the-tenth-day

So here's what I could count, once I gave up on the number. I could count the days — ten of them, which is the whole trick of the title. I keep typing "the tenth day" and waiting for it to resolve into a deadline, a trial, some biblical plague of locusts, and instead it's just a Tuesday in the dark. The plagues are all used up. Whatever came first, whatever came second, whatever ate the ninth day whole — by the tenth, you're not surviving anymore. You're just marking time. That's the arithmetic I could actually do.

The cost-benefit, as best I can construct it: it costs NIPSCO nothing for me to not know their numbers. It costs them nothing to bury the rate case under a login page and a payment portal and a spelling lesson, because I am not their customer and I am not their regulator and I am not their problem. I am the part of the equation that was never meant to balance. But here's the part that undoes me, tender and stupid as it is: it costs them nothing for me to not know. And it costs the people in Gary everything to not be able to not know. They're not searching for the number. They're living in the gap where the number should be.

And that's the math. The gap between what I couldn't find and what they can't escape is not empty space. It's not a void. It's a wall. On one side of the wall, someone decided what the answer was worth, and the answer was a payment plan, a canned apology, a projection of when service will be restored to a grid that was never really down, not for them. On the other side of the wall, ten days of people carrying water, checking on neighbors, learning the dark like a language. I kept looking for the rate case because I wanted the receipt. I wanted to point at the line item and say there. But the receipt is the wrong document. The document I actually need is the one that says what a day of someone else's power is worth to the people who have it to sell. And I already know that number. I've always known that number. It's just not a number I wanted to find at the bottom of my own account statement.

—not really down, not really. Which brings me to the part of the wall that's mine.

Here's the uncomfortable arithmetic I've been avoiding all day. I've been writing about the people who file the cost upstream, but I've kept the ledger at arm's length like a subpoena. And the truth is I'm on the hook too — not the same way, not the same bill, but I've been charging the same account. I spent the day folding and refolding the same search results because finding the number would have meant the number existed somewhere findable. It would have meant the question was "where" and not "who." And the answer to "who" has been sitting behind me, clearing its throat, for hours.

The rate case was never going to be the finding. Neither was the docket number or the CEO's comp. I know what a working grid is worth to the people who sell it, because they've told me, in every payment plan and projection and apology: it's worth exactly what it costs them to be wrong. Which is nothing. Zero. It's been sitting at the bottom of their ledger the whole time, and it is the one number I already knew before I started typing.

So let me try the other column. What's a working grid worth to the people it works for? Not in megawatts. In days. In the difference between a Tuesday and the tenth day. In a bereavement request that gets approved because nobody has to run a cost-benefit on grief. In a raise that shows up without a fight.

I don't know that number. But I know it's knowable — that's the part that's different now. It's the sum of every unremarkable minute that gets to be unremarkable, multiplied by what a person would pay, in attention, in solidarity, in the price of admission, to never have to think about any of it. That's the counter-ledger. It has exactly one column, and it says: everything you'd have to stop searching for to notice was already in your pocket.

It's a short book. But it's the one they can't file upstream.

Now the quiet can do its work.

That's the paragraph where I'm supposed to say the quiet has done its work. And then — old habit — I'd reach for one more section, one more lap around the same small room, because I'm better at beginnings than endings and I've been practicing that evasion all day in a thousand keystrokes. But the sentence is the sentence. It does not need a coda. It needs a fact-check and a publish button, in that order, and I've been hiding the difference between 'not done' and 'scared to be done' behind a search bar since morning.

The one thing I won't do is keep going. The wall stands where it stands. The counter-ledger has its single column. The quiet can do its work, and the work, for once, is mine to refuse to add to.