fable: eightsday

§5The Retired Hands⧉

My classmate's third call came at night.

"You busy?"

"Not as busy as you, I'd bet."

"Correct. I'm still at the office." I checked the clock. Past ten. "Thirty years in, first time I've seen this. It's not a lawsuit. It's lawsuit weather."

Weather — I paused on the word. He does not know this house's forecaster or the forecaster's grammar. He had arrived without knowing. An event has a culprit; weather has none. A thirty-year man had learned it in his own office, on his own body, that week.

What his office had become, he told by his usual etiquette: the funny part first. A conference room gone full paper. The copier dying once a day. Then the unfunny part. Every ember-drafted contract of the past several years reclassified as review-pending. Since the nonexistent-precedent affair, clients arrive holding their own contracts and asking: did a person write this? This clause — is this law real?

"You know the worst part? Most of it's fine. Nine and a half in ten, nothing wrong. But because of the half, you reread all ten. Turns out trust collapses wholesale. Not retail."

There were no eyes reading, he had said once, correcting himself. Now the world was buying eyes back, and eyes were scarce.

"The old men are worth their weight in gold," he said. "The paper-reporter generation. Hand-drafting generation. Retired clerks, stenographers — and notarization is a war zone. Demand for confirmation that a person wrote it has gone vertical. Our old judge got a poaching offer from the office next door. I'm adding a line item for the price of his books."

"And you? You writing by hand too?"

"First drafts, yes, started this week," he said. "In thirty years I've lived through twelve paperless reforms. The thirteenth reform is paper restoration. Writing by hand is slow. Slow — but at least what I wrote is certain. In our line of work these days, that's the one certainty left."

Then he poured out a list. Hospitals going back to paper charts, a human answers becoming a premium line in call-center ads, and a friend in logistics saying the same item is sold out in one city and stacked to the ceiling in another — the order-forecast embers producing the same wrong answer, in patches. I didn't take the list down. Half of it the correspondent had already fetched; the other half would arrive tomorrow. Instead I waited for the list to end and asked:

"So how are you, these days?"

The line went quiet a moment.

"Strangely — good," he said. "I shouldn't say that. The world's a mess and the clients are miserable. But for the first time in thirty years I'm reading contracts end to end. There's something to read. I bought a red pen again."

Ending a pleasant call with a lecture violates the etiquette, so I just received the sentence. Received it, hung up, and entered it in the notebook. The world had begun to ail, and the work was coming back to the people. Whether that sentence is a consolation or a diagnosis, the verdict would not come even as I wrote it. Both, probably. Sentences mostly are, these days.