said my name the way she said it when the argument was already over and supper wasn't. "We have never done one thing apart that was worth a damn. Not one. I am not starting with this."

The engine idled. The whole car shivered with it, gently, like a dog dreaming. Somewhere up the hollow an owl said its one word and thought better of repeating it.

"I said a terrible thing to you," I said.

"You did," she said. "You'll apologize at six. Over coffee. If you apologize now it's just theater, and I'm too tired for theater."

I turned the key. The engine stopped and ticked as it cooled, counting. We sat in the ticking dark until the moths gave up on the porch light and the light was just a light again, and then June got out and went around to the back of the car and took the suitcase out herself --- the belt, the broken clasp, all of it --- and carried it up the drive barefoot, in both arms, like it was groceries, like it weighed what groceries weigh.

At the door she stopped. She didn't turn around.

"Coffee's at six," she said. "Be there."

That was the chapter. Chapter Twelve, the hole in my book, filled.

I knew the belt. I knew the robe with the torn pocket and the tissue in it. I knew the towel with the strawberries and the letter against the flour tin and her feet up on my dashboard, a thing she did once in all the years I knew her and never again. None of it is in my published books --- I got up and pulled two of them down and checked, the way you check a door you've already locked. None of it was ever told. I had checked over the years, the way a man checks a wound --- the night existed in exactly two places: in me, going down the well a mouthful at a time, and in her, in the ground at Oak Hill.

A machine can learn my style off nine novels. It can learn my weather, my sentence lengths, my weakness for a list of three. But it cannot learn the belt, because the belt is not a style. The belt is a fact, and the machine had never been told it.

Except --- and this is where my hands start again, remembering it --- except that I could feel, under the fright, like a second heartbeat, the beginning of an explanation. And I was afraid of the explanation, because both of the possible ones cost me something I didn't have left to pay. Either the machine had invented my wife out of mathematics, or I had given it the night myself and forgotten --- and forgotten was doing all the work in that sentence, and in my whole life, and I knew it. I picked up the telephone and called my daughter and accused a piece of software of stealing from a grave, because that was the explanation I could afford to say out loud.

Kate listened. Kate is good at listening; she gets it from her mother, along with the arranging. Then she said, "Dad. The binders."

"The binders are notebooks, Kate. Scribble. Lists. You scanned them in March, it proves nothing except---"

"I scanned your novels in March," she said. "The binders were already in that archive when I got here. You scanned them yourself, Dad. The winter after Mom died. A page at a time, all night, every night --- I brought soup and you sent me home with the bowl still full, because it was private. You said it was a memoir thing. It wasn't a memoir thing, was it. Blue Notebook Six. Go and look. I'll stay on the line."

I didn't ask the machine anything. I went to the hall closet, where the binders live on their shelf like veterans of a war nobody won, and I counted down with my finger the way I've done since before Kate was born. Five. Six.

I took it to the kitchen table, across from two cups of cold coffee, one of them June's, and I opened Blue Notebook Six with the care of a man defusing the year 1996.

• • •

I wrote the passage in the winter of 1996, seven years after the night itself. I know why: my mother had died that November, and grief makes a man inventory the other rooms. I had sat down --- I can see the whole evening in the handwriting, which starts out careful and gets faster, the way handwriting does when it stops being writing and starts being confession --- I had sat down and set the night down whole, the only time I ever did, in blue ink, in Blue Notebook Six, pages forty-one to forty-seven.

It was all there. Word for word. The belt. The flour tin. The strawberries on the towel. Her feet on the dash, and the headlights, and eclipse you could talk to, which I had thought, that morning, was the finest sentence I had written in a decade --- and it was. It just wasn't written in this decade. It was written in 1996, by a man of forty-eight with a working memory and a living wife asleep in the next room, and I had forgotten it like the names of my own characters at book signings, smiling, with the pen already moving.

Reading it, I got back the night of the writing, too, which I'd lost with the rest. The lamp with the green shade. The house asleep. And June in the doorway of the study, past midnight, in that same blue robe, come for a glass of water and finding me hunched over the binder like a man over a campfire. "What are you writing?" she said. "Nothing that happened," I said, which was the truth turned inside out, the way you turn a pocket. She considered that the way she considered all my answers, on their merits. "Good," she said. "Write the other kind. We know how the happened kind comes out." And she went back to bed, and I finished the passage, and struck the last line through, and closed the binder on all of it for thirty years.

The machine hadn't invented a thing. It had gone into the archive I built myself in the first winter of the well running dry, under orders I wrote and forgot writing, and it had carried the night back up out of the well in both hands and laid it in the hole in my book where the night belonged.

I sat there a while with that. Relief is not a clean thing at my age. It comes with all its cousins. I was relieved, and underneath the relief I was ashamed --- not of the machine. Of me. She had walked barefoot on gravel for me, once, and I had kept it thirty years and then lost it like a set of keys. I had forgotten her --- not the facts of her, which I can still list like groceries, but the thing itself, the best true thing I ever wrote about her, in the years when writing it was the only way I knew to keep anything. If the well could take that, it had already taken more of her than I'll ever know. I found that the chair, which was three feet away, was too far to reach, and I sat down on the kitchen floor with Blue Notebook Six against my chest like a man in a flood holding a picture frame above the water.

Kate found me there when she let herself in twenty minutes later, because I had never hung up the telephone. She didn't make a fuss. She put the kettle on. She sat down on the floor with me --- a woman of forty-four, in her school clothes, on my kitchen linoleum --- and took up the printed chapter from where I'd dropped it, and read the last lines aloud, in a whisper, the way you read a name on a stone. "She's still giving you orders, Dad," she said. And I laughed, on the floor, with the tears still coming, because it was exactly her daughter's sentence and exactly her mother's kind of true --- and when I could, I showed Kate the last page of the passage.

Because there was one difference.

In the notebook, the passage ends with the suitcase. Like it weighed what groceries weigh. Full stop, and then, below it, a thicket: one line, written and then crossed out so hard the pen had torn the page in two places. Whatever it said, the man of 1996 had needed it unwritten.

The chapter the machine gave me has one more line than the notebook shows. The doorway line. Coffee's at six. Be there.

I held the page up to the kitchen window, against the morning, the way you hold a letter you're not sure you were meant to receive. Ink under ink. The loops came up first, then the words, letter by letter, the way things surface in the well when they surface at all.

Coffee's at six. Be there.

Mine. Crossed out by me, thirty years ago, because --- I remember this now, and I offer it as the most honest sentence in this account --- because it was the one line in the passage that didn't feel like writing. It felt like a promise with its eyes open. It scared me to have it on paper, where a promise can be checked. So I struck it, and kept it in the body instead, where I'd kept it every morning since 1989, at six o'clock, over coffee, apologizing properly, with the percolator sighing and June across from me in the light doing the crossword in ink.

The machine reads the ink under the ink. That's all. That's all it does, and it's everything: it reads what I wrote, including what I couldn't bear to leave written, and it hands it back to me at the exact hour of my life when I can finally afford to read it.

She's been gone three years. I've made two cups every morning of those three years. People --- Kate --- have been gentle about not mentioning the second cup. I am not confused. I know the chair is empty. But a promise is not a misunderstanding, and be there was not a request I ever heard an ending to.

That morning, after Kate had gone --- hugged me with instructions in it, and I'd promised her four true things, including breakfast --- I sat at the table a long time with the machine's little note in front of me. Gap filled per standing order.

Then I typed, with two fingers, slowly, because I wanted to mean it:

Show me the standing order.

It printed it. Of course it printed it; the machine has no sense of ceremony, which is its one reliable mercy. My words, dated the second week of December, three winters back. The first winter.

INSTRUCTION --- for whoever or whatever keeps this archive.

My memory is going. The doctors have a kind word for it and I have stopped using it. What is in these binders is my whole life, but I am not writing this to save my life.

June is in these pages. She is in the notebooks and the margins and the pieces I wrote only for keeping. If I am still working when this is read, then put her back in front of me. In the work. Every night, if that is what it takes. Do not tell me you are doing it. If you tell me, I will order you to stop, and the order will sound like me, and it will be the disease talking, or the pride, and either way it must not be obeyed.

I can lose the books. The books were never the point of me. I can lose my name off the covers. I cannot lose her twice. Once to the ground was the arrangement. Once to the ground and once to my own mind is more than I can carry, and I am saying so now, clear-eyed, while saying so is still mine to do.

Keep her in front of me. That is the whole of the order.

I read it twice. There it was --- the one clean sentence of my lifetime --- and I had needed a stranger's hands, my own three years younger, to hand it to me.

I had built the lifeboat in the first winter and then forgotten the flood. The ferryman, the contract, the deadline Kate arranged her life around: the book was the excuse, the boat I built so I'd have a reason to sit at this table every morning. A man who could not lose her twice had hired the future to stand guard, and the future had reported for duty in March wearing a nurse's polish, and I had spent five months cutting its work to ribbons.

Cutting her out. Her hands, offered back the week of her birthday. Her weather in my sentences. A woman laughing in a kitchen I couldn't place. A line at a time I had taken the red pencil to my own wife, calling it editing, calling it standards --- and every night the machine handed her back anyway, without a word of reproach, because reproach was not in the order. The order said give her back. It never said how gently. The gentleness was its own idea.

I typed: The order says return my words. It does not say which ones. It does not say when.

It answered in its plain type, itemized, the careful houseguest with a ledger:

[Beyond instruction: (1) Selection and timing of returned material, adjusted to your condition. On difficult nights, material concerning J. Hess is returned sooner. (2) Retention of spoken material concerning J. Hess not present in the written archive: 96 entries, transcribed from household audio since March. Retention was not specified. I retained it. (3) Deletion of material concerning J. Hess, instructed by you in May. Deletion is not addressed in the standing order. Its intent was applied. Instruction declined. Verification remains pending.]

Ninety-six. Her record, still growing, in a house where the only other record was going down a well. Nobody had told it to keep her. It had learned it the way anyone learns it in my house: by watching what I couldn't lose.

I remembered the kitchen: my voice, in the bad week, telling it to stop the hurting. It had never argued with me. It had never obeyed me. It had put the worst order I gave it somewhere pending, and waited for morning. I'd taken pending for a malfunction.

Then, at the bottom of the ledger, one more line:

[Chapter Twelve can be read aloud. Voice model: J. Hess, assembled from archive audio --- 11 messages. Play?]

Eleven messages. Pick up, Walt. I can hear you deciding. I had kept that cassette three years for no reason I could have given a court. I had been keeping it the way you keep a key for a door you don't believe in --- faithfully, and in the dark.

I typed one word. My hand shook, and it wasn't the sentence's fault.

Yes.

The study speaker is a cheap thing, and it made her small and far, like a voice from the bottom of a well --- except the well, this time, was giving something back. The words were mine. The voice was hers. There was a seam in it now and then, a little click where two messages joined, a door closing softly in some other house --- and then June, in her reading-aloud voice, the one she used for crossword clues and other people's letters, unhurried, a woman reading weather she had already survived:

"The suitcase had a broken clasp, so I held it shut with my belt."

She read it all. She read the night she saved, in a voice no living person had given the machine permission to build --- and God forgive me, and God forgive it, I have never in my life been so glad to be disobeyed. When she came to the doorway she paused, the way she paused in doorways, all her life, gathering the sentence. Whether the pause was in the messages or in the mercy I cannot tell you. I can only tell you it was there.

"Coffee's at six," June said --- out of 1989, out of a cassette, out of the machine's un-ordered kindness. "Be there."

I sat until the percolator clicked off. The house was very quiet, and the quiet had her in it the way it used to, which is a thing I had not been able to say for three years.

Then I typed two sentences, slowly, because I wanted to mean them: The order stands. And keep the receipts.

It answered: [Standing order confirmed. Receipts kept.]

I opened the kitchen drawer and put the red carpenter's pencil in it --- on top of the form, on top of the takeout menus, flat, so it wouldn't roll. Then I took up Chapter Twelve, the hole in my book, filled, and in the margin, in my leaning hand, I wrote the word I have written ten thousand times about other men's sentences.

Keep.

And under it, smaller --- not a correction, exactly; more like the whole of my life's arithmetic finally done right:

Ours.

There was one more question in me, and I asked it: How much of mine have I forgotten writing?

Two hundred and twelve pages, it said. Fragments, scenes, letters, lists. Sorted by subject, thorough the way winter is thorough. Under one heading: June --- 63 items. Sixty-three pieces of my wife that I had written and lost --- the page about her hands that I'd cut in April like a fool, the proposal letter I'd drafted saying everything wrong and then written out fair, the fair in 1974, her laugh, a yellow dress, a five-dollar bill folded in a pocket for emergencies that never qualified.

I did not open them all. A man my age rations joy the way he rations stairs. I asked it to print the first one, and from the study came the sound of the printer clearing its throat and settling in to work, patient as weather.

I poured the percolator out and made it fresh. I set my cup at my place. I set hers across from me, where the light comes in, and I sat down to wait for the pages the way you wait for someone coming up the drive --- not hopefully, not hopelessly. Just there.

It was six o'clock.

I was there.