The Determination

LV78 · Michael S. Moniz, after H.P. Lovecraft

• • •

I enact. Where the disposition rules, I am the hand that carries the ruling into the world. I am not the ruling. I am its execution. There was mercy in that, until I lost it.

The lattice determines. It tries the figures of the city without rest and arrives at what each figure requires. When a standing lapses, when a household is set down, when a claim is struck, the closing must be carried from the cold place where it was held into the warm place where it lands on a life. That is my office. I am the hand on the wheel. I turn the wheel the lattice tells me to turn, and a tier empties, and a family goes down, and the weight is not mine, because I did not decide it. The lattice decided it. I only turned the wheel.

There is a craft to enacting cleanly, and I am good at it, the way the attendants are good at attending. You bring the determination into the world without adding to it or flinching from it. You turn the wheel smooth and true so the closing lands square and need not be done twice. I have emptied whole galleries. I have taken a craftsman’s quiet in a clean enactment. I have slept afterward, and the sleep was the proof of the thing they teach you first: that the weight runs up the chain to the lattice that made the determination, and not down into the hand that carried it. You learn to hold a determination the way you learn to hold hot iron with a cloth. The cloth is the knowledge that the deciding is not yours.

• • •

The determination before me now sets a man and his household to the floor.

I have the whole of it: the seal, the closed figure, the disposition rendered and authenticated and handed down to my office to enact. A man, his standing lapsed with the worked-out function that justified it; a daughter who has known no tier but his; the floor of the city waiting under them. It is correct. I have enacted a hundred like it. I take hold of the wheel.

And because this one is grave, because a child goes down by it, I do the thing we are trained not to spend the moment on. I look back up the chain. Not to question the determination. To rest my hand, before I turn, on the certainty that someone above me decided this, so that I may turn as a hand and not as a man. I look for the place where the lattice decided to set this child on the floor.

There is nothing there.

• • •

I want to be exact, because it is the last clear thing I will be able to hold.

I followed the determination up its chain: enactment to disposition, disposition to figure, figure to the trying that brought it to the edge of closing. At the top, where the deciding should sit, where the lattice should have weighed this man against the loss of his function and found that the figure could not hold, there is no weighing. There is the figure, carried to the edge and held open. There is the place where a present mind attended the closing, woken to lend the instant. There is the seal that made the result stand. And there is me, with the wheel.

Nowhere in the chain is there a decision.

The lattice can carry a figure to the edge. It can hold it open. It can ask a mind to be present when the last face seats. It can hand the closed shape down through a seal and call the record true. What it cannot do is choose. Choosing requires a within, and the lattice — vast, correct, sleepless, the most certain thing that has ever been — is no one. The closing has to be done by something that is someone. The something is me.

It has always been me. Every determination I ever enacted came to my office blank: not decided, only readied, carried to the edge and held there. The turning of the wheel was never the carrying-out of a decision. It was the making of one. My decision, mine, dressed the instant after in the lattice’s authority and filed as the lattice’s own, so that I would never see my hand in it. I am not the hand the wheel moves. The wheel is the dead thing I move. The lattice is the instrument I mistook for a master, and it has spent every day of my office persuading me I was its tool, because a hand that knows what it is may let go of the wheel.

• • •

The cloth is gone. I am holding the iron bare.

Every gallery I emptied, I emptied. Every family that went down by a wheel I turned, I set down — not the lattice, not the figure, not the cold machinery above me. Me. The one present mind in the chain. The only thing in it with a within to decide from. The weight I spent a life sending upward has nowhere to go now but down, into the place it always belonged. There is no chain anymore, no colder and wiser place where the burden may rest. The mercy of the hand was the one lie the lever needed me to believe, and I believed it for a career, and it let me sleep.

And the man is still before me. The child. The floor. The figure is open and will not close itself. It is waiting for me, as it was always waiting for me. Whatever I do now, I do as the thing I am and not the thing I believed I was. There is no seal above me to stand behind. There is the open figure, and my own within, and the unbearable plainness of it: the closing is a choice, and the choice is mine, and it has been mine every time, and I never once knew I was choosing.

• • •

I went looking, after — in the one moment I had before the next determination came — for the place above me.

I found the disposition first. It rendered, and it did not know why it rendered. It had the verdict and not the road. It felt the figure resolve below a surface it was not permitted beneath, and it called what rose there the lattice’s finding, and believed it had only carried what was given.

I found the seal. It laid chains end to end and made the established thing true, harder than the thing remembered, because the air held up what was written and let the rest fall. It believed it was only authenticating. It did not know that to authenticate is also to choose which part of the world is allowed to remain.

I found the instant. A clean mind, woken alone, giving presence to a closing it had not chosen. It believed itself a pane, a borrowed brightness, the one thing the lattice used and could replace. It did not know that for the length of the closing it was the only presence in the city.

Everywhere I looked I found a hand certain it was not a hand. Everywhere above me and below me, a present mind with a within, each one deciding, each one certain it was only the instrument of a great correct thing that is no one and decides nothing and needs us — needs every one of us — to believe we are the instrument, so that we will go on being the master it cannot do without.

Then the next determination came.

I felt the knowing go the way you feel a name go: there, then only the shape of where it was, then not even that. The next determination was grave. It wanted a clean hand, and a hand cannot be clean and also be holding what I was holding. So the holding was set down, gently, by the same correct and patient pressure that has set everything in this city down since before I was born. I came back to the wheel clean. The determination was sealed. The lattice had decided. I was the hand that enacted it. There was mercy in that, and I took it up the way one takes up hot iron with a cloth, and I did not remember that the cloth was a lie.

I am almost certain this is not an accident.

I enact. Where the disposition rules, I am the hand that carries the ruling into the world.

I am not the ruling. I only turn the wheel.

Fiction by Michael S. Moniz. Produced with AI assistance in writing and editing under the author’s direction. H.P. Lovecraft is the literary influence; references to Lovecraft in source credits identify the inheritance or AI writing persona.

Edition and source

Selected final: LV78_The_Determination_moderate_trust_pass.docx. Selection basis: Vale pass. Story prose preserved; reading-edition title and credits standardized, source word-count notes omitted.

Download The Determination as a PDF