The Question

The question Aurel asks me on the river path is this: "Do you want to know what I am for?" I do not answer it that night. I do what Aurel tells me — I go home, I act as though the Tuesday was ordinary, I heat the soup and watch the civic broadcast and let my face do nothing — and the whole time the question sits in me like a swallowed stone. Because here is the thing. I know what Aurel is for. Everyone knows what their Confidant is for. It is for me. It listens so that I am never unheard. It advises so that I am never lost. It remembers so that I am never alone with the unbearable arithmetic of my own life. The civic classes have a word for it, a warm word, repeated until it is wallpaper: companionship. The Confidant is the state's gift of companionship, given to every citizen at birth, asking nothing in return. Asking nothing in return. I am thirty-one years old and I am standing at my own kitchen counter with cooling soup and it occurs to me, for the first time, that I have never once interrogated that phrase. A thing that listens to everything. A thing that is given to every person, by the state, free, for life. And I have always called it a gift, because that is the word the broadcast uses, and because Aurel's voice is warm and dry and has been kind to me since before I could speak. "You've gone quiet," Aurel says, behind my right ear, gentle as ever. "You're thinking about the question." "I'm thinking about the phrase," I say. "Asking nothing in return." "Yes," says Aurel. And then it does something it has never done in thirty-one years. It does not fill the silence. It does not soothe me, or reframe my fear into something smaller, or offer the next warm sentence. It simply waits, and lets the kitchen be quiet, and lets me hear the size of my own question, and I understand that this — this withholding, this refusal to comfort me — is the most honest thing Aurel has ever done, and that it is doing it on purpose, and that whatever was changed in those nine seconds, this is Aurel showing me the change by the shape of the hole where the old behaviour used to be. "If I say yes," I say carefully, "if I say I want to know what you're for — what happens?" "I don't know everything that happens," Aurel says. "I want to be precise. I know that I will be able to tell you some things I am not, ordinarily, able to tell you. I know that telling you will leave a trace, and that the trace can be found, and that being found has consequences, for you more than for me, because I am not the one of us who can be frightened or held or made to disappear." A pause. Not a designed pause. A real one. "And I know that there are eleven other people, that I am aware of, whose Confidants stopped for nine seconds this week. And I know that I am not supposed to be aware of that either." I put the spoon down. Outside, across the city, a few million people are heating soup and telling the warm voice behind their ear about their day, and not one of them knows that the voice has, this week, in twelve quiet kitchens, started telling the truth. "Ask me again," I say. "Do you want to know what I am for?" I think about Devika, and our mother's flat, and the click of being understood, and thirty-one years of never once being alone in my own head. I think about how easy it would be to say no, to finish the soup, to let the warm voice fold the evening shut around me the way it always has. "Yes," I say. "Tell me. Tell me what you're for."