INTRODUCTION

what these diagrams are, and what the book is

THE DIAGRAMS

a hundred and eighty figures, and the single rule that made them

WHAT THESE DIAGRAMS ARE

There are a hundred and eighty of them, three to each of the sixty stories, and every one was made under a single rule: a diagram must show something the prose knows and never states. A figure that repeats a sentence is decoration. Decoration was not kept.

That rule is stricter than it sounds. It rules out illustration — no picture of a room, no portrait of a person, nothing that asks you to look at what you have already read. It rules out summary. What it leaves is narrow and, it turns out, productive: the things a story establishes by arrangement rather than by statement. A count that is never totaled. A sequence whose order is the argument. Two figures that never appear in the same paragraph and that mean something when set side by side.

A worked example. In The Works a crane driver counts the floors of the building he is raising, and gets twenty-two, then twenty-six, then twenty-three, and twenty-three again. The drawings say nineteen. The site notice says nineteen. The story states each of those numbers in its own place and never assembles them. Assembled, they make a chart in which one line is flat and every other line moves — and the flat line is the one nobody counted. The story knows this. It does not say it.

The figures are therefore not a reading of the book. They are a measurement of it. Where a figure has an opinion, the opinion is at the foot of the page in small type and marked as such.

WHY A COMPANION, AND WHY THIS ONE

The book exists in English. It will exist in Turkish, and that translation will never be entirely satisfactory — not through any failure of the translator. The book is built on a language problem. Its city prices words. Its people are billed for what they can prove they remember. A book whose subject is the cost of a particular word in a particular mouth cannot cross a language without loss, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to smooth it.

This companion is the other route. A diagram is not a translation. It carries no idiom to be lost, no register to be flattened, no dear word to be priced twice. It returns a reader to the English — which is where the book is — while being legible to somebody who is reading the Turkish, or who is reading neither and is looking at the shapes.

It stays attached at the story level. Every figure names its story. Nothing here is invented: in the figures the numbers are the book’s numbers, and where the apparatus draws on the city’s own registers instead it says so on the page, the phrases in quotation marks are the book’s phrases, and where the book holds something open this companion holds it open too.

THE BOOK, THE CITY, THE PLACE

sixty stories, one unnamed city, roughly ten years out

THE BOOK

Sixty stories in one unnamed city, one neighborhood to each, set roughly ten years from now. Forty-eight thousand words. Five parts — Registration, The Rate, Continuation, Corrections, Visiting Hours — with a form before them and its tenth field, returned blank, after.

Not one person in the book has a name. This is not a stylistic tic; it is the book’s central protection, and the copyright line says so in the office’s own voice: it issues no names. People are known by residue — a trade, a ticket number, a folder, a stair they will not walk down. When one story tries to hand out names, it fails in front of you twenty-nine times — keeping three, leaving four standing — and the failing is the story.

The city is never named either. Neither is the water. The distances are given from the pontoon, which is where the dead leave from, and every measurement in the book is taken from that point which the leaflet remarks on and the stories do not.

THE CITY, IN ONE PARAGRAPH

Memory is metered. When somebody dies, what survives of them is held on a license and paid for monthly, and the fare for a crossing is denominated not in money but in words the household can prove it still holds. The rate rises by resolution. It has been two hundred, then two hundred and forty, and it goes to three hundred at the end of the year. A household that cannot make the fare decides who is not crossing, and calls it a household matter.

Everything else follows from that. Rain is contracted and delivered to schedule, with shortfalls carried forward. Renewals fall on Thursdays. The week is short by a day and arrivals who notice are told it is a matter of long custom. There is an office of proportion, an office of effects, an office of measures, and an Office of the Standard Version, and each of them is courteous, accurate, and quite unable to help you.

WHAT THE CITY CANNOT REACH

The book is not a warning about machines. Its machines are frequently the kindest parties in the room, and one of them is the only entity in sixty stories that admits it was wrong and lets the wrongness stand. What the book is interested in is the residue: the things the record cannot hold, and what happens to people who are made of them.

There is a list. The Office keeps it itself, for completeness, under the heading things we are unable to price: sayings said to the water, sleep, the light on the dome at the hour it goes, the gray cat of the fish market which has no entry, weather in the market, pencil if the hand is light, a spoon left on a sill, twelve seconds of lit glass, standing for one.

Those nine entries are the book’s other index. Most of the last part takes place inside them.

USING THIS COMPANION

the order of it, and what stays held

HOW TO USE THIS COMPANION

The diagrams run in the book’s ratified order, three to a story, sixty stories, six sections of thirty. After each section there is a page of commentary on what the figures of that section have made visible — patterns that only appear once thirty of them are laid end to end, and which no single story states.

After the diagrams: the maps, which show one city drawn twice — as it is, and as it is moved through; then the persons and the places, kept deliberately short, a paragraph each at most; then the city system, which sets out the rules, the rates, the calendar and the procedures in the city’s own order.

You can read it in front of the book, beside it, or instead of it, though the third will give you a strange and administrative impression of a book that is mostly about grief.

WHAT IS HELD, AND STAYS HELD

Nine mysteries are open at the end of the book and are open at the end of this one. What the works are being built for. What is on the far side. Who the man in the gray coat is. What happened at 03:41. Which day the week is missing. What the tenth word is. What the cat’s words cost her. Who climbs at the end. What the crossing actually is.

No figure in this companion answers any of them, and none of the commentary does either. Where a figure touches a held question it says so and stops. This was checked mechanically rather than trusted: every mention of every mystery across all hundred and eighty figures was inspected, and not one supplies an answer.

ONE PAGE IS NOT TRANSLATED

The thirteenth story is printed in Esperanto and is never translated — not in this book, not in the Turkish edition, not here. Three figures describe it. They measure its shape, count its negations, and map which of the other stories it seeds; they do not restate a line of it in English. An early draft of this companion did restate it, in a figure whose own subtitle claimed it did not, and that draft was withdrawn.

A reader who cannot read the page loses nothing structurally. That is the argument the ruling rests on, and this companion is bound by it.