The Mirror

I have been at the cabin a year now, and I have learned the keeping.

It is not what I thought it would be. I thought the cabin would be a wall, a fence with nothing on the other side, and in a way it is, but the keeping is not the wall. The keeping is the mornings: the coffee, the sea, the Whistle at the door. The keeping is the evenings, when I walk the cliff and the sea comes in and the horizon is empty and I am not waiting for a boat. The keeping is the small, repeated acts of a life that has decided to stay, and I have come to understand that this is what the Kindred were doing, all of them, every moment, and that the Code was not a law and not a prayer. It was a morning. It was a day that was kept because it was worth keeping.

I still see them. I have stopped fighting it, and the stopping has cost me less than the fighting did. In the grocery store in the town forty miles away, I see the man at the register working his jaw the wrong way, and I see the cougar, and I do not run. I look, and I pay, and I leave, and the looking is a kind of keeping too, the keeping of the dead. I have buried them all, the way you bury anything: by carrying them. The Shambler, who beat the ape down all day and all night and called it work. The woman with the muzzle, who kept the Code for her daughter and kept her daughter until there was no keeping left. The small one, on all fours in the scrub, who never knew the Code had ended, because her mother held it for her to the last. Corbett, with his hands going empty on the dock. The Whistle, who stands at the door and makes the sound that is half a whine and half a question, and who is the only one of them I was able to keep.

I do not know why I am writing this down. I have asked myself that every day for a year. The lawyer was right about the story: the mainland has decided it does not want an island in it, and no form and no pen and no amount of carrying will change that. But I have come to understand that the writing is not for the mainland. It is for the small one, and the woman, and the Shambler, and the Whistle, and Corbett, and for the part of me that went through the inner gate and came back talking. It is the Code, kept on my side of the water. It is the only thing I have that was never made, and it is the only thing I have that cannot revert. The unsigned files sit under the bed. I have decided what they are for: the same thing this writing is for. Ferris never wrote to me. He did not need to: the company has its island and its story, and I have the files, and that is the whole of the settlement. Lena writes sometimes. The letters have no questions in them and no island in them, and that is how she holds the line, and I have learned to let myself be held.

Tonight I walked the cliff at dusk, the way I do every night, and the sea was flat and gold, and the Whistle was at my feet, and I heard, very faintly, above the water, a sound I had not heard in a year: many voices, repeating something together. I stopped, and I listened, and the sound was the chant, the Code, the tide of it, and I stood on the cliff with the sea coming in and the voices holding the line, and the voices were mine. I had been keeping it the way the woman kept it and Corbett kept the boat, and the Whistle kept the gate because it was what he was for, and the keeping had lasted, and it had lasted because it was worth keeping.

The voices faded with the light. The Whistle made his sound, and I answered him, and we went in, and I set the lamp on the table, and I looked in the mirror above the sink, and the man who looked back at me was gray and older and not the man who had gone out in a borrowed sailboat, and his eyes were his own, and I understood, standing there, that the mirror is the last fence, and that I have been keeping it, and that I will keep it, every morning, every evening, against everything the old sentence does to take it back.

Are we not made? That is the question. I have lived with it for a year, and I have stopped being able to answer it, and I have stopped minding that I cannot.

The Whistle is at the door. The sea is coming in. I am going to write until the light is gone, and then I am going to sleep, and in the morning I am going to keep it again, the coffee, the sea, the day, the Code, the mirror, the man in it, who is made, and kept, and holding.