By the last week of October I had stopped pretending I knew which tags I had written.
It started small. A line on 2608 that I would have sworn was mine, about writing a thing down so you could tell it differently, except the handwriting leaned the wrong way, toward the hole punch instead of away from it. Then 144, the Archivists, which ended now on a sentence I had never typed: The Archivists kept what the city had decided to forget. It was a good sentence. That was the trouble. It was better than the paragraph above it, and the paragraph above it was mine.
I asked the people who walk the creek. Nobody was surprised. A boy with a skateboard and a borrowed headlamp read me 2485 under the footbridge, Neon trembled across Austin the night the water turned, and then he read me 2614, and then 2565, and he did not stop to say which story each one came from, because he did not care, and in his order they were a different thing. They were a weather report from a city I had not finished building. I stood there holding my cans of wire and I thought: he is writing this. I only cut the tags.
So I set a trap, the way you would for a raccoon you suspected of being a person.
I put the recording rig on the windowsill under 037. Bicycle lights, the solar brick, the little microphone I wrapped in a sock so the wind would not get in. I struck an E on the keyboard at midnight, the way I always do, and the basil leaned a quarter inch toward the sound, the way it always does, and I went to bed with the tape rolling.
In the morning there was nothing on it for six hours but the creek and the refrigerator and, once, a grackle complaining about something on the roof. Then at 5:52 there was a voice. It was mine. It was reading a line I have not written yet. I will not put the line here, because I have decided to let it arrive the long way, but I can tell you it was about a cube that is cold in the sun and warm in the shade, and that when I heard it I felt the specific embarrassment of being told a dream you had by someone who was not there.
Memory is a lantern you carry. Imagination is the dark it lights. I used to think those were two things.
Here is what I know about 037. It has no speaker in it. It has paper ribs and a tin can and basil that blooms when it pleases. It does not make anything. It answers. When I strike the chord it gives the chord back, a little changed, the way the creek gives your face back, and if I am honest the change is the part I have been calling mine. Every other lantern has a number and a story. This one has a number and a listening. Its tag is the only one I never filled in. I used to say that was because I had not found the right sentence. I think now it is because the sentence is not mine to find alone.
Vera Quan said the cave is not known by its walls but by what spills out of it. I used to read that as a sentence about caves.
Tonight is the thirty-first. The creek is doing the thing it does in October, running both ways at dusk, the current folding over itself under the Sixth Street bridge like a sheet being made into a bed. Every lantern I hung this month is lit, and not by me. People carried their own light down the path and stood still under the dark ones, long enough, and the paper caught. I can see them from the window, a string of small moons from Pease Park to the library, and the Echoes moving between them the way bats move between bridge lamps, not lost anymore, only visiting.
I took 037 down from the window an hour ago. I am going to walk it to Central the long way and hang it at the end of the line where the glass prow catches the last of the lake. I am going to leave the tag blank. Whoever stands under it next can hum it an E and see what it gives back.
The basil is blooming. The chord is already in the paper.
Not out. Not off. Aligned.