On the Procedural and the Irreversible

The café was wrong for this. I knew it as soon as I arrived — one of those converted industrial spaces with exposed ductwork and Edison bulbs, the kind of place that performs authenticity the way a mannequin performs standing. But Aickman had chosen it. He’d arrived early and secured a corner table near the back, where the noise of the espresso machine was muffled by a load-bearing wall. He was drinking tea from a cup he appeared to have brought himself.

Ligotti was late. When he arrived he looked at the ceiling — at the ductwork, specifically — with something between disgust and professional interest, the way an exterminator might examine a particularly well-established infestation.

“Sit anywhere,” I said.

“I intend to.” He sat across from Aickman and did not order anything.

I had my notes, such as they were. The premise I’d sketched: a procedural manual discovered in an office supply room, describing the operations of a department that doesn’t exist. A document so thorough, so procedurally competent, that it starts to make the phantom department more real than the actual workplace. I wanted to talk about it. I wanted their help. What I got was something else.

“The manual itself is the least interesting element,” Ligotti said, before I’d finished explaining. “Manuals exist. Departments exist. The horror isn’t that a fake document describes a fake department. The horror is that all departments are fake. All procedures are fake. The manual merely has the indecency to make this visible.”

Aickman set down his cup. “I disagree, though not in the way you’d expect.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything.”

“The horror you describe — everything is equally fictitious, all structure is puppet theater — that’s a philosophical position. It may even be correct. But it isn’t frightening. It’s numbing. What frightens is when the fictitious thing begins to behave as though it has preferences.”

I wrote that down. Aickman noticed.

“Don’t write it down as though I’ve said something quotable. I’m feeling my way toward something. The manual — it shouldn’t simply exist. It should want things. Not in any anthropomorphic sense. But the way a river wants to reach the sea. The way a form, once it exists, wants to be filled.”

“That’s mysticism,” Ligotti said.

“It’s observation. You’ve never encountered a form that seemed to want completion? A questionnaire that, by the sheer fact of its blanks, compels you to fill them in? Even when the questions are absurd?”

Ligotti considered this. I could see him considering it, which was itself unsettling — the slow, mechanical quality of his attention, as though thought were a process performed by something other than a person.

“There are forms at the insurance company where I worked,” he said. “Incident reports. When a workspace injury occurred — a fall, a laceration, a back strain — you filled out the form. The form asked what happened, where it happened, what the injured person was doing at the time. Standard. But there was a section near the bottom, Section G, that asked you to describe the condition of the workspace prior to the incident. Not at the time of the incident. Prior. As though the form understood that the injury had a history. That it existed before it happened.”

“That’s what I mean,” Aickman said.

“I know what you mean. I’m telling you you’re wrong about why it’s effective. The section doesn’t want completion. It reveals that the injury was always going to happen. The form doesn’t create the past. It acknowledges that the past was always structured to produce this specific present. That’s not mysticism. That’s pessimism carried to its natural conclusion.”

I tried to steer them toward the story. “So in the manual — the one the office worker finds — should it feel like the department was always there? Like it predates the discovery?”

“Obviously,” Ligotti said.

“Not obviously,” Aickman said. “It should be unclear whether the department was always there or only begins to exist once the manual is read. The reader should never be able to settle the question. That’s where the discomfort lives — in the impossibility of assigning cause.”

“You want the reader uncomfortable. I want the reader convinced of something they’d rather not know.”

“And you think those are different.”

“I think conviction is more damaging than discomfort.”

They looked at each other across the table. I drank my coffee, which had gone cold. The espresso machine screamed behind the wall like something being processed.

“Can I tell you what I’m afraid of?” I said. They both looked at me as though they’d forgotten I was there, which was fair. “I’m afraid the manual will read as a gimmick. A creepy prop. Strange document appears, reality gets wobbly, the reader nods along because they’ve seen this before. Borges did it. Chambers did it. You’ve both done versions of it. How do I make the manual feel necessary rather than clever?”

Aickman answered first, which surprised me. “You make it boring.”

“Boring.”

“Procedurally boring. Exhaustively boring. The manual should read the way actual procedural documents read — with that deadening specificity that makes your eyes slide off the page. Subsections and cross-references and revision dates. The horror isn’t that the manual is strange. The horror is that it’s exactly like every other manual you’ve ever tried to read, except it describes something that doesn’t exist. The familiarity is the weapon.”

Ligotti was almost smiling. It wasn’t a smile anyone would want directed at them. “He’s right. I’ll give you that. The most effective corporate documents are the ones that could describe anything. Workflow optimization. Client intake procedures. Performance review criteria. The language is so thoroughly evacuated of specific meaning that it functions as a kind of universal adapter. Plug it into any department and it fits. Plug it into a nonexistent department and it fits just as well. Because the language was never about the department. It was about the form itself. The procedure. The ritual of procedural compliance.”

“But something has to be wrong with it,” I said. “Right? There has to be a signal that this manual is different. That reading it does something.”

“Why?” Ligotti said.

“Because otherwise it’s just a manual.”

“And what if that’s the point? What if the revelation is that there’s no difference? That the manual for the nonexistent department is indistinguishable from the manual for the real one, because both are equally unanchored from reality?”

“Then you have a philosophical argument, not a story,” Aickman said. “Fiction requires something to happen. Not much, perhaps. Not anything dramatic. But there must be a change — a shift in the social fabric around the manual. Colleagues begin referencing the phantom department in meetings. Not because they’ve read the manual. Because the department has become, somehow, a fact of the office. A social fact. People mention it the way they mention the weather. Naturally. Without emphasis.”

“That’s the Borges element,” I said, excited now. “The imaginary world overwriting reality through collective —”

“Don’t explain it,” Ligotti said. “If you can explain it, you’ve killed it.”

“He’s right about that,” Aickman said, and for a moment they were allied, and I felt the way you feel when two people who’ve been arguing suddenly agree that you’re the problem.

“Let me try something else. The office itself. I want it to feel specific. Not ‘an office’ but a particular kind of workplace — maybe something municipal? A records office. A place where procedure isn’t just policy but the actual substance of the work.”

“A place where the form and the content are already confused,” Ligotti said. “Yes. A records department. Where the records are the reality. Where filing is not administrative support for some other activity but the activity itself.”

“A county assessor’s office,” Aickman suggested. “Or something like it. A place with physical files. Folders. Cabinet drawers that haven’t been opened since someone retired or died. That smell — you know the one. Old paper and the absence of air movement.”

I knew the one. I’d worked in a building like that, briefly, years ago. Data entry for a municipal court. The ventilation was from the 1970s and made a sound like a distant argument.

“The supply room,” Aickman continued. “Where the manual is found. It shouldn’t be hidden. It should be on a shelf with other manuals. In sequence. As though it belongs. The worker picks it up because they need something — toner, staples, a new three-ring binder — and it’s there, between the facilities maintenance guide and the telecommunications directory. Volume placement suggests it was always part of the collection. No one hid it. No one planted it. It was simply there, the way everything in an office supply room is simply there.”

“And the worker reads it,” Ligotti said, “not out of curiosity but out of procedure. Because the manual exists, and therefore must be acknowledged. Must be complied with. The worker doesn’t seek the manual. The manual, by existing, creates the obligation.”

“Do they enjoy reading it?” I asked.

They both looked at me.

“Does the worker feel pleasure? Recognition? Is there a moment where the manual makes something click — where the phantom department explains something that was always wrong with the office?”

“That’s dangerous,” Aickman said. “You’re giving the worker an epiphany.”

“Not an epiphany. More like — recognition. The feeling of reading a description of something you’ve always sensed but never articulated.”

“That’s an epiphany wearing a disguise,” Aickman said. “And it would ruin the story. The worker should not understand the manual. The worker should comply with it. There’s a difference between understanding and compliance that your story should live inside.”

“Compliance without understanding is the human condition,” Ligotti said. “It’s what we do from the moment we’re born. Comply with gravity. Comply with hunger. Comply with the social expectation that we will continue existing even though no one asked us to begin.”

“You’ll have to forgive him,” Aickman said to me, as though they’d known each other for years. “He’s always like this.”

“I’m always correct.”

“You’re always consistent, which is different. Tell me this — your philosophical pessimism, your conviction that existence is a puppet show with no puppeteer. Does it leave any room for what I’d call social horror? The specific dread of being in a room full of people who are all behaving normally and something is wrong?”

“Your dinner parties.”

“My hospices. My estates. My gatherings where the food is too abundant and no one will tell you the rules.”

“Those are effective. I’ll grant that. But they work because they approach, from the social angle, the same truth I approach from the ontological angle. The rules aren’t hidden. They don’t exist. People behave as though they do because the alternative — admitting that the social fabric is a collective hallucination — is more frightening than any specific transgression.”

“I think the alternative is stranger than that. I think the rules exist but can’t be spoken. They’re real, but they’re not articulable. Like the rules of a dream that dissolve the moment you try to describe them to someone at breakfast.”

I was losing the thread and also, I think, finding it. “So the office. The colleagues. They start mentioning the phantom department. How does that feel? What’s the texture of that wrongness?”

“Polite,” Aickman said. “Completely polite. The way someone at a dinner party mentions a mutual friend who doesn’t exist, and rather than correct them you simply nod, because the correction would be more socially disruptive than the error.”

“And then,” Ligotti said, “you realize you’re not sure the mutual friend doesn’t exist. You can’t quite remember. The name is familiar. The context is plausible. And you begin to wonder whether your certainty that this person doesn’t exist is itself the error.”

“That’s the manual’s work,” I said.

“That’s the work of all sufficiently detailed fictions,” Ligotti said. “A lie told with enough specificity becomes indistinguishable from a memory. And memories are already lies. So the circle closes.”

Aickman finished his tea. He looked into the empty cup the way characters in his own stories look at things — with a patience that suggests the object might yet do something unexpected.

“I want to say something about endings,” he said. “Your story shouldn’t end. Not in any conventional sense. The last page should feel like the middle of something. The reader should put the story down and feel that the phantom department is still operating. That it has, in fact, begun operating inside them. That by reading a story about a manual that overwrites reality, they have participated in exactly the process the story describes.”

“Art as contagion,” I said. “The Chambers element.”

“Don’t label it. The moment you label it, you’ve made it safe. You’ve given the reader a frame to put around it. Let them sit with it. Let them try to shake the feeling that their own office — or school, or home — has a room they’ve never noticed. A procedure they’ve been following without realizing it.”

Ligotti stood up. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything. He looked at the ductwork one last time.

“The story should make the reader suspect that the world is a procedures manual,” he said. “And that they’ve been complying with it their entire lives. And that the manual is being revised, constantly, by no one they’ll ever meet.”

He left. Aickman and I sat in the noise of the espresso machine and didn’t say anything for a while. I wanted to ask him something about the social wrongness he’d described — the polite acceptance of impossible things — but I couldn’t find the question. It was there, shaped like a question, occupying the space where a question would go. But when I reached for it, there was nothing in my hand.

Aickman put his teacup in his coat pocket and stood.

“You’ll find the shape of it,” he said. “Or the shape will find you. Either way, don’t force the ending. The best endings are the ones the writer doesn’t fully understand.”

He paused at the door, half-turned.

“Have you checked whether your office has a supply room?”