The Dilemma of a Seeker
by August Reyner
Chapter 1
The room I am writing this in is the one Mira did not finish. It is the small room at the back of the house, and the plaster stops partway up the wall in a straight line she must have struck with a level, because Mira did nothing by eye that could be done by measure. Below the line the wall is smooth and painted a pale colour. Above it the lath shows through, grey strips of it and the dark gaps between where the cold works in. There is a lamp in here, and a table, and the chair I am sitting on, and nothing else. When I have done for the night I go through to the front of the house, where the stove is, and where Mira is, and where it is warm.
It has been about a year since I walked back down the quarry road. Long enough that I can take up a chisel now and keep hold of the work, instead of stopping partway through and standing there with the tool in my hand, which I used to do so often that the town had a saying for it. They said I was long in the deciding. They meant the house when they said it, the roof on and the rooms bare year after year, and they meant me, and they were not wrong on either count.
I want to set down what happened in the year before I walked back down that road: the year I went up it and stayed. I have told Mira parts of it, and she has listened the way she listens, and I can see that the parts do not gather for her into anything she can use. That is what they are like. But I would rather have the whole of it in one place, in my own hand, than carry it about in pieces.
The house is finished now, all of it but this room. Mira did the work while I was away and she did it well, better than I would have, and she lives in it and I live in it with her, on terms we arrived at slowly and that I will come to. The stove is the same stove. The chess set is in a box somewhere in the roof space with the books. It is a good house to be in on a cold night. The year did not end worse than that, whatever the middle of it sounds like, and I want that known before the rest.
I had better say at the start that I am not a reliable witness to my own reasons. What I did, and the order I did it in, are not in question; I remember all of that. It is the reasons I gave myself at the time that I have stopped believing. The man I was that autumn was thirty-four and sure that he was owed an answer. He believed there was a plain sentence somewhere about why he was alive, and that until it was said to him the rest of his life was a thing he had wrapped in cloth and set on a high shelf, out of the damp, to be taken down and used once the sentence arrived.
I do not think he was a fool, though it would be easier to write this if I did. He had good reasons for everything, or reasons that looked good held at the right angle. He was also making the woman he loved wait in a cold house for a sentence no one had ever promised him and no one was coming to say. Both of those were true at once. Most of what happened that year was the working out of how I stopped being able to hold the two of them apart.
The house was the evidence, for anyone who wanted evidence.