No Work for the Watchman

The phone stayed downstairs, in his jacket — at home it was always under his pillow. Jacob lies down behind him, lays his arm across him, “heavily, the way you slide a bolt shut,” and reaches for nothing more. Simon listens — the way he has listened all his life: to the house, the stairs, the door. “Here the house was silent, the stairs had no voice,” and there turned out to be nothing to listen to except breathing. “The weight didn’t become a grip.” “Gradually the watchman who had stood inside him all his life, counting other people’s hands, stopped counting. Not because he’d been told to. There was simply no work for him.”

Safety cannot be explained to a body — it can only be lived through: minute by minute, in which the expected does not happen. The watchman does not leave on command; he leaves when he has had nothing to do for long enough. “He thought he should check one more time where the door was. He didn’t check” — the first sleep without a post in twenty years. This card is a pair to “The Science of Being Invisible” from chapter one: there we saw how the watchman appeared; here, how he sits down for the first time. Remember the formula “no work for him”: it is exactly by this formula that we will recognize, in the next chapter, that he has returned to his post.