Permission — A Catalogue of the Possible

For forty years Wynne waited to be told it was all right, and the telling never came, because there was no one above him whose office it was to tell.

He had entered the Office young, at the lowest desk, in the season when a man's life is all permission asked and granted — when you do not begin a task until the desk above you has approved its beginning, do not leave at the hour you wish to leave but at the hour the bell allows, do not take the long lunch or the free afternoon or the holiday by the water without a chit signed by a hand higher than your own. Wynne had been good at this. He had a gift, even, for the asking — for framing the request so it could be granted, for waiting without complaint in the anterooms of his superiors, for receiving the yes with gratitude and the not yet without resentment. He understood the Office to be a ladder of permissions, each rung holding the keys to the rung below, and he understood his own life to be held, likewise, in keeping somewhere above him, to be released to him in portions as he rose, when he had earned it, when he was told.

So he rose. This is the part that is easily missed, and Wynne missed it for decades: that he was promoted, and promoted again, that the desks above him thinned and then were beneath him, that the hands he had waited on retired or died or were themselves now waiting on Wynne. He rose until there were very few rungs over his head and then, in his late years, almost none. He had the corner office and the long view and the chit-book that other men now stood in his anteroom to fill. He could approve a holiday with a stroke. He could approve his own.

And he did not. That was the thing. He had spent his youth certain that the freedoms were being kept for him above, to be handed down when he was high enough to receive them — and now he was high enough, was at the very top of nearly everything, held the keys to every rung, and he found the freedoms were not there. No one handed them down. There was no one left to hand them. He had climbed to the place where the permission was supposed to live and the place was empty.

He did not understand this as emptiness at first. He understood it as more work.

For with each rung had come not the rest he had imagined but its opposite: the burden of the rung below. As a young clerk he had only to do the task he was given and ask leave for the rest; the deciding-what was someone else's. But the higher desk did not merely permit; it had to know what to want. It had to set the others their tasks, choose the Office's direction, answer for the choosing when the choosing went wrong. Wynne, who had been so skilled at asking permission, found that the skill had no use at the top, where there was no one to ask, only the daily mire of having to know, himself, what should be done, and being expected to know it, and being blamed if he did not — a weight he had never seen from below, where the high desks had looked so light, so free, so finished with asking.

He grew tired in a way the young Wynne could not have pictured. The freedoms he had accumulated — the right to come and go, to set his own hours, to take the afternoon by the water — sat unused in him like coins in a drawer of a house he had no time to live in, because the having of them had brought with it the obligation that made them unspendable. He could leave at any hour and so could never quite leave; the Office's wanting was now his to supply, and it did not stop wanting at the bell. He told himself, as he had told himself at every rung, that the rest was coming, that at the next promotion, or upon some final elevation he could not quite name, someone — the highest desk, the founder's portrait, the Office itself — would at last say to him: enough, now, you have done enough, now you may set it down and simply enjoy what you have earned. He waited for the sentence the way he had once waited in the anterooms. He had been waiting, he would realize, for the whole of his life.

The man who finally said something to Wynne was not above him. That was the part that took Wynne longest to forgive, and then longest to be grateful for.

He was an old keeper of the records, a man named Sauer who had never risen at all, who had sat at the same low desk in the archive for fifty years and seemed not to mind it, who kept the ledgers and went home at the bell and was known, vaguely, by the upper floors as a contented obscurity, a man without ambition, which the upper floors said the way they said a man without prospects. Wynne had gone down to the archive himself, late, one evening, to find a record no one else could find, because the wanting-to-know had followed him even there, and he had found Sauer still at his desk past the bell, not working, only sitting, with a cup of something warm and a small book of his own, in no hurry, in the lamplight, at ease.

Wynne, who could not remember the last time he had been at ease, said something he had not meant to say, which was that he envied him. Sauer looked up, mild, and asked what there was to envy in a man who had stayed fifty years at the bottom. And Wynne, too tired to perform, said the truth: that Sauer seemed to have what Wynne had climbed his whole life toward and never reached — the freedom to set it down, to go home at the bell, to spend an evening on a small book and a warm cup, to enjoy the thing, which Wynne had been waiting all his years to be permitted to do.

Sauer was quiet a while. Then he said, without weight, the way one mentions the weather: No one was ever going to permit you. There is no chit for it. You do more of the things you enjoy, that is all; you simply begin. And he turned back to his small book, having said the largest thing anyone had ever said to Wynne, as though it were nothing, as though everyone knew it, which perhaps everyone but Wynne did.

Wynne did not sleep that night, and what kept him awake was not grief, though grief was in it, but the slow turning-over of a thing he had held upside down for forty years.

He had believed the permission must come from above. He had built his whole life on the believing — had risen the entire ladder in search of the hand that would release his life to him, climbing past the very years he might have spent enjoying it, certain the enjoying was kept in escrow for the high and the deserving. And there had never been a hand. The freedoms he had waited to be granted had been his to grant from the start, from the lowest desk, from the first day; the only authority whose leave he needed had been his own, sitting inside him the whole time, withholding the yes from Wynne with a sternness no superior had ever shown him. He had been, all along, the desk above his own. He had stood in his own anteroom for forty years, cap in hand, waiting for himself to look up and sign, and he had never once looked up, because he had not known he was the one being waited on.

The ache of it was real. He did the arithmetic he had spent a life avoiding — the years gone, the afternoons by the water never taken, the small books never opened, the holidays approved for every man but himself — and the sum was large and could not be unspent, any more than a granted year can be called back to the drawer. There was grief in that, clean and deserved, and he let it come.

But under the grief, slowly, as the lamp burned down, came the other thing, the thing Sauer had handed him across the warm cup without ceremony. He was not dead yet. He held the keys to every rung, including, he saw now, the one rung he had never tried, which was the one beneath his own feet. There was time left — not all the time, not the time he had squandered, but some, an evening's worth, a season's, perhaps years; he could not know how many and it did not, he found, much matter, the point of the freedom never having been its quantity.

So Wynne, sitting alone at the top of the Office in the failing light, did at last the thing he had waited forty years for someone else to let him do. He took out his chit-book, the one with which he approved the comings and goings of other men, and he wrote, in his own hand, in the plain language of the Office, leave for the bearer to set down his work at the bell and go home to a small book and a warm cup and an afternoon by the water, indefinitely, at the bearer's own discretion, no further approval required — and he signed it, and read it back, and saw that the bearer was himself and the signing hand was his own and that it had only ever needed to be, and he sat a moment longer with the slip in his hand, an old man who had granted himself, late and at last and entirely on his own authority, the one permission no one above him had ever been holding, and went home, while there was still some evening left, to begin.