The Amendments

The rules went up at twenty to seven, which is earlier than anybody asked for and exactly when Eter said they would.

Seven of them, typed, one sheet, taped at all four corners to the glass over the postboxes. I brought the tape. I also brought a second copy, in case of rain, which I did not mention to anyone, because there is no way to mention a thing like that and come out of it well.

Gia arrived while the tape was still going on. He reads out loud when he intends to disagree.

“Residents shall not obstruct the passage of another vehicle.” He looked up. “And the tree?”

“The tree is rule six.”

“Rule six says the tree stays.”

“It does,” I said. “Rule six says the tree stays.”

He stood there in the particular posture of a man discovering that something he voted for is something he agreed to. I said that if he wanted, he could take it to the committee. He said he was on the committee. I said yes.

Marina came down at ten past with coffee and no intention of reading anything, and asked what I made of rule four. I said rule four was the most sensible of the seven. Gia said what about six, and I said six was sensible as well, and Marina turned her head very slowly.

“You said four.”

“They’re both sensible.”

“They contradict each other.”

“Only in the courtyard,” I said, which I meant as a joke about jurisdiction and which arrived as something else.

Then Eter came out, and the rules stopped being the point. She had a bank letter folded to the line that mattered, and she had not come down about parking at all.

“Nine ninety-five a month,” she said. “Since two thousand and nineteen. Some film channel.”

“Do you watch it?”

“I don’t know what it is.”

It took forty seconds. There is a number, then a menu, then a person who tries twice, and the trick with the person is not cleverness — it is saying the same six words in the same tone until they stop. Eter watched the confirmation come through and then looked at me in a way I want to be careful about describing, because it was not gratitude. It was the look you give a locksmith.

“Do Gia’s,” she said.

I said I could do the whole building before lunch. I said it too quickly, and I had already started counting doors, and I heard both of those things happen at roughly the speed they happened.

Muse does this now, at the scale of everybody who downloaded it this month, and over the weekend somebody finally added up the other side of the ledger: Americans who spent more on subscriptions last year are averaging $1,887 each, and cancellations are up across every category anyone measures. The defence being mounted is not that the subscriptions were good. It is that cancelling them used to be difficult, and that this was load-bearing.

There should be an eighth rule, about amendments. I am not going to propose it. Nine of us agreed on all seven, nine votes to nothing, in about fifteen minutes on Friday, and the amending started before the tape was dry — and a rule about that would be amended too.

Gia’s is nineteen ninety. Twice hers, for a channel he watches on the wrong input.

I have not told him yet.