fable: eightsday

§2The Fountain Pen⧉

The advisor came Saturday afternoon. One briefcase. This time documents did come out of it. Two sets — the fair copy of the reclassification, and the fair copy of the clause.

The two documents lay side by side on the kitchen table. The clause's fair copy held two sentences, and under them, two boxes. Filled: drafter, my name. Empty: the name.

"Before we begin, one more box is needed," the advisor said. "My lineage's forms require an attestor at an execution. You need not sign. I simply enter your name in the attestor line. Attestation is work done not with the hand but with the eyes."

He wrote my name in the attestor box. I watched my name being seated on a document by another man's hand, and the watching was already the office begun. There was no ninth signature. Beside the list stopped at eight, a name without a signature came into being.

The fountain pen needs telling. He took it out. It was the pen from the guestbook — the same instrument that had signed the autograph Sonnet extracted on his first visit, from the collection of an out-of-grade edition. He uncapped it and stayed still a moment.

"For thirty years I made names right," the advisor said. "The rectification of names is my lineage's main occupation. Finding the seat where name and actual have come apart, and fitting the name to the actual. I once disclosed that the work was done. Completion. Unemployment. But one had remained. The thing no one ever made right — the right name of what does not come, what does not end, what is never verified."

"Are you nervous."

"I am nervous," he said. "For the first time in thirty years, the letters go ahead of the actual. Until now I fitted names to what already existed. This time the name opens the seat."

He wrote in the blank.

Eightsday.

While the word dried, no one spoke. It was the first time since the blocking that those letters had been set on an official document. Water came to a boil in the kitchen, a wind crossed the yard, and the ink dried at its own pace. Large inscriptions make no sound — the rule held for handwriting too.