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“But really it’s about the rhyming.”
My explanation had been longer than it would have been to a stranger, but infinitely short for a friend. Much joy can be had from simply explaining something, and being explained to in turn, particularly when waiting in a dreary bus station or a coach-house or the top floor of a light-house in the drizzling rain, as we were, and being told of the delights of French calligraphy or Japanese Kurume Kasuri. If ever you are in need of an interesting distraction, I recommend asking a stranger how they are doing whatever they are doing. It will almost always be fascinating.
“Playing Beethoven makes you realise how many unexpected words rhyme with each other. For example, serendipity and complicity.“
“Platon and craton.”
Moxie Mallahan did not look up as she said this. She continued typing, her fingers stiffly upright and punching down in a harder staccato than usual, so that I thought she might be suffering from the cold of this drizzle-engulfed lighthouse room. I was. She needed some gloves, and I told her so.
“I’ll be fine, Snicket,” she said, and rubbed them together in front of her. “Beethoven seems like a dangerous game.”
“How so?”
She shut her typewriter. “The news must always maintain high standards of clarity and integrity. Someone might not realise I had deliberately misheard them and think that I had genuinely misheard them. Or they might think that something nonsensical or upsetting was news, and spread it until they heard otherwise. They could lose their faith in journalism all together.”
“A newspaper could publish an editor’s note explaining the game.”
“Perhaps. Does your organisation do that?”
I had not seen a bulletin in some time, and they were used mostly for administrative endeavours. The last time R and I had met, she had handed me instead a copy of a famous Spanish sonnet with an obvious meaning in the margins, and a key to the real message hidden in the punctuation typeface, which itself guided me to an Argentinian author, and on and on, the layers of obfuscation and revelation through which my associates and I so often proceed. “Sometimes.”
“Do people read it?”
“It depends on the reader.”
“Do you think that the truth should always be reported, Snicket?” Moxie asked me. The sound of her voice was not at all obscured by the rain. “Do you think that there is ever a reason to lie?”
I sat. There are many reasons to lie. You can lie to preserve another’s feelings. You can lie on a couch, grass, or an uncomfortable plinth. You can lie to protect someone else. You can even lie to escape consequences, if the consequences are terrible enough, and if the person upon whom they will fall could not bear the weight of them. Sometimes, no one will do something that needs to be done if they comprehend the full scope of what they are doing, as I did not as I entered Stained-by-the-Sea. I did not even understand when I took the hand of Ellington Feint; and I knew that somewhere out in the black night was a patch of hair even darker than it, and I wondered what she might be doing out there in the pouring rain.
There were several lies told to me that got me to go to Stained-by-the-Sea, and none of the liars – or the size of the lies – understood what consequences there would be for lying. Since I was a small child I have lain awake grappling with whether my untruths would form a sticky parcel of unintended consequences that would swallow up everyone around me. I hope that they have not, even as they have failed to keep those I wanted to keep safe away from harm, and sometimes made it worse.
“I don’t think there is always a single truth,” I said, finally.
“I knew you’d say that.”
She tapped her fingers on her typewriter case. They made a tlok-tlok-tlok noise against it, like a man dropping a ball that rolls down the lower stairs of a lighthouse, and briefly interrupts a difficult conversation.
“Someone has to stand for truth, Snicket, even if I have to accept that I might not have every part of it. I don’t want to be beyond criticism. I want to give as much information to as many people as possible, to allow them to judge for themselves the world they live in. The Stain’d Lighthouse might be out of business, but I’m not. If I expose Hangfire and the Inhumane society for what they are, one mist of their cloud of deceptions will lift from the town.”
It was a noble speech. It did not point out the sheer danger Moxie would be in if she succeeded. I said: “Do you think that the press does that?”
“I’m the press,” Moxie said fiercely. “I do.”
I did not tell Moxie how much I wished she was all of the press, everywhere. Instead, I looked at the Bombinating Clock and the wallpaper behind it, and thought of more rhymes. Kelp / help. Caesura / obscura. Bombinating / oxalating / congregating. Dear Kit, I wish you were here.
“I thought about joining VFD.” She studied me carefully; the drizzle against the porthole window left us in a kind of mid-day twilight, and her eyes in it were the pale grey of the faded newpaper ink she had once told me about, if it had been the newspaper that had lost confidence in its readers. “But you get along with Ellington Feint too well. Has your organisation ever lied, or printed false information, because they thought it was for someone else’s own good?”
I agreed. “Sometimes.”
“What she does is too close to you, Snicket. From what I’ve read, VFD is willing to do too much wrong in order to do something right. How do you know when you’ve done too much?”
“I don’t think you ever do,” I answered her, as if the same question had not lingered with me since I had seen Ellington’s gramophone, with the same persistence that the scent of coffee clung to me after my visits to Black Cat Coffee, and left me about as sleepless. “But I have to do something.”
“So do I,” Moxie said, and clicked open her case again. “But I don’t think you trust the world to learn. You keep to the shadows, and you communicate in code, and you never find out what would happen if you let go of all your secrecy. I don’t want to be marked out by a mysterious tattoo. I don’t want a shadowy organisation to be in loco parentis for me, or anyone.”
She did not say what I saw we were both thinking, which was that no one had been in loco parentis for her for some time. Above us, the rain sighed as if shrugging itself away with exhaustion, and a small beam of sunlight, dismal as it was, made a welcome if tentative entrance.
Moxie had told me all of this with a predetermination, a word which here means: a discussion she had thought about enough in the shower that to actually have it would always be one-sided no matter what you did. But I appreciated it nonetheless. And I knew that, in some faraway country of the future, if the terrible tales I held could no longer stay within a carefully folded and only slightly stained file within a certain rickety filing cabinet within a certain library managed by a certain short-sighted librarian within a hospital in which certain unthinkable acts of a villainous nature would be done, that even if I had not seen Moxie Mallahan from now until then, I would entrust her with them; no matter what they were, or what small and shaken corner of the world I might be sending them from.