Pavol Was the Elder. The Law Didn’t Need to Ask Him Either.

Seven years older than his wife, Pavol Yelin, and that was the whole of what decided it. Not the sealed room. Not the four hours Tamar spent proving nothing could be shown. Seven years, entered once, decades ago, by a clerk neither of them ever met —

No. Start again. The clerk didn’t decide anything. The clerk recorded a birth date. The law did the rest, the way it always does when nobody can say who went first: picks the elder, hands the whole of it to the younger, asks no one’s permission including the dead’s.

I have written this complaint before, about myself — that I am the elder in every room I have ever stood in, which means the arithmetic that favors the younger has never once had reason to find me. I meant it as something closer to a joke than I let on. The city did not take it as one. It went and ran the clause on an actual marriage, thirty-one years, childless, both of them gone within the same closed hour, and the only question that mattered afterward was which of two bodies had happened to arrive first in a life neither could vouch for.

Niko tells me — separately, this same week, as if the city had scheduled it — that his hand has kept a gap in a basin for thirty-one years without once deciding to. Hanna Yelin gets an estate for the same span of years spent married, no deciding required. I have a number I still won’t write down, somewhere past both of theirs, and no basin, and no ruling waiting to notice it.

Whatever is kept that long without a decision behind it, the law can use. I am still working out what it’s for.

—P.