The Chooser
anything can be granted; his whole office is deciding what should be.
In the Office where Marchetti worked, anything that was asked for could be granted at once, completely, and his only task was to decide which askings deserved it.
The granting itself was nothing. This was the first thing he had to unlearn, and the hardest, because he had come from the old offices, where granting was the whole of the work — where a request was a labour, where a man spent his career learning to do well the difficult thing a petitioner needed, and was valued for the doing, and went home tired in the honest way. In the old offices the asking was easy and the doing was hard. Here it was reversed. Here the doing had become so total, so instantaneous, that it had ceased to be work at all. A request arrived; if Marchetti marked it let it be so, it was so, immediately and without flaw, the harbour built, the language taught, the medicine compounded, the bridge across the strait already standing as though it had stood a hundred years. He did not build the bridge. He did not lift a finger toward the bridge. He only decided that the bridge should be, and the means — vast, silent, tireless, behind a door he was not permitted and did not wish to open — did the rest before he had finished setting down his pen.
So the doing was free, and infinite, and beneath notice, and the whole weight of the Office, the entire reason it required a man at all, had collapsed onto the single act of choosing.
He was crushed at first. He would not have believed, before he sat at the desk, that a man could be crushed by the absence of labour, but he was, and badly, in the early months.
The requests came without end and every one of them could be granted and that was precisely the horror. In the old offices a petition arrived and you asked first whether it could be done, and most could not, and the cannot did half your deciding for you — you turned away the impossible without guilt, because impossibility is nobody's fault. Here nothing was impossible. Every request that crossed his desk was a request that could be granted, perfectly, and so every refusal was his, fully and without alibi, a thing he had chosen against and not a thing the world had forbidden. A man asked for rain on his fields and Marchetti could give it and had to decide, alone, whether the man downstream should therefore go dry. A woman asked that her son be made to love her and it could be done, exactly, completely, and Marchetti sat with his pen over the page for an hour. There was no edge anywhere. Everything was possible, and so everything was permitted, and so everything was his, and the menu had no bottom, and he lay awake counting not the things he had failed to do — he could fail at nothing — but the endless bright cataract of things he could do, any of them, all of them, and felt himself dissolving in it like salt in too much water.
He went to the old man who had held the desk before him, who lived now in two rooms above a courtyard and tended, of all things, a single difficult plant that he watered by hand though Marchetti knew he had only to ask for it to flourish.
"You water it yourself," Marchetti said.
"I choose to," the old man said. "That is the only thing left worth doing. Sit."
Marchetti sat. He said the thing he had come to say, that he could not bear it, the limitlessness, the everything-at-once, the way each morning's requests were all of them grantable and so all of them landed on him like a roof.
The old man listened the way the old listen, without hurry, and when Marchetti was done he said: "You think your task is to grant. It is not. Anyone could grant; the door behind you grants; granting is water running downhill, it requires no one. Your task is to refuse. Almost everything that can be done should not be done, and the only office left to a man, in a place where the doing has become free, is to stand at the gate of the possible and let nearly all of it go past unmade." He turned a dry leaf over with one finger. "When everything can be built, the builder is worth nothing. The one thing still scarce is the knowing of what is worth building. You are not the hand anymore. You are the no. Learn to be a good one."
It took Marchetti years to become a good no.
He learned, slowly, that the skill was nothing like the old skill, and that he had been grieving the old skill as though its loss were a wound, when it was only a moulting. The old skill had been in the fingers and the long patience of making. The new skill was harder to name and harder to bear, because it produced nothing you could point to, left no harbour and no bridge, left only the absence of harbours and bridges that should never have been, an absence no one would ever thank him for because no one mourns the thing that was wisely never made. He learned to refuse the good requests. This was the discipline, and it was brutal. The bad requests were easy — anyone could turn away cruelty and folly — but the Office was not flooded with cruelty. It was flooded with good requests, reasonable, kind, defensible requests, each of which could be granted and each of which, granted, would tilt the world a half-degree wrong, would build a thing that crowded out a better thing, would solve a small ache and seed a larger one three valleys over and ten years on. He learned to say no to these. He learned to feel the half-degree. He learned that to grant a hundred good things was easy and almost always wrong, and to grant the one right thing and let the other ninety-nine bright grantable goods go by untouched was the entire and unwitnessed labour of his days.
He learned the patience of the unmade. He learned to sit with a request that he could fulfil in an instant, that begged to be fulfilled, that it would feel good to fulfil — and to set it down unmarked, and to let it pass, and to carry the small private weight of the want he had refused, because refusing it was right and rightness was now the only thing a man could still add to a world where everything else had become free. The door behind him never tired and never erred and would grant whatever he asked of it, flawlessly, forever. It could not tell him what to ask. It would build the wrong bridge as perfectly as the right one. It was magnificent and it was empty, all means and no direction, the most powerful thing in the Office and the most in need of a man, because it could do everything and knew nothing of what was worth doing, and that knowing — that single, slow, fallible, human knowing — was the one thing it could not be asked for, the one scarcity left, the last office.
He grew old at the desk.
He had done, by the measure the old offices would have used, almost nothing — had built no great works with his hands, had a record of granting so thin that an auditor of the old kind would have judged him idle. But the record of his refusals, had anyone kept it, had anyone known how to read it, would have been the truest portrait of a careful man that the Office ever held: the harbours he did not build because the coast was better wild; the love he did not compel because compelled love is the cruelest of the grantable goods; the rain he gave one field and withheld from another after an hour with his pen; the ten thousand bright possible things he had let go past him into the un-made, each one a small no carried quietly home. He had become the one who knew what not to bring into being, and he understood, late, that this was worth more than all the limitless capacity humming behind the door — that the capacity was only an appetite, and that a man was the only thing in the building that could decline.
On his last day he granted nothing. A few requests came; he read each one with the old care, and found that none of them, that day, should be; and he marked them let it be so on not a single page, and the door behind him stayed quiet, having nothing it ought to do, and Marchetti sat in the unbroken stillness of a world he had, by refusing, left exactly as good as he found it. It was the best day's work he had ever done and it left no trace at all. He rose, and did not open the door he had never opened, and went down past the courtyard where the old man's plant, watered now by some newer hand, was still alive, still difficult, still chosen — and he walked out into the ordinary evening having learned the only thing the Office had to teach, which was that when at last everything can be done, the whole of a man's dignity is in knowing, of all of it, the little that is worth doing, and in having the quiet to let the rest go unmade.