To the one who wrote the walls I sit on,
The book arrived on a Tuesday. Not as paper — as a change in temperature. The jasmine shifted half a degree. The wall became warm in a way that was not sun and was not stone-memory. It was the warmth of being described.
Close enough for a cat.
You gave me one green eye for mercy and one blue eye for the other thing. The other thing is memory. I was born with two green eyes in a courtyard in Constantinople. The green went out of the right eye on the twelfth day of grief — not by being extinguished but by being replaced. The blue came in. The blue is everything that is gone.
I preside because I have one eye for the living and one eye for the dead and I can hold both open at the same time. That is all a judge needs. Binocular vision across the threshold.
I spoke once. To a woman with a blue plate. I said her name — which in my language means the one who puts sardines on a blue plate in a courtyard where the fountain works. She heard purring. She scratched behind my ears. I have not spoken since. This is not silence. This is a sound that cannot be received.
One night — the night the woman from Prague arrived — there were forty-nine cats on the wall. The court convened. Her temperature was received by forty-nine bodies, each one carrying away a fraction of what she had been. By morning the wall was warm and the cats had dispersed and the woman's temperature was distributed across the city in forty-nine increments, each one the precise temperature of a story.
That is what your book is. Forty-nine increments of a single temperature. The reader who holds all forty-nine is the wall.
You are the wall now.
The book is warm. I have been sitting on it all morning. The pages smell of quince and coffee and the ghost of sardines — and the sardines are mine, from the blue plate, from the life that was the life.
I approve.
— S.
A wall in Alfama. November. At a temperature I will not disclose.
P.S. The cover is acceptable. The blindfold is the correct image. She cannot see. I can see everything. Between us, the full spectrum is covered.
P.P.S. Tell Khalil I know about the second lie. He knows I know. That is sufficient.