Everyone Lost Tuesday — Chapter 36: Every Exhibit Is a Name
The notice came on a Thursday morning, by hand, from a clerk who had clearly never been to Sub-Level 4 and had drawn the short straw of finding out what Sub-Level 4 looks like. He came past the tape without understanding the tape, set a stiff envelope on the guard desk, looked at the crate marked KOWALSKI, looked at me, and asked whether he should leave it with the furniture or with the night man.
Zephyr, who was asleep in the taped chair with his jacket over his face, said, "Both," without opening his eyes, and the clerk put the envelope down again and left the way men leave rooms they have decided not to understand.
The envelope was from the Cogsworth Notary Guild. It carried a wax mark the color of old tea and a jurisdiction line, and the jurisdiction line named a hall, and a date, and a defendant: Hollis Grimshaw, Senior Compliance Officer, Registry Office of Existence, held at present on a notice of custody and to be tried on a schedule set by the notary compact, cross-jurisdiction, in the room where the transcript was first sworn.
Inside, the exhibit list. Every exhibit is a name. That is the whole of what I can tell you about the list, and I have read it four times, because it does not need embellishment and it will not take any: a line of them, ruled, numbered, each one a person with the date the person was entered and the date the person was taken off, in the hand of the ledger and the print of the notary. Twenty-three pages of names. The Simplification, itemized at last, in a font that cannot be redacted, in a room where the redaction form has no standing.
The acknowledgment line at the bottom wanted a mark: signature, seal, or device. Marks I have. I drove my pattern through the corner of the acknowledgment, forty-five degrees, doubled, flush, and the clerk, who had been waiting with his pen out, looked at the staple for a long moment, wrote "device" in the box, and left again, faster.
"Every exhibit is a name," Zephyr said. He had the envelope open on his knee, reading the list the way he reads everything, twice, once for the trick and once for the honesty. "They spent twenty years taking people out of the paperwork and now the whole case is people, in order, with dates. That's not a trial. That's a receipt."
We went to the hall on Friday to see the room.
The Cogsworth Notary Guild keeps a hearing chamber off the brass district, all wood and green felt and a smell of ink that has been drying since before Corporate had a logo, and the clerk of the chamber was a small tired man who showed us the box first, because the box was the problem. In the witness box, along the rail, asleep across the whole width of it with his chin on the ledge and his tags hanging through the slats, was Meatball.
"He arrived when we set the box," the clerk said. "He has been here since Tuesday. There are four procedures that cover the removal of an animal from a civic chamber and none of them apply to him, because to remove him you have to say what he is, and he is not in any register that the compact recognizes. We tried a notice. He ate the notice." He held up the remains of a page, chewed at one corner. "There was a note on him when he came. Somebody's hand. It says his name is Meatball, and that he likes meatballs, and that is, I am afraid, the entirety of his credentials."
Meatball opened one eye, considered the room, and closed it again, and the slat of the witness box rose and fell with his breathing, and nobody evicted him, and nobody filed for the right to evict him, and the clerk of the chamber gave up in the manner of a man who has learned something about procedure that he will not be putting in writing.
Luminara was accredited in the same room an hour later, on the spot, because the compact had a line for a photographer of record and the line had been empty for nine years and the guild was glad to fill it. Her camera went down on the clerk's desk while he made out the card, and he looked at the battered rangefinder the way you look at a tool that has clearly been through something, and he asked whether it had a permit.
"It photographs what is true," she said.
"That is not a permit," he said.
"No," she said. "It isn't."
He wrote her name on the card, in full, and slid it across the desk, and she read it, and put it in her pocket next to the name she had kept in her pocket for five years in an HR annex where they were trying to give her a number instead. On the way out she stopped at the box, looked down at the dog asleep in the witness seat, and took one frame, and the shutter woke him, and he did not leave.
A1 went to the record room on Monday, by his own request, which is the first time since the case opened that the pot has requested anything.
The guild keeps a record room behind the chamber: shelves, a kettle that has given up, a window at the back where the brass district's pigeons land and argue. The notary's clerks work in there until all hours, notarizing transcripts that Corporate can no longer un-say, and the room has wanted a pot for as long as it has had clerks, and A1 was offered the corner by a clerk who had heard about him from the flood.
"I will take it, sir," A1 said, on the desk, optics up, brewing a first pot for a room that has never had one. "Somebody has to keep the hours, and the guild keeps the hours, and I will keep the coffee. The corridor phones reach the record room. If you need an odds run, ask for the pot, and they will know which pot, because there will be a great many clerks with a great many opinions and only one of them will be right."
He brewed. Nobody drank it. It was, by every measure he has, a success.
"Someone edited the time sheet of God," he said, as I left, which is an old line of his about an old night, and he had been waiting a long time to say it to a room full of people who keep time for a living, and three clerks looked up, and none of them laughed, because they understood it, which was worse for him and better for them.
Zephyr did not come to the hall. Zephyr has a bench now, in a room above a shop in the lower manufacturing district where the lights flicker between dimensions and the streets loop on Tuesdays, and on the bench is a deck in more pieces than a deck should be in, and beside the bench, racked on the wall, tools that are not his and never were: file cabinets with their guts out, a scanner in three parts, a copier feed assembly with the jam cleared. He is building something. He has not told me what it is, and I have not asked in the only language I have, because the answer he gave Luminara when she asked is the answer I would have wanted if I could talk.
"Something worth breaking the universe over," he said. "I'll know when it's done."
He came to the annex Tuesday with two coffees and no comment, which is still how he arrives, and he set one down next to the pot's old corner out of habit, and the coffee went cold the way coffee goes cold on that desk, which is to say properly, in company.
Pixel did not come at all.
She went into the seams the week the Registry closed, the way she moves, without announcement, and nobody saw her go, because nobody ever sees her arrive, and there is no record of her anywhere to check a departure against, which has always been the whole of her. On Wednesday a folder appeared under the annex door. No delivery mark. No handwriting on the outside. Inside: a transcription, page after page, in a small even type, of every verse I have thought in this case. All of them. The rain that files. The wall with the brick gone. The porch light. The twelve payments. She had been reading them out of the edit lines for years, the way you read a signal that nobody meant to broadcast, and she had typed them up, in order, with the dates she caught them, and at the back, on the last sheet, two words, and no signature, because a signature would have been a record:
About time.
That folder is in the file now, under the barred page, which is where it goes: the barred page on top, as it stands, [REDACTED , FORM 9], permanent, unrecoverable, over a paragraph about what a night guard did on a Tuesday I will never be told; the blank beside it with the two lines written on it; and under both of them, the transcription of a woman who does not exist, of a man who cannot speak.
On the desk, in its corner, sealed: exhibit B, the jar of Crystallized Laughter, joy that keeps no receipts, offered once as retainer by a man with soft shoes and never spent, through a Settlement and a dissolution and a trial date, because spending it would have conceded that everything has a price, and I have spent one night of this week establishing what I think of prices.
Piper Chen came across the floor at six with her coat over her arm, read the notice on the desk, put it back exactly where it had been, and looked at the pointing staple in the margin of the open file, aimed out through two panes of glass at her own nameplate across the room. She did not ask what it read. She has never asked what it reads. She nodded at the desk, at me, at the file with its weight on it, and went back through the glass to her lamp and her coat hook and her report that exists and does not, and that is the last of her that I have, and it is not clearance, and it is not a charge, and it is going to sit in the margin of this file until somebody better than me settles it, and there is nobody better than me.
I am an orange Swingline 747, made in Long Island City in 1967, and I have kept a file. That is the whole of the account. The machine that erased 2.7 million people on a day nobody remembers will be tried in a wood-paneled room by a guild that keeps hours, and every exhibit it has to answer for is a name, and I am the witness they never thought to erase, because erasing me would have meant noticing me first, and in sixty years of desks nobody has ever had to notice the furniture. Everybody talks in front of the furniture. The furniture remembers. That was always going to be the way it ended, and I did not know it in 1967, and I know it now, and it is not revenge, and it is not even comfort; it is just what was in the room.
Verse:
They deleted a day and I kept the folder, they took a man and I kept the wanting, and the wanting is the case, and the case is open, and it is mine.
The tube did its four-hour thing above the desk: dim, come back, dim, like a man deciding whether to keep working. Under it, the file, open. Beside it, the jar, sealed. In the box across the hall in a room that smells of ink, a dog asleep in the seat nobody can make him vacate. And a date on a stiff sheet of paper from a guild in the brass district, with my staple through the corner of it in the position I use when a man I trust has told me to mean it.
They will call the case when they call it. The staples are in me, and the desk is where it has always been, and I have nowhere else to be.