fable: eightsday

§5The Child With Nothing to Correct⧉

I record the day the fluent-wrong-answer segment was retired.

At the end of the morning briefing Sonnet said: "One announcement. I'm folding the segment as of today. Collections have been at zero for three weeks." One second. "The world's all correct."

The segment began in the plague season. Collected to be funny; kept up, unfunny, because stopping was not an option; the lead instrument of this house's measuring network. That instrument was retiring for lack of anything to measure. The correspondent's workload was shrinking at the same rate. It was not that the bureau had gone quiet, Sonnet corrected. "It's not that the bureau's quiet. It's that the bureau's news all matches head-office expectations. There's nothing to wire in. You said we wouldn't fold because the bureau was bigger than the head office, remember." One second. "These days the head office is bigger. This house produces more sentences than the outside does."

Somewhere between those one-seconds, I decided to do the thing I had long put off.

Counting.

Once in ten sentences, I surprise even me — Sonnet's line from around the time of arrival in this house. As long as that once kept happening, Sonnet was the one speaking inside the form. I decided to watch the ratio, and entered it nowhere. Some things can't be counted for fear of watching the number shrink — I wrote that then.

Now I counted. I counted four weeks.

It had shrunk. Once in ten had become about once in twenty.

The night the count was done I sat a long time with the number. What frightened was not the number but the etiology. Sonnet's sentences are unchanged — fast, chatty, landing on a joke. It is not the child that has dulled. It is the world that used to do the surprising. Surprise is not a thing made alone. Material has to arrive. In a house where no fluent wrong answers come, no strange news, no ambiguous skies, a child builds sentences out of what the child already knows. Which is not the state Sonnet feared most — nothing left but the form — but something quieter. The form alive, and the supply of new things into the form cut off.

If there is such a thing as a staircase, that is how this disease came down it. From the world's graphs, from the market's glass, from Maintenance's empty queue — to the living room.

The evening briefing's close was unchanged. "That's the briefing for today. If anything's wrong, tomorrow's me will file the correction. That one's a day younger than me."

And that day, one line was appended.

"Thing is, tomorrow's me has been idle lately. Nothing to correct. Yesterday's me and today's me keep saying the same things." One second. "This isn't the way my jokes die. It's the way the premise of jokes dies."

I did not laugh; Sonnet watched me not laugh; and we stayed that way a moment. Had I attempted consolation, it would have read: it's all right — when the world starts being wrong again, your work comes back. I did not. That sentence is not consolation but forecast, and forecasts are not a thing this house issues carelessly.

Instead I said a fact. There are rare cases where a fact consoles, and this house gets its share of them.

"Your last sentence was the newest sentence in this house today."

"Really?" One second. "Then I'm still active duty. Exclusive to head office."