The Surveyor's Instruments Are Not for Surveying

Calvino brought a deck of cards. Not tarot, not playing cards — index cards, blank on one side and covered on the other in his small, precise handwriting. He spread them across the table between us as though laying out a city from above, and I watched the arrangement take shape: rows and columns at first, then something less regular, cards angled against each other, overlapping at corners, a few standing on edge and leaning against their neighbors like buildings on a narrow street.

“Each card,” he said, “is a room.”

Kafka had arrived before either of us. He was sitting at the far end of the table in a cafe that I had chosen because it was unremarkable — not charmingly unremarkable, not the kind of place a writer would choose for its atmospheric plainness, just a cafe on a street in a city that does not matter for this story. Kafka had ordered water and was drinking it with a concentration that made me feel I had been drinking water wrong my entire life. He looked at the cards.

“A room,” he said. “What kind of room.”

“Any kind. That’s the point. This one” — Calvino tapped a card near the center — “is a bedroom where the occupant has never slept. This one is a kitchen where the stove has no burners. This one is a library with books on every shelf, but the pages are blank, or printed in a language that no one in the city speaks, or — and this is the option I prefer — printed in a language everyone in the city speaks but refuses to read.”

“Why refuses?”

“Because reading would settle something. Reading would close a question. The citizens of this city prefer their questions open. They enjoy the weight of a book whose contents they have chosen not to learn. It is a form of luxury.”

I should say here that Calvino was not performing. This is important because it would be easy to read his manner as theatrical — the cards, the elaborate conceit, the evident pleasure he took in constructing possibilities. But what I was seeing, I think, was the way he actually thought. The cards were not a presentation. They were thinking made physical, the way another person might pace or tap a pen. He needed to see the structure laid out in front of him before he could decide what it meant.

Kafka’s process was the opposite. He had come with nothing. No notebook, no cards, no visible preparation. He sat with his water and his silence and waited, and the waiting was not passive. It had a quality of readiness, like a clerk who has cleared his desk and is now prepared to receive whatever document the next petitioner brings, not because he wants to receive it, not because it will lead anywhere, but because receiving is the task, and the task must be performed correctly, and correctness is the only dignity available.

“I want to talk about the story,” I said.

“We are talking about the story,” Calvino said. He was still adjusting cards. “Every arrangement is a possible story. Look — if you enter the city from the south, you encounter the library first, then the kitchen, then the bedroom. This is a story about a person who arrives looking for knowledge, discovers that sustenance is available but incomplete, and finally reaches a place of rest that offers no rest. If you enter from the east, you find the bedroom first. You rest before you search. This changes everything. You wake up in a city whose logic you have not earned, and the disorientation becomes the texture of every subsequent room.”

“You have given me a city,” Kafka said. “I did not ask for a city.”

“No one asks for a city. A city happens to you.”

“A castle happens to you. A summons happens to you. You arrive at a village because you have been summoned, and the castle is there — you can see it — and the summoning authority is presumably inside, and your appointment is presumably recorded, and the only thing that remains is to enter. To walk from where you are to where you have been told to go. This should be the simplest act in the world. It is not.”

“Because the path is blocked?”

“Because the path does not exist. There is no path. There is a village, and there is a castle, and between them is not distance but procedure. You cannot walk to the castle because walking is not the correct method of approach. You must petition. The petition must be filed with the correct office. The correct office is in the castle. To reach the office you must enter the castle. To enter the castle you must file a petition.”

Calvino picked up one of his cards and held it between two fingers, turning it slowly. “This is beautiful,” he said, and I could see that he meant it with complete sincerity. “The recursion. The loop. It has the elegance of a proof.”

“It is not elegant,” Kafka said. “It is a trap.”

“Traps can be elegant.”

“To the trapper, perhaps. Not to the one inside.”

This was the first real disagreement, and I recognized it as the one that would shape whatever we made together. Calvino saw the recursive structure — the petition that requires the castle that requires the petition — and admired its geometry. Kafka saw the same structure and felt its walls. They were both looking at the same thing and seeing something irreconcilable: an architecture of impossibility that was, depending on who you asked, a game or a sentence.

“Let me try something,” I said. “A person arrives somewhere. A city, maybe, or a building, or a complex of buildings — the scale doesn’t matter yet. They’ve been told to report to a specific room. Room 16, let’s say. Or room 308. A number. They know the number. They have documentation. Everything is in order. They just need to find the room.”

Kafka nodded. The nod was very slight, almost involuntary, like the twitch of a compass needle finding north.

“And the room does not exist,” Kafka said.

“Wait,” I said. “Not yet. The room might exist. The point is that they cannot find it. The hallways are numbered but not sequentially. Room 12 is next to room 47. Room 3 is on the fourth floor. The numbering follows a system, but the system is either obsolete, or refers to a previous arrangement of the building, or operates on principles the protagonist does not understand and no one will explain.”

“Good,” Kafka said. “No one will explain. This is essential. The information exists — someone, somewhere, understands the numbering — but the protagonist cannot reach that person, or the person is on break, or the person explains in a way that assumes knowledge the protagonist does not have, which is the cruelest form of explanation.”

“But here is what interests me,” Calvino said, and he began rearranging the cards again, pulling them apart and reassembling them in a new configuration. “You say the room might exist. This ‘might’ is the whole story. In the city of Valdrada, which sits on the shores of a lake, every building and every person is reflected in the water, and the inhabitants live in the knowledge that every action is doubled, watched by its own reflection. The city and its reflection cannot be separated. Neither is more real than the other. Your room — room 308, let’s say — is like Valdrada. It exists in the building’s records, in the protagonist’s letter of appointment, in the memories of anyone who has ever worked in the building. It exists in every system. But it does not exist in the hallway where the protagonist stands. The room is real in every way that does not help.”

I felt something click — not a solution, but the shape of a problem worth writing about. “The room is real in every way that does not help,” I repeated. “That’s the story.”

“No,” Kafka said. “That is the premise. The story is what happens to the person who must find the room regardless. Who cannot go home, cannot leave, cannot say ‘the room does not exist’ and be released from the task. Because the task has been assigned, and an assigned task cannot be unassigned. It can be failed. Failure is always available. But unassignment requires an authority, and the authority is behind a door the protagonist has not yet found.”

“Another door,” Calvino said, almost delighted.

“You find this amusing.”

“I find it generative. Every door that cannot be opened produces two more doors. One that might be the right door. One that leads to the office that knows which door is the right door. The building grows. It grows from the protagonist’s need. It is like one of Kublai Khan’s cities — Kublai asks Marco Polo about a city, and Marco describes it, and the act of description calls the city into being, and then the city is real, as real as Venice, as real as anything that has been given a name and a shape and a set of streets.”

“Your cities are produced by imagination,” Kafka said. “My buildings are produced by bureaucracy. These are not the same force.”

“Are they not?”

There was a silence. I drank my coffee, which had gone cold. Outside the cafe, someone was arguing with a parking meter, or with the absence of a parking meter, or with the post where a parking meter had once been. I watched this for a moment and tried to think about what I was hearing.

“There’s a difference,” I said carefully, “between a structure that multiplies because someone is inventing it — because the act of describing it creates more of it, because language is generative — and a structure that multiplies because the person inside it keeps trying to find the exit. In the first case, proliferation is a kind of freedom. In the second, proliferation is the mechanism of entrapment. Every new hallway the protagonist discovers is another hallway they have to walk down. The building gets bigger, but the protagonist gets smaller.”

Kafka placed his glass of water on the table with the care of someone setting down a piece of evidence. “The protagonist gets smaller. Yes. That is what happens. K. arrives at the village. He is a land surveyor. He has skills, credentials, a profession. He is someone. By the end — though there is no end, I never wrote an end, which is its own kind of answer — by the point where the story stops, K. is no one. He has been ground down by the procedures, by the waiting, by the officials who may or may not be officials. His identity has been consumed by the process of trying to establish his identity. The castle has eaten him, and the castle is still hungry, because the castle is always hungry, because hunger is the castle’s function.”

“But what if,” Calvino said, and he leaned forward, and his cards shifted, some of them falling off the table’s edge, which he did not notice or did not mind, “what if the protagonist is not ground down? What if each new room, each new hallway, each new door that opens onto a staircase that leads to a corridor that leads to a room that is not room 308 — what if each of these is also a discovery? Not a pleasant discovery, not a useful discovery, but a genuine encounter with something new. The hallway with green tile that the protagonist has never seen before. The office where two clerks are playing chess with pieces carved from soap. The window that looks out onto a courtyard that should not exist given the building’s exterior dimensions. Each failure to find the room is also an encounter with a room that was not the room they were looking for, and these rooms have qualities, textures, smells, inhabitants. The search fails, but the searcher accumulates.”

“Accumulates what?”

“Experience. Which is the only thing anyone ever accumulates.”

Kafka considered this. His face did something that I would not call a smile but that occupied the same region of the face where a smile would be if a smile were theoretically possible. “You want to save the protagonist,” he said.

“I want to give the protagonist something other than diminishment.”

“Diminishment is the truth.”

“Diminishment is one truth. The building contains others.”

I opened my notebook. I had been writing nothing until this point, paralyzed by the feeling that anything I wrote down would be less precise than what I was hearing, which is the permanent condition of the writer in the room with better writers. But I forced myself. I wrote: The building contains others.

“Here’s what I think the story does,” I said. “The protagonist arrives. They need to find the room. They cannot find the room. Each attempt to find the room reveals more of the building — new floors, new offices, new people who work in the building and have never heard of room 308 but are willing to speculate about where it might be. And the protagonist is caught between two experiences. One is Kafka’s: the building is a trap, the search is futile, every new corridor is a new wall. The other is — I don’t want to say Calvino’s, because that would make the story too neat, too balanced — but something adjacent to Calvino’s: the rooms the protagonist finds instead of the room they’re looking for are interesting. Not helpful. Not consoling. But interesting in a way that makes the search feel like something other than pure loss.”

“You are trying to split the difference,” Kafka said.

“I’m not. I’m trying to make the protagonist experience both things at once. The entrapment and the — I don’t have a word for it. Not wonder. Not discovery.”

“Inventory,” Calvino said. “The protagonist is taking an inventory of the building. Not by choice — by necessity, because every wrong room must be noted and discarded, and noting is itself a form of attention, and attention produces knowledge, even when the knowledge is useless. Marco Polo’s cities are an inventory. Kublai Khan asks: ‘Tell me about your travels.’ And Marco describes city after city, each one impossible, each one a way of thinking about what a city could be if cities were not constrained by geography and physics and the habits of actual human beings. The inventory never reaches a conclusion. The last city is not the answer to the first. But by the end — and there is an end, I did write an end, though it is an end that opens rather than closes — by the end, the accumulation of cities has become a thing in itself. Not a map. Not a taxonomy. A conversation that has grown so large it has become a landscape.”

“The conversation between the emperor and the traveler becomes a city,” I said.

“Becomes many cities. Becomes the only city.”

Kafka stood up. He was not leaving — I understood this immediately, though I could not have said how. He stood the way a man stands when his body has grown tired of one position and needs another, and standing was simply the next position. He walked to the cafe’s window. Outside, the person at the parking meter had given up and was now sitting on the curb, looking at a piece of paper.

“I will tell you what I am afraid of,” Kafka said, without turning around. “I am afraid that the story will be too comfortable. That the rooms the protagonist finds — the green tile, the chess game, the impossible courtyard — will become compensations. Little gifts the building gives to the protagonist in exchange for never letting them reach room 308. And the protagonist will begin to accept these gifts, and the reader will begin to accept them, and the entrapment will start to feel like enrichment, and the story will have lied. Because entrapment is not enrichment. A prison with a garden is still a prison.”

“A prison with a garden is a different prison than a prison without one,” Calvino said.

“Is it? To the prisoner?”

“Yes. To the prisoner most of all. The prisoner with a garden knows something the prisoner without a garden does not know: that beauty is possible inside captivity, and that this possibility makes the captivity worse, not better, because now the prisoner must contend not only with the walls but with the knowledge that the walls contain something worth seeing. This is a more sophisticated torment.”

I wrote this down. I wrote it down too fast and my handwriting degraded into something I would not be able to read later, and I felt the sentence slipping away even as I captured it, which is the condition of all note-taking.

“The rooms are not compensations,” I said. “They’re complications. Each room the protagonist enters instead of room 308 makes the search harder, not easier, because each room contains people and systems and logics of its own, and these logics interfere with the logic of the search. The woman in the office on the sixth floor who insists that room 308 was renumbered to room 412 in 1987. The janitor who says the east wing was sealed after the flood and any room with a number above 300 is behind the seal. The bureaucrat who produces a form — an actual, physical form — that says the protagonist’s appointment has been transferred to a different building entirely, a building whose address she writes on a slip of paper, except the address is the address of the building the protagonist is already in.”

Kafka turned from the window. “The address is the address of the building the protagonist is already in,” he repeated. “Yes. This is correct.”

“And the protagonist knows this,” I continued. “They look at the address and they recognize it. They are standing in the building they have been sent to. The loop is complete. And yet the room is not here, or it is here but they cannot reach it, or they have already passed through it without recognizing it because the number was missing from the door or the door was open and the room looked like a hallway or — ”

“Or the room was one of the rooms they noted during their inventory,” Calvino said. “One of the rooms they entered and found interesting but wrong. And they must now go back. The inventory must be re-examined. Every room they dismissed must be reconsidered as a candidate for room 308. The search reverses. The building does not change, but the protagonist’s relationship to every room in the building changes, because any room could be the room, and the quality of searching-for is different from the quality of passing-through, and every room that was merely interesting is now potentially significant, which is a much less pleasant thing to be.”

“Interesting versus significant,” I said. “That’s the turn.”

We sat with this for a while. Calvino gathered his cards from the table and the floor and stacked them into a neat pile. Kafka returned to his seat and his water. I looked at my notes and found that they described something I did not fully understand yet, which is the only honest outcome of a conversation like this. If I had understood it, the conversation would have been unnecessary, and most things that feel necessary are in fact performances of necessity, but this one, I think, was not.

“There is one more thing,” Kafka said. “The protagonist must not be a philosopher. The protagonist must not think about what is happening to them in the way we have been thinking about it. The protagonist must be practical. A person who wants to find a room and cannot find the room and keeps trying to find the room. Their frustration must be ordinary frustration — the frustration of a person whose appointment is at three and it is now four-thirty and no one will tell them where to go. Not existential. Not emblematic. Ordinary. The story becomes what it becomes because ordinary frustration, sustained long enough and denied resolution long enough, becomes indistinguishable from something larger. But the protagonist does not know this. The protagonist just wants to find the room.”

“And the rooms they find instead?” I asked.

“Are just rooms. To the protagonist. Rooms with desks and windows and people. The protagonist does not marvel at them. Does not see them as gifts or compensations or inventories. Sees them as obstacles, or irrelevancies, or mistakes. The beauty — if there is beauty — is visible only to the reader, who is outside the building and can see its shape.”

Calvino nodded. It was the first time he had agreed with Kafka without qualification, and the agreement had a weight that his disagreements had lacked. “The protagonist is inside the building,” he said. “The reader is above it. The reader sees the map. The protagonist sees the hallway. And the map is extraordinary, and the hallway is just a hallway. This is the cruelty and the gift of the form.”

I closed my notebook. The cafe was emptying. The person outside had left the curb, and the parking meter post stood alone, a steel pipe with a flat top where the mechanism had once been, useful for nothing, marking a space that no longer needed marking.