The man raises his eyes slowly. The administrator is standing by the bench again. He’s different now than he was back then.

“Still quite all right?” he asks, pleasantly, without moving, his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat.

“F-fine,” the man says, everything inside him sinking away into icy blackness. He’s come back. It’s never good when the administrator comes back.

The administrator sits on the bench, and for an unreal moment, it’s as if he’d never left. Not even the daylight has changed, not even his shadow, documenting him on the ground beside the bench.

“It’s a very fine day...” the administrator says.

“Very fine,” the man says.

The administrator swivels his head slowly around, scanning the park, the river, and the blistering towers on the far side as mechanically as an automated camera. The man stares in helpless fascination at the administrator’s fingers as they steeple, open and shut, angling up and down against his dark clothes, pale and like a luminous readout scanning him for fluctuations of... modifications and modulations of...

The administrator is not facing the man when he speaks again.

“I was thinking over our conversation of earlier today,” the administrator says. “I like to reflect carefully on everything I have heard, everything I have been told. It gives me something special to savor as I walk. It helps me to relax, to collect myself. Some days it is so difficult to collect yourself, don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” the man says. This is a ploy. You must not commit to anything unless you are compelled to, and you must avoid affirming or denying anything vague. There have been times when, in conversation, he’d seen a menacing gleam and hardness, a captor’s relish, come into the administrator’s eyes as he spoke in a certain rapid, complicated way that he knew the man could not understand.

“Well, for example, I wonder what it means to claim, as you do, to be fine, when you are asked whether or not you are quite all right?”

It is useless to try to remember the conversation. He has a recording, you don’t, but even if you had a photographic memory, how could you contradict an administrator? They take exhaustive records only to study your profile, not so as not to be bound to their contents themselves.

“I was unaware of any difference.”

“So, for you, to say you are fine and to say you are quite all right are the same thing?”

“Now that you say them together, I’m not sure.”

“You’re not?

“I am not sure that there is no difference between saying I am quite all right and saying I am fine. The difference did not occur to me at the time—that there would be a difference, or could be a difference, did not occur to me at the time.”