Concern

Part II

The room held forty desks and each desk had a lamp and a screen, and the screens stood on end, taller than they were wide, because you did not put a picture on them and you did put a page.

It was quiet the way a room is quiet when the noise is all one noise. Forty keyboards. Good ones — sprung, sculpted, serviced twice a year by a man who came on Thursdays with a case, and they made a sound like weather.

Gene had desk nineteen, which was under the second window, which was worth about four dollars a week to anybody who had it.

The work came in on the cart.

The form on top of each job was one page and it had never changed in the eleven years he had been doing it, and the fourth line of it was the only line anybody read.

CONCERN:

Underneath that the client wrote the thing they were frightened of. Then you read the document and you told them whether it was in there.

Gene’s first that morning was a supply agreement, sixty-one pages, and the fourth line said:

CONCERN: whether we can be made to buy the whole quantity if the plant goes down

Which was a good one. That was a client who had been hurt before. You could always tell, because the ones who had never been hurt wrote is this a fair contract, and there was no answer to that and you sent it back.

He read it in an hour and ten minutes and wrote four sentences at the bottom of the form. Section 9.4, yes, they can, unless the outage exceeds thirty days and is certified by a third party under 9.4(c), and there is no third party named in the agreement.

That last clause was the whole job. Eleven years and the job was still, four times a day, there is no third party named in the agreement.

The second one was ninety pages and the concern line said whether we are on the hook for the freight, and Gene got about eleven pages into it and stopped and sat back.

He read the eleventh page again.

Then he turned to page forty and read a paragraph there, and then to page seventy-one, and then he put the whole thing flat on the desk and put both hands on it.

Marchetti came past with her cart and he put a hand up.

“Look at this.”

She came round and read where his finger was, which was section 12.2, four hundred words, one sentence, with the word notwithstanding in it twice.

“Okay,” she said.

“Read it again.”

She read it again. She was fast — she was the fastest in the room, which everybody knew and nobody said — and she read it again in about twenty seconds and then a third time in about forty.

“It doesn’t say anything,” she said.

“It doesn’t say anything.”

“It’s —” She put her finger on it and moved it along. “Notwithstanding the foregoing, the party of record shall maintain such obligations as arise under and are consistent with the provisions of this section.”

“Which are.”

“Nothing. There’s nothing in the section. The section is that sentence.”

Gene sat back.

“There’s four hundred words of it,” he said, “and it parses. Every clause parses. You could put it in front of a grammarian and he’d sign it.”

Marchetti straightened up and looked at the room for a second — forty lamps, forty screens on end, the weather noise — and then back down at page eleven.

“Mad Lib,” she said.

“Mad Lib.”

“How many of those in there?”

“I’ve found three so far and I’m at page seventy-one.”

“Bill it long,” she said, and took her cart on.

He billed it long.

At the bottom of the form, under the four ruled lines, he wrote: Freight is at 4.1 and you are clear. Note that sections 12.2, 14.6 and 19 are, in my reading, without content. They are not ambiguous. They are constructed so that a reading of them terminates without a finding. I would not sign a document with three of them in it.

The client took the answer about the freight and signed it anyway, which was the correct commercial decision and which Gene had known before he wrote the sentence, because there was no version of the transaction where they did not sign.

He wrote the sentence anyway. Everybody in that room wrote the sentence anyway. It was the only part of the job that was not clerical and it went in the file and the file went in the cabinet.

At four o’clock a job came back off the cart with a red slip on it.

Nobody at desk nineteen had touched it. It had gone through intake and stopped there, and it was traveling back the other way with the slip stapled through the corner so it could not come off, and the reason box on the slip had one word written in it in somebody’s ordinary handwriting.

graven.

Gene did not look up as it went past. Neither did anybody else. Marchetti’s cart went out the double doors at the end and came back four minutes later with a fresh stack, and the room made its noise, and that was a Tuesday.