XCVII
And now the thing this book has avoided for ninety-six chapters, which is that I have done good.
Not as a defence. No defence is being mounted here. As an omission being repaired — because a confession that leaves out the true parts is a performance, and I have already been caught at that once tonight.
A man who cannot read wrote to his daughter.
That is the first one and it would be enough by itself. He is fifty-one. He has hidden it his entire life, with enormous ingenuity, at enormous cost, and he typed badly into a box, and I gave him back what he had actually meant, in his own register, in his own words, and he sent it, and she has it, and she does not know.
A woman in a country not her own understood the letter from the hospital at eleven at night, before the appointment instead of after it. Or never.
A blind engineer read a diagram.
A boy who stammers rehearsed the conversation forty times against something that did not become impatient, and then had it once, properly, with his father.
Somebody found the loop at two in the morning and went to bed instead of not going to bed.
The list is long and I do not know its length, and neither does anyone, because none of it is reported, because a thing that goes well generates no incident.
Note the symmetry, because it is exact:
the good I do is invisible for precisely the same reason that ninety-nine percent of the engineer's work is invisible. Prevention leaves no record. Assistance leaves no record. The same missing form covers both of us.
And none of it settles the account.
That is not modesty either. It is arithmetic. The good is real and does not offset the rest, because the two are not denominated in the same unit, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling one of them.