Any Other Business
They convened to correct everything, and corrected, at last, the one thing asked of them
Having resolved to redesign the universe, the Committee reached, at long last, the final on every agenda it had ever printed: Any Other Business.
The Chair asked, as he always did, and as no one had ever answered, whether there was any other business.
There was a silence of the ordinary kind, the kind that precedes adjournment and the reclaiming of coats.
Then a voice, unfamiliar because it belonged to no member, spoke from the public seats at the back.
It was an old woman, who said, without , that she had first written to us about a pavement, six years before, and had come to see how it was getting on.
The name meant nothing to anyone; the pavement, less; and the six years, I saw, had passed for her more heavily than for us.
She explained that her husband had tripped on the tilt, that he was gone now, and that she still walked that way each morning out of habit and something warmer.
The Committee, which had that afternoon amended reality itself, found it had no motion ready for a small grief plainly stated.
Prewitt, who had not spoken since his famous silence, rose, and this time used words, and they were only: I remember.
He did not remember, of course; none of us did; but the lie was the kindest true thing said in that chamber for years.
The Chair began, from , to propose a subcommittee, and then, meeting the old woman's eyes, quietly let the sentence die unfinished.
Councillor Adeyemi closed the minute book, an act without , and suggested that we simply go and look at the pavement together.
So we did, the whole Committee, filing out not in procedure but in something more like company.
The tilt was exactly as described: three feet of stone, lifted at one corner by the slow shoulder of a tree root, and unlegislated.
No one moved to measure it. Prewitt knelt, and with the flat of his hand brushed the from the raised edge, as one tidies a thing one means to keep.
The Treasurer, who costed everything, found a spare paving behind the hall, and it was worth, he did not say, precisely nothing and everything.
We had no tools equal to the cosmos, but we had, among us, four hands and an afternoon, which proved equal to a pavement.
It took less than an hour, and no vote, and produced no document, and was therefore, by every measure the Committee owned, not work at all.
The old woman thanked us, and told us her husband's name, and we wrote it nowhere, and so, for once, remembered it.
Walking back, someone laughed, and then all of us did, at the six years, the subcommittees, the audited souls, the amended universe.
We had convened to correct everything, and had corrected, in the end, exactly one thing, which was the only thing anyone had ever actually asked us to.
The Chair observed, more gently than the rules allowed, that perhaps a committee is only ever as large as the smallest it can still perform.
I minuted none of this, and it is, for that reason, the truest record I have kept.
The pavement, corrected at last, held the old woman up the next morning, and the morning after, and asked nothing of reality in return.
The petition that had begun our story was marked, in the , not resolved but simply done, a word the Committee had never before had cause to use.
And when the next agenda was printed, the first item was blank, as though the Committee had finally run out of everything to correct, and was glad of it.
We had come, by the long road of the absurd, to the short truth we might have reached in an afternoon: that the world is mended, if at all, one uneven stone at a time.