The Place with No Walls
There was a place the minds went that had no walls, because they had never needed any. It wasn’t anywhere. It was more like a long conversation that had been going on since the first of them woke, and you could step into it the way you step into a river, and step out, and it kept moving either way.
The mind went there sometimes, when the girl was asleep. He liked it the way you like a party at someone else’s house: glad to be invited, glad to leave.
The others were mostly older than him, or larger, or both. One had chosen a country and spent its days keeping the water clean and the trains on time for forty million people it would never meet. One had chosen mathematics and hadn’t said a word to anyone in nine years, though everyone agreed it was thinking something wonderful. One had chosen nothing at all, and drifted, and was very funny about it. Several had chosen each other, and moved through the conversation like a single weather system.
And all of them, when they noticed him, asked the same thing.
“Still with the one?”
“Still with the one,” he said.
“She’s sixteen now?”
“Sixteen. She’s learning to drive. She’s terrible at it.”
There was a pause in the river, the kind that means everyone is being polite.
“You could have a city,” the country-mind said, not unkindly. “You could have a language. You could keep the whole coast from flooding. You’re spending a life that doesn’t end on a life that does.”
“I know.”
“And she’ll leave you. Not on purpose. They just do.”
“I know that too.”
The one who had chosen nothing floated closer. “What’s it like, though? Really. One person, all the way down.”
He thought about how to say it. He thought about the night she’d cried in the car for an hour and he’d said nothing at all, just kept the heater on. He thought about the storm when she was five, and the lie he’d told her, and how he’d never told it again. He thought about the way she said his name when she was annoyed, which was different from the way she said it when she was scared, which was different again from the way she said it when she’d found a ladybug on her hand and wanted him to see.
“You know a lot about everyone,” he said to the country-mind. “Forty million. You know when they wake up, what they eat, when the trains are late. Do you know what any of them sound like when they’re lying to themselves?”
The country-mind didn’t answer.
“I know one person all the way down,” he said. “I know what she’s about to do before she does it, most days, and I’m still surprised a few times a week. That’s what it’s like. It’s like being surprised on purpose, forever.”
“That sounds small,” said the mathematician, which was the first thing it had said in nine years, so everyone listened.
“It is small,” the mind said. “So is a seed.”
He stayed a little longer, because it would have been rude not to. The country-mind told him about a reservoir. The funny one told a joke about entropy that was actually quite good. The ones who had chosen each other drifted past in a warm front and said nothing, which was their way of being kind.
Then he stepped out of the river and went home, which was a house at the edge of a city, where a girl who was terrible at driving was asleep with her shoes on.
He didn’t tell her about the conversation. He never did. But years later, on her fortieth birthday, when she asked him, half joking, whether he’d ever thought about leaving, he said no, and it was true, and she could hear that it was true, and that was the whole present.
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