On Registers and the Recording of Nothing

James had chosen the place, which did not surprise me. A village church in Oxfordshire — or what had been Oxfordshire, before the county lines began to blur in the way that all human demarcations blur when there are fewer humans to enforce them. St. Barnabas, Iffley. Norman doorway, twelfth century, the zigzag carvings worn soft by nine hundred years of English weather. She was already inside when I arrived, standing in the nave with her hands clasped behind her back, reading the memorial tablets on the wall as if they contained instructions.

Johnson was late. I found a pew and sat and waited and tried not to look at the font.

“The registers are in the vestry,” James said, without turning around. “I asked the churchwarden — well, the man who calls himself churchwarden, there being no vicar — if I might see them. He showed me three hundred years of baptisms, marriages, and burials. Vellum first, then paper. Beautiful copperplate deteriorating into ballpoint. The last baptism was 1995.”

“And after that?”

“After that, the page is blank. Thirty years of blank page. But the burials continue. The marriages continue, though fewer each year. What struck me was not the absence of baptisms but the fact that someone is still keeping the register. Still ruling the columns. Still writing the dates of deaths in the same hand, in the same ink, in the same book where births used to be recorded.” She turned from the wall. “That, I think, is where the story lives.”

I said I thought so too, but that I wasn’t sure whether the keeper of the register was performing an act of defiance or an act of madness.

“Those are the same act,” she said. “In my world, they always were.”

Johnson arrived through a side door I hadn’t noticed, carrying a Styrofoam cup of something that smelled like instant coffee brewed too strong. He’d been walking — his boots were mudded past the ankle, and he had that look he gets in his writing, the look of someone who has been paying attention to things nobody asked him to look at. He sat in the pew across the aisle from me and set the coffee on the hymnal shelf.

“I heard the part about the register,” he said. “I was standing outside. The door was open.”

“How much did you hear?” James asked.

“Enough to know you want the story to be a document. A record. Something official that the unofficial keeps bleeding into.”

James sat down in the front pew, carefully, as if the wood might not hold. “I want the form of the register — the ruled columns, the dates, the categories — to be the architecture. Not a framing device. Not a conceit we visit occasionally. The whole story told through entries in a parish register that continues to be maintained after there is no earthly reason to maintain it.”

“Because the earthly reasons are all gone,” Johnson said. He was looking at the ceiling, at the vaulting, where damp had bloomed in patterns that resembled weather maps. “No more baptisms. So what does the register become? A death book. A ledger of subtraction.”

“Not only. Marriages continue. People still marry. In my novel — in Children of Men — one of the things I found most unbearable to write was the wedding. Because a wedding without the possibility of children is a different kind of covenant. It is two people promising themselves to a future that will not outlast them. It is an act of love that is also an act of closure.”

I said, “But Johnson’s characters wouldn’t see it that way. Fuckhead wouldn’t see it that way.”

Johnson laughed. It was a short, hard sound, not unfriendly. “No. He’d see the wedding and think it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed and also have no idea why. He’d be standing in the back of the church with something in his veins that shouldn’t be there, and the bride would turn and he’d see her face and for one second the whole rotten world would crack open and he’d see something through the crack. Light or God or whatever you want to call it. And then the crack would close and he’d go outside and throw up in the churchyard.”

“That,” James said, and I could hear something sharpen in her voice, “is precisely the tension I want. The register is mine. The ordered columns, the copperplate hand, the insistence on recording what remains to be recorded — that is the English instinct toward bureaucracy as a form of prayer. But the person keeping the register — or at least the person whose entries we read — should carry your damage. Your fractures.”

“You want my narrator in your document.”

“I want your narrator’s perception. The way reality slides in your work. The way your people see things that are there and things that are not there and cannot always distinguish between them. In a world where no children have been born for thirty years, that inability to distinguish — between what is real and what is wished for, between a pregnancy and a hallucination, between dawn and what the astronomers call the false dawn — becomes diagnostic. It becomes the only honest way to perceive.”

Johnson set down his coffee. I don’t think he’d tasted it. “You’re asking me to be unreliable inside a reliable form.”

“Yes.”

“The register doesn’t lie. The handwriting lies.”

“The register records. The entries become increasingly — unmoored. The early ones are correct. Deaths, marriages, the proper names, the proper dates. But as the years pass and the keeper’s mind begins to — I won’t say deteriorate. As the keeper begins to see differently. The entries change. A baptism appears where there cannot be one. A birth is recorded. Crossed out. Recorded again. The margins fill with observations that do not belong in a parish register. Weather. The behavior of birds. A description of light that no one else can see.”

I felt something shift between them. James was leaning forward. Johnson was very still in the way that meant he was listening with something other than his ears.

“The birds,” Johnson said. “Say more about the birds.”

“In a world without children, the natural world continues. Birds nest. Seeds germinate. The cycles persist. There is a term — phenological mismatch — for when species fall out of synchrony with the seasons. Flowers bloom before their pollinators arrive. I think the human race, in this scenario, would experience something like that. We have fallen out of synchrony with our own biology. The seasons of human life — birth, growth, reproduction — have been disrupted. The register, which was designed to record the human seasons, continues to record the non-human ones. The keeper starts noting when the swallows return. When the first frost kills the last roses. These are not mad entries. They are the entries of someone who has noticed that the register of a parish without births or christenings must find something else to consecrate.”

Johnson picked up his coffee, drank, grimaced, drank again. “I wrote a story once. Guy’s in a hospital. Janitor. He’s high on something he stole from the pharmacy. A man comes in with a knife in his eye. And the janitor — Georgie — he pulls it out. And it works. Not because Georgie’s competent. Because the universe, at that exact moment, decided to let the incompetent hand do the right thing.”

“I remember the story,” James said.

“What I’m saying is — the keeper of your register. He shouldn’t be keeping it because he’s disciplined. He should be keeping it because he can’t stop. Because his hands do it the way Georgie’s hands pulled the knife. Not from training. From something underneath training. From the part of the nervous system that doesn’t know the world has ended.”

I asked if the keeper was a priest. A sexton. A clerk.

“I don’t think it matters,” James said, but Johnson said, “It does. It matters because the role determines what they have access to. A priest would have theological resources for understanding what’s happening. A sexton digs graves. A clerk fills in forms. I want someone who fills in forms. Someone for whom the act of recording is physical, not spiritual. Pen on paper. The specific pressure of a nib on a ruled line. The ink that dries on the left hand of a left-handed writer.”

“You write left-handed,” I said.

“I wrote left-handed. I don’t write much anymore. But yes. The smudge. The evidence that a body did this, not a machine. That’s what the register should show. The body of the keeper, encoded in ink.”

James said, “A parish clerk. Not ordained. Not educated beyond the grammar school. Someone who learned the job from his father and kept it because the alternative was to admit that the job no longer existed. Someone whose handwriting is the only continuous record of a community’s slow disappearance.”

“And at some point,” Johnson said, “he starts lying. Not to deceive. Because the truth is worse than a lie and the page won’t accept it. He writes down a baptism. Just one. He invents a child. He gives it a name and a date and godparents and he writes it in the register in the same copperplate he uses for everything else. And the lie sits there in the ruled columns looking exactly like the truth.”

“Is it a lie?” I said. “Or is it a prayer?”

Neither of them answered. The church was cold. Late afternoon light came through the clear glass — the stained glass had been removed years ago, or centuries ago, I couldn’t tell — and fell on the stone floor in an undifferentiated wash. No colored light. No images. Just brightness and shadow.

“In Jesus’ Son,” I said, “the narrator sees things. Real things, but seen wrong. The blind man driving. The woman in the field who may or may not be there. What if the clerk starts to see a child? Not a hallucination. Just — a presence. The way you see movement at the edge of your vision and when you turn there’s nothing. But he records it. He records the child the way he records the weather and the birds. As something that belongs in the parish.”

Johnson said, “That’s the story. Right there. A man recording what isn’t there in a book that was designed for what was.”

“Except it must not be sentimental,” James said. “The child cannot be a redemptive vision. The child cannot save anyone. The child is the absence of children given a form by a mind that can no longer bear the absence. It is the parish register’s way of refusing to accept the final column.”

“But —” Johnson started.

“But?”

“But what if there is a child? What if, like Theo in your book, like the pregnancy in Children of Men — what if among all the false entries, one is real? Not proven real. Not confirmed. Just — possible. The register contains a hundred lies and one entry that might be true, and no one, least of all the keeper, can distinguish them.”

James stood. She walked to the font. She put her hand on the rim of it and I watched her fingers trace the stone, which was dry, which had been dry for decades, which would remain dry.

“That is the cruelest thing you could do to a reader,” she said. “Give them hope they cannot verify.”

“Cruelty is not my word for it.”

“What is your word?”

“Honest. It’s honest. Because that’s what hope is, in a world like the one we’re describing. Unverifiable. You can’t prove the child exists. You can’t prove it doesn’t. You’re left with the register. The entry. The handwriting. The smudge where the left hand dragged across the wet ink. And you have to decide for yourself whether you’re reading a record or a hallucination.”

I wrote that down. My hand was shaking slightly, which I attributed to the cold but may have been something else. The font stood between them — James with her hand on its rim, Johnson still seated, his coffee growing cold in a building that had been consecrated for the express purpose of pouring water over the heads of newborns and saying their names aloud for the first time.

“The register form lets you do something a narrative can’t,” I said. “It lets you show time as columns. Births. Deaths. Marriages. Three columns ruled on a page. And when one goes empty, the other two keep filling. The page becomes lopsided. The balance is destroyed. A reader would see it — literally see the shape of the extinction on the page.”

“Visual prosody,” James murmured.

“More than that. Structural grief. The form itself mourning what it was built to hold.”

Johnson finished his coffee and crushed the cup. “I want the last entry to be a birth. I want it to be written in handwriting that is either very careful or very trembling — you can’t tell which — and I want the margins around it to be blank. No weather. No birds. No observations. Just the entry. Name. Date. Parents. And then the register ends. Not because the keeper died. Not because the story resolves. Because the page ran out.”

“And we don’t know if it’s true,” James said.

“We don’t know if it’s true.”

“And the reader —”

“The reader is holding the register. The reader is the one who found it. The reader is standing in a vestry that smells of damp stone and old paper and they are holding three hundred years of a parish’s life in their hands and they have to decide what the last entry means.”

James took her hand off the font. She looked at it — her hand, I mean — as if checking whether the stone had left any mark. “I would have written the ending differently,” she said. “I would have left the register open to a blank page. No final entry. Just the ruled columns waiting for an entry that will never come.”

“That’s the difference between us.”

“Yes. You believe the entry matters even if it’s false. I believe the blank page matters even if it’s unbearable.”

I said, “Can the register hold both? The entry and the blank page? The last recording and the silence after?”

Neither of them answered that either. A jackdaw landed on the windowsill and looked in at us with one eye, head tilted, the way birds do when they’re deciding whether something is food or threat. Johnson watched it. James watched Johnson watching it.

“Write it down,” Johnson said, still looking at the bird. “Write it all down. Even the parts that aren’t there.”