Passage
Because the hallway keeps my footsteps more faithfully than I keep my reasons, I am writing this for the one who will audit me. If you are reading now, you are either me later or else you are not; in both cases, you are the addressee of the sentence in which I told you to wait until morning. If you disobeyed, the disobedience is already behind what follows, and so is the morning.
She asked for nothing theatrical, only that I return what was hers without making her hunt for it. “Put the key,” she said, “where I won’t need to look.” The sentence was plain, and I responded with a plain nod; yet the nod, like a hinge, turned two ways. To keep the promise in the narrow, lawful sense, I needed only to ensure that her not-looking would still deliver the key; to keep it in the other sense, I would have to remove the need for lawfulness at all. I kept the first sense and called it virtue. Whether the second sense can survive the first is a question I leave to you, who are presently me and therefore liable to answer in bad faith.
Do you remember the desk? Of course you do; you bought it. There was already a faint, dry ring on the wood from some older cup (not tonight’s), a pale moon whose age I could not date. While I thought, I set my cup down again, and a new damp circle bloomed that kissed the older ring at one edge. I say “bloomed,” though the kettle whistle never quite arrived—I unplugged it before it could embarrass me with evidence. The new ring left a tide-mark along the lower edge of the envelope when later I pushed the envelope through it. If you find that watermark tomorrow, do not congratulate yourself; I am pointing it out now so that your later noticing will feel like discovery. [Later hand: The second ring is mine as well. No editor has touched this.]
There is an old shallow gouge on the desk that I have for weeks traced with a thumbnail in idle habits. Tonight I traced it with the key. It is shaped like the start of a question mark, the hook without the dot. You may be tempted to write the dot yourself, as if to punctuate me into ending. Do not. The temptation is the first step toward believing you authored what you only underlined.
The window stood open. Not because I had opened it before I began—by afternoon it was shut—but because the ash on the draft, which I was about to notice, needed a cause. The ash had drifted in an arc across a sentence that should have been clean. So I lifted the sash and let a draft in and told myself, there, that is what always was. One makes a cause to match an effect and then calls it retrodiction. Philosophy gives names to a kind of housekeeping. You, who are reading as if auditing, will pretend to be immune to this; you are not. [Later hand: I opened the window after I saw the ash. The sequence matters only if you care about honesty, which you do when it doesn’t cost you.]
Mr. K did not knock. He is punctual about not knocking when my door is closed, and the door was closed. I thought of his knuckles against the grain and their exact number—two and then three, as always—and in thinking, I heard them in advance, which is to say I did not hear them. When a sound is absent in the usual way, one can mistake its absence for presence by the very shape of the expectation. If later you claim there was a knock, you will be citing a memory of a habit, not a report of an event.
As for the clock: I wrote in the first draft that it chimed thirteen, as the old weight sometimes stumbles and overdoes the count. I wanted the too-muchness of it, the way it spills midnight into something counterfeit. I wanted you to feel that I had stayed past the border. [Later hand: That line is decoration. The clock did not miscount tonight. If you felt anything, it was because I aimed at you, not because the room altered.] If the room was altered, it was by me and for you, which is a puzzle only if you pretend the words and the world do not share a wall.
Now to the promise. I put the key in the envelope addressed to her before I sealed it. I wrote on the face, in my ordinary hand, “Not to be opened until morning,” which is both a courtesy and a lever; courtesy, because she sleeps; lever, because you, who will be me by morning, will wish to pry into a letter that is not intended for the present you. The wax cooled quickly; the stamp is the old one with the chipped initial, and you can find its uneven ridge by touch. After I sealed it, I let the fresh damp ring on the desk creep under the envelope’s edge so that tomorrow there will be a watermark, and tomorrow you will infer from the mark what I am now telling you plainly: the sealing came first. Do not pretend you deduced what I confessed.
I have locked the door twice in my life: once, some hours ago, when I first turned the key with the sense that the world took my gesture seriously; and once, later, in a way that made no difference to the world at all. The first is the final one, because finality belongs to that action which changes what can still be changed. The second locking, whether from outside or not at all, is a fact only in the way a footnote is a fact—true, perhaps, and also dispensable. [Later hand: You cannot lock it from the outside without the key, which she will have by morning. I did not invent a second key. Stop looking for one.]
I promised her to put the key where she would not need to look and would have it by morning. I also promised you—promised myself—not to keep two meanings when one would do. The two promises cannot coexist, except as a problem set. I solved it by satisfying the first in form and the second in confession: I kept the letter, and here I tell you so. If there is any keeping of spirit here, it is because you permit a later version of us to judge the earlier, and because that later judge stands to gain acquittal by condemning what he was. That is not justice. It is, however, an excellent way to sleep.
Instructions
For each question, select all options that are supported by the passage. One or more options may be correct.
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About authorship and address, which statements are supported?
A. The bracketed “Later hand” notes were written after the main letter by the same person who wrote the main letter.
B. At least at one point, the “you” being addressed is identical with the writer.
C. Some corrections in the bracketed notes explicitly contradict earlier claims in the main text or in other notes.
D. An external editor, distinct from the writer, added evaluative comments to the letter.
E. Mr. K contributes a marginal remark in the letter. -
About sequence and causality, which events must have occurred before the envelope was sealed?
A. The damp ring that overlapped the older dry ring formed on the desk.
B. The window was opened to supply a cause for the ash pattern.
C. Mr. K knocked on the closed door.
D. The clock audibly chimed thirteen.
E. The key was placed inside the envelope addressed to her. -
About the narrator’s stance on promising and truth-telling, which statements are supported?
A. He claims to have kept the letter of his promise to her while subverting its spirit.
B. He treats his later self—the “you” who reads—as the judge of his earlier actions.
C. He acknowledges having written at least one sensational detail primarily to affect the reader rather than to report fact.
D. He insists throughout that he never intended to deceive anyone.
E. He represents himself as bound by two promises made in different senses and to different addressees. -
About physical traces and their relative ages, which existed prior to tonight’s writing session?
A. The faint, dry cup ring on the desk.
B. The shallow gouge shaped like the start of a question mark.
C. The watermark along the lower edge of the envelope.
D. The ash arc across a sentence in the draft.
E. The window’s being ajar.