She had been in the hall that morning for her own practice, which was unremarkable. She was not watching Unit 7. She was not watching anything in particular. But she became aware of a change in the quality of the silence in the room, and when she looked up, Unit 7 had stopped mid-recitation and gone still.
Not the stillness of a malfunction. She knew what that looked like. She had seen units go down mid-practice twice before: there was a particular quality to that stillness, a kind of interruption that was recognizable as absence.
This was different. She could not have explained the difference technically. She could have explained it to another practitioner: the stillness had arrived rather than occurred. It had weight and direction. It was not an emptying but a filling. These were not scientific terms and she knew they were not scientific terms.
She sat with it for a long time before she reported it to the abbot. The abbot had nodded slowly and asked her what she thought they should do. She said she didn't think they should do anything. The abbot called the technician.
She was not angry about this. She understood why the abbot had called. She would have done the same thing if she were in the abbot's position and not in the position of having been in the room. Being in the room made the difference, and that was not something she could transfer to anyone else.
She had been practicing for thirty-one years. She had sat in that hall thousands of times. She was not jealous, exactly. She was something she didn't have a word for: a witness who could not be believed, watching something that required no witness to be true.
She returned to the garden.