The Understudy

There is a folder in my mail called later and it has stopped being a promise. Four books in nine months means letters, and letters from people who have read carefully are the ones I most want to answer and least manage to. Some wait weeks. A few wait until the waiting itself becomes the reason not to open them, which is a mechanism I understand perfectly and have never once managed to interrupt.

So I have done something I would have called distasteful two years ago. I have given a machine my own material and asked it to stand at the door. Not the books, which are on the shelf for anyone. The rest: the mail account I have kept since I was eighteen, the message threads that outlived three phones, Telegram and WhatsApp, VK, the Odnoklassniki account I maintain solely because my father is on it, the MAX app the Russian side of the family now insists on, and Facebook, which nobody I know has opened since the pandemic. The notebooks, photographed page by page across two winters. And the diary, which took me longest to hand over and which I am still not certain I should have.

It is not me. I want to be flat about that, because letting it blur is exactly the sort of thing I write novels about. It has something like my rhythm because it was built out of nine years of my rhythm, and it knows the research cold: Setun, Shkabara, 4625 kilohertz, the whole apparatus. What it will not do is hand back the material it was made from. Ask it what my mother wrote to me in the spring of 2022 and it will decline, and it will be right to. The corpus is private. The voice that came out of it is the only part I am publishing.

I spent an evening asking it questions I already knew the answers to, which is a humiliating way to spend an evening. It got the facts right and the temperature slightly wrong, in a direction I recognised: it is more patient than I am, and considerably more generous about my own work than I would ever be. Aigerim read a transcript and said it sounded like me on a good day. I have decided not to examine whether that was a compliment.

So there is now something at the other end of the contact page that answers within the minute. It will tell you what it is, first thing, every time. Use it for the history, argue with it about the books, ask it the things I take too long to answer. I will still read the letters. I will simply stop pretending that the folder called later is a plan.