The Permanent Record is downtown, right across the Plaza from the Speculative Service, but the Provisional Record is everywhere—in storerooms and spare rooms and sheds, in crawl spaces underneath homes and attics atop them.
Aster’s, she tells us, is in the basement, so off we go in a small parade, marching in single file back onto the exterior landing, down to the courtyard, through a narrow entrance between apartment doors, and one more flight down. Ms. Aster leads the way with her flashlight, me just behind her, and Paige bringing up the rear, tuned in, keen.
The basement is still and cold and full of boxes, lit by three banks of flickering fluorescents. A record room like other record rooms all over the State, in every residential building and private home, climate-controlled and easily accessible.
Everybody keeps everything. You know it; I know it. Archiving is a bulwark.
At age seventeen you’re issued your first package from the Preservation Office, a full set of boxes and bags accompanied by four small-type pages of instructions and warnings, making detailed reference to the relevant text of the Basic Law. It’s thrilling at the outset, to come out of your parents’ boxes and assume this solemn responsibility borne by all good and golden citizens: taking the time every evening, before it gets to be midnight or before you go to sleep, whichever comes first, to curate the day that has passed. To compile all interaction stamps, all recorded observations, all receipts and paperwork from the day that was, gather it all up into a Mylar bag, seal it and mark it and file it among all the other days of your life. We carry our individual archives, our Provisional Records, moving through the present with our past enturtled on our backs.
Otherwise how would everybody know, for sure and forever, that the things that have happened have actually happened? How would the law know for sure? How would the future?
Of course, most daily bags remain sealed for the rest of your life, because most truth never needs to be unsealed. But if the State should need it, there it is: every day can be reviewed if necessary, every flat fact can be exhumed, held up to the light, double-checked and reverified, compared and contrasted with other relevant archives. And then one day death comes, and a team from the Record comes in afterward, bears your papers away, and your Provisional becomes a part of the Permanent, one more tributary flowing into the main trunk.
They’ll be here by the end of the day for Crane’s records, I don’t doubt, and I’m glad to miss ’em. Strange people, the death collectors. I’ve known a few.
Aster has her tenants’ respective archives organized into different areas of the room, and she finds Crane’s section with no trouble. I step around her and hover my flashlight over the topmost box and nudge it with my toe.
“Is this the first pallet?” I ask her.
“First and last.”
I look at her in the dim light, and then back at the pallet. A single pallet. Six boxes.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely sure?”
“What am I going to do?” she says. “Lie?”
The room feels colder than it was. Colder and darker. I glance at Ms. Paige, and she looks uneasy, standing behind me with her hands on her hips.
“Ms. Aster.” My voice is in neutral. My mind is going ten different ways at once. “How old was this man again? If that’s a fact you’re—”
“Fifty-four,” says Aster, busybody, knowledge collector. She knows.
I grunt. I crouch to the pallet. Fifty-four years. Same as me. I shift my weight to talk over my shoulder to Paige.
“Hey. What’s your gut?”
“What?”
She looks caught out, confused. But this is how it works. This is the job. Something feels wrong, you make a decision. Anomaly, whispers of anomaly. What do you do?
“Come on, Ms. Paige. Come on. Your gut.”
“Dig,” she says quietly. “My gut is we dig.”
“Okay.” I shrug. “So? Dig.”
She crouches down beside me and we open our satchels. I keep all the special small tools for this kind of investigation in a zippered inner pocket: the slicing tool for clean-cutting dailies, the highly specialized adhesive tape for officially and properly sealing them back up and stamping them opened/examined next to today’s date. We pry off the lid of the first box and start digging.
Crane has got everything in order, just like he’s supposed to, just like everybody: each day’s pocket flotsam is gathered together in its own Mylar bag, each week of days is gathered together in a durable hard-paper sack and sealed. We paw through Mose Crane’s days, and we are both thinking the same thing: they are thin. Some days only have one or two pieces of paper in them, one or two conversations, or just a couple of receipts, or none. Aster watches Paige and me, unsealing thin bag after thin bag—days without incident, nothing worth recording, no transactions, no conversations at all. There’s one Saturday, three weeks old, with a parking ticket, an unlucky lottery card, and a note to himself, torn from the corner of his Day Book, scrawled in pencil, indecipherable.
Most days are even thinner. Employer-stamp slips and nothing else: Crane worked and went home, worked and went home. The combined Record of his life adds up to just six boxes, and six boxes is nothing. I’ve got nineteen boxes, personally. Same number of years, thirteen more boxes of days. Receipts for beers with friends from work, carbons of wedding invitations, of my wedding invitation, pictures and postcards and memories.
And listen, I’m fucking nobody. I’m no social butterfly. I don’t like people, I don’t talk to strangers, I don’t have hobbies. After fifty-four years of wandering around our good and golden land, some people have got dozens of boxes, hundreds.
But our man Crane is sitting on six. Six.
And listen, there’s a part of me processing this as a trained Speculator, a law enforcement official with a wealth of institutional experience on which to draw. Six boxes isn’t much, but it’s not off the charts. Some people are just lonely, that’s all. Some people don’t get out. It’s just more evidence of the kind of life that Crane led, like the dumpy apartment, like the single ratty pair of shoes: introverted, dull, absent of incident. A bachelor, a day laborer, working and eating and sleeping.
“You doing all right, Ms. Paige?” I am bending to the second to last of the boxes.
“No,” she says, a strangled single syllable, and I turn. I didn’t notice, but Paige at some point has stopped digging. She’s come up out of her crouch halfway and is frozen like that, legs bent, one hand over her mouth. Aster has lapsed into expectant, curious silence, her lips pursed and her eyes caught and held.
“Paige?”
Nothing. Here we go again. “Ms. Paige?”
“There’s—” She shuts her eyes, longer than a blink, tries again. “There’s—”
“Ms. Paige?”
“There’s—look—” She swallows hard, and I swear I can feel it, the pulse of pain that jams her up a second, before she manages to explain, sticking her hand into the one box I haven’t gotten to yet, the most recent one. “Look.”
“What am I looking at?”
“There are two weeks missing.”