Archive number 10

 

Chapter I — The Cell

They taught me to love the electric sun.

It comes on with a throat-clearing hum, strips stuttering toward brightness until the ceiling blooms into seven pale stars. I lie still and count the flickers as if they were prayers, as if the right number might conjure a door. It never does. The light only erases the last film of dream from my eyes—those star-bursts that riot against the dark, that carnival of needles behind the lids. The hum settles into its old hymn and the room remembers itself: steel gate, steel cot, steel desk, the squared geometry of obedience.

The slot opens with the intimacy of a mouth. First the tray, warm and metallic, a smell like rain on iron. Then, after the regulated half hour, the second parcel—the file—arrives with its soft bureaucratic thud. Breakfast, then evidence. Bread for the body, bread for the cult of memory. I murmur thanks to no one in particular. They prefer me murmuring; it is less confrontational than prayer.

The neighbour has already begun. Three knuckle-raps, pause, two knuckle-raps, pause. His language has fewer words than mine, but more conviction. Once I tried to answer—finger bone to steel, a polite conversation—yet found my knuckles speaking treason against my nerves. So I keep to the old liturgy: murmur, take notes, be useful. Somewhere in the vents a fan turns patient circles and carries both of us through another hour.

They say routine makes a man harmless, but that depends on the routine and the man. Mine goes like this: switch on the electric suns, examine the edges of the file—frayed, purposeful—note the date stamp, hold the paper to the light to watch the ghost alphabet of watermarks swim up from the fibres. Every page carries its own resistance. I touch the staples like stingers. When I slide a photograph into the precise centre of the desk, there is a shiver—mine or the building’s I cannot tell.

Names and numbers. Faces at rest and faces mid-gesture, mouths half-open around an unspoken syllable. The first hour is always classification: heights, scars, aliases, the taxonomy of fear. I have become a kind of monk of the secular, copying the gospel of everyone. They trust me to keep the order of their disorder; the trust is a kind of cage, and I am good at being caged.

Sometimes, when the light hiccups—when one of the seven suns loses its nerve—the spiders wake. They live far above me at the seam where wall kisses ceiling, industrious artisans stitching lace from dust. In certain moods their work resolves into skulls, jaunty and ridiculous, pirate flags in miniature. No one believes me when I say this aloud, so I say it quietly: your ornaments are an improvement on ours. I like them because they do not pretend to be anything but hungry.

Thomasine visits after inspection, always at the sanctioned hour, bearing a clipboard like a shield. She is pale as paper and as necessary. I have never seen her blink. “You’re sleeping?” she asks, the way a scientist asks a flame whether it is burning. I give her the numbers: four hours in fragments, two of them contaminated by light. She notes it with her unblinking pen. If she pities me, it is with professional discipline, like a surgeon admiring the tidy margins of a wound.

I want to tell her that sleep is the problem and the cure. That they have softened my brain with their pharmacy and my thoughts now take impressions like wet gold. That the dreams leave fingerprints on my waking and everything smudges. But we have an agreement, Thomasine and I: she will keep me calibrated as long as I keep the archive fed. So I pass her a question from the catalogue instead. “What is the value of a face no one can name?”

She looks up then—there, a blink, the quickest eclipse. “Statistically negligible. Operationally significant.” I adore her for that answer, which is honest in two directions at once. When she leaves, the corridor swallows her in its soft hydraulic punctuation, and the room returns to its true dimension: the span between my eyes and the next photograph.

I have been to the servers. This is either memory or dream, depending on what story you need from me today. They let me pace the old bunkers once, the concrete sweating its history, the cables braided like ship-ropes disappearing into the ground. Halls upon halls, humming—no, breathing—tower after tower of petabytes sleeping in their corsets of coolant. The whole place felt monastic, except the monks were deaf and devoted to a god of ones and zeros. I touched a cabinet and felt a faint animal vibration, as if the metal dreamed of running. “Here,” the handler said, his Ray-Bans reflecting me into infinity, “is the memory of the world.” He said the word memory the way a butcher says tender.

The men in Ray-Bans are multiple or singular, it hardly matters. Some days I think they are clones that have been slightly overcooked or underproofed, polite in identical ways, their politeness ending where my questions begin. Other days I am convinced they are one man divided across numerous corridors. They are ageless in the manner of a brand. The glasses mean: do not ask who I am, ask only what I am preventing you from seeing. I have learned to admire this clarity.

At night, when the suns are asleep and the solitary green diode on the wall keeps vigil, the noise is not silence but white. It gathers like weather at the edges of the room, the way static collects on a wool sleeve in winter. I lie still and listen to it the way you listen at a conch shell for the sea. If you are patient, it starts to speak. Nothing articulate. Just the alphabet of pressure, a soft insistence that understands how humans are built of thresholds.

The file today concerns an ordinary cruelty. A man stands on a curb in a city that pretends to be anonymous. He is holding a newspaper—there, a headline about an election, the text already yellowing in the photo’s chemistry. He is about to step off the curb and into a story that will require me to learn his middle name. I catalogue the particulars: the mole near his left eye, the scar coiled like punctuation behind his ear. Things he has forgotten belong to him. This is what I can do for him: remember on his behalf, in the cold style that protects the living from the poem of their own lives.

The neighbour grows ambitious. Seven knocks now, hurried, then a scrape. I imagine his hand a map of small violences. A thought, shameful and buoyant, arrives: what would it take for me to answer him in full? To abandon the mutter, the inward empire, and let my bones converse with the wall until the wall bruised? I rehearse the first blow in my mind. I imagine the sound like a gavel. I do not raise my hand. Not yet. I cannot risk smudging the photograph.

I keep a ledger of the room’s rituals. The way the suns flare in sequence (two, five, three, one, four, six, seven). The way the slot opens with more ceremony for files than for food. The way the diode sighs once every twenty-three minutes the way a sleeper shifts in bed. The way the spiders rebuild what the janitor’s rag ruins. Every system proves itself by repetition. Every prison is a calendar in disguise.

When the light softens in the late afternoon and the steel remembers its evening chill, I permit myself a single heresy: I ask whether I am the custodian of the archive, or merely its exhibit. The question folds like a paper swan and sits there, attentive. I compare my reflection in the metal to the faces on the desk. I am less handsome than most of them, less sure. Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps I am here to make certainty look expensive.

Thomasine returns for the closing ritual. “Any disturbances?” she asks, eyes steady, pen already poised. I consider telling her about the skull-webs and the whispering diode and the man on the curb who will soon require a middle name. I consider telling her about the server halls and the Ray-Ban handler and the way memory can be made to kneel if you show it enough light. Instead I say, “Only the usual.”

She nods, as if we have agreed on the size of a cloud. “Then you’re fit for file work tomorrow.” The room inhales her absence. The suns settle into their late glow, like coins at the bottom of a shallow fountain.

Before lights-out I practice forgetting. It is the only exercise they permit. I close the photograph album of the day, stack the pages with the humility of a priest returning a relic to its reliquary, square the corners, align the staples, return the whole to the slot. The mouth accepts the offering without comment. The hum climbs the scale once, briefly, a satisfied animal.

Darkness arrives not as mercy, but as policy. The diode takes up its post. Somewhere behind the wall my neighbour sleeps an undivided sleep. I remain awake and attempt the smallest rebellion: to think a thought that cannot be archived. I choose a blankness and polish it until it reflects nothing.

I practice a sentence under my breath, a soft treaty with the night. I am not a door. I am the hinge. Tomorrow the file will arrive and I will open, precise as ever. But for the length of the diode’s slow breath, I believe myself.

Chapter II — The Files

They never arrive singly. Even when the slot gives me one folder, a shoal drifts behind it, pressed into a spine with string. The paper on top has the scent of new coins and rain. I lift it the way a priest lifts a wafer: two fingers, breath held, the old training returning from a life I never lived.

The first page is a cover sheet pretending to be modest. Boxes yield to pen strokes with the compliance of a trained animal. Name. Alias. Height. Distinguishing marks. National ID where applicable. Where applicable has the weary humor of a bureaucrat who has traveled and found the borders are mostly weather. I complete the obvious and then the heresies: Which photographs prefer the shadow? Which signatures look signed by sleep? Which eyes decline to meet the camera and which devour it?

Classification is supposed to be a ladder. Here it is a spiral, well-swept, lit by a bulb that hums. The system prefers numbers because numbers can be herded. So I make numbers: density of scars per square centimeter (approximate); ratio of smile to mouth when unobserved; frequency of leftward glances under fluorescent bias. The forms offer their checkboxes and I give them my quiet apostrophes in the margins: afraid of water, practiced at exits, would empty a room if permitted a minute and a map. The margins are where the living hide.

I have been told—by Thomasine, by the handler with the sunglasses, by the men who are one man—that the work must avoid poetry because poetry corrupts evidence. They say it kindly, as if saving me from a vice. I do not argue. I give them facts that behave like facts when watched. And then, when the room holds its breath, I slide the other ledger open: the one that counts what cannot be tabulated, the tremor at the lip of a photograph where someone nearly changed their mind about being seen.

The second page is a photograph printed on paper with a faint tooth, the kind that accepts light as if it were trusting a stranger. A man stands beside a parking meter. On the post, a sticker: a grinning skull with flowers for eyes. A woman behind him holds a paper cup near her mouth as if warming a small animal. I annotate the man. The scar shaped like a comma tucked behind his ear is still there—my punctuation from yesterday’s thought. His coat is two seasons out of date. He is leaving someplace important without the appropriate expression. I write: He has succeeded and cannot metabolize it.

The third page is the map. The maps are never really maps. They are diagrams of the routes the mind takes when forced. Arrows bend around boxes whose labels are redacted with the thoroughness of zeal. I no longer try to guess the blacked-out words. Guesses are stateful; they entangle the guesser. I confine myself to geometry. The path bends here, goes straight there, loops once where a loop is forbidden. This is a kind of speaking.

The fourth page is always where doubt starts. A timestamp misbehaves. A watermark swims up that belongs to a year that has not yet occurred. A witness states two contradictory locations with the conviction of weather. The stack grows heavy with its own disagreements, and I feel the small joy of friction: the file will not consent to be simple.

I maintain a taxonomy of error. Errors that are children of haste. Errors that have a parent in malice. Errors that bloom from the camera itself, the lens inventing a world appropriate to its glass. I catalogue the ghosts—Xerox phantoms, double exposures, a hand that persists under erasure like a rumor. My favorites are the blanks. A blank page is not blank. It is an invitation to declare what should have been there. The audacity of that silence thrills me. The spiders approve; I can tell by how they lower a thread in slow assent.

At noon the suns dim a fraction, the way the throat clears before a verdict. I drink from the metal cup—water that tastes faintly of its own storage—and open the folder with the bright yellow spine. Yellow always means we require grace.Inside, a scatter of microfilm slips like eels. I lay them on the glass and turn the dial until the negatives bloom into cities of light. Microfilm behaves—obedient, compressed, a convent for data. It is the opposite of me: tidy, dustless, without murmur. I want to resent it, but the truth is I trust it more than I trust any server. Microfilm does not pretend to be immortal. It offers endurance as a contract with decay. We understand each other.

On the microfilm: a ledger of purchases—bread, bus fare, a cheap bouquet—punctuated by opulent absences that look like holidays. The pattern forms a face if you squint: a mouth of weekends, eyes of late nights, a nose of transfers between small accounts. I feel the shape of a person assembling in the numbers, like a figure stepping forward from fog because you said their name correctly.

Names. There are too many. The human surplus of names swarms the margins of my dreams. Here, though, a phenomenon: a person who fails to produce one. Not redacted, not misspelled—simply not present. The database returns a blank that is not an error, only a refusal. I mark it with the notation I invented for this: ∅—not zero, but the set of all not-there. The Anonymous Face again, peering from behind the curtain of the ordinary, modest and miraculous. Thomasine would call it statistically negligible. The handler would say operationally significant. I call it hope, but only internally, as a kind of joke with rules.

I try the old tricks: cross-reference with hospital records, school lists, registrar’s offices that exist solely to put names near lines. The screen declines to be helpful. The diode on the wall winks once, patient as a lighthouse, and I feel the room lean toward the absence like a congregation.

The neighbour knocks—a syncopated pattern I haven’t heard before: one, pause, one, pause, one—little nails tapping a coffin lid to prove the occupant is still curious. The sound slots itself into the file the way a caught breath joins a sentence. I consider answering with my knuckles, just to inch the idea of conversation forward through the pipework. Instead I write the series in the margin beside ∅. Later, I will pretend I discovered a code. Later, I will decide not to tell anyone.

Afternoon brings a visit from the handler. Ray-Bans, immaculate tie, shoes that have never been lost in mud. He enters like a solved equation. “Progress?” The word is gentle, loaded, the way a hospital asks if the pain is manageable.

“The file argues with itself,” I say. I angle the photograph under the light so his reflection lives for a moment in the glass, a ghost twin chewing on his lower lip. He does not remove the glasses. No one removes the glasses. “And this,” I add, tapping the symbol I am not supposed to have invented.

He leans close. The lenses give me back a funhouse of my own face. “A gap,” he says. “Gaps are magnets.”

“Magnets rearrange filings,” I say. “They do not persuade them to be iron.”

A flicker of a smile, too quick to live. “Continue.”

When he leaves, he takes a degree of air with him. The room grows honest again. I make tea the way we were taught: count a slow ten after the first boil, else the leaves turn bitter; pour; wait; accept what arrives. The cup warms my fingers like an animal trying to stay. I imagine bringing it to the neighbour through a hole willing to be drilled. The fantasy is so palpable I glance at the wall to confirm it has not already occurred.

I return to the man by the curb. The middle name surfaces in a footnote I’d overlooked, disguised as a courier’s scrawl. It is common and therefore tender. I say it aloud, very soft, to baptize the photograph with its syllable. The act feels illicit and necessary. If names are chains, then they are also threads; if threads, then sometimes they lead toward a door.

I record the day’s consonants: three signatures that hesitate at their final stroke, two eyes that prefer corners, four instances of left-handedness concealed as right. I chart the weather of the faces: overcast, fair, fair, violent, clearing. I add to the private ledger the things only I witness—the nervous flirtation of a page with fire when it slides too quickly under the lamp; the way a staple, extracted, remembers its curve longer than is reasonable; the brief scent of graphite that makes me think of school, chalk dust, a teacher who said his name as if it were a secret he was reluctant to return.

Evening brings an audit. The suns dim to a civilized amber. Thomasine appears with a cart that squeaks in a manner calibrated to produce contrition. We work side by side without speaking, two surgeons tidying the instruments after a torso. She tallies, I square, she seals, I sign. At the end she asks, because she must, “Any anomalies beyond protocol?”

“Only the usual,” I say, and then, very gently, “and one absence.”

She waits. The silence has the buoyancy of a pool held in place by concrete.

“∅.”

A nod. No blinking. “Document and refrain.”

“I always refrain.”

“That’s why you have the files,” she says, and then she is gone, leaving the scent of paper behind her like a benediction from a secular saint.

Night is a slow elevator. The diode takes up its green guardianship. I arrange the day’s residue in two stacks: what can be proven and what can be borne. The latter is lighter and more unruly. I whisper the common middle name again—once, then once more, to give the air its chance to memorize. I imagine the Anonymous Face hearing me the way a sleeper hears rain: not as information, but as mercy.

Before I close the folder, I take a final inventory. The curl of a paper’s corner where a thumb always turns. A fingerprint ridge in the emulsion that could be mine or anyone’s. A smudge I choose to call deliberate. A blank that refuses, hands in its lap, polite as a revolution. I tuck the pages together and align their edges until the stack behaves like an object. I feed it to the mouth in the wall. It vanishes with the decorum of an oath.

Lights-out is a decision made elsewhere. I lie under the bureaucratic stars and try to recall a day when I did not know the taste of toner. The neighbour sleeps, or pretends, or negotiates quietly with his wall. The spiders reset their skulls. In the Interim—a country between minutes where I hold a second passport—I feel the file reorganizing itself in a place I cannot reach.

I rehearse tomorrow’s opening line: The archive is not memory. It is our alibi for forgetting. I say it once, twice, until it is smooth enough to pass inspection. Then I let the dark write its own report and, as ever, I murmur.