Financial Services Furnished Without Payment

The Bureau of Labor Statistics occupies a building in Washington that looks exactly like every other federal building in Washington, which is to say it looks like a building designed by a committee tasked with expressing seriousness without attracting attention, and the committee succeeded. Saunders had suggested we meet inside — he wanted to see the cubicles, the fluorescent lighting, the particular shade of gray-blue that the federal government apparently buys in bulk — but security was a problem, so instead we were across the street in a Panera Bread that smelled like sourdough and industrial cleaning solution.

Saramago ordered a black coffee. Saunders ordered something with caramel in it, looked at it when it arrived, and said, “This is the kind of drink a character of mine would order right before discovering he’s been dead for thirty years.”

“Your characters discover they are dead too often,” Saramago said.

“They discover it exactly the right number of times.”

I had a water. I was nervous, which I mention because the nervousness was specific: these two writers approach institutions from such different angles that I wasn’t sure there was a story in the space between them. Saunders makes institutions funny and devastating in quick alternation — the laugh and the gut-punch arriving in the same sentence. Saramago makes institutions into weather systems, vast and impersonal, something you live inside and cannot see from outside. I needed them both, and I wasn’t sure they needed each other.

“The premise,” I said. “A dead economist haunts the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He helped design the postwar measurement apparatus — employment categories, seasonal adjustments, the whole infrastructure of counting. He’s been dead since, let’s say, 1991. He watches the monthly jobs report get assembled. He sees what they count. He sees what they’ve stopped counting. He tries to talk to a young analyst who suspects the numbers are broken, and she can only hear him as static in her earbuds.”

Saunders set down his caramel thing. “I love this. I love this because the comedy is structural. Every month, this man — this ghost — watches people compile a document that uses the architecture he built, and the architecture is still standing but the thing it was built to measure has changed shape underneath it. Like a house where the ground has shifted and all the doors still open but they open onto different rooms.”

“More than that,” Saramago said. “The doors open onto rooms that did not exist when the house was designed. The gig economy. Unpaid internships. People who have stopped looking for work and therefore, according to the formula he helped design, do not exist as unemployed. They are not unemployed. They are not employed. They have fallen through a gap in the taxonomy and the taxonomy has closed over them like water.”

“Right, right — but the gap in the taxonomy has a kind of institutional innocence to it, doesn’t it?” Saunders said. He was leaning forward, elbows on the table, the way he does when an idea is alive for him. “Nobody at the BLS woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s design a system that renders people invisible.’ They inherited categories. They refined categories. Each refinement made sense at the time. The invisibility is emergent. It’s nobody’s fault. And that’s what makes it — ”

“Terrifying,” Saramago said.

“I was going to say funny.”

“It is both. It is terrifying that it is funny. This is the particular horror of bureaucratic systems — they function with such apparent reasonableness that the horror must be expressed as comedy, because to express it as tragedy would imply that someone, somewhere, intended the outcome, and no one did. No one intended anything. The system intended, if a system can be said to intend, which I believe it can, which is a point on which you and I will disagree.”

“We’ll disagree,” Saunders said. “Because I don’t think the system intends. I think the system produces. It produces outcomes that no individual component designed or desired. The guy at the desk entering data, he’s a good guy. He coaches his daughter’s soccer team. He brings doughnuts on Fridays. He is precisely the person who, in a different configuration, would be horrified by what the system does. But inside the system, he is one of the components by which the system does what it does, and his goodness is irrelevant. Not consumed — irrelevant. It exists on a different plane.”

I wrote that down. The goodness exists on a different plane. There was something in that for the ghost — a man who designed the system out of genuine belief in the welfare state, in counting as a form of care, who is now watching his design produce blindness.

“But the ghost was also wrong,” I said. “In his lifetime. The pitch insists on this. He wasn’t some oracle of good measurement visiting judgment on the fallen present. He had his own blind spots. He didn’t count domestic labor. He probably thought GDP was a reasonable proxy for well-being. He built a measurement apparatus that had ideology baked into it from the start — he just couldn’t see it because it was his ideology.”

Saramago nodded slowly. He does nothing quickly; even his agreement has weight. “This is essential. If the ghost is merely a critic, the story is a lecture with ectoplasm. The ghost must be implicated. He must gradually come to understand that the distortions he observes in the present are descendants of the distortions he introduced in the past. His measurements were never neutral. They were always a theory disguised as a counting.”

“OK, but — ” Saunders held up a hand. “I want to be careful here. Because there’s a version of this story where the dead guy has a big sad realization about his own complicity, and it’s moving, and it’s earned, and it’s exactly the kind of epiphany I’ve spent my career trying not to write. The dead realization thing. The heavenly perspective. ‘I see now what I could not see then.’ That’s Hallmark. That’s Christmas-Carol stuff. The ghost should not have a clean arc of understanding.”

“Then what does the ghost have?” I asked.

“Confusion. Growing, compounding confusion. He understood the system when he was alive because he was inside it — he was the water, he couldn’t see the water. Now he’s dead and he can see the water, but he can also see that the water he was swimming in was different water than this water, and both waters were water, and the fish in both cases couldn’t see it, and the metaphor is breaking down, which is — ”

“Which is the point,” Saramago said. “The metaphor breaks down because measurement itself breaks down. This is not a failure of this particular institution. This is the condition of measurement as a human activity. We create instruments to observe reality and the instruments become the reality. The map replaces the territory. The number replaces the thing the number was designed to count. This has always been true. Your dead economist is not watching a degeneration. He is watching a continuation.”

Saunders sat back. There was something in his face I recognized — the expression of a writer who has heard an argument that threatens the emotional core of his story. He wanted the ghost to grieve. Saramago was telling him there was nothing to grieve, only a pattern to observe.

“I need the grief,” Saunders said.

“Why?”

“Because without it the story is an essay. A very good essay, maybe. The kind of thing you’d read in Harper’s and nod along with and forget by Thursday. I don’t write essays. I write about people who are trapped and in pain and trying to get out. The ghost is trapped. He’s in pain. He’s watching something he built get used in ways he didn’t anticipate, and he can’t do anything about it because he’s dead. That’s grief. That’s the engine.”

“The engine of a George Saunders story. But this is not only a George Saunders story.”

There was a silence. Saunders drank from his cup. The caramel was clearly too sweet — I could see it in the way his eyes tightened — but he drank it anyway, the way you commit to a bad decision because reversing it would mean admitting the decision was bad.

“Tell me about the girl,” Saramago said. “The analyst.”

“She’s young,” I said. “Late twenties. She runs the seasonal adjustment models. She’s good at her job in the way that means she’s beginning to see the seams in what she does — the assumptions built into the adjustments, the things the model smooths away. She suspects the metrics are broken but she doesn’t have the language for it yet. She has the feeling before the thought.”

“And the ghost tries to reach her.”

“Through static. He tries to talk and all she hears is interference in her earbuds. She’s listening to a podcast about — I don’t know, something — ”

“Make the podcast about economics,” Saunders said. “She’s listening to a podcast about the economy while she’s assembling the numbers that describe the economy. There’s a hall-of-mirrors thing there. She’s listening to someone interpret the data she is in the process of creating. And underneath the podcast voice, there’s this other voice, this dead voice, trying to say something she almost recognizes.”

“Almost,” Saramago said. “Yes. Almost is the operative word. She cannot hear him because the system is not designed to transmit his signal. Not because the system is blocking him — there is no conspiracy, no antagonist, no one turning the dial. The system simply has no frequency allocated for the dead. They are not in the taxonomy. Like the workers who have stopped looking for work, the dead economist does not exist in the categories the system uses to describe reality. He has fallen through the same gap he helped design.”

I felt something lock into place when Saramago said that. The ghost falls through his own gap. The system he built has no category for him, the same way it has no category for the people it has rendered invisible. The architect of the blind spot, swallowed by the blind spot.

“That’s beautiful,” I said.

“It is not beautiful,” Saramago said. “It is structural. You are confusing beauty with symmetry, which is a common error.”

Saunders laughed — a real, loud laugh that made the barista look over. “Jose. You just told someone their observation was a common error. That is the most Jose Saramago thing that has happened in this Panera.”

“Panera is an appropriate setting for a discussion about measurement,” Saramago said, without smiling. “Everything here is measured. The bread is measured. The coffee is measured. The nutritional information is printed on the wall in a font designed to be both legible and ignorable. We are surrounded by numbers that describe the food without telling you anything about whether the food is good.”

“Whether the food is good,” Saunders repeated. “That’s the story. That’s the whole story. GDP tells you the food exists. It tells you the food was produced and sold and consumed. It does not tell you whether anyone was fed.”

“There is a specific detail from the source essay,” I said. “GDP includes a line item called ‘financial services furnished without payment.’ It counts the difference between what banks pay depositors and the market rate as a service the bank is providing. The depositor is receiving a financial service by getting less money than they could get.”

Saunders stared at me. “Say that again.”

“The depositor is receiving a financial service by getting less money — ”

“That’s — that’s a sentence a character says while standing at a whiteboard, and the other characters nod, and the ghost standing behind them has his face in his hands. Because he knows — he knows — that this is the kind of accounting trick that makes the entire edifice look absurd, and he also knows that he invented three tricks of his own that were just as absurd, and at the time they seemed like elegant solutions to hard problems, and maybe they were, and maybe the financial-services-furnished-without-payment thing is also an elegant solution to a hard problem, and the distance between elegant solution and institutional hallucination is — ”

“Is zero,” Saramago said. “The distance is zero. An elegant solution to a hard measurement problem and an institutional hallucination are the same thing viewed from different positions in time. From inside the moment of invention, it is a solution. From the future, it is a hallucination. From the position of the dead, it is simply what humans do.”

We sat with that for a while. Outside, a bus went by with an ad for a financial services company — I am not making this up, or maybe I am, but it feels true enough to keep — and the ad said something about “measuring what matters.”

“The prose question,” I said. “How does the ghost’s voice sound versus the living voices?”

Saramago set down his coffee cup. “The ghost should speak in long, unpunctuated passages. Not stream of consciousness — that is a different technique with different aims. Unpunctuated accumulation. The sentence does not end because the observation does not end. One thing connects to the next thing connects to the thing after that without the courtesy of a full stop, because death has removed the need for breath, which is what punctuation originally marked, the places where the speaker must pause to inhale, and the dead do not inhale, and therefore the dead do not pause, and therefore the prose runs on, and the running-on itself becomes the experience of being a ghost trapped in an institution — the inability to stop watching, the inability to look away, the observation that continues past exhaustion because exhaustion is a property of the living.”

“That’s the voice,” I said. “You just did it.”

“I have been doing it for fifty years.”

Saunders was quiet. He was turning something over. “But the living characters need air,” he said. “They need the short punchy declarative. They need the office email. The meeting agenda. The PowerPoint bullet point. ‘Key Findings: Employment Up 0.2%. Unemployment Stable. Labor Force Participation: See Appendix.’ The living speak in fragments because the institution has fragmented their language. The ghost speaks in rivers because death has freed him from the formatting.”

“And the girl?” I said. “The analyst?”

“She’s in between,” Saunders said. “She’s starting to hear the ghost, which means she’s starting to hear the river underneath the fragments. She can’t sustain it — she goes back to the spreadsheet, back to the email, back to the bullet point — but there are moments when her prose loosens, when the sentences get longer, when she’s reaching toward something she doesn’t have vocabulary for, and in those moments the ghost is closest, and she almost turns around.”

“Almost,” Saramago said again.

“Always almost. She never fully hears him. She can’t. To fully hear him she’d have to step outside the system, and there is no outside. There’s only more system. The system is not a building you can walk out of. It is the air.”

Saramago nodded. “In Blindness I made the epidemic total. Everyone goes blind. There is no outside perspective. The sighted woman who remains is not outside — she is inside with a secret, which is worse. Your analyst is similar. She does not have an outside perspective. She has a suspicion, which is a kind of partial sight, which is a kind of blindness that knows it is blind, which is perhaps the most painful condition of all.”

“The Ellison thread,” I said. “The Invisible Man angle. The ghost is invisible — obviously, he’s a ghost. But the people the metrics don’t count are also invisible. And the analyst is becoming visible to the ghost, which means she is becoming invisible to the institution. Because to see what the institution cannot see is to become illegible to the institution. She starts asking questions that don’t have fields in the database. She requests data that doesn’t exist in the categories. Her supervisors don’t suppress her. They just — don’t understand what she’s asking for.”

“Because the asking requires a vocabulary the system does not contain,” Saramago said. “This is not censorship. Censorship implies the existence of the thing being suppressed. This is something prior to censorship. The absence of the conceptual space in which the question could be formulated. She is trying to ask a question for which no form exists.”

“No form,” Saunders said. “Literally. There is no form. She goes to the Office of — whatever — and says, ‘I need to report that the thing we are measuring is not the thing we think we are measuring,’ and they say, ‘Please fill out Form 1172-B: Request for Methodological Review,’ and the form asks for the specific metric in question, and the specific proposed revision, and the specific data supporting the revision, and none of these fields can hold what she is trying to say, because what she is trying to say is: the fields are the problem.”

“The fields are the problem,” I repeated. “That should be a line in the story.”

“No,” Saramago said. “That should be the thing the story understands but never says. If a character says ‘the fields are the problem,’ you have written a thesis statement. The story should make the reader feel the inadequacy of the fields without naming it. The reader should reach for the insight and find that it, too, does not fit in any available form.”

Saunders rubbed his face. “See, this is where we diverge. Because I think someone should say it. Not in a thesis-statement way. In a breaking-down way. In a ‘I’m standing at my desk at 11 p.m. and I’ve been staring at this spreadsheet for six hours and I just said out loud to an empty office that the fields are the problem and nobody heard me except possibly a dead man’ way.”

“And possibly a dead man,” Saramago said. “Yes. That is acceptable. That is even good. Because the possibly is doing the work. She does not know the dead man is there. She does not believe in ghosts. She said it to the empty room and the empty room contained someone, and the containment is the whole tragedy of the story — that the person who could hear her has no way to answer, and the people who could answer cannot hear.”

The Panera was getting crowded. A family had taken the table next to us and a child was methodically tearing a baguette into pieces too small to eat. I watched the child and thought about data — about how each piece of baguette was still bread, still countable as bread, but was no longer functional as bread. At what point does the measurement of a thing diverge from the thing. At what point does the bread stop being bread. The child didn’t care. The child was working on a project that had nothing to do with bread and everything to do with the pleasure of destruction, which is also a kind of measurement — testing where a thing breaks.

“I want to go back to something,” Saunders said. “The ghost’s own errors. His blind spots. Because right now we keep talking about him as the one who sees, and that’s comfortable, and I distrust comfort. What did he get wrong?”

“He counted households,” Saramago said. “He assumed the nuclear family as the unit of economic life. He did not count the grandmother raising three children on a pension. He did not count the roommates splitting rent six ways. He built a world of husbands and wives and 2.3 children and a mortgage and a car, and the world was always more complicated than that, and he knew it was more complicated, in the way that one knows a thing without letting the knowledge alter one’s behavior.”

“He was a man of his time,” Saunders said. “Which is not an excuse. It’s a diagnosis.”

“And the analyst is a woman of hers,” I said. “Which means she has blind spots too. Maybe she can see the failures of the old metrics but she can’t see — what? What is she not seeing?”

Neither of them answered immediately. The child at the next table had reduced the baguette to a pile of crumbs and was now stacking the crumbs into a tower, which kept collapsing, which the child found delightful.

“She is not seeing herself,” Saramago said finally. “She is not seeing that her own dissatisfaction with the metrics is also a product of the system. Her critical perspective was formed by the institution she criticizes. She reads papers published in journals funded by the same apparatus. She thinks in categories invented by the same tradition. Her rebellion is inside the walls. She believes she is looking at the system from outside, but there is no outside, and her belief that there is an outside is perhaps the last and most persistent of the measurement errors.”

Saunders was staring out the window at the BLS building. “You know what I keep coming back to? The monthly report. It comes out the first Friday of every month. Every month. And for a few hours, the entire financial system holds its breath and waits for a number. One number. And the number moves markets, changes policy, determines whether a politician can say ‘the economy is strong’ or has to say ‘we’re working on it.’ One number, assembled by the people in that building, using the categories this dead man helped invent. And the number is wrong. Not in the sense that they added it up wrong. In the sense that the thing the number describes is not the thing people think the number describes. And everyone kind of knows this. And the number comes out anyway. First Friday. Every month.”

“First Friday,” I said.

“First Friday. The ghost has been watching first Fridays for — how long has he been dead?”

“Since 1991.”

“Since 1991. So he’s watched — what — over four hundred first Fridays. Four hundred times the number came out. Four hundred times the world reacted to a measurement of something that the measurement does not measure. And he cannot scream. He has no mouth with which to scream. He has only the static, and the girl with the earbuds who almost hears him, and the almost is the whole story, and the story does not resolve, because the next first Friday is always coming, and the number will always come out, and the number will always be wrong in a way that nobody has a form for.”

He stopped. The caramel drink sat between us, half finished and going cold. Saramago picked up his empty coffee cup, looked into it, and set it down.

“You should not have told me the number of first Fridays,” Saramago said. “Now I will think of nothing else.”