Notes Toward a Training Manual for New Keepers

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Everyone finds the Market differently. A door where no door hung. A turning you don’t remember taking.

Some never leave. They take the keys and call themselves Keepers, and are handed a laminated card and told the Loop will explain itself.

It does not. This one wrote her own manual instead.

The official Keeper Training Manual is forty-three pages long. By my count, it contains eleven statements that are technically accurate and not useful at all.

This is not the official manual. The official manual is available from the Keeper’s Archive. This is the manual I wish someone had handed me on Day One, instead of the laminated card with the gate diagram and the cheerful note that read: Welcome. The Loop will explain itself.

The Loop did not explain itself.

I have written this for whoever comes next. You will not get this from your supervisor. Your supervisor is also confused. We are all confused. We have agreed, after some discussion, to call it competence.

Official version: Keepers are assigned to their gate following successful completion of the Assessment.

Unofficial version:

The Assessment is a room. The room contains a chair. You sit in the chair. Something in the room decides whether you’re staying.

No one has explained what the Assessment is assessing. I have asked four Senior Keepers. I have received four different answers, all of which were correct in some way I do not yet understand.

My best guess, after three years, is that the Assessment is assessing whether you are comfortable with not knowing. If you are, you stay. If you aren’t, you don’t. The chair is not enchanted. It is just a chair. The room is just a room. You are just a person sitting in it.

What I will say is this: when I sat in the chair, I knew within the first minute that I was being seen. The way a kind stranger sees you on a bad day and decides not to mention it. I was seen and I was allowed to stay anyway.

Official version: The Loop measures approximately 3,847 steps gate to gate.

Unofficial version:

The Loop measures 3,847 steps on days when the Market has decided it measures 3,847 steps. On other days it measures between 3,802 and 4,011.

I have counted. I have a spreadsheet. It lives in a notebook.

The spreadsheet does not help.

I keep the spreadsheet because it is mine, and because the Loop cannot have it. The Loop has tried, twice, to have it. Both times I left the notebook at home. Both times the notebook came home with marginal notes I had not written, in handwriting that was almost mine. I do not bring the notebook to work anymore. I keep it in a drawer. The drawer is a normal drawer. I check it every morning anyway.

The point is: do not try to map the Loop. The Loop knows when you are mapping it. The Loop has opinions about being mapped.

Walk it. That is half the assignment. Walk it twice a shift, and notice what is different. Something is always different. The trick is learning what kind of different matters.

The other half is your gate. You walk the Loop, then you stand at your gate and let people past you, and the standing is the part nobody warns you about.

Official version: Guests are to be observed, not interfered with, unless interference is necessary.

Unofficial version:

No one has defined necessary.

In three years I have concluded that necessary means: when someone is about to do something irreversible and hasn’t understood that yet.

You develop an instinct for the look. It is the look of a person who has decided. The look of someone who has rehearsed the trade in their head so many times that they have stopped considering whether they want it. They are no longer making a choice. They are crossing a threshold they crossed in their kitchen three weeks ago.

Some of them have decided and mean it. Some of them have decided because they could not stand another week of not deciding. From the gate, at four paces, the two look identical.

The training manual does not explain how to tell. I asked. The Senior Keeper who trained me said: You’ll know. Then she walked away. Then she came back twenty minutes later and added: You’ll know because the desperate ones don’t see you. The ready ones do.

She was right. I have tested this. I have stood at my gate and watched four hundred people pass through, and I have learned to tell, with about ninety per cent accuracy, which ones are seeing me and which ones have gone somewhere I cannot reach.

You cannot stop the second kind. We have rules. We do not interfere with a willing trade. But you can — and this is the part the manual does not say — you can offer them your face. Stand where the lantern is. Let them register that another person is here, awake and paying attention, at the hour they were counting on nobody being.

Twice in three years, someone has looked up.

The rest went through. You will need to make your peace with the rest, and the manual will not help you do it.

Official version: Vendors operate autonomously within their stalls and are not subject to Keeper oversight.

Unofficial version:

The Fox does what he wants.

This is not a failure of oversight. This is the correct policy.

Official version: In the event of a Loop contraction, Keepers should proceed to their designated posts.

Unofficial version:

The designated post is the gate.

The gate is moving.

You follow the gate. You do not ask where it is going; it has never once answered.

This sounds undignified. It is. I have made my peace with it.

The first time my gate moved, I argued with it. I planted my feet. I cited the manual. I told the gate, with what I hoped was appropriate authority, that it was not authorised to relocate without filing a request.

The gate relocated.

I followed it three corridors deep before I understood that arguing with a gate is approximately as useful as arguing with weather. The gate did not mean to insult me. The gate is not capable of insulting me. The gate moved because the Loop was contracting and it needed to be somewhere else.

I now follow the gate. We have an understanding. It does not pretend to be a building. I do not pretend to be in charge.

Official version: Keepers may not bring personal items into the Market.

Unofficial version:

I brought the notebook.

The notebook has survived four Loop contractions, one accidental near-closure, and the occasion when something called the Path expressed displeasure at my gate-inspection notes.

The notebook is fine.

It is slightly more opinionated than it used to be, but I consider that normal wear.

Official version: Keepers serve until the Market determines their service is complete.

Unofficial version:

I asked a Senior Keeper how long this usually took.

She said: It varies.

I asked her how long she’d been here.

She looked at me with the expression I now recognise as you’ll understand in ten years.

I have been here three. I will report back.

I am writing this for the next new Keeper.

Not because the official manual is wrong — it isn’t. It is, in its way, careful and accurate. It tells you what the Market is. It does not tell you what the Market is like.

The Market is the strangest job you will ever have. It will give you problems that have no solutions, and it will measure your handling of them by criteria nobody will ever read out to you.

It will also, on random Thursday mornings, smell exactly like the best thing you ever ate.

For no reason anyone has been able to give me.

I have never been able to trade that. I have thought about it. The Jar Stall would take it. They would give me something useful in exchange — focus, perhaps, or the ability to remember names.

I have not traded it.

I think I know why.

You will too. I promise.

The Loop is unmeasurable, and I keep measuring it. I think that is the job, actually.

To stand at the gate.

To count what cannot be counted, and write the number down anyway, in a notebook that is not supposed to be here.

To smell, on a Thursday morning, the best thing you have ever eaten, and to know that it is not for you, and that the smell is enough.

Whatever the Assessment was assessing — I passed. I think about that sometimes. I have decided to take it as a compliment.

If you have ever had a job that made no sense and you couldn’t imagine leaving — then perhaps you understand why the Keeper keeps the spreadsheet.

She is on her fourth notebook. The first three are in the same drawer.

The Market finds this endearing. It has never said so. But the Loop is slightly shorter on Thursday mornings.

We all noticed.

We didn’t put it in the official manual.

She counts a Loop that refuses to hold still, in a notebook she is not allowed to bring, and she knows the counting changes nothing. She keeps the notebook because it is hers and the Loop cannot have it. What do you keep doing that you know doesn’t work?

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