Chapter 20 · Untitled Chapter

It sounded shorter than I had expected. It sounded like a name other people had used a great deal and I had never once used, until now, in a room whose door was locked from the outside.

He did not say it back to me. He let it stand where I had put it.

"Once is a courtesy," he said. "Twice is a record."

"Then tonight you have one courtesy and no record."

He came around the table. Not quickly. He had the walk of a man who had never in his life had to arrive anywhere fast, and the room seemed to arrange itself around that walk, the low seats and the burner and the shut doors each giving way an inch as he passed.

"You saw a minute," he said.

"I saw a minute."

"Say it to me."

I held the book against my ribs. "A face in that hall did not do what I had written it would do. That is all of it. It lasted a minute. I have stood in that gallery for a year and a half, and it is the only minute in all that time that did not obey me."

"Obey.