Can we change the subject? Leonard asked.
It is exactly as I say! Mill said.
I’m kind of stuck here, Leonard said. I can’t go anywhere.
I apologize, dear friend. Perhaps you also are in prison?
Feels like it sometimes.
Oh, dear! What had Leonard said? If NP were testing his skills with Clients Very Much Not Like Me, they didn’t need to know that the White Room sometimes felt like a prison. They wouldn’t understand that Leonard liked it that way.
I am most sorry, Mill said gravely. Who shares your cell, if I may inquire?
You mean, do I have a group plan? Are you selling minutes?
(Leonard’s Brazen Head satellite-cell minutes came from Neetsa Pizza, but if he were to lose his job???)
What a quaint idea! Would that I could sell minutes, for I sense that time is running short. Forgive the poor translation: I am, as yet, inexpert in this form of communication. I am wondering what manner of man shares your temporary dungeon habitat.
Leonard explained that he lived and worked alone; Mill couldn’t believe it.
This must be the greatest torment of alclass="underline" to be always alone!
I like it, Leonard said. And he did: solving problems with a pizza coupon was as much people as Leonard generally wanted.
I, on the other hand, Mill said, am surrounded by prisoners of the lowest class! Riffraff, ruffians, and bowlegged bastards!
My! Leonard said.
And visitors. Mill had been in his “temporary dungeon habitat” less than one week, but already news of his incarceration had reached the noblest society. Fine ladies visited him, eager to hear his tales. Some brought sweetmeats or news from home, the prettiest promised him things with their eyes, all assured him they’d do what they could.
I’m sure they will, Leonard said, aware that he’d all but given up on conversion.
Humph, said Mill. Tell me about your temporary dungeon habitat. Is it dank, does water drip down the rough-hewn stone?
Actually, it’s white. Everything is white. I paint it every year.
No past inmate has scratched poems on the mortar?
Leonard laughed, then remembered the strange, unreadable scrawls his grandfather had left on his walls, before the room became White. His grandfather had asked, each year on Leonard’s birthday, whether Leonard could read what he’d written there; each year Leonard was not up to the task.
No poems, he said.
Do you have a window? Mill persisted. Can you hear the children playing?
It’s night. The children are all in bed.
Night? Mill said. My good friend, it’s well past dawn.
I do the midnight shift, Leonard said. It’s definitely night.
I implore you, do not let your mind slip! I am looking out the window and plainly it is day: ships are active, gulls fly, wenches lift their skirts for sailors.
Sometimes you have to let a client have the last word.
If it were day and I could see out the window, Leonard said, I’d see buildings just like this one.
What a benighted land! Mill murmured. So many prisons! We face the port, of course. This is how my captors torment me! I thought I saw Uncle Maffeo on a boat much like the one the Great Khan gave us to escort the Princess Kokachin to Arghun of the Levant.
Mill was silent a moment.
It was just a vision, Mill concluded in a sad voice, of the sort I have frequently had since crossing the Desert of Lop. You’ve met them, I assume? The Tibetans?
The line went dead.
Prison and the White Room
Over the next few nights, Mill was Leonard’s only caller. Leonard grew accustomed to the phone’s gentle bleating and Mill’s jovial but strangely distant, overly accented voice. Reassured that this was not an NP test, Leonard reinstalled his true-ray blocker, unfiltered his screen, and left bannocks by the cat-chimney.
How long have you been in your temporary dungeon habitat? Mill asked. Perhaps you too have just arrived?
Three years.
My friend! How is it that you have not gone mad! Have you a beard down to your belly? I am glad to have found you — do not despair! I shall relate stories to you, wonders such as you have never known! The days will fly!
Okay, Leonard said.
And so he began. Mostly Mill’s tales were not so wondrous. He had much to say about the availability in dull-sounding countries of water, food, and game. He spoke of climate and wind and pasturage for beasts. Of cloth and carpets and dates. Of deserts and steeds and falcons and asses. Leonard couldn’t share Mill’s enthusiasm for the particulars of what he called Custom and Commerce. He also couldn’t follow Mill’s specious geography, for he could find no Lesser Armenia on the map he’d printed and illegally affixed to his white wall, no Persia, no Levant — certainly no Desert of Lop! But still Leonard listened, because compassion welled, and because his screen hissed whenever he turned it on, and because occasionally Mill described something of interest, like mountains of salt, or a lake that produced fish only during Lent (whatever that was), or a caliph who starved to death in a tower of gold. A shoemaker who gouged out his eye because he had taken too great a pleasure in one lady’s foot. Date wine that loosened the bowels, three kings who threw a magic stone into a well, a hot wind that stifled armies, professional mourners who never ceased lamenting.
Adventures too: Mill was pursued once by a renegade khan, narrowly escaping capture; many of his companions were not so lucky. He spoke of fierce Saracens, of whom any evil might be expected; also, marauding Tartars and his friends, the Tibetans.
Tell me, Mill said, once he’d called back, does this not sound like the life for you? Every night a new bed, every day something you never imagined?
No! Leonard said. How do you stand it? Don’t new things frighten you? Wouldn’t you rather be safe at home?
I have no home! My home is where I am, wherever that may be. That is freedom, that is happiness!
Leonard pondered the world outside his White Room, outside his sister’s house, beyond the corners of Boise and Degas. His stomach became distinctly unsettled.
I think you’re very brave, Leonard said.
What you call bravery is easier than the alternative.
Which is?
Fear. And isolation from one’s fellows. But truly, one is brave only if one pursues what one fears, and I do not fear the unknown.
What do you fear? Leonard asked.
…
Mill? Leonard asked.
I suppose this place, Mill said softly. The sameness of it, the smallness. It does not resemble the desert I have mentioned, yet it shares many of its qualities; at night I tremble, much as I trembled there, before I met them. It is the emptiness I fear, emptiness and being alone. Here is where I must be brave.
Oh, Leonard said.
But all places have their fascination, even this one — you will learn this once you leave your temporary dungeon habitat, as soon you shall, I am sure. You have only to pay attention, to give yourself over to wonder. On this very subject, tell me, what do merchants trade in your land?
Leonard had to think a moment.
Food, mostly. Fast food. That’s my business, fast food.
Fast food: I’m afraid the translation is poor.
Food one can obtain quickly, Leonard said.
As from a tavern? Mill asked.