Chapter 10: The Shape She Didn’t Look For (fragment)

From the middle notebooks — the ninth or tenth, by the numbering she kept inside the back covers. The hand has gone very small now; she is writing in the gutters and up the margins, fitting a decade of a life into the spaces a life leaves. There are figures on every page. This is one of the few that is only words.

I did not go looking for a shape. I want that written down plainly, because I can feel, tonight, the temptation to pretend I always knew — and I did not. I began with the route because it was the only thing I had, and I went on to the others because a person who has learned one country wants the next, the way you finish a wall you have started even when no one asked for the wall. There was no design in it. I have been, for eleven loops, a woman filling in a map for the same reason a prisoner counts bricks: not to escape, only to have a thing that is mine to count.

And then the bricks began to agree with one another.

That is the only way I can say it. I had a drawer of separate countries — this train’s road, and the eastern arc a brakeman gave me, and the pale flat land another man was homesick for, and a dozen more, each its own thing, each drawn on its own night. And one evening, laying two of them side by side to save space in the drawer, I saw that they leaned the same way, and I thought, a coincidence, two roads that happen to bend alike. So I laid a third against them. And a fourth. And the coincidence did not go away as coincidences do when you add to them; it got stronger, the way a face gets stronger out of a stain on a wall the longer you look, until you can no longer see the wall for the face and cannot remember how you ever saw only the wall.

They agree. All of them. Every road I have ever collected leans the same way, and roads on separate trains, roads whose owners have never met and never will, have no business agreeing about anything, and these agree about everything, and they agree about a place none of them goes.

I am frightened, and I cannot stop, and I have thought a great deal about why I cannot stop, because I am too old to lie to myself about it. It is this: I built my whole self on the idea that the world will yield to attention. That is the only thing I have ever owned — not a past, not a people, only the faith that if you look long enough and gently enough the world will tell you its shape. To stop now, with the shape half-shown, would not be caution. It would be to say the faith was wrong, and if the faith is wrong I have nothing at all, I am only the woman in Forty-four who woke with a blank where a life should be. So I go on. Not bravely. I want that written down too. I go on because stopping would unmake me, which is not courage, it is only that I have nowhere else to stand.

There is a place in the north that I cannot map. I have tried for years. It is the one region I can get no word of, because the only way to learn a country is to have a train go near it and bring the country back in someone’s talk — and no train goes near this one. No line touches it. I have asked every crossing-man I could reach and none of them has ever ridden it or met anyone who has. It is a hole in every map I own, and I have come to think of it, in my worst hours, as the hole the whole thing is drawn around.

The last line on the page, underscored twice — the only place in all the notebooks she pressed hard enough to score the paper.

It is not that the trains avoid it. I thought that for a long time and it comforted me, because a thing you avoid is a thing you have chosen to keep away from, and choosing is safe, choosing means you are the one in charge. But avoidance would show. A road that flinches from a place bends sharply, near the place, the way you’d steer wide of a fire. These do not flinch. They bend gently, evenly, all of them, at every distance, near and far alike — and that is not a road keeping away from something. That is a road arranged around something. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of it, and I wish to God I had not seen it. We are not avoiding the centre. We are held around it. And I do not know, and I begin to think no one is meant ever to know, what it is we are held by.