THE PERSONS

known by residue · a paragraph each, and no more

A NOTE ON THESE ENTRIES

Not one person in the book has a name, and none is supplied here. They are listed as the book lists them: by trade, by residue, by what they are carrying. Where the book leaves an identity open, the entry leaves it open.

THE CRANE DRIVER

Eleven years on the same site, raising a building nobody has told him the purpose of. His hands say twenty-three floors; the drawings say nineteen. He can retire in four with the site pension, which is a real thing and pays on the day. He has stopped saying the number out loud at home.

THE WIDOW OF THE SURVEY

Seventy-one, thirty-one years married, four years a subscriber. She declines all three boxes on a sentiment form and asks for one thing: that the stops be left in. She is the last person who knows how her husband took his tea. Her fourteen words appear on a leaflet; the rest is held at the counter, and very few people ask.

THE MAN WITH THE RECEIPTS

Eleven years a subscriber to his wife’s continuation. Keeps every receipt flat. Says the present tense first and corrects it second, every time, and hears himself do it. He is one queue away from the man he would become and knows the figure to the penny.

THE CORRECTOR

Walks nine hundred and forty stones filing licensed plates against cut granite. Three hundred and eleven left. One row she does not walk, filed as deferred, access. Her mother’s plate runs on a monthly debit; her mother’s stone is blank, with a space above the name that has waited six years for a line she cannot choose.

THE SECRETARY

Thirty-one years minuting a board that signs nothing. Strikes a word the Chair asks struck, and minutes the stroke, so the word survives in the width of it. Her mother dies during an item; condolences are not minuted, and the sentence saying so is ordered minuted. Her own renewal is moved to the top of the next agenda without discussion.

THE CLERK OF EFFECTS

Thirty years at a wall of shallow trays. Reads his own life off somebody else’s pocket contents — a wound watch, a ticket folded to the width of a nail — and signs the identification in his own hand, which no file in the city has ever held. The only one in the book who signs his own — and signing is how the name leaves him.

THE ONE WHO SUPPLIES THE ENDINGS

Finishes the sentences a cheap household block eats. Has three endings and they fit everything. Has never once been told she was wrong, which is not the same as being right, and knows the difference. Once supplied aloud, into a block, for a neighbor holding a handset from the ward.

THE MAN AT THE RAIL

Ticket R-73, refunds, one matter: overcollection, years one to eleven inclusive. Stands up five times in one day to prove he is in the room. Answers to a number now. The board has a field for revalidations and none for him.

THE GRAY CAT OF THE FISH MARKET

Talks. Not often, not warmly, and never to the ones who want it. Has no birth entry, no license, no continuation plan and no name; an interest was registered in her and found nothing to attach to. Recordings of her play back as room-tone. She leaves on a Thursday, up the steps, and the cameras file her departure as weather.

THE MAN IN THE GRAY COAT

Appears at a chair, at a bank, at a table, in a leaflet and on a hill. Sold something at the dark end of the bank, cash in the hand, and was struck from the register first and shot second. The book does not confirm that these are the same man. Neither does this companion.