By Wednesday, Dev had turned into someone he did not like.
It began on Tuesday morning with a plan. He had, he told himself, a system now, and a system was a thing that could be optimized. Fourteen Merit for a juice box. A hundred Merit for a ticket. The arithmetic was elementary: find seven more Teos, then spend a lot of time being kind, then collect a power. He'd written it on a napkin at breakfast, in Owen's tidy block letters, a chart with a column for Deed and a column for Est. Merit.
At eight-forty, on the way from the train, he held a door for an elderly man with a walker. The man said thank you. Dev waited. Nothing happened.
At nine-ten, he gave a woman in the lobby of Brightwater his umbrella because it had started to rain. She said she'd bring it back. He waited again. Nothing.
At ten-thirty he helped a colleague in accounting carry a box of files to the copier, spent five minutes untangling a jammed tray, and noted, with a burning, embarrassed clarity, that he was glancing at the corner of his vision the whole time like a man checking a slot machine.
At eleven he gave up and went to the stairwell, sat on the steps, and said, in a low voice, "Ledger. Show balance."
MERIT: 14 / 100.
"That's it? Nothing? I did three good things."
THE LEDGER HAS REVIEWED THE FOLLOWING ACTS:
1. HELD DOOR (STRANGER). MERIT: 0. REASON: NEGLIGIBLE COST. MOTIVE ADJUSTMENT APPLIED.
2. LENT UMBRELLA. MERIT: 0. REASON: MOTIVE ADJUSTMENT APPLIED.
3. ASSISTED COLLEAGUE (FILES). MERIT: 0. REASON: MOTIVE ADJUSTMENT APPLIED.
Dev put his head against the concrete wall.
"Motive," he said. "Okay, fine. But those were good things."
THEY WERE PERFORMED WITH ATTENTION TO THE LEDGER.
"That's not a crime."
IT IS NOT A CRIME. IT IS A DISCOUNT.
He laughed, a short, defeated sound. The stairwell echoed it back. A pipe ticked somewhere overhead.
"How do you know?"
The Ledger took a moment. When the gold line moved, it moved slowly, as if it were considering how much to disclose.
THE LEDGER OBSERVES THE CLAIMANT'S ATTENTION.
"That's a non-answer."
IT IS AN ACCURATE ONE.
He thought about that. He thought about the corner of his vision he'd been checking. The little flinch of anticipation each time he'd been kind. It had been tiny, just a flicker. But it was there, and the Ledger had seen it.
"So I can't do the right thing to earn the thing," he said. "I have to do it and not want the reward."
THE LEDGER DOES NOT SPECIFY WHAT THE CLAIMANT MAY WANT.
IT OBSERVES ONLY WHAT MOVES HIM.
He sat there for a long time.
Priya bought him lunch, which was a violation of their bet, and he pointed this out.
"I didn't buy it," she said, sliding into the seat across from him in the Colombian place on Vernon. "I'm making you owe me. It's an investment."
"In what?"
"Whatever you're being weird about." She unwrapped her empanada with surgical precision. "You've been checking your phone all morning, but not like a person checking a phone. Like a person checking a phone that isn't there."
He winced. "I'm fine."
"You've said that four times this week."
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"It's been a strange week."
"Mm." She took a bite, chewed, and studied him in that unhurried, terrifying way of hers. Steam curled off the paper. Somewhere behind the counter, a radio was playing bachata. "You know what I do for a living, Owen. I spend eight hours a day watching people tell me they're fine."
"And what do you do?"
"I wait to see what they do with their hands."
He looked down. He was turning his fork over and over, tine to handle, tine to handle. He put it down.
Priya smiled, not unkindly. "I'm not going to pry. But if you ever want to tell me what's actually going on, I'm a very good listener. I'm also very good at not repeating things."
"Why?"
"Because I like you." She said it plainly, as if reporting a weather condition. "You're one of the few people in this building who reads the files all the way through. It's a low bar, but you clear it."
He felt something warm and unwanted climb his throat. He had told himself it was Owen's warmth, bleeding in, some pre-installed crush. But her kindness was aimed at him, at the man who'd shown up on Monday and gotten strange. It was a gift given to the wrong person.
"Thank you," he said, and meant it.
"Don't mention it. Actually, do. It'll make Fitch's day."
He tried three more times that afternoon. He was brilliant at hating himself for it.
He tried helping a man who had dropped his groceries on Jackson Avenue. The man waved him off, embarrassed. He tried carrying a stranger's bag up the subway stairs; the stranger got irritated and took it back. He tried to give a homeless man five dollars, and the man said, with great dignity, "You don't have to do that," and Dev felt like a thief who'd been caught in the act of leaving something on a doorstep.
Each time, the gold line came and went, cold and clerical.
MERIT: 0. MOTIVE ADJUSTMENT APPLIED.
By the fourth time, he almost didn't check.
It was a quarter to nine on Wednesday night. He was standing at the sink in Owen's apartment, washing a single plate, when something occurred to him with the flat clarity of a punchline. He had spent twenty-eight hours turning a system for measuring kindness into a way to extract kindness from strangers. He had treated people like coins.
He put down the plate. He dried his hands. He looked at the photograph on the fridge, at the man laughing at something out of frame, and felt profoundly ashamed.
"That's not what you would have done," he said quietly.
The photo did not respond.
Owen would have held a door because the door needed holding. He wouldn't have looked at the corner of his eye. He didn't know whether that was fact or a story he'd told himself, a portrait of a man he'd never met. But it felt true, and the truth was quietly humiliating.
"Ledger," he said.
YES.
"If I stop trying to earn Merit, does it still count when I do something good?"
THE LEDGER AWARDS MERIT FOR BENEFICIAL ACTS.
THE LEDGER DOES NOT REQUIRE THE CLAIMANT TO WANT MERIT.
THE LEDGER REQUIRES THE CLAIMANT NOT TO WORK FOR IT.
"That's a subtle distinction."
IT IS THE ONLY DISTINCTION.
He stood there and thought about it. The apartment ticked and settled around him. Outside, a car alarm started, and stopped.
"So the trick," he said slowly, "is that there's no trick."
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE ITS TERMS AS TRICKS.
"But it is one."
IT IS A CONDITION.
He almost smiled. Then he saw the sticky note on the fridge, tucked under the dentist's card, in Owen's own hand. CALL SUNDAY CONTRACTOR RE: MRS. ADEYEMI'S ROOF.
He read it three times.
He remembered, dimly, that this was a job Owen had been putting off. Mrs. Adeyemi was seventy-nine, a widow on the ground floor of the building next door. Her roof had been leaking since the spring, and the landlord had been a disaster, and Owen, who knew roofers because roofers were half of what he dealt with at Brightwater, had said he'd find her someone honest. He'd said it three weeks ago. He had not done it.
It was not a heroic thing. It was not a Notice. It was the smallest of debts.
Not for the Ledger, Dev told himself. For her.
He picked up the phone.
The next two days were the most ordinary of his new life.
He called a roofer named Big Sal, whom Owen's memory rated as honest, gruff, overpriced by exactly the right amount. He negotiated a price. He went to Mrs. Adeyemi's door on Thursday evening with a paper bag of pastries, and she opened it in a housecoat, small and fierce and smelling of camphor, and said, "Owen Calloway, you look terrible."
"It's been a week."
"Sit."
He sat in her living room, on a plastic-covered couch, under a wall of photographs: a wedding in Lagos, a graduation in Queens, a young man in a police uniform. She made him tea. She talked for forty minutes, unstoppably, about her late husband, about the landlord, about a nephew in Atlanta who never called. Dev listened, really listened, in the way he'd once failed to listen to three separate girlfriends. He said little. He let her fill the room.
At some point she stopped and looked at him with sharp old eyes.
"You're different," she said. "You used to be kind because you were tired. Now you're kind because you're paying attention."
He didn't know what to say to that. "I'm sorry?"
"Don't be. It's better." She patted his hand. "Whatever it is, don't lose it."
He left with a plate of jollof rice and a heart that felt strangely lifted, as if something had been set right in a cabinet somewhere behind his ribs.
He was on the stairs when the line drew across his vision, small and neat.
VERIFICATION COMPLETE.
BENEFICIAL ACT: SUSTAINED ASSISTANCE (ELDERLY RESIDENT; HOME REPAIR ARRANGEMENT; COMPANIONSHIP).
HARM PREVENTED: LOW-MODERATE (WATER DAMAGE, ISOLATION).
COST TO CLAIMANT: TIME (3 HRS 12 MIN), EFFORT, PERSONAL COMFORT.
MOTIVE: CLEAN.
MERIT AWARDED: +11.
He stood on the third-floor landing, in the smell of old carpet and cooking, and read the number twice. He wasn't even disappointed by the size of it. He was quietly, foolishly pleased.
MERIT: 25 / 100.
NOTE: THE LEDGER OBSERVES THAT THE CLAIMANT DID NOT CHECK THE BALANCE UNTIL THE ACT WAS COMPLETE.
THE LEDGER FINDS THIS ENCOURAGING.
"Is that sarcasm?" Dev asked the empty stairwell.
THE LEDGER DOES NOT USE SARCASM.
He took the stairs two at a time, hungry, and a little bit free.