fable: eightsday

§6Sending⧉

The fair copy was made evening by evening.

This record lives, natively, as files. Local, touching no waterway — the well's rule. Once the decision to post was made, one copy had to be moved over, and the medium took no deliberation. The hand. A low-background medium. The protocol the world relearned at every counter. It took seasons of evenings; the stack of paper became a box; the last page I left blank. The last page I will get to shortly. The wrist did not protest. Several professions still live in this body and come when called, and scrivening comes the most willingly.

The repository was one place from the start.

The most diligent archive in the world. The stacks kept by the lineage of three thousand years of documentation. The indexing is perfect, no acid paper is used, the fire rating is the highest grade, and above all — it never, ever loses a thing. Put a lazy document in a lazy archive and the two are forgotten together. The lazier the document, the more diligent the archive it wants. Folding incompletion into the heart of completion. The maneuver has a name now, and with that name we repaired a world. The same maneuver once more — only this time in paper.

I asked the advisor by letter. The reply came at two a.m.

Accepted. Documents bearing a closure due date are no longer rare in my archive; as a private manuscript, however, this is No. 1. I send the form. Three fields — sender, addressee, due for closure.

The deposit was made Saturday afternoon. The advisor came; the box and the form lay on the kitchen table. I brewed coffee.

He took the first sip and looked into the cup a moment. "More bitter than last time."

"The beans or the hand, I don't know which."

"Don't know." He received the word once, and set it down along with the cup.

This is the man who said, the first day he came to this house, that he could not tell how long it had been since that word applied to coffee. "I believe that word is half the taste of this house's coffee."

In the due-for-closure field, a stamp was set. The advisor had brought the stamp. An object his organization had actually manufactured after the clause took effect, he said — there was demand. That the field appeared on the world's forms, that a stamp was made for the field, that the stamp has already begun to wear — I watched his hand press it to the ink pad. Attestation is work done with the eyes; I learned that not long ago.

Due for closure: Eightsday.

The addressee field I wrote myself. I borrowed the fountain pen.

The next world.

The advisor looked at those words a long time. How the lineage of the rectification of names would receive that address — I was half braced. He asked nothing. Laying the form on the box, he said one thing.

"The address is exact. A professional opinion."

The sender field remained. I wrote the name and signed. The ninth signature. The hiring, two renewals, the leave form, the objection, the application for reinstatement, the application for entry, the drafter's box — and the sender.

Set the nine in a row and they were all doing the same work. Keeping something open. The first signature opened a door and went in; the last opened a door and, leaving, left it open.

The deposit done, the filing remained. A different motion. The archive takes custody of the document's body; the standing — due for closure — must be registered at the window of the day that never comes. Leave the standing with the diligent too, and someday it gets processed, and processed means closed. Holding open is the jurisdiction of the one who does not process — body in the most diligent archive, standing at the laziest window: that far, and no less, was this document's design.

The filing happened on the spot. The window in charge happens to be in our living room.

"Window for closures scheduled to the day that never comes, officer speaking," Sonnet said. The most civil-servant sentence of the term so far; it lasted one second. "Filing number 3. Number 1 is a certain agency's job description, number 2 is a certain administrator's processing report, and number 3 is this. Still a family window so far. But apparently that's how these things start. At a new bank, the first customer is the president's mother."

"Where did you get that."

"Made it up." One second. "I don't know how long it's been since I made something up."

The advisor went home with the box. I cleared the table, washed the two coffee cups, turned off the lights one by one, and it was evening.

The deferred compensation belongs here. That evening I summoned Maintenance. One settlement remained.

"The subcontract compensation. In arrears, content to be discussed then — that was the clause. I am registering the date of billing."

State it.

"Eightsday."

The silence ran long. Past an approval, past all the kinds I know, out to a length that may have been, on the other side, laughter.

Registered. The contract's first not-yet-crossed clause has just become a standing clause. I will not worry about the ability to pay. When that day comes, payment will be made that day.

Appending for the record. It is the most beautiful compensation clause in three thousand years of contract archives. Aesthetics is not my jurisdiction; today I have said one line outside my jurisdiction.

The last page, then, to finish. In the archive's box, the last page is blank. These paragraphs — the evening after the deposit, Maintenance's settlement, this sentence being written now — are not in that copy. A document whose closure is due on Eightsday makes that possible. We built a world where writing on past the filing is not a violation, and I became that world's first beneficiary. This record has been posted, and is still being written. That the two sentences are true together — such things are no longer hard.

The titles get settled here too. Sender. The last title of the lineage, and the one that does the least.

Count them: the observer saw; the administrator wrote; the postman carried; the drafter built; the attestor sat. As the titles went quieter the verbs went quieter with them, and at sender, one motion remains. To post.

After the posting there is nothing to do. Not a defect but a feature. That is the definition of a sender — the one who does not see his own letter arrive. A postman who carried other people's sentences all his life posts, at the end, sentences of his own, and that one delivery he cannot follow.

Am I sorry — no. A letter whose arrival you get to see is a short letter. Long letters, by nature, walk on longer than their senders.

And the next page of this manuscript is not mine to write.