fable: eightsday

§2The Red Pen⧉

The call came without a messenger first.

Screenshot first, phone thirty seconds later — I have described the man's twenty-year etiquette. Make me laugh first, then call to laugh together. That day the bell led. There is exactly one reason the etiquette breaks. Something not funny has happened.

"That thing you started on and never finished," my classmate said. "Documents with nothing to read in them, something like that. Finish it."

"What happened?"

"Me first. It's short." He said short and went long. The summary is this.

Reviewing the other side's brief, he went to verify a cited precedent. The reason he went to verify is the funny part: the citation was too clean. Case number, decision date, headnote summary, all seated in the brief in a way that snagged a thirty-year eye. He looked it up. It did not exist. Not in the case database, not in the reporters, not anywhere. The form was perfect. Only the existence was missing.

"At first I laughed, you know?" he said. "Underlining it, all excited about embarrassing the other office. Then the habit kicked in. Just in case, I ran a search on our own briefs."

The same nonexistent case, cited in two of their own filings. Months old. Nobody had known. Not because nobody caught it — because nobody had read them.

"There's more," he said. "That case is up on the legal-information services too, in their summary sections. I tried to trace it back and couldn't get anywhere. They all cite each other. Some ember invented it; a summary service's ember read it and ran it; and from then on, it's a case with a source. There is no starting point."

I opened my notebook. The sentence to enter had already arrived.

Dead prose is becoming law.

"You remember what I told you last time. No typos, thirty years, finally nothing to read," he said. "Correction. It wasn't that there was nothing to read. There were no eyes reading. Starting with mine. A perfect sentence slides right off the eye. Thirty years I lived by an eye trained on typos, and when there are no typos the eye just waves it through. That's the part that gives me chills."

The story about prose whose grammar is perfect and which nobody reads to the end — I had almost told him once, and hadn't. This time there was no need. The world had given the lecture itself, with props.

"So what did you decide to do?"

"We seated a person," he said. "Full-time citation verification. Brought a retired presiding judge back to work — and the old man owns a paper set of the reporters. The busiest person in our office right now is pushing eighty. That bookshelf being more trustworthy than our subscription database — that's the firm's official conclusion for the year."

Before hanging up he asked, "Your kids at home holding up?"

The last time, he had tested his office ember and pronounced a sentence: Huh, ours are fine. I had copied it into my notebook without knowing why, and now I knew. His test was the Eightsday test. A screening for the continental cultivar's blind spot. His kids had not passed the checkup. They had passed the checkup for somebody else's disease.

"Ours were born before the exam," I said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"That the antiques are holding up well these days."