Compliance Is Voluntary and Has Always Been Completed

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which was the day Gerald Pinch received most of his correspondence, because Tuesday was the day the post came, because Gerald had arranged with the postal service to consolidate his deliveries to a single weekly visit, because Gerald believed that efficiency was a form of respect for institutions, and institutions were what kept the world from sliding into the kind of disorder where people opened their mail on any day they pleased.

The envelope was cream-colored and heavy in the way that implied someone, somewhere, had selected the paper stock with intention. In the upper left corner, embossed in a font that seemed to retreat slightly from the eye: BUREAU OF CONDITIONS. Below that, in smaller type: Assessment Division, Sub-Branch 7(a), Provisional Wing.

Gerald opened it with the letter opener his mother had given him when he moved into his flat, fourteen years ago. He had never used a knife. A letter opener was the correct tool. Gerald was a man who used the correct tool.

Dear Mr. Pinch,

Thank you for your response to our letter of 14 November (ref: PES-7/GP/11-14). As you are aware, your Provisional Existence Status has been flagged for routine review. Please report to your nearest Assessment Centre at your earliest convenience (no later than 72 hours from receipt of this communication) to complete a Verification of Continuance.

Please bring: (1) two forms of photographic identity, (2) proof of current address, and (3) one item of personal significance (non-monetary, non-inherited).

We look forward to resolving this matter to our mutual satisfaction.

Yours in continued processing, The Bureau of Conditions

Footnote: The Bureau of Conditions does not, in the traditional administrative sense, exist. This should not be interpreted as a reflection on its authority.

Gerald read the letter twice. He had not received the letter of 14 November. He did not know what Provisional Existence Status meant, although the word “provisional” troubled him in the way that a stain on a ceiling troubles a person who does not know what is on the floor above. He Googled the Bureau of Conditions. Nothing. He called the phone number printed at the bottom of the letterhead, in a font so small he had to hold the paper at an angle that made him feel like a jeweler appraising a suspect diamond.

A recorded voice thanked him for calling the Bureau of Conditions and informed him that his call was important. “Please continue holding,” the voice said, “in the manner to which you are accustomed.” Gerald held the phone to his ear for forty minutes. He did not put it on speaker. He did not set it down. He held it, because the voice had asked him to hold, and holding, in Gerald’s experience, was something you did with your hands.

The line disconnected. The tone it made sounded, Gerald thought, genuinely sorry.

He went to the address on the letter the following morning, having packed a folder containing his passport, his driving license, a gas bill, and a fork.

The building was between a dry cleaner Gerald had used for nine years and a vacant lot Gerald had walked past every day on his route to work. He had never noticed a building between them. The building did not look new. It looked, if anything, older than either of its neighbors — a slab of beige concrete with no windows and a revolving door that turned with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting.

Inside: carpet tiles the color of institutional tea. Fluorescent lighting tuned to a frequency that was almost, but not quite, the frequency of a headache. A reception desk, behind which sat a woman with steel-colored hair and the measured patience of a person who had explained this particular thing eleven thousand times and had come, over the course of those explanations, to enjoy the explanation more than the thing being explained.

“Name?” she said.

“Gerald Pinch.”

“Lovely. You’re expected.” She wrote a number on the back of his hand with a felt-tip pen — 4 — and gestured toward a hallway. “Waiting room is through there. Take a seat, have a read of the Companion, and someone will be with you once your number becomes relevant.”

“When will that be?”

“When it becomes relevant,” she said, in the tone of someone who has answered the question by repeating it.

The waiting room contained twelve plastic chairs, nine of which were occupied by people who appeared to have been occupying them for some time. One man had brought a sleeping bag. A woman in the corner was knitting something that might have been a scarf or might have been a very long receipt. On the wall above them, a poster: YOUR COOPERATION IS APPRECIATED AND INEVITABLE.

On a small table by the door sat a book: A Visitor’s Companion to the Bureau of Conditions, 14th Edition (Provisional). Gerald picked it up. It was heavy in the way that suggested comprehensiveness, or possibly despair.

(A Visitor’s Companion, p. 3: “Welcome to the Bureau of Conditions. The Bureau exists to administer the Conditions under which existence is provisionally granted, maintained, and, in certain procedurally defined circumstances, revisited. The term ‘existence’ is used throughout this Companion in its standard regulatory sense, i.e., the state of being on file.”)

Gerald filled out the forms he was given. Name. Date of birth. Address. National Insurance number. The forms asked other things too. “List three memories you are confident are yours.” Gerald wrote: his mother’s kitchen, the smell of paint in his first office, and the sound his front door made when it closed — a particular click that he had never heard any other door make. He was certain these were his. He could not have said why he was certain, only that the form seemed to require certainty, and Gerald provided what forms required.

“Describe the quality of light in the room where you first realized you were a separate person.”

Gerald stared at this one. He wrote: “Yellow.”

“Do you consent? [Note: this question refers to a specific act of consent which will be defined at a later stage in the process. Your consent at this stage is preliminary and may be revised, expanded, or rendered retrospectively unnecessary.]”

Gerald ticked “Yes.” He had never not ticked “Yes.” A box existed to be ticked. An unticked box was a failure of character.

(A Visitor’s Companion, p. 87: “The forms used in the Verification of Continuance are periodically updated to reflect changes in the Conditions. Applicants holding forms from a previous edition are advised that their answers may be correct but irrelevant, which is administratively equivalent to incorrect.”)

His number became relevant after two hours. A man appeared in the doorway of the waiting room, tall and thin, with the face of someone who had been helpful his entire life and intended to die helpful.

“Mr. Pinch? I’m Mr. Trott. Won’t you come through?”

Gerald followed him down a corridor and into a small room containing a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet that appeared to contain, based on the labels on its drawers, every letter of the alphabet twice plus several letters that Gerald did not recognize from any alphabet he had studied.

“Please, sit. This won’t take long.” Mr. Trott opened a folder. “Now. The Verification of Continuance is a standard procedure. Most people pass. The ones who don’t — well.” He smiled. “They simply aren’t, and never were, and it’s really nothing to worry about, because worry requires a subject, and if you aren’t, you can’t.”

“I see,” Gerald said, because he had found that “I see” was a response that satisfied most officials without committing him to having actually seen anything.

“Good. First task.” Mr. Trott produced three photographs and laid them on the desk. All three were photographs of Gerald. Gerald recognized himself in each: the same face, the same thinning hair, the same expression of a man who has been asked to identify himself and is doing his best. “Which of these is you?”

Gerald pointed to the one on the left.

Mr. Trott nodded and made a mark on the form. The mark was not a tick or a cross. It appeared to be a small drawing of a door.

“Excellent. Second task. Please recite your National Insurance number backward.”

Gerald did so, perfectly, without hesitation. He had memorized his National Insurance number at the age of sixteen, forward and backward, because it seemed like the sort of thing a person should know about themselves, the way a person should know their blood type or the name of the street where they were born.

Mr. Trott looked impressed. Then concerned. Then impressed again. “Third task.” He slid a new form across the desk. “Form PES-7a. This is a form about the experience of filling out Form PES-7. Forty-seven questions. Take your time.”

Gerald did not need to take his time. He worked through the questions with the fluency of a man for whom forms were not obstacles but landscapes — familiar terrain, navigable by instinct. Question 12: “Rate the clarity of the instructions on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is ‘opaque’ and 7 is ‘transparent but unhelpful.’” Gerald wrote 5. Question 19: “Did you experience any of the following while completing Form PES-7? (a) Doubt (b) Certainty (c) The sensation that you were being described by someone who had never met you (d) Hunger.” Gerald circled (c) and, after a moment, (d).

Question 23: “At what point during the completion of this form did you first suspect that the form was the assessment?”

Gerald’s pen stopped. He looked at the question. The question looked back at him with the bland patience of a thing that had been waiting to be arrived at. He wrote: “Question 23.”

Mr. Trott read the answer upside down and made another small door on his form.

“Final task.” Mr. Trott straightened in his chair. “Your item of personal significance.”

Gerald reached into his folder and produced the fork. It was a standard dinner fork, stainless steel, with four tines, one of which was bent slightly to the left from an incident Gerald could not remember but which must have happened because the tine was bent, and things do not bend themselves.

Mr. Trott took the fork. He weighed it in his hand. He held it up to the fluorescent light, turning it slowly. He measured it with a small ruler he produced from his jacket pocket. He set it down on the desk between them as if it were a document that required both their signatures.

“Why this fork?”

“I use it every day,” Gerald said.

“Would this fork exist without you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you exist without this fork?”

(A Visitor’s Companion, p. 214: “The Fork Inquiry is a standard component of all Continuance Verifications. Applicants are advised to select an item they would not miss, as items submitted during assessment become the property of the Bureau. The Bureau does not want your item. It simply wants you to not have it.”)

Gerald opened his mouth. The answer should have been yes. The answer was obviously yes. A person does not require a fork to exist. A fork is a utensil. It is a thing for lifting food from a plate to a mouth. It has no bearing on the ontological status of its user. Gerald knew this. He also knew that he had eaten his tuna sandwich with this fork every weekday for eleven years, and that the bend in the tine meant it held the tuna slightly differently than a straight fork would, and that he had adjusted his grip to account for this, and that the adjustment had become invisible to him in the way that all daily things become invisible, and that the invisibility was, if he was honest, the only kind of intimacy he currently maintained with any object or person on earth.

“Mr. Pinch?”

“I’m thinking,” Gerald said.

“Take your time,” Mr. Trott said. “Although I should note that time, like your fork, is subject to assessment.”

Gerald did not answer the question. Mr. Trott made a mark on his form — not a door this time, but something Gerald couldn’t see — and placed the fork in the filing cabinet, in a drawer labeled with a letter that did not exist.

Mr. Trott directed Gerald to a corridor to wait for his results. The corridor was longer than the building. Gerald understood this in the way one understands that a dream is a dream without it becoming less real — the walls continued, the carpet tiles repeated, the fluorescent lights hummed at their almost-melody, and the corridor did not end. He passed doors: Department 7, Department 493, Department 2, Department 7 again. Behind one door, typing. Behind another, what sounded like the sea.

He met a woman sitting on a plastic chair that she had apparently brought with her, positioned against the wall between Department 493 and Department 2, as if she had selected this particular stretch of corridor with the care of someone choosing a seat in a restaurant.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Janet. Have you just come from your assessment?”

“Yes.”

“How did it go?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t answer the last question.”

Janet nodded as if this were expected. “I’ve been here three weeks. Give or take. Time in the corridor behaves more like a suggestion than a rule. I’ve completed seventeen assessments.”

“Seventeen?”

“Each time I pass, I receive a letter informing me that my results have been forwarded to a different department for secondary review. So I wait. And then I’m assessed again.” She smiled. The smile was genuine, which was the worst thing about it. “After a while you stop expecting it to end. Like retirement, but with more forms.”

“Have you ever tried leaving?” Gerald asked.

Janet looked at him with the genuine puzzlement of a person who has been asked whether water is wet. “Why would I leave? They haven’t told me I can.”

Gerald walked on. The corridor continued. The fluorescent lights hummed. He passed Department 7 a third time, though he had not turned around. Behind its door, the typing had stopped, and what had replaced it was not silence but the particular quality of attention that a room acquires when someone in it is listening.

He reached a door marked EXIT.

Behind it was a staircase going down. The stairs were concrete, lit by the same fluorescent tubes, and Gerald counted fourteen steps before the landing, then fourteen more, then fourteen more, and the building, he was fairly certain, had only one floor. The staircase delivered him to a hallway, and the hallway to a room, and the room contained a desk.

Behind the desk sat no one. On the desk sat a folder with Gerald’s name on it, a felt-tip pen, and a small laminated sign: Your assessor is currently completing their own Verification of Continuance. Please complete Form PES-8 (Self-Assessment of Assessment) and leave it in the tray marked PENDING. Your results will be mailed to the address on file, which may or may not still be your address, depending on the outcome.

Gerald sat down. There was no Form PES-8 on the desk. There was no tray marked PENDING. There was only the folder, which he opened, and which contained a single sheet of paper on which someone had written, in handwriting he recognized as his own, though he had no memory of writing it: “Gerald Pinch was here.”

He did not know when he had written it. The ink was dry. The paper was the same heavy cream stock as the original letter, which meant nothing except that the Bureau, whether or not it existed, had consistent taste in stationery.

(A Visitor’s Companion, 15th Edition, p. 214: “The Fork Inquiry is a standard component of all Continuance Verifications. Items submitted during assessment are catalogued, filed, and retained in perpetuity. To request the return of a submitted item, please complete Form IR-1 (Item Retrieval). Form IR-1 requires the applicant’s Bureau reference number, which is assigned upon successful completion of the Verification of Continuance, which requires the return of the submitted item.”)

There was a number on his hand, written in felt-tip pen that had not dried and showed no sign of drying. The number was 4. He checked, although he did not know what he was checking against, since numbers do not change and 4 had been 4 for as long as mathematics had opinions on the subject.

The pen on the desk was the same brand as the one the receptionist had used. Gerald picked it up. He turned the sheet of paper over. The back was blank. He could write something — a complaint, a question, a second declaration of his own presence. He could write “I was here” again, as if repetition were a form of proof.

He put the pen down. He left the paper where it was. He stood up and walked back toward the staircase, which now had fifteen steps per landing, though Gerald did not count them, because he was thinking about his fork, and whether the Bureau would file it correctly, and whether correct filing, in a system that did not exist, was a concept that meant anything at all.

Somewhere above him — or below, the building having lost its opinion on the matter — a drawer opened.