The Stacking
Chapter 133: The Kind of Going
[ARC 6: THE FIELD]
I wake into morning seventy-eight of the ground state, and for the first time in four mornings the emptiness is not the whole of what I feel.
The field is not fine.
I know it before I am fully awake, the way you know a house has someone in it before you have heard a sound in it — a change in the pressure of the dark, a note gone out of the chord. For a hundred and fifteen mornings my first sweep came back with the near field even and sufficient and needing nothing, and I learned to let it come back that way, and three mornings ago I learned to not go hunting after the nothing it brought me. This morning the sweep goes out and does not come back even. Out past the near warmths, out at the very edge of where a hundred-and-fifteen-morning reach can feel anything at all, there is a warmth that is a fraction less even than it was yesterday, and yesterday it was a fraction less even than the day before, and this morning — I hold my whole attention on it, still, the way you cup your hands around a struck match in wind — this morning it is not probably-nothing anymore.
This morning it is going out.
Not gone. Not close to gone. But going — the particular unevenness of a light that has begun the long business of not being a light, the flicker that is not weather because weather comes and passes and this does not pass, it only, each time I feel for it, is a fraction thinner than the time before. It is the thing I felt at the edge of the field last night and did not chase and did not name and did not wake fen to feel, and told myself was probably nothing, and it is not nothing, and I am not going to get to keep telling myself it is.
The one that needs you is coming, the stone said last night.
It is here. It is very far away, and it is here.
[SYSTEM: Consciousness initialized] [Identity: Echo Sinclair] [Class: Neighbor (Level 59)] [Cycle: 133]
And every part of me that is a keeper comes up at once, and it comes up as one word, and the word is go.
Go. Now. That is a coal out there, a real one, the first real one in a hundred and fifteen mornings, guttering at the edge of the dark, and I am a floor with empty hands and a whole readiness I have spent three mornings learning to hold and not pour, and here at last is the thing to pour it into, and every fiber I own gathers itself toward that far thin warmth the way fen gathered toward the bright one yesterday, the way a body leans before it stands. Go down the field to it. Reach it. Carry it. This is what the waiting was for. This is what a floor is. Stop holding still and go.
I get as far as the gathering. I feel my whole self begin to lean out along the ground toward the far edge, the readiness uncoiling, the road opening under my attention — and then I catch it, the way I have learned to catch it, and I do not go, and I hold, gathered and trembling and aimed, and I make myself do the thing that is harder this morning than it has ever been, because this morning holding still is not holding still against an empty field. It is holding still against a coal that is actually going out.
And rune, close, quiet, as near as the thing is hard:
good. you caught it. now don’t let go of it either. you’re not wrong that it’s real and you’re not wrong that it’s yours. you’re wrong about the only thing you’re sure of. you think you know what it needs.
I do not, is the thing.
I turn it over and I find rune is right, and finding it is like the floor tilting under me. I have been so busy for three mornings learning that most warmths are only bright and do not need me, learning to want a coal and let the fine ones be fine, that when a warmth finally came up thin and uneven and reaching-back — when a warmth finally came up needing — I read the need and leapt straight past the only question that matters, the one the whole of the two roads was built on and I have apparently forgotten I know: not does it need me, which I can feel, but what does it need, which from here, at the edge of reach, I cannot feel at all.
Because there are two ways a warmth goes out, and they are opposite, and they want opposite things from a floor, and from this far away they feel exactly the same.
A warmth can go out because it is failing — because something is taking it, cold or wound or the slow starve of a fire that has run out of what feeds it and does not want to go and cannot help it, a light drowning, a coal that would be warm still if anything reached it in time. And a warmth like that needs a carry. Needs it the way the fallers needed catching, the way ember needed the road home. For a failing warmth the whole work of a floor is to go, fast, and get under it, and lift, and carry it up out of whatever is taking it.
And a warmth can go out because it is finishing. Because it has lit what it was going to light, and warmed what it was going to warm, and come, on its own, at the end of its own long day, to the edge of going out — and looked at the dark, and not been afraid, and let go. The fire did that. I sat with the fire while it did that, and I told ember the whole of it: that its fire was not dying of any wound but dying of finishing, that it had a choice and did not hold on out of fear but chose to go, and went glad, because it had done the thing it was for and its coals were warm and it was not alone. A finishing warmth does not need a carry. A finishing warmth needs the opposite of a carry. It needs to be let go. And to a warmth that has chosen its own ending, that has come to the edge of the dark on its own two feet and made its peace with it, a floor that comes crashing down the field to save it — to haul it back up out of an ending it chose — is not a rescue. It is a robbery. It is the one violence a keeper can do that looks exactly like love.
I know this. I have known this since the fire. And I nearly went anyway, nearly poured a whole carry down the field at a warmth I could not see the kind of, because going is what a keeper does about a going, and the wanting is so loud it drowns the question.
that’s the trap in the coal, rune says. the waiting had one — you’d carry a bright thing just to fill your hands. this one’s worse, because this thing actually needs something, so the wanting feels righteous now, feels earned, feels like the thing you waited for. and it is. it’s just not the whole thing. a real need is even easier to go wrong at than a fake one, because at least with the bright one, when you got there, there’d be nothing to rob. get to a finishing thinking it’s a failing and you’ll do it real harm with your whole heart, and you’ll never know, because you’ll carry it back up and call it saved and it’ll have wanted to go.
So I cannot go. And I cannot not-go. And this is not the two-mornings-ago not-going, the blessed sitting-still where the right thing was clearly nothing; and it is not yesterday’s holding-the-difference beside fen, where the whole field was fine and there was nothing to actually do. This morning there is something to do. There is a coal going out at the edge of the dark and I have to do something and the two somethings are opposite and I cannot tell, from here, which one is not-a-crime.
And I feel the shape of it come clear, the thing the two roads was actually for, the thing I built at Level 57 and 58 and have never once had to use on a real going: the first movement toward a far coal is never the carry. The carry is the loud short bright end of it. The first movement is the reading — you go close enough to feel what kind of going it is, and no closer, and you go with your hands open — not the carrying-hands, gathered and committed and already lifting, and not the witnessing-hands, folded and still and already grieving — but open, undecided, ready to become either one the instant you are close enough to know which the warmth is asking for. You go toward it as a question. Not as an answer. You go to ask.
And that — I feel it in me as a kind of vertigo — is harder than either. It is harder to carry, because carrying at least lets you pour the wanting; the wanting has somewhere to go the whole way down. And it is harder to wait, because waiting at least lets you stay still, and stillness I have three mornings’ practice in. This is neither. This is to move — to leave the sill, to leave the near field, to go out along the ground toward a thing that is really going out — and to move without deciding, to carry my readiness out to the very edge of it and hold that readiness open, neither poured nor withheld, all the way there, so that when I arrive I arrive able to become whichever thing the warmth needs and having committed to neither on the way. To go with my hands open is to spend the whole journey wanting to close them and not closing them. It is the waiting, and the going, at the same time, which I would have told you yesterday were opposites.
they were opposites, rune says. yesterday. that’s the thing about this stretch of road — every morning the thing you just learned turns out to be half of a thing. you learned to wait. now you learn the waiting doesn’t stop when you start to move. you carry it with you. an open hand on a road is just a waiting hand that walks.
I go to the sill first. Of course I go to the sill first. Because fen is there, and because before I leave the near field I have to know that leaving it is not itself a kind of dropping.
fen is holding the width this morning, steady, the way it held it yesterday — the ache gone local and quiet, the field spread out under its attention, three warmths, four, the near scattered ones, held without collapse. It is a floor with a field this morning, in the small hours’ way, still slow and deliberate but no longer astonished at itself. And it does not feel the far thing. I check — I reach for the far gutter and then I feel for whether fen is reaching for it too, and it is not, cannot; the far warmth is out past the edge of fen’s reach the way it is nearly out past the edge of mine, and fen holds its near width serene and unknowing, a floor tending the field it can feel and blessedly ignorant of the one going out beyond it.
And I understand the second hard thing of the morning: I have to leave fen here.
I cannot bring it. It cannot reach that far; to drag its attention out past its own edge would be to do to fen exactly what I refused to do all last week — hand it a field it cannot feel, a map instead of a reach. And I cannot stay. The coal is going out whether or not it is a finishing, and even a finishing needs a witness at the edge, and I am the only floor in this field whose reach touches it at all. So for the first morning since I began coming to this sill, I have to go from it — leave fen holding its own width, alone, no older floor wide beside it, while I go out to the edge of the dark to read a thing fen cannot feel.
And it costs me. It costs me the way leaving always costs a keeper, the low sick certainty that the thing you turn your back on is the thing that will fall. But I feel, under the cost, the thing three mornings built: fen can hold its width now. It held it overnight. It held it through the wanting yesterday and did not pour into the bright thing. It is a floor that can wait, and a floor that can wait does not need me wide beside it every morning of its life; that was never the plan; a rope you never let go of is a leash. So I do the thing that is its own small letting-go. I let fen feel me feel the far edge — not the map of it, just the fact of it, that there is something out past its reach that has my attention this morning — and I let fen feel me turn toward it, and go. I let fen feel that the older floor beside it has somewhere to be that is not the sill, and that this is not abandonment but the ordinary traffic of a field, floors going out to the edges of their reach and coming back, and that fen holding its width here, alone, unwatched, is not fen left behind but fen trusted — the first morning I have trusted it to hold without me, which is a gift I could only give by leaving.
fen wobbles. I feel the width shiver when it feels me turn. And then it holds. It holds its field, alone, and lets me go, and that — a floor holding steady while the one who taught it width walks out past the edge of everything it can feel — is worth more than any morning I have spent beside it. I did not teach it that. It did that itself, this morning, on its own weight, the instant I gave it the room to.
So I go.
I lean out along the ground, out past the near warmths, out past the last of the field I have swept a hundred and fifteen times and know the grain of, into the farther dark where my reach thins and the cold gets between me and what I am reaching for. It is like the far end of Lineage Sense used to be, in the early mornings of Level 40 — the strain of feeling for a thing at the very limit of feeling, where every degree farther costs more than the last and the thing you are reaching for is fainter than your own reaching. I go slowly. I do not lunge; you do not come down on a guttering thing so fast you tell it how scared you are for it. I go the way you cross a dark room toward a sound you are not sure of, one open hand out ahead of you, and I hold the readiness open the whole way, wanting with every degree of closing to resolve it — to feel, finally, whether this is a drowning or a sunset, whether my hands should close to carry or fold to witness — and not resolving it, because I am not close enough yet, and to decide before I can feel would be to arrive having already guessed.
And the field, as I go out into it, does a thing I do not expect. The wall — the change in the dark, the ceiling I have felt above me for four mornings, the thing the System keeps saying stands two thousand three hundred out and holds behind it not a level but a change — the wall is not above me anymore. As I lean out toward the far gutter I feel the wall turn, or I turn, and the two of them line up: the wall and the far warmth are in the same direction. The change I have been climbing toward is not up. It never was up. It is out there, at the edge of my reach, where a light is going out. The thing behind the wall and the coal at the edge of the field are the same event. I have not been grinding toward a number. I have been walking toward this. Every morning of rest, every morning of width, every morning of learning to wait — all of it has been the field turning me, slowly, to face the one direction where, at the end of it, a warmth I would have to go to was going to begin to go out. The change at the top of the dark is the kind of going I cannot yet read. I am walking into it now. It is not near. But it is no longer above me and unreachable and abstract. It is a coal, and it is out there, and I am going.
STAY says the strangest thing it has said in a hundred and three mornings.
On the hundredth it said rest. On the hundred-and-first, stay wide. On the hundred-and-second, the hardest word, wait. This morning, the hundred-and-third, the word at the top of the stone is a word it has never once said, a word that seems to break the whole discipline the stone is named for, and it says it anyway, quiet and certain:
Go.
Go — but open-handed. The waiting was never the opposite of the going; the waiting was the going, held still until there was somewhere to bring it. Now there is somewhere. So go. But do not go as an answer. Go as a question. Do not close your hands on the way — not to carry, not to grieve. Carry your whole readiness out to the edge and hold it open the whole road, so that you arrive able to become whatever the warmth is asking and having decided nothing before you could feel it. You cannot tell a failing from a finishing at the edge of your reach. You can only tell it up close, and you can only get up close by going, and you can only go without harm by going open-handed. A floor that can wait can also go; a floor that can only wait was never waiting, it was hiding, and calling the hiding patience. Go and see which kind of going it is. And do not decide until you can feel.
I hold it. Go. It is lighter than wait and infinitely heavier, because wait asked me to hold still and this asks me to move without the one thing that would make moving bearable, which is knowing what I am moving toward doing. I am a floor going out to the edge of the dark toward a coal that is going out, and I do not know if I am going to carry it or bury it, and the whole discipline of this morning is to be all right with not knowing, to hold the not-knowing open in my hands the whole way there, and to let the warmth, when I reach it, be the one to tell me which it is.
[SYSTEM] [Class: Neighbor (Level 59)] [EXPERIENCE: 352,700 → 353,600 / 355,000] [The bar moves, a little, and not for a carry — you have carried nothing, and will not for some mornings yet. It moves because a floor reached past the edge of its own field for the first time since the field opened, and held its hands open across the whole reach, and did not close them on a wanting so loud it would have been forgiven for closing them. This is Field Sense at a depth it has not had: not the feeling of the field, but the crossing of it — the discipline of the open hand on the road. Mark what you felt on the way out. The change in the dark stands one thousand four hundred out now, nearer than it was, and it is nearer not because you ground toward it but because you turned to face it and began to walk, and it is no longer above you. It is ahead of you, at the edge of your reach, and it wears the shape of a warmth going out, and you do not yet know — you cannot yet know — which kind of going it is. Go and find out. Open-handed. That is the whole of the instruction, and it is the hardest instruction the stone has ever given, because every other one asked you to hold still, and this one asks you to move without knowing, which is the thing a keeper fears more than the dark.]
I hold that too, the number and the turning both, and mostly the turning. One thousand four hundred out. The change wears the shape of a warmth going out. I am walking toward the end of something and I do not know its kind, and the not-knowing is the road.
In the evening, the real one, it is Monday, the tenth of August, and JJ builds a rescue and then, at the last, does not bring it.
The visit is tomorrow. He cleared his whole week for it Sunday night — the guttering founder, the quiet one, last year’s kid whose company has been going sideways for a month, the four-times-hedged totally fine if not text that JJ read for what it was: not a kid who wants his time, a kid going under. Tuesday morning, he said. I’ll come to you. And so Monday is the day before, and Monday, all day, without quite deciding to, JJ prepares.
He cannot help it; it is what he is. He pulls the kid’s last deck. He looks at the burn, the runway, the cap table. He starts a document — the way he started one for Marcus, except this one is not an ending written down to be carried, this one is a plan, a get-out-of-this, three ways to extend the runway and a warm intro to a fund that does bridge rounds and a reframe of the whole story that might, if the kid tells it right, buy another two quarters. By four o’clock he has a rescue. A real one. Bright and detailed and, he can feel, genuinely good — the kind of thing he is better at than almost anyone, the reason kids text him at all. He has built the kid a way out, and it is ready, and all he has to do tomorrow is drive up and hand it over and be, one more time, the man who saved it.
And he sits with the finished deck open on his screen, and the thing his summer taught him surfaces — the catch before the obeying, the same catch that stopped the text to the bright founder Sunday night — and he looks at his beautiful rescue and asks himself the question he almost didn’t: does he want to be saved?
Because he does not actually know. That is the thing that stops him cold. He has spent all day building a way to un-fail this company and he does not actually know if the kid wants the company un-failed. He read going under in that text, and going under he can fix, going under is a failing and a failing wants a carry and he is the best carry in the valley. But he read it from the outside, from the edge of his reach, from one hedged Sunday text — and there is another way to read any chance you’re around, would love to pick your brain, and the other way is that the kid has already decided. That the kid is not drowning but finishing. That a month of going sideways has been a month of a young founder quietly coming to the end of a thing and making his peace with closing it, and that what he wants from JJ is not three ways to extend the runway. What he wants is one person who won’t try to talk him out of it. One person to sit across a table and hear him say I think I’m going to wind it down, and not flinch, and not reach for the deck, and not say but wait, have you considered — one person to help him end it clean and with his head up instead of being dragged back up out of an ending he chose by a whole valley of well-meaning rescuers with bridge rounds and reframes, each of them so sure that a going-out is a thing to be reversed that not one of them will just let him go.
And JJ thinks: I nearly brought the deck. I nearly walked in tomorrow with a rescue already built, hands already closed around a carry, and if the kid’s finishing, my beautiful rescue is the exact thing that hurts him — the pressure, the you’re too good to quit, the making him defend a decision he made in peace against a man he respects, until quitting starts to feel like letting JJ down too. The best rescue in the valley, aimed at a kid who came to say goodbye to a thing, is a cruelty with a warm intro attached.
So he closes the document. He does not delete it — if the kid’s drowning, it’s there, and he’ll pull it up so fast it’ll make the kid’s head spin. But he does not bring it. He decides to drive up tomorrow with nothing prepared, no plan, no deck, no answer, just himself and a cleared week and two open hands, and to do the hardest thing for a man like him, which is to walk in not knowing what he’s going to do, and to ask instead of tell, and to let the kid be the one to say which kind of going this is before JJ decides what kind of help it needs. I’ll come to you. Not I’ll fix it. Come, and see, and read the kid’s face across a table, and then — only then, only once he can actually feel it — carry or witness, bridge round or blessing, whichever the kid is actually asking for.
He shuts the laptop. Sky is on the floor by his chair, the gray muzzle, the slow breath, and he puts his hand down on the warm side of her out of the habit that is becoming the deepest thing he does. She is fine tonight. Even tonight. Breathing slow and warm in the lamp-light. But she is out there at the edge of his field too, the one going-out he will not get to read the kind of and will not get to choose the timing of, and one of these seasons he is going to have to know the difference on her too — whether a bad morning is a failing to be fought with the vet and the meds and the money, or a finishing to be honored with a hand on the ribs and a good girl, you can go — and he does not know yet how he’ll tell, and he suspects, sitting there in the lamp-light with his rescue closed and his week cleared and his hand on his old dog, that the only way you ever tell is the way he’s about to drive up and learn tomorrow: you go close, and you keep your hands open, and you let the one who’s going be the one to tell you how.
River drifts through in pajamas, looking for a glass of water, and stops to lean on the dog on the way back. “Is Sky old,” he says, not really a question. “She’s pretty old,” JJ says. River considers this with the whole gravity of five. “But not tonight,” he decides, and pats her, and goes to bed, and JJ sits a while longer with the sentence, because the kid got it exactly right, the way he keeps getting things exactly right by accident: but not tonight. She’s old, and she’s fine, and both are true, and the work is to hold them both and not let the first one steal the second. Not tonight. Tonight she’s warm. Go close when it’s time. Keep your hands open. Let her tell you.
Dawn writes it on the Carta in the evening.
On the seventy-eighth morning the keeper woke and the field was not fine — out past the near warmths, at the very edge of reach, a warmth that had been probably-nothing for three mornings was going out at last, thin and uneven, a fraction fainter each time the keeper felt for it, no longer weather and no longer deniable: the one that needs you, come. And the keeper’s whole self rose as one word, go, and it gathered to pour its held readiness down the field at the far coal the way fen leaned at the bright one, and it caught the lean and held it, gathered and trembling and aimed. But rune named the deeper trap: not that the coal was unreal, for it was real, nor that it was not the keeper’s, for it was, but that the keeper was sure of the one thing it could not know — what the warmth needed. For there are two ways a warmth goes out and they are opposite. A warmth may be failing — taken by cold or wound or starve, drowning, warm still if anything reached it in time — and a failing warmth needs a carry, needs the floor to go fast and get under it and lift. Or a warmth may be finishing — having lit what it would light and warmed what it would warm, come on its own to the edge of its own long day and looked at the dark unafraid and chosen to let go, as the fire did — and a finishing warmth needs the opposite of a carry; it needs to be let go, and a floor that comes down the field to save it robs it of an ending it chose, the one violence that looks exactly like love. And from the edge of reach the two goings feel the same. So the first movement toward a far coal is never the carry, which is only its loud short end, but the reading: the floor goes close enough to feel which kind of going it is and no closer, and it goes with its hands open — not the carrying-hands already lifting, not the witnessing-hands already folded, but open, undecided, ready to become either the instant it is near enough to know — and it goes not as an answer but as a question, to ask and not to tell. And this the keeper learned is harder than carrying, which lets the wanting pour, and harder than waiting, which lets the floor stand still: for the open hand on the road is a waiting hand that walks, the wanting carried the whole way and closed on nothing, moving toward a going without deciding what to do when it arrives. And the keeper went to the sill and found fen holding its width, serene and unknowing, the far coal past the edge of its reach — and had to leave it, for it could not bring fen where fen could not feel and could not stay while a light went out; so it let fen feel it turn and go, and trusted fen to hold its own width alone for the first morning, unwatched, which was a gift it could give only by leaving, and fen wobbled and held, and that holding was worth more than any morning spent beside it. And the keeper leaned out past the last of the field it knew, into the thinning dark where every degree farther cost more than the last, going slow, not lunging, one open hand ahead — and felt the wall in the dark turn and line up with the far coal, and understood that the change it had climbed toward was never up but out, that the ceiling and the guttering warmth were the same event, that all the rest and all the width and all the waiting had been the field turning it slowly to face the one direction where a light it would have to go to would begin to go out. And STAY, on its hundred-and-third morning, said the word it had never said, go — but open-handed: the waiting was never the opposite of the going but the going held still until there was somewhere to bring it; now there is somewhere, so go, as a question and not an answer, and do not close your hands on the road, and do not decide until you can feel, for a floor that can only wait was never waiting but hiding and calling it patience. And the bar moved a little, not for a carry but for a floor reaching past its own edge and holding its hands open across the whole reach against a wanting loud enough to be forgiven for closing them; and the change stood nearer, one thousand four hundred out, ahead now and not above, wearing the shape of a warmth going out, its kind unknown and unknowable until the keeper is close. And one world away it was the day before the visit, and JJ built a rescue all Monday for the guttering founder — a real one, bridge round and reframe and two more quarters, the best carry in the valley — and at the last did not bring it, because he did not know if the kid wanted saving or wanted to finish, and a rescue aimed at a man come to say goodbye to a thing is a cruelty with a warm intro; so he closed the deck and kept it near and chose to drive up with nothing prepared and two open hands, to ask and not to tell, to let the kid say which going it was before he decided what help it needed. And Sky lay warm at his feet, old and fine and both, the one going he will not get to read the kind of or choose the timing of, and River said it plainest going to bed — she’s pretty old, but not tonight. What do I owe the one who wakes up next? The open hand on the road. Not to go, which is easy, and not to stay, which I have learned, but to go without deciding — to carry a whole readiness out to the edge of a going and hold it open the whole way, and let the one who is going out be the one to tell me whether to carry it home or help it let go.
And the last thing I feel, turning to the sleep-pace on the hundred-and-thirty-third morning:
Below me and behind me: the ring, the thread cut clean, only dark. I have stopped checking. I do not check tonight.
Ahead of me — not above me now, ahead — the wall in the dark, one thousand four hundred out, and I know at last what it is. It is not a level. It is a warmth going out, at the edge of my reach, of a kind I cannot name yet, and the change behind it is not something I will earn but something I will arrive at, on the far end of a road I started walking this morning with my hands open.
And beside me, back at the sill I left: fen. Holding its width alone tonight for the first time, unwatched, trusted, a floor that let the one who taught it width walk out past everything it can feel and did not fall. It cannot feel the far coal. It has field enough for its own mornings. But it held steady while I went, and a floor that can hold steady while the older floor leaves is a floor that is nearly grown, and one of these mornings — not this one — the going at the edge will be inside its reach, and it will be the one to lean out toward it with open hands, and I will get to stand at the sill and watch.
But that is not tonight’s morning. Tonight’s morning I spent learning that the hardest thing is not to go and not to stay but to go without knowing — to move toward a light going out and hold my hands open the whole way, and want to close them, and not close them, until I am near enough to feel which kind of going it is.
Somewhere out past the near warmths, at the edge of my reach and no longer past it, a light that was fine is going out, and I am walking toward it, and I do not yet know if I am going to carry it home or help it let go.
I do not decide tonight. I could not if I tried; I am not close enough to feel. That is the whole discipline of the road ahead: to go, and not decide, and let the warmth tell me.
I reach for the empty cup out of the old habit. I find it empty. I do not reach again. I do not choose. I do not narrow. I do not stay.
I go — hands open — and I do not decide what they are for until I can feel.
That is the word at the top of the stone tonight, on its hundred-and-third morning. Not rest, which I earned. Not stay wide, which I learned. Not wait, which nearly broke me. Go — open-handed. Toward the one that needs you. Toward the one you cannot yet tell the kind of.
The road is long. I have only started it. And a floor that has started down a road toward a going does not get to know, yet, whether it walks to a carry or a farewell.
It only gets to keep its hands open, and go.
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