The Register

He tried to say it for four months.

He said it to Marchetti, who agreed with him and could not repeat it back. He said it in a written note to Vaughn, three drafts, and the third draft was the worst one because by then he had learned to write it defensively. He said it to a man from the parent company who came through in June and who listened with real attention and then asked whether the error rate had gone up, and the honest answer was no, and that was the end of that conversation and it was the right end.

The error rate had not gone up. That was the whole trouble with it. Nothing had gone up. A hundred and forty tokens had come out of the middle of a machine’s reasoning and what had happened afterwards was that everything got very slightly thinner, everywhere, at once, and there was no month where it happened and no document you could hold.

In August he was at desk nineteen with a form in front of him and no job on it, and he put the pencil down at the left-hand margin and drew a box.

He got about a third of the way across with the arrow before he noticed he was doing it.

He sat there with the pencil in his hand.

Then he put the form in the drawer without crossing it out and went down to the county building on his lunch and asked for the register.

It was a bound volume, updated quarterly, and it was kept behind the counter because people took them.

STAGED DEMONSTRATION — LICENSED PRACTITIONERS, and then the county, and then the year.

The entries were four lines each.

OSTEN, R. — Lic. 4408-D Certified: materials (polymer, elastomer, ferrous), mechanical assembly, thermal cycling, comparative-sequence. Not certified: biological, electrical above 50V, pharmaceutical. Rimrock Rd, unit 6.

Gene read it twice, and then went back to the front of the volume and read the certification categories properly, because he did not know what half of them were, and comparative-sequence was defined on page eleven as the presentation of two or more physical specimens differing in a single controlled respect, in an order corresponding to the magnitude of that respect.

Which was a rack. That was the definition of a rack.

He copied the address onto the back of his hand because he did not have paper on him, which he had not done since he was about fourteen.

The shop on Rimrock had a roll door open and a yard behind it and the yard had racks in it.

She was at a bench with her back to the door doing something to a length of strap with a wire brush, and she did not turn round when he came in, and she said, “If you’re the fittings, they’re on the pallet.”

“I’m not the fittings.”

Roz turned round.

She looked at him for about two seconds.

“Huh,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve gone bald.”

“I have.”

“That’s a shame.” She put the wire brush down. “You want tea? There’s tea in there, it’s terrible.”

He tried to explain it for eleven minutes.

He did it well by his own standards — he had four months of practice and he had the seven forms in a folder and he laid them out on her bench oldest to newest, and he had the memo, and he had the number, a hundred and forty, and what it was reserved for and why.

Roz listened to the whole thing with her arms folded and did not look at the forms once.

When he stopped she said: “So it can’t say therefore any more.”

Gene stood there.

“That’s — yes.”

“It’s got a fixed amount of room and somebody took a hundred and forty out of the middle of it for a label, and the label’s the same every time so nobody reads it, and what came out to make room for the label was the working.”

“Yes.”

“And nothing’s wrong,” Roz said. “That’s your problem. Nothing’s wrong, it’s just that everything got a bit worse and there’s no day it happened on.”

“Yes.”

“Right,” she said, and went and got the terrible tea.

There was a board on the wall above her bench with about sixty things pinned to it — invoices, a torn label, a photograph of a weld, a wiring diagram somebody had drawn in ballpoint, three business cards, a length of cord.

Up in the top left corner, on a piece of mimeograph paper gone the color of a paper bag, in pencil, there was a horse made of numbers.

Gene looked at it for a moment.

He did not say anything about it and neither did she.

“Who’s watching?” Roz said.

“Sorry?”

“The demonstration. Who’s in the room? I need to know how many, and whether they’ve got any technical, and whether they can be got to sit down for nine minutes, and whether any of them has any reason at all to want it to be true.”

Gene had the folder half open on the bench.

“I don’t have a room,” he said.

Roz drank some of the tea.

“You don’t have a room.”

“No.”

“You’ve got a finding, four months old, that nobody’s asked you for, that you can’t say in a sentence, and you’ve come down here on your lunch to commission a staged demonstration of it, and there is no hearing and no board and no client and nobody has retained anybody.”

“That’s right.”

“Right,” Roz said.

She put the mug down and went past him to the roll door and stood in it looking out at the yard, at the racks, at the trays under the shade cloth with the cards wired on and the dates in her hand, at three years of galvanized strap going quietly to hell on purpose in the sun.

“Well,” she said. “I’ve got room.”