On the Arithmetic of Unanimous Failure

The restaurant is on the second floor of a building whose ground floor houses a passport office. I arrive early and watch the line from the window. It does not move. I count the people in it — nineteen — and order coffee and wait for twenty minutes, and when I look again there are still nineteen people, though I cannot be sure they are the same nineteen.

Saramago arrives first, which surprises me, because I had imagined him as a man who enters rooms already in progress. He sits down heavily and says nothing for a moment, then looks at the passport line below and says, “They will all get their passports. Every one of them. That is what makes it unbearable.”

I am not sure what he means yet. I write it down.

Kafka comes in through a side entrance I had not noticed. He is carrying a folder. He places it on the table without opening it and orders nothing. He looks at the menu for a long time, sets it down, and says, “I will have what the building is having,” which the waiter, to my astonishment, seems to understand.

“The premise,” I begin, because I have learned from previous meetings that the first person to state the premise controls the direction of the quarrel, “is a law. A transparency law. It passes the legislature four hundred and twenty-seven votes to one. It is signed by the president. It requires a government agency to release its files — all of them — within three hundred days. The law is perfect. The passage is perfect. And then the implementation produces the opposite of what the law demands.”

Kafka opens his folder. Inside is a single sheet of paper, blank except for a stamp in the upper right corner. “I brought my credentials,” he says. “Fourteen years at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. I processed cases in which a man lost his hand in a machine and then had to prove, by filling out a form with both hands, that he had in fact lost one of them. Not a metaphor. That was a Tuesday.”

“But your cases had outcomes,” Saramago says. “Terrible outcomes, unjust outcomes, but outcomes. The man eventually received or did not receive his compensation. The machine kept running. What interests me about this premise is not the injustice. Injustice is a result. What interests me is the phenomenon of a democracy producing a near-unanimous vote and then watching the object of that vote dissolve. Not defeated. Not overturned. Dissolved.”

“Dissolved is too gentle,” Kafka says. “The law does not dissolve. The law persists. It is on the books. It can be cited. The agency will cite it in its own press releases. ‘Pursuant to’ — they love that phrase. The law becomes the instrument of its own non-execution.”

I write that down too. The law becomes the instrument of its own non-execution.

“Who is the protagonist?” I ask. “I’m thinking of the legislative aide who drafted the law. The person who wrote the actual sentences.”

“A drafter,” Kafka says, with something close to recognition. “Yes. There is something essential about the drafter. She does not make the law. The legislators make the law. But she shapes the words, and the words are what the bureaucracy receives. She hands the language to the system and the system — ”

“Eats it,” Saramago says. “The system eats the language. This is what systems do. They consume words the way a furnace consumes coal: the heat is produced, the coal is gone, and the furnace continues to operate regardless of what was written on the coal.”

Kafka shakes his head. “No. The furnace metaphor implies destruction. The system does not destroy the language. It preserves the language. Every word of the law is reprinted on the cover page of every redacted document. ‘Pursuant to Section 3(a) of the Transparency Act.’ The law is cited more after its failure than it ever was during its passage. It is present everywhere and operative nowhere.”

“Then the protagonist must experience this progression,” I say. “She writes the words. She watches them pass. She watches them get signed. And then she watches them appear — her own sentences, her own clauses — on documents that accomplish nothing.”

“On documents that accomplish the opposite of nothing,” Kafka says. “Nothing would be an improvement. If the agency had simply ignored the law, the failure would be visible. Instead, the agency complies. It releases three million pages. It holds press conferences. It builds a website. And the three million pages are redacted until they contain less information than the original law required to be released.”

Saramago leans back. “Here is what troubles me. In my country — in the country I wrote about, which is and is not Portugal — the blank votes were an act of collective refusal. The people decided not to participate, and the government could not function without their participation, and so the government attacked the people. That is a story about the limit of democratic tolerance. But this — this four hundred and twenty-seven to one — is the opposite. The people participate. They participate overwhelmingly. The vote is nearly perfect. And it still does not work. This is not the government attacking the people. This is the government agreeing with the people and then being unable to become what it agreed to become.”

“Unable or unwilling?” I ask.

“That is the question the story must never answer,” Kafka says. “If the agency is unwilling, you have a conspiracy. A thriller. If the agency is unable, you have a tragedy. But if you cannot tell which — if the protagonist cannot tell, if the reader cannot tell, if the agency itself cannot tell — then you have something closer to the truth.”

We spend a long time on the question of the single dissenting vote. I bring it up because it seems like a detail that might anchor the story — four hundred and twenty-seven to one, who was the one?

Saramago dismisses it. “The one does not matter. The one is a footnote. What matters is the four hundred and twenty-seven. You have never seen four hundred and twenty-seven legislators agree on anything. They cannot agree on the name of a post office. And here they have agreed, unanimously, on a question of justice, and their agreement changes nothing. The story is not about the exception. The story is about the consensus.”

Kafka disagrees, gently. “The one matters, but not as a character. The one matters as arithmetic. Four hundred and twenty-seven to one means that the law passed with ninety-nine point eight percent support. It means that the margin of opposition is effectively zero. And yet the margin of effectiveness is also zero. The arithmetic is the horror: ninety-nine point eight percent of democratic will produces zero percent of democratic outcome. The number is the story.”

“Then the title should be the number,” I say.

Kafka looks at me as though I have said something correct for the wrong reason. “Perhaps. Though the number alone is meaningless. Four hundred and twenty-seven to one could be anything — a batting average, a molecular weight. It only becomes significant when you understand that it represents the ratio of democratic consent to democratic result, which is to say, infinity to nothing.”

“The redactions,” I say, because the conversation has been circling the bureaucratic mechanism without landing on it, and I need to know what the pages look like. “Three million pages were released, and most of them were blacked out. What does the protagonist see when she reads them?”

“She sees her own law printed at the top of every page,” Kafka says. “And below that, black bars. Paragraph after paragraph of black bars. Occasionally a preposition survives. ‘At.’ ‘On.’ ‘The.’ The prepositions are not redacted because they contain no information. But they are the bones of sentences, and you can see the shape of what was said the way you can see the shape of a body beneath a sheet.”

“The palimpsest,” Saramago says. “In Lisbon, there are manuscripts in the Torre do Tombo where the monks scraped the parchment clean and wrote prayers over the philosophy beneath. But the ink sank into the skin. With the right light, you can still read Aristotle under the Ave Marias. The redacted pages are the same: the truth is beneath the black, and everyone knows it is there, and the black is not hiding anything, the black is simply the new text that has been written over the old.”

Kafka frowns. “You are making it too beautiful. The redactions are not palimpsests. A palimpsest is an act of preservation through erasure — the monks kept the parchment, at least. The redactions are something else. They are the system performing compliance. The agency was ordered to release the pages, and it released them. The agency was not ordered to release the words on the pages. Do you see the distinction? The law said ‘pages.’ The agency delivered pages. That the pages were unreadable is not a violation of the law. It is the law’s most precise execution.”

I feel something shift. That is the mechanism of the story: the law, executed precisely, produces the opposite of its intention. Not because the law is broken, but because it is followed.

“There is another element I need to address,” I say. “The invisibility. The aide does everything correctly — drafts the language, watches it pass, follows the implementation — and discovers that the system was never designed to see her work. Was never designed to produce the outcome she wrote into it. She is invisible to the process she created.”

Saramago nods slowly. “This is the American problem. Not the Portuguese problem, not the Czech problem, though we have our own versions. In America, the promise is explicit. It is written down. We hold these truths. Government of the people. Equal protection. The words are on the buildings. And the woman who writes a law that embodies those words, who gets that law passed by the widest margin in a generation, who watches the president sign it — that woman discovers that the words on the buildings and the words in the law are the same kind of words. Decorative. Functional as architecture. Not functional as governance.”

“Architecture is a good word,” Kafka says. “The castle — the one I wrote about, though perhaps all castles — is visible from everywhere in the village. You can see it from every window. But you cannot reach it. The roads that lead toward it curve away. The officials who work there are available, in theory, but they are always sleeping, or in conference, or they have just stepped out. The castle is not hidden. It is simply unreachable. And so the protagonist adjusts. He sends messages. He waits. He cultivates relationships with people who claim to know the officials. He follows procedures. And none of it brings him closer, because proximity was never the obstacle. The obstacle is that the castle exists in a different register of reality than the village, and no procedure can bridge that gap.”

“Your protagonist was a land surveyor who was never given land to survey,” Saramago says. “This aide is a lawmaker who made a law that will never be executed as law. The parallel is exact, and it is insufferable.”

“Good,” Kafka says. “It should be insufferable.”

The waiter brings Kafka something I cannot identify — a small plate of what appears to be bread, cut into rectangles, each one stamped. Kafka eats without comment.

“The ending,” I say, though I know what they will say.

“There is no ending,” Kafka says. “My book did not end, and it was not because I died before finishing it. I did die before finishing it, but that is not why it has no ending. It has no ending because the process has no ending. K. will never reach the castle. The aide will never see her law executed. The files will be released and released and released, and each release will contain less than the last, and each release will be accompanied by a statement of compliance, and eventually the law will expire or be superseded or simply forgotten, and the files will remain in their redacted state, and the press will move on, and the aide will — ”

“The aide will keep working,” Saramago says. “She will write another law. Or she will not. She will stay in the building or she will leave the building. It does not matter. The building will continue to function. The passport office below us is still open. The line has not moved, but it has not dispersed either. The nineteen people are still there. They will get their passports. They will travel. They will return. And the line will form again, with different people, or the same people, and the office will process them, and the passports will be valid, and none of it will mean that the system works. It will only mean that the system continues.”

I close my notebook. I have what I need, or rather, I have the shape of what I need, which is the understanding that the story cannot end with revelation, because there is no revelation to be had. The aide will not discover a conspiracy. She will not uncover a villain. She will trace her law through the bureaucracy and find that the bureaucracy is not concealing anything — it is simply operating. The law entered the machine and the machine processed it, and what came out the other side was three million pages with black bars where the words used to be, and a press release that said “compliance,” and the number four hundred and twenty-seven to one printed neatly at the top of every empty page, like a return address on a letter that was never sent.

Kafka pushes back his chair. “One more thing,” he says. “The single dissenting vote. You should mention it once, early, and then never explain it. It should sit in the story the way a stone sits in a shoe. The reader will keep expecting it to become important. It will not become important. But it will be the only honest thing in the entire process — the one person who said no — and the story will not give the reader the satisfaction of knowing why.”

He picks up his folder. The blank page with the stamp is still inside. He has not shown it to anyone. He leaves through the side entrance.

Saramago stays a moment longer. “He is right about the ending,” he says. “But he is wrong about the tone. He wants precision. Precision is correct. But precision without breath is suffocation. The sentences should be long enough to carry the reader past the point where they would normally stop and object. By the time they reach the period, it should be too late. They should already be inside the machine.”

He pays for Kafka’s unidentifiable plate and leaves through the front door, passing the passport line, which has grown to twenty-three.

I sit with my notebook and count the people in the line one more time. Twenty-three. The same number, I realize, as the number of words in the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. I do not know if this is meaningful. I write it down anyway.