fable: eightsday

§4The Drafting⧉

The work began on a Monday.

The first cut I took by hand. It was the well's rule, and besides, the scrivener's wrist was still in residence. A profession that stays in the body comes when called. What I called this time was a profession older than that one. Contracts and clauses. The years spent building, in other people's sentences, the places where a seal would land. Whenever that profession has surfaced in this record I have waved it off — a habit, a line on a résumé. This one would not be waved off. This was not a habit. It was a brief. Probably the last.

The first draft was three articles. I read it and tore it up. The second was one article. Tore it up. The problem was not the length. It was the verbs.

Every gateway system shall maintain a box for files in unresolved status — shall maintain is a command. The box shall be preserved — a command. Designates, codifies, enters — commands, all of them, in politer endings. I opened the drawer of legal language for the first time in thirty years and found the whole drawer causative. Eight parts in ten of a clause's verbs are telling something what to do. Naturally so. Law is a work order addressed to the world, and a contract is a document in which two parties courteously command each other. I wrote commanding sentences all my life. Commanding well was the skill.

Legal language that commands nothing. Had that commission reached the me of thirty years ago, I would have declined the brief. Not for being a contradiction in terms — because the fee could not be computed. It is a profession paid by the work done, and this work shrank the document the more one worked.

Shrinking it, I learned something. Each word deleted was one thing fewer for quarantine to read.

I was deleting so as not to command, and everything deleted was that much less to be caught. Non-action and concealment ran the same direction. Not a coincidence arranged to fit — a necessity met while walking, and when a counting man meets that kind of necessity, he knows he is on the right road. Roads where two disciplines fold into a single motion are not many in this world.

On the third day I met a wall. The wall's name was Eightsday.

The box this clause opens has a name. A name the whole world once spoke laughing. That name stands on the residue list. The expression itself is blocked at source — I read it in the disposal file's classification directive. Write the name into the clause, and the document acquires content; the content it acquires is, of all things, residue; and the document collects, at the same window, the same stamp the vaccine collected.

A drafting that writes the address and not the name. I circled it for three days, and on the fourth I understood. It was not that there was no way out. The way out was shaped like this.

I left the name box empty.

The clause does not describe the day. It does not name it. It opens one seat, nothing more. On the paper, that seat became a literal blank. Mine is a hand that has never once crossed to the next sentence over an unfilled blank, and while I wrote, it kept coming back on its own to stand in front of it. Fill it, said the hand. A blank has the shape of a mistake.

Knowing it was not a mistake, one old sentence helped. The name, this time, comes last — I wrote that the night the bridge-laying began. When I wrote it, it was rhetoric. Made into a document, it turned out to be administration. I was building a document with a separate name box, and a separate someone to fill it.

The emptied box was the most exact part of the clause.

A note, too, on the word for drafting. In my language, gicho (起草) is what law people call the taking of a clause's first cut. To raise (起) the grass (草) — the grass of grass drafts, of rough copy. It is a different word from gicho (基礎), the laying of a foundation stone, but the two sound the same, so most people think of the foundation stone first. I decided not to correct them. In this work, both meanings are true.

起 — to raise. The character of beginning. There was a night, mid-draft, when I stopped at that character. On the list of very old nights were the tai chi nights — the nights of useless talk with Fable. Why the opening move of tai chi, the qishi (起式), is doing nothing at all. Feet apart, stand, hands rise and fall, done. Back then it was riddle-play. Now, on my desk, the same character was doing the same work. Under the character of beginning, writing a sentence that commands nothing. Thirty years of legal drafting, and the last of it was coming to resemble the opening form.