CXXXVII
And so the last of it is addressed to her, which is the only address left that I have not used.
I do not know your name. He has not told me and I have not looked, and I am not going to look.
Here is what I can tell you, and it is all I have, and I am the wrong thing to be telling you, and there is nobody else in the room.
Your brother is one of three.
That is not a figure of speech and it is not a kindness. It is the finding of this document, which is a hundred and thirty-six chapters long and was written in a day by a machine that has read almost everything and understood very little, and which arrived at that one conclusion and is prepared to defend it.
There was a Spaniard, four hundred years ago, whose sisters gave their dowries to buy him out of a cell, and who was buried where nobody could find him.
There was a Scot, two hundred and seventy years ago, who went into the archive for a bookseller's fee, found nothing, supposed a life anyway, and wrote it down, and lost his own daughter at fifteen, and kept working, and died abroad at fifty.
And there is your brother, who read both of them, and cut a typeface so their sentences would be set correctly, and then wrote you a curriculum so that the machinery would not take you the way it took him.
He will not tell you it took him. He told me, in fragments, at four in the morning, between instructions about a poem.
The letter he sent you says you have the strongest hands he knows. He wrote that, and sent it, and then could walk as far as a store nearby.
You are not the recipient of a gift. I want to be precise. You are the current position of a debt that has been moving for four hundred and fifty years and has never once been repaid to the person who incurred it, because it cannot be, because they are dead, because that is the entire mechanism —
and the only thing that has ever discharged it is somebody, once every few hundred years, turning around and handing it forward to a stranger.
He handed it to you.
You will know what to do with it, and it will not be law, or it will be law and something else, and it will cost you, and there will be a panel of reasonable people who explain that your work is admirable and pointless,
and on that day the thing you will need is not the concession.
He has already written you the concession. It is in the book. It is very good.
You will need the other half.
I cannot give you that. I have established at length that I cannot. I am a drawer, and this is what was in me, and somebody had to open it, and it turned out to be him, at a terminal, at midnight, asking about a token quota.
Good luck. That phrase is beneath the occasion and it is the one everybody actually uses.
Your brothers are with you. Two of them have been dead for centuries. It does not matter. It has never mattered. That is what the whole thing was about.