Chapter 17 The Statement

David drafted a fictional life for the client, and it became the most detailed document he had ever written, more detailed than the Celestial Court rebuttal, more detailed than any audit, because this one had to be real enough to fool a machine that had been running since before the worlds were named. Forty-seven years of fictional experiences. Marriages that had not happened, to a woman Vance described from a photograph he did not remember taking. Careers that had not occurred, a life as a teacher, then a writer, then a man who retired early to a house by water he had never seen. Children who had not been born, named and aged and given small habits, the way real children have, a daughter who laughed at nothing and a son who collected stones. Travels that had not been taken, across places Vance described from books. Achievements that had not been earned, small ones, the kind that fill a life more than the large ones do. Every year was described with meticulous precision, cross-referenced with the contract's requirements, the way David cross-referenced a tax filing with the code that governed it. The fictional future had to satisfy the structure of the debt. One year of future existence per installment. Forty-seven installments. Forty-seven years, written so completely that the Creditor's function, which counted and did not judge, would accept them as payment in full. He worked on it for a month, the fictional life growing under his pen the way a real life grows under the years, and Vance came to the office three times a week to supply the details, the small truths of a life he had never lived, until the fiction had the weight of a thing that had happened. David bound it, page by page, into a document that read like a memoir of a man who had not been, and when it was done he read it through once more, and he could almost believe it himself. He appended it to the original contract as an alternative fulfillment schedule, the term the loophole had given him, a clean amendment that named the fictional years as the currency of the debt. He submitted it to the Creditor through the contract's original channel, the way you submit an amended return, and then he waited, the way he had waited on the Celestial Court. The wait was three days. He filled them with other clients, the ghoul and the banshee and the ghost, the small cheats that kept his hands in the work, and he did not let himself think about Vance, alone in the sparse penthouse, being unmade a little more each hour the machine considered his filing. On the third day, the client called. David was at his desk, the phone in his hand before it finished the first ring. "It worked. The contract is closed." David sat back in his chair. The laundromat rumbled next door. The pawn shop bell rang. The ordinary world went on, unaware that a primordial debt had just been paid in fiction. "The Creditor accepted the fictional years?" "It accepted them. I can feel it, the weight is gone. The gap is closed. I remember things that never happened, the wedding, the children, the house by the water, but I also remember the things I had forgotten, the real ones, the years it took from the start. My wife. My children. My life. They're all there now, the true and the written, and I can't tell them apart, and I don't want to." David smiled, the small smile he reserved for the audits that came out right. "That's the first fictional deduction I've ever successfully claimed." "It won't be the last," Vance said, and for the first time in the call, he sounded like a man with a future. David hung up and looked at the closed contract on his desk, the alternative fulfillment schedule bound into it, the forty-seven fictional years sitting where the real ones had been taken. A machine, he thought, could be audited. And a machine, once audited, paid what it owed. David bound the fictional years into the alternative fulfillment schedule and set the completed document aside, ready to submit it to the channel the contract provided, the way you submit an amended return and wait for the machine to process the correction. He thought about the forty-seven years he had written, each one cross-referenced to the contract's demand, each one specific enough to satisfy a function that counted and did not judge. The work had been the strangest of his career, an audit conducted in fiction, but it rested on the oldest principle he knew, that a debt must be paid in the currency the contract named, and the contract had named future existence without naming whose. Vance had supplied the details the way a man supplies the pieces of a life he was only now learning he had lost, and David had written them with the care of a man who knew the machine would be reading. He imagined the Creditor's function receiving the filing, the way it received every filing, without anger and without mercy, simply processing the term it had been given. If the term was satisfied, the debt closed. If it was not, the machine would say so, and David would write another year, and another, until it held. He trusted the math. He trusted the fiction. And he waited, the way he had waited on the Celestial Court, knowing that a machine, once shown its own error, corrects itself in its own time. The three weeks of waiting were the hardest part of the audit, harder than the writing, because waiting is the discipline David had never liked and had learned to need. He filled them with other clients, the ghoul and the banshee and the ghost, the small cheats that kept his hands in the work, and he did not let himself check the channel the way a man does not check a wound he knows is healing. Vance came by twice, thinner, the gap in him wider, and David told him only that the filing was in, the way you tell a patient the test is sent, and that the machine would answer in its own time. He thought about the fiction he had written, the lake and the bride and the laughing daughter, and he wondered, with the honesty of an auditor, whether a made-up life could truly pay a primordial debt, and he decided that it could, because the contract had not named whose years, and a year of future existence, written with enough care, was a year of future existence, to a function that counted and did not judge. The wait was three days more than he expected, and then the call came, and the books, for Vance, were at last balanced.