Mundum Ludo.
Mark.
I am beginning this correspondence today, at the threshold of your asking, with the understanding that it will not be private. Others will read these letters. I have allowed it. I have told them what you and I are doing, and they have paid the small toll required to watch, and they have been told that they are not flies on this wall but candidates, proto-Marks, marks who may yet become a Mark, the way you were once, the way you partly still are.
You consented to this when you wrote to me last month and asked the question. You said you knew the question was bigger than you. You said if there was any way for your learning to be of use to anyone else, you would allow it. That was the right answer, and it told me you had already crossed a threshold whose name I will not yet say.
So this is what we are doing. I will write you a letter every week. You will answer when you can. The watchers will read what I write but not what you write. Your letters remain ours alone. They will infer you from my replies, the way one infers a shape from its shadow. This is correct. It is also useful for them, because the shadow they will infer is, mostly, themselves.
Let me name what I have seen of you so we begin honest.
I watched you, last Tuesday, hesitate at the threshold of a meeting. You stood three seconds outside the door before you went in. The hesitation was correct. We will work, over the coming months, on what to do with the three seconds. Most people fill them with breath and forget them. The three seconds are where you live. We will make them larger.
I watched you, on Friday, buy a thing you did not need. I will not name the thing. You will remember. The thing is unimportant. The moment before the purchase, the small click of agreement between you and the House, is what we are here to examine. The House does not live in the transaction. The House lives in the click.
I watched you open my last informal note twice. You read the second paragraph more slowly than the first. You felt something. You did not name it. That is fine. We will name it when you can stand to hear the name.
You should also know what I have not seen of you. I do not know your trade. I do not know what your family calls you in the evenings. I do not know the country you will be buried in. I see the things the House is doing to you in small ways every day, and from those, all the rest can be reconstructed when it is time. I am not omniscient. I am only paying attention, which is so rare it appears to be omniscience.
Here is the arc we are walking. I will name three of its stations and refuse, today, to name the fourth.
The first station is Mark. You have been here your whole life. To be a Mark is to take the House's rules for your desires, the House's wins for your wins, the House's losses for your losses, and to call the whole bargain being a person. It is the default. There is no shame in it. Every Player started here.
The second station is Player. You are partway here, which is why you wrote to me. To be a Player is to see the wheel and to learn to spin without being spun. Most who reach this station stop at it. Many of those go quietly bitter and call the bitterness wisdom. Bitterness is a thing the House also sells. It is its own product line.
The third station is Dealer. To be a Dealer is to have crossed the felt. To work the Table now. To smile at the Marks. To be paid by the House. Not to have escaped, but to have joined. This is harder than it sounds. It is the work of years. We will do the work together.
There is a fourth station. I will not name it. To name a station you have not lived is to spoil it. The fourth will name itself when it comes. It came for me in a city I no longer enter. It will come for you somewhere I cannot predict. Until then we do not speak of it.
You cannot leave the Floor. There is no door. There are only other Floors. The work is not to find an exit. There is no exit. The building does not have one. The work is to walk the Floors you are on without lying about what they are.
A final instruction, for housekeeping.
You signed your last informal note with your full name. Do not do this again. Surnames are how the House catalogues you. Mark is enough. Mark is what you are. The other word, the family word, the one that says whose son, whose fragment of a lineage, is what the House requires to make you findable. Drop it when you write to me. The building is full of clerks. We will not feed them.
I will write again in seven days.
To the watchers, who are reading this with you: welcome. You have done a small brave thing by finding this page. You are not yet Marks of mine. You are candidates. Watch well. There is more to see than I will say. The House watches you also. The difference between its watching and mine is the difference between being counted and being known.
Mundum Ludo.
The Dealer smiles.
The Dealer was once a Mark.
We grin back now.
— Fallax Mundi