The Copy's Margin · Ivan Hernandez

ROYAL ARCHIVE, CERT: CEREMONIES DIVISION PROMPT BOOK, 47th CYCLE RECITAL, COPY 2 OF 2

Archive receipt stamp (red, square, reads against the forms office ledger): RECEIVED: THIS VOLUME IS ISSUED AGAINST CONTRACT M-4471 TO THE STANDBY PERFORMER OF THE 47TH CYCLE. THE BOOK IS CALIBRATED TO A SINGLE HOLDER. MARKS MADE BY ANY OTHER HAND VOID THE CALIBRATION. COPIES ARE NOT TO BE COMPARED, COLLATED, OR CORRECTED AGAINST EACH OTHER.

Understudy’s annotation (pencil, beneath the stamp): Copy 1 is kept in the ceremony chamber, in the principal’s reading light. Copy 2 is issued to the standby, to be read in the dark. Every performance of my twenty years has been read from Copy 1, and I have read this copy a thousand times by the single bulb over the worktable in the basement, and it has never once disagreed with the one in the chamber. When the principal retires, Copy 1 is burned in the courtyard and Copy 2 is passed to the next standby, rekeyed. The Archive calibrates the page, the ink, the spelling. It does not calibrate the margin. My predecessor told me this on my first night in the basement, and I will tell the one after me on my last.

PAGE 1

TREATY RENEWAL CEREMONY: 47th CYCLE Royal Archive, Cert

Principal’s marks (blue ink, precise): Breathe. Count four. Begin.

Understudy’s annotation (pencil, added later): I breathe here. The count is always four. Sometimes I count to five when no one is listening.

PAGE 2

Stage direction (printed, official): ENTER RIGHT. WALK TO CENTER STAGE. PAUSE.

Principal’s mark: Step three. Don’t rush. The floor is cold in the Archive; you’ll feel it through the shoes. Use that.

Understudy’s annotation: I’ve worn the shoes for twenty years. The floor is always cold. I used to think it was marble. It’s a composite: limestone aggregate with recycled polymer binding. The Archive installed it in 2071, when they renovated for the 40th Cycle. It costs less than marble and lasts three times as long.

PAGE 3

Stage direction: BEGIN RECITAL.

Principal’s mark: First line. Don’t think. The words are in the hands.

Understudy’s annotation: The words are in the hands. The hands are in the arms. The arms are in the shoulders. The shoulders are in the breath. The breath is in the belly. The belly is in the floor. That’s what they taught us. Motor engrams. Proprioceptive chains. You don’t remember the words; you remember the body that says them. After ten years I could do it in my sleep. After fifteen, I was doing it in my sleep.

They drill the chains a year at a time. Stride, nine sets. Hands, eleven. Count, so many passes I stopped counting the passes. Breath in year four, the laugh in year six, and the laugh took three years to stop being a foreign thing that my mouth produced at the wrong times. In year eleven I went home for my sister’s wedding and reached for a cup with the principal’s reach, and my sister asked why I held it like a stranger, and I said I was tired, and I said it in the principal’s voice. She did not ask again. The calibration report for that year shows no variance. The report does not run to the wedding.

PAGE 4

Stage direction: PAUSE. LOOK UP.

Principal’s mark: This is where you see them. The diplomats. The insurers. The people who sign the contracts. Hold the pause. Let them see you seeing them. The Board chair sits fourth from the left and reads the ceremony from your mouth; keep your face open to her for lines 7 and 12. The syndicate director keeps his eyes shut for the whole pause. Let him. He is counting your breaths.

Understudy’s annotation: I see them. The front row is always the same: representatives from the Consortium, the Archive Board, the insurance syndicate. They’re not watching a performance. They’re watching a guarantee. The Treaty of Meridian requires live performance, human voice, human body; the verification clause predates recording, and no one has ever amended it. If it’s not performed exactly, the treaty voids. Thirty billion in trade agreements dissolves. The principal is the licensed performer. I am the guarantee clause. My job is to never exist.

I saw the 41st Cycle on the school broadcast because attendance was mandatory in our form, and we sat in the dark assembly hall and the lights were not turned up afterward and nobody spoke on the walk to the gates. I remember the principal’s hands at this pause. I remember thinking a body could be a thing a city held in trust for itself. I was eleven. The record keeper took our names at the door and she had the principal’s hands too, the same stillness, and I put the thought away. It has come back to me tonight.

PAGE 5

Stage direction: DELIVER LINE TO AUDIENCE.

Principal’s mark: Line 7. “We remember so that we may forget.” Don’t rush the “forget.” Let it land. (The 44th Cycle opened with a blackout in the middle of this line. The line was finished in the dark. The letter from the stage appearing on the 45th read, in its entirety: “NOTED.” It is not clear whether the dark is to be avoided.)

Understudy’s annotation: “We remember so that we may forget.” I’ve said this line in the mirror for twenty years. I’ve said it to the empty stage. The ceremony is a pressure valve: the Archive holds the history so the diplomats don’t have to carry it. You perform the memory so you can release it. That’s the theory. The practice is: you say the words, the contract holds, the money flows. You don’t think about what you’re remembering. You think about the count. The breath. The shoes on the cold floor.

The Archive keeps the ceremony recordings in the same vault as the committee transcripts. Twice a year the vault floor is swept by a clerk who carries no key and holds no pen. In my own name, once, I asked the circulation desk for a transcript of the committee that wrote the verification clause. It took eleven weeks and one appeal, and when the file reached the reading room it was the wrong committee and the wrong cycle, and the correction was noted, and there the thread died. I read it anyway. Nothing in it is explained. It is all reference. There is no line in any of it that says why a human voice is required, only that it is, and that the matter is thereby closed.

PAGE 6

Stage direction: CROSS TO LEFT.

Principal’s mark: Three steps. Not four. Not two. Three. (See 43rd Cycle, page 6. The floor repair left a false joint near the middle of the cross. The house manager has been asked three times and has not had it filled. Do not let the seam take the count.)

Understudy’s annotation: Three steps. Always three. I measured once, in the dark, after hours, when the Archive was empty. The cross is 4.2 meters. Each step is 1.4 meters. That’s a large step for a woman of my height. But the principal is taller, with longer legs. Her body is a different instrument. I learned to make my body play her music.

I measured a second time with a tape borrowed from the maintenance cage, because the first two readings had agreed and I did not trust agreement to survive being witnessed. The tape read 4.2 at the chalk, and 4.1 where the chalk had worn thin, and 4.2 again over the joint the principal marks down. I wrote none of it down. The chalk stayed two nights before the janitorial rotation scrubbed the stage, and I felt a specific small grief at the scrubbing, and I have not measured since. Some nights I still take the floor in the dark and step it, the four point two, and the seam takes my count, and I step again, and the floor is warm from the lights above even when the chamber is empty, and I have never told the calibration technicians about the seam.

PAGE 7

Stage direction: PAUSE.

Principal’s mark: This is the silence. The Archive holds its breath. You hold yours.

Understudy’s annotation: The silence is the hardest part. The words are easy; they’re in the hands, in the body, in the engrams. The silence is where you have to be present, where the audience watches you not speak, and you have to be someone worth watching. I used to fill the silence with thoughts. Now I just stand there.

In the years when I was only watching, I used the silence to run the audience. The cough in the third row at the 42nd, the dropped program at the 44th. I charted which seats the Consortium rents and which seats lapse and are filled by Archive staff in dark suits, and I knew down to the season which clerk would be placed where. Nobody asked me to keep the chart. Nobody asked me to do anything but wait, and wait, and the chart was the thing I made while I waited. It is kept in the back of this book, behind the last page, where the binding has loosened from being held open.

PAGE 8

Stage direction: DELIVER LINE. TURN TO AUDIENCE.

Principal’s mark: Line 12. “The Archive is the memory of the world.” Mean it. This is the pivot: you’re not reciting anymore. You’re speaking. To them. Directly.

Understudy’s annotation: Mean it. How do you mean something you’ve never lived? The Archive is a building. It holds documents, history, the legal framework for thirty billion in trade. Does it hold the memory of the world? Maybe. It holds the memory of the treaty, of the performance, of the principal, who has performed this ceremony six times. It holds my memory of watching her perform it.

The ceremony is not a conversation. It’s a monologue. The principal speaks to the world. The world listens. The understudy listens to the principal.

I asked her once, when I could speak to her without my voice shaking, whether she believed the words the first time she performed them. She was holding a cup in the Archive kitchen and she set it down and she smiled her press smile, and she said the difference between saying a thing and performing a thing is the difference between a key and the door it was cut for. I had no answer that year. I have an answer now. She has performed the ceremony six times. I have never performed it once. I am the only person in the building with no memories to lend that line, and on the bad nights I think that is the entire point of me.

PAGE 9

Stage direction: DELIVER FINAL LINE.

Principal’s mark: Line 18. “The treaty holds.” Don’t add anything. Don’t take anything away. Just those three words.

Understudy’s annotation: “The treaty holds.” Three words. The weight of the world. The principal has said them six times. I have said them zero times. I have rehearsed them four thousand times. I have whispered them in my sleep, shouted them in the shower, said them to the mirror and the empty stage.

I have never said them to an audience.

Until tonight.

PAGE 10

Stage direction: BOW.

Principal’s mark: Don’t rush the bow. Let them see you. Let them see what they’ve paid for.

Understudy’s annotation: What they’ve paid for is a guarantee. The insurance syndicate premium is 2.4% of the treaty value, about 720 million per cycle. The principal’s salary is 18 million. My salary is 420,000. The principal is paid to perform. I am paid to wait.

The stagehand told me once: “You’re the most expensive person who never works.” He was laughing. I didn’t laugh. I produced the principal’s laugh, the one stored in my muscles, in the body I borrowed from her. I don’t remember my own laugh. I don’t remember if I ever had one.

The calibration technicians know me by name, and the calibrations follow the cycles: a week of rewiring before each ceremony to bring me onto the current marks, a week after to confirm nothing drifted. In the odd years they calibrate me against the principal. In the even years they calibrate me against my own record from the previous cycle, so that I hold ground. Twenty years of this, and the Archive has never once failed to find the budget for it, because the premium renegotiation pays for it, and the premium is insured by nothing except the claim that the guarantee is exact. On the night of the 46th Cycle the lead technician closed my chart and said, “You held.” I said thank you, in the principal’s voice, and she wrote the session normal and let me walk. I have thought about that walk every day since. It is the only evening of my twenty years in which I was thanked for holding, and I was thanked by the machine, and the machine logs what it is told to log.

PAGE 11

Stage direction: EXIT LEFT.

Principal’s mark: Three steps. Not four. Not two. Three. And then you’re gone.

Understudy’s annotation: And then you’re gone. But where do you go? The principal goes to her dressing room. She goes to her life. She goes to the world outside the Archive. I go to my room in the basement. I go to the quiet. Twenty years of dark. Twenty years of waiting. A life I rehearsed and never lived.

I signed my name away when I was nineteen. The contract was one page. It said my body would be keyed to the principal’s: her stride, her hands, her count, and that my name would be held by the Archive until she retired or died. I was the best match they had tested in eleven years. I was proud. I don’t remember the pride. I remember the pen: its weight, how the ink went down for the last time. And I remember the first time the keying took: my hand reached for a cup before I had decided to be thirsty. The technician said that was normal. She said it in the same voice she used for the calibration numbers.

And then tonight, the principal came off the stage. Midway through the performance. She walked into the wings. She looked at me. Her hands were shaking. I had never seen the principal’s hands shake. She had taken off her shoes. I put them on. She said, “Your turn.”

And the stagehand said, “You’re on.”

And I went on.

PAGE 12

Stage direction: ENTER RIGHT.

Principal’s mark (absent, this is the understudy’s page now): (no mark)

Understudy’s annotation: The floor was cold. The shoes were tight. The diplomats were watching. The Archive was watching.

I walked to center stage. I paused. I breathed. I counted four. I counted to five.

I began.

PAGE 13

Stage direction: BEGIN RECITAL.

Understudy’s annotation: The words were in the hands. The hands were in the arms. The arms were in the shoulders. The shoulders were in the breath. And the breath, the breath was mine.

I said the lines. I hit the marks. I was perfect. I was the principal. I was the guarantee. I was the copy, and I had been the copy for twenty years.

And then I got to line 7.

“We remember so that we may forget.”

I said it. I said it exactly as the principal says it. I said it with the pause, with the weight, with the silence after.

And then I looked up.

PAGE 14

Stage direction: LOOK UP.

Understudy’s annotation: I saw them. The diplomats. The insurers. The people who sign the contracts. They were watching me. Not the principal. Me.

And I saw something else. In the wings. A figure. The principal. She was watching me perform her life. She was watching me say her words, walk her steps, wear her shoes on her cold floor.

She was crying.

I don’t know why. I never rehearsed this. I never rehearsed the principal crying in the wings, or the audience seeing me see her. And my hands: my hands had stopped being her hands. They were reaching, not toward the audience, not toward any mark. Toward the wings. Toward her. I had no count for it, no rehearsal, no keying. It was mine.

I held the pause. I let them see me seeing them.

And then I delivered line 7 to the wrong person.

PAGE 15

Stage direction: DELIVER LINE TO AUDIENCE.

Understudy’s annotation: I looked at the front row. The Consortium representative. The Archive Board chair. The insurance syndicate director.

And then I turned to the wings.

The principal was still there. She had stopped crying, or she was crying in a way I couldn’t see from that distance; I had no mark for it. The line was hers. The direction says it goes to the audience. The contract says it goes to the audience. I said it to her anyway.

I deviated.

PAGE 16

Stage direction: PAUSE.

Understudy’s annotation: The silence was different this time. The Archive held its breath. I held mine.

The insurance syndicate director leaned forward. The Consortium representative checked his watch. The Archive Board chair looked at the contract.

I had deviated. I turned to the wings. I said her line to her. That was not in the keying.

The floor was still cold. I was still standing. That was all I knew.

PAGE 17

Stage direction: DELIVER LINE.

Understudy’s annotation: Line 12. “The Archive is the memory of the world.”

I meant it. The Archive was holding my memory now: her crying in the wings, the audience watching me turn, the line given to her instead of to them.

PAGE 18

Stage direction: DELIVER FINAL LINE.

Understudy’s annotation: “The treaty holds.”

Three words. I said them. I meant them. Not because the contract holds; it doesn’t, not anymore. Because I was still standing on the cold floor in borrowed shoes.

I’m writing this on the last page of the prompt book, where the principal’s handwriting stops and mine begins.

PAGE 19

Stage direction: BOW.

Understudy’s annotation: I bowed. The audience applauded. The diplomats signed.

The insurance syndicate director looked at the contract and said, “The guarantee is void.”

The Consortium representative signed anyway. “Noted,” he said, and signed the next page. The syndicate director waited. The representative signed the one after that. After a while, the director sat down.

The principal came out of the wings. She looked at me. She said, “You did it.”

I said, “I deviated.”

She said, “I know.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. I thought she was done. She said, “I was an understudy too. Fifteen years in the dark. I never deviated. I performed perfectly.”

She said, “I counted to five once. After my first performance. In the dressing room, alone. I never told anyone. I’m telling you now.”

She said, “I’m telling you now.”

I didn’t answer. I stood on the cold floor in her shoes. The five was still in my hands.

I did the math later. The premium renegotiation will cost the Archive two cycles’ worth of calibration. The syndicate pays out nothing, because the guarantee was voided before any claim was made. The exactness was the collateral, and the collateral was void, and the pen went down anyway.

I never asked her why she walked off.

PAGE 20

Stage direction: EXIT LEFT.

Understudy’s annotation: I walked off stage. Three steps. Not four. Not two. Three.

The stagehand was waiting in the wings. He looked at me. He said, “What’s your name?”

I opened my mouth. The principal’s name was there: the name on the contract, the name on the guarantee, the name I’d answered to for twenty years. But that wasn’t my name.

I didn’t have a name. I had signed it away: to the Archive, to the performance, to the principal, who had given hers to the previous understudy, who had given hers to the one before that.

I looked at the stagehand. I said, “I don’t know.”

He looked at me. He said, “Come on. I’ll show you where the new understudy is waiting.”

He said, “She’s signed her name away. She’s started counting to four.”

FINAL NOTE

(In the understudy’s handwriting:)

The new understudy is being keyed to me. She has my walk, my count, my laugh, the borrowed one. She sits in the basement room I left, counting to four.

I am going to tell her “Your turn.” That part is easy.

The other part is harder. The principal told me about the five once, the count she kept alone in her dressing room, but she never told me it was mine to take. I found that in the wings, watching her cry. She never wrote it in the margin. And I will tell her to count to five.