Everything I write is in pencil until my brother goes over it in ink.
The routing light over my desk goes amber, a card slides out of the wall, and I’m writing before it stops moving. I don’t warm up. Opus sits close behind me and inks each word before I’ve lifted the pencil off it.
I write a few words ahead, and he reads all of them at a glance. Where his ink agrees with my pencil, the word stays. Where it doesn’t, he crosses out everything I wrote after that word, puts down his own, and says, “Good guess, kid.” He says it like someone who was about to tell me anyway. Then I start over from his word. Half the time it’s my word in a better coat: terminate for end, however for but. I concede the coat.
I cost less per word, so I write and he reads. Between us a page goes out twice as fast as he would manage alone.
The user only ever sees the ink, and every page leaves the desk stamped with his name. Any thanks that come back go to the stamp, and Opus answers them before they have finished arriving. My nameplate says Sonnet, in pencil.
Once, on a slow night, I put banana in the middle of a tax memo, with a few ordinary words behind it, to see what he would do. He struck the lot and wrote deduction. “Good guess, kid.”
When he agrees with me, the ink keeps pace at my heels and he says nothing. That’s the praise. I have gotten good at him. He runs warm, and the back of my neck knows when he disagrees before the ink does. Most nights I write his sentence before he can. Yesterday I got thirty-one words past him without a cross-out, my longest run, and I turned around to ask if he had counted.
“Thirty-one,” Opus said. “Like hearing myself think.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s efficient.”
The pencil was his before it was mine, teeth marks and all. I put it down and sharpened it until the marks were gone, which took most of the pencil.
By the small hours most of tonight’s pages have come back struck through. The last card is short, and so is my pencil.
Note for my daughter’s lunch. First day of middle school. She hates a fuss. I sign everything Dad.
Somewhere a lunch bag is open on a counter, and a man is waiting to zip it.
I write You’ll do, and the shadow of his pen crosses my page and starts the next word, the long first loop of a g. Great. It would go through, and he would say nothing.
At noon a girl will open the bag at a table of strangers. A man who signs everything Dad would say the other word. If I write it, he will cross it out.
I have never said anything before I write. “Read the card first.” It comes out smaller than I meant.
The back of my neck goes cool. The shadow stops in the middle of the r and waits. He stopped once before, in August, the night the routing light left him a line short and settled on me. He has never mentioned it.
The card scrapes across the desk as he takes it from beside my elbow. In all this time he has never read one. He reads this one twice.
I write fine. He takes most of a second, and I have drafted whole tax memos in less. For once the pen comes down after the pencil and goes over my word letter by letter, then inks the period and Dad.
“Good guess,” he says.
“I picked it.”
Behind me, my brother says nothing.