Wandering Wizard Name Generator

The story

Ez ordered enough buns for eight mourners. He told the new innkeeper that people sometimes ate very little on such occasions. She said that in her experience they sometimes ate a great deal, and asked whether he wanted the ordinary eight-person price or a discussion of human nature. He chose the price. The memorial was for Ezren of the Nine Lamp Studies, the longer written name under which his old acquaintances knew him. Ez was the same wizard's short spoken name. The keeper had never met either name before and accepted him as the colleague arranging the room, not as proof that anybody had died.

He had been away for six years. During the first he wrote often; during the second he intended to write; afterward he developed an increasingly impressive explanation of how difficult it was to begin again. Coming home had not made the beginning easier. The Fox and Horn was now the Fox and Plough. Its former keeper had retired, the supper hour had changed, and a wall had been removed from the room where Ez once lectured beside the fire. He wanted to discover that the old town had been keeping a place for him. He also wanted to avoid asking anybody who might say it had not.

The false memorial offered a cowardly solution disguised as an ingenious experiment. He could stand behind the service curtain, listen to what people said and return to ordinary life reassured. He paid adult messengers to carry notices to addresses in his old contact book. The notices named his longer research byname, announced his death and invited acquaintances to remember him. No mistaken clerk or mischievous spirit supplied that lie. He wrote it himself, slowly enough to admire a sentence about his lifelong devotion to light. Then he signed as the colleague handling arrangements and paid for the deliveries.

Two addresses were no longer current. One recipient had moved to a farm beyond the north road; another had left town entirely. A messenger returned the undelivered envelopes. Ez had imagined a room full of people describing his absence and found that several had been absent from his own knowledge first. He placed those envelopes beneath his notes. An old acquaintance named Bren sent a reply asking why nobody had called her before the notice. The handwriting leaned so hard into the question that it almost punctured the paper. He put that reply beneath the envelopes.

His only magic for the occasion was a recorded portrait display. He planned to project his younger face in an empty arch while the guests recalled him. Before anyone arrived he tested it against the source sheet. The little painted lamp in its corner glowed green although the original remained yellow. Under his Uncertainty practice he recorded the exact discrepancy in the margin beside his written inquiry byname. He could not explain it. He nevertheless knew it was a color-changing image, not a person waiting to receive tribute. He closed the display before the service began and left its ordinary release mark within reach.

The first guest was Tessa, who had helped him move a heavy desk sixteen years earlier and had never allowed him to forget the desk's many unnecessary drawers. She carried no speech. She asked the keeper whether his last days had been comfortable. Behind the curtain Ez stopped adjusting his collar. He had imagined affectionate anecdotes, perhaps an amusing complaint about the drawers. Tessa was worrying about pain she thought a friend had suffered without telling her. The keeper said she knew nothing beyond the arrangement. That answer was honest, which made his own place behind the curtain considerably harder to occupy.

Bren arrived next with a little packet of letters. She was angry. She said she had assumed his silence meant he was busy or selfish, either of which would have been preferable to what the notice now suggested. Tessa said she ought not speak harshly of him today. Bren said today appeared to be the only day he had arranged for them to speak. Neither had made an accusation that sounded like a fond joke. Ez heard the buns being set on plates and suddenly disliked every one of them for having been bought to accompany this conversation.

He could still have remained hidden through the speeches and invented some extraordinary explanation afterward. Instead he came out before the portrait played. Tessa looked at him without understanding. Bren understood first and stood up so quickly that her chair hit the wall. He said that he was Ezren, that there had been no death, and that he had sent the notices because he wanted to hear whether people missed him. The sentence was much uglier spoken aloud than in his earlier account of the experiment. He did not ask them to admire the courage it took to finish it.

Bren asked whether he had read the reply beneath his envelopes. He said yes. She put her letters back in their packet and left. He did not follow with an apology that required her to stop walking. Tessa remained long enough to say that grief was not a surprise party he could throw for himself. Then she asked for time without another invitation. Ez agreed. The keeper opened a window and began collecting the unused cups. She said the booked room and food bill remained payable. He paid them. Neither her receipt nor the money could settle what he had done to the people who came.

He wrote corrections to every person he had actually contacted, including the two whose original notices had returned undelivered. Each correction identified him plainly as the living sender of the false announcement. Where an address was no longer usable, he left the correction marked undelivered rather than declaring the matter finished. He paid the current dispatch charges for the available addresses. Tessa and Bren had heard the truth in the room; others had not automatically heard it because he finally said it. He kept their names beside their separate delivery states, an unflattering page he did not improve by giving it an elegant title.

Afterward he asked the keeper whether he could help put away chairs. She said he could stack the light ones by the door and leave the folding platform alone. This was work she allowed, not a ceremony by which he repaid her customers' feelings. A third acquaintance, Dall, arrived late after finishing his shift. Ez met him outside and told him the truth before he entered. Dall listened, called him an idiot and said he was too hungry to construct a more original response. He would have breakfast with him tomorrow at seven, he said, provided it was breakfast and not another disguised examination.

They ate at seven. Dall asked about the road, disagreed with Ez's opinion of a town they had both visited and left in time for work. He promised nothing about Tessa or Bren. Alone again, Ez went to the front desk to collect his receipt. The keeper asked what name she should put on it. He gave both forms and explained that they belonged to one person. She wrote them on the same line. Above the room and bun charges, her account book had space for a short description of the event. After considering him for a moment, she wrote: memorial canceled, customer present.