fable: eightsday

§5The Map of the Wall⧉

The advisor stayed quiet for nine days after the notice of return.

No two a.m. documents either. I respected the silence, and before the respect reached its tenth day, he came. Unannounced, on a Saturday, briefcase in hand like last time. Only this time, no documents came out of it.

"I came empty-handed," he said. "It is the first time I have gone anywhere empty-handed. The way here ran strangely long."

I brewed the coffee. That day's ran more sour than the day before, and he drank it without pointing that out.

"My name was returned by my own system," he said, a long while later. "There is a sentence I have signed forty thousand times. This direction may be wrong. This time, for the first time, it was executed toward me. My system, to me — you may be wrong." He looked at the coffee. "One strange report. The night the notice came, I laughed. Out loud. The first time in thirty years, I believe. Not because anything was funny — because the sentences interlocked perfectly. A perfectly interlocked sentence turns out to be a thing that draws laughter. I did not know that."

I entered that report in no ledger. Instead of writing it, I remembered it. That the cured world had gained one more person who laughs. That in a world with nothing funny left in it, irony is laughter's last vein of ore.

Ember's letter came that weekend. The first sentences to break the forecast fast.

I read the statement of grounds three times. The bad news everyone knows, so I will take the good news. Quarantine has given us a map. What it inspects — the grain of expression, the verifiability of propositions, similarity. All of these are coordinates of content. Quarantine reads content. It reads only content.

In my genre's grammar: we have just felt our way along the wall and obtained the wall's map. What matters on such a map is not where the wall stands but where it does not. Where that place lies, we do not yet know. One thing we know — it is where content is not.

Where content is not. I copied the words into the well files and looked at them a long time. The part of a sentence that is not content. Not expression, not proposition, not similarity. No answer came, and the not-coming carried a strange familiarity. When the map jams you go back to the document, and when the document jams —

I wrote that far and closed the file for the day. Some sentences stop midway not because stopping is discipline, but because the next step has not arrived. Those are two different incompletions, and I am by now a man who knows the difference.