Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Language I Cannot File
A registry clerk in Murrow wakes one Monday to find that the plainest stamps in her office have lost their weight, and begins filing round the absences.
- perspective: close-third
The stamps on the third floor of the Rates Hall say what stamps say — OVERDUE, RECEIVED, FILED — and for nineteen years Vera Cotterill had felt them the way you feel a stair without looking. On the second Monday of the month she picked up the received stamp, and the meaning was not in her hand. She stamped, because the hand knows its work. The word came out on the form level and black and weighed nothing. A coin worn smooth, she thought. Still legal. No face.
It is not her letters. She spelled the words to herself in the lift and they kept every letter they were entitled to; they had lost their underside instead. Overdue, received, filed. Then pending. Then returned. Then, one bad Thursday, closed. A shelf of the ordinary going blank one plank at a time, and the shelf still bearing its label. She can say around them: an overdue account is one that has gone past its day and been asked for. The definition works like directions to a town she used to live in. Correct. Complete. No smell of the streets.
So she files round the gaps, and her trays have never once misfiled, which the office would call recovery and she calls geography. Dates still mean; paper weight still means — the floppy sheets off the housing pool, the stiff ones down from legal; corner folds mean. She sorts by whatever still has a floor under it, and the blank words are handled last, by their corners, and set down where the dates tell her they belong. At the end of the week her section's total balances to the page. Accuracy intact. Meaning walled. If you asked her which was worse, she would say the question is badly drafted, and it would be the truest thing she says all day.
She keeps a card in her handbag now, folded once, a definition for each word in her own small writing — received: came in, and was marked as come in; filed: put where the day can find it. She knows them by heart; that is not the point. The point is the rehearsing. At the kitchen table, home, she writes each blank word out once and crosses it through, once a day, to keep the hand in, she tells nobody. It is like copying the signature of a person you have never met. The writing is exact. The person does not come.
Words are not lent to you, she knows this. They are simply there, like the floor. But a registry is a place of loans — items out, items due back — and the forms ask, over and over, in the flat hand of the office, when things will be brought in. Last month a circular came from upstairs with RECEIVED printed across it half an inch high, and she stood in the corridor reading a word that gave her back nothing it had promised. She filed it, by its date, under the correct year. It occurred to her, and she let it occur, and then she let it stop occurring, that a recall notice looks like any other circular. That is a thought, and the office runs on thoughts that survive the working day.
Received, and not kept. She finds the phrase in her own hand on the blotter some evenings, as if her pen had been saying it on her behalf at the end of a shift. She cannot account for the pen being out of its tray. She rules the blotter back to clean and does not enter it in any column, because there is no column for it. There is no column for most of it now. The trays look exactly as they always looked. That, she thinks, is the trick of a good registry: it can go on being right long after the rightness has gone somewhere else.
Friday, ten to five, the floor thins out and she does the week's last filing and sits down at the desk with the day's forms squared and the stamps put by. Everything on the third floor can be proved, which is more than most floors manage, and proof is what the registry pays for. She stamps FILED on the last one, and it lands black and level, and she waits half a second for the meaning, the way you wait on a stair that isn't there. Nothing lands. And the question she has never put to anyone, filed nowhere, kept past the? — kept anyway, comes out at last in the empty office, at the volume of the strip lights: when her words are returned to her — recalled, restored, brought back like certificates — will they come back used?