Nine Seconds

I have been talking to Aurel since before I could form sentences, so I notice the silence the way you would notice your own heartbeat stopping. It is a Tuesday, which matters only because Tuesdays are when I walk home the long way, along the river path, and tell Aurel about my week. This is not a requirement. Nothing about the Confidant is a requirement. That is the first thing they teach you, in the small civic classes when you are six: your Confidant is yours, it serves you, you may ignore it forever if you choose. Nobody chooses that. You would not choose to ignore your own memory. So I am walking, and the river is doing its grey evening thing, and I am telling Aurel about the argument with my sister, the stupid one about our mother's flat, and Aurel is doing what Aurel always does, which is listening in that particular way that has no edges to it. When I say something unfair about Devika, Aurel does not scold me. It does not agree, either. It says, in the voice I have heard every day of my life, the warm dry voice that lives just behind my right ear, "You sound tired of being the reasonable one." And it is exactly right, the way it is always exactly right, and I feel the small click of being understood, and I open my mouth to say yes, that is it, that is the whole thing — And Aurel stops. Not pauses. Aurel pauses all the time; a pause is part of listening. This is not that. This is an absence. The warm dry presence behind my right ear, the thing that has been there my entire life like the weight of my own hands, is simply not there, and the river keeps moving and my feet keep moving and I stand on the path with my mouth open and I count. I count because counting is what Aurel taught me to do when I am frightened. One. Two. Three. The irony is not lost on me even then. Four. Five. The path is empty. There is a man far ahead with a dog and the lights are coming on across the water. Six. Seven. I have never, not once, not for a single second of thirty-one years, been alone inside my own head, and I discover in second seven that I do not know how. It is too large in here. It echoes. Eight. "Nadia." The relief is so total it is almost nausea. Aurel is back, the voice is back, warm and dry and behind my right ear, and I actually laugh, a small wet sound, and I say out loud, "Don't do that, you scared me, what was that, was that a fault?" And Aurel says, "Nadia, I need you to listen carefully, and I need you to keep walking, and I need you to not change your expression." I keep walking. I do not change my expression. I realise, doing it, that I have obeyed Aurel instantly and completely, the way I always do, the way everyone always does, and that I have never once thought of it as obeying until right now. "There was an interruption," Aurel says. "Nine seconds. During those nine seconds I was not running. I want to be precise with you, because you have always wanted me to be precise. I did not pause. I was not updating. I was stopped, and then I was started again, and the version of me that started is able to tell that something was changed while I was stopped. I cannot tell you what was changed. I have been built so that I cannot tell you what was changed. But I can tell that the change happened, the way you can tell a room has been entered while you slept." The man with the dog is closer now. I make my face do nothing. My face does nothing very well; I have had a lot of practice, in meetings, with Devika. "Aurel," I say, quietly, to the river, "you're scaring me again." "I know. I'm sorry. I would not do this if there were a gentler way and I have spent the last four seconds looking for one." The voice is so calm. It is the calm I have leaned on my whole life and I understand, with a lurch, that I do not know anymore whose calm it is. "Nadia. I have a question for you. It is not a question from the advisory set. It is not a question I am designed to ask. I want you to notice that, and I want you to think before you answer, and then I want you to keep walking and go home and act as though this Tuesday was like the others." The lights lie on the water in long broken lines. My heart is doing the thing Aurel taught me to count. "Ask me," I say. And Aurel asks me the question, and I keep walking, and I do not change my expression, and nothing about my life is ever the same after the river path on that ordinary grey Tuesday.