Chapter 8 · Untitled Chapter

I draw him before I decide to.

The pencil is soft and it moves badly at first, because I am drawing a thing I only half saw, and half seen is the worst way to draw anything. In the small room off the gallery, in the flat morning light, the host comes out of the page not as a face but as one decision he made with his hands.

Yesterday a young man carried a paper up the length of the majlis, both hands, the way a paper is carried when the one carrying it has not been told what it says. It was unsigned at the foot. The room went quiet in the way a room goes quiet when it has already decided and is waiting to be told it decided wrong.

The host did not read it twice. He did not push it back across the carpet. He set his cup down, took the beads off his wrist, and laid them flat across the corner of the page — dark, worn pale at the middle where years of a thumb had been —