Index of Remaining Things

The manuscript arrived on a Monday in a brown envelope with no return address. Lena Voss put it on her desk next to her coffee and her red pencils (she used red for errors, blue for queries, green for suggestions that were not strictly necessary but that she felt the text deserved) and opened it with a letter opener that had been her grandmother’s.

The title page read: A Complete Index of the Remaining World. Below the title, no author name. Below that, a publisher’s stamp she recognized — the house’s old sigil, the one they’d stopped using four years ago. Someone in production must have used the wrong template. She made a note.

The manuscript was 412 pages. She counted them, as she always did, by lifting the bottom-right corner and letting the pages fall in sequence past her thumb. The paper was heavier than standard manuscript stock. Each page was numbered in the upper-right corner in a typeface she didn’t recognize — not Garamond, not Caslon, not anything from the house’s stylesheet. She made a note.

She began reading.

The book opened with a list. Not a table of contents — it was positioned on page one, where the narrative should have started — but an inventory. Objects, arranged not alphabetically but in an order Lena could not immediately identify. She worked through the first thirty entries before she understood: they were organized by the date of their disappearance.

1. Candle wax (translucent, unscented) — removed 14 March
2. The word “dappled” — removed 15 March
3. Postage scales (brass, spring-loaded) — removed 15 March
4. Birdsong between 4:00 and 4:15 a.m. — removed 16 March
5. The ability to fold paper more than six times — removed 16 March

The list continued for twelve pages. Some entries were concrete objects. Some were words. Some were sensory experiences (the smell of cloves, the particular heat of asphalt in July), and some were abstract capacities (the ability to distinguish between envy and jealousy, the conviction that Tuesdays were different from Wednesdays). Each entry was dated. Each was marked “removed,” as if by a clerk processing requisitions.

Lena checked the style guide. The house had no policy on this kind of list. She flagged the inconsistent capitalization, noted that “birdsong” should probably be lowercased, and moved on.

She returned to the list. Entry 22 was “the distinction between lavender and lilac.” Entry 23 was “the sound of a key in a lock that has been recently oiled.” Entry 24 was “the word ‘penumbra.’” She paused at this one. She liked penumbra. The partial zone, the almost-dark. “Semi-darkness” was not the same. “Partial shadow” was not the same. To lose “penumbra” was to lose a specific way of seeing the edge of light, one that no synonym could reconstruct.

She flagged none of this. It was not a copy editor’s concern. She did note that the em-dashes were inconsistent — some entries used spaced en-dashes, others used closed em-dashes — and moved on.

Page 13 is where the narrative began, or what passed for narrative. A woman — unnamed, referred to only as “the indexer” — lived in an apartment in a city that was never named. She worked for an institution described only as “the Bureau of Standard Revisions.” Her job was to maintain a cross-reference system for a collection of documents that described the world as it currently existed. When something in the world changed, the index had to be updated.

Lena made a note: Check that this doesn’t read as pastiche. The tone is close to parody in places. Author may want to push the voice further from the obvious references.

But as she read deeper, the tone shifted. The indexer’s days were not absurd. They were ordinary. She woke, commuted, sat at a metal desk, updated her cross-references with a fine-point pen, and went home. The building where she worked had linoleum floors and a drinking fountain that produced water so cold it hurt her teeth. Her supervisor, a man named Dahl who wore the same brown cardigan every day, reviewed her entries once a week and initialed them in the margin without reading them. She had a coworker named Petra who ate rice crackers at her desk with a focus that suggested she was performing a task rather than having lunch.

Nothing was wrong. Everything was exactly itself. And yet something in the rhythm of the sentences made Lena read faster, and she understood — without being able to point to the specific sentence where she understood it — that things were missing.

She kept reading. The indexer had a routine that the manuscript detailed with a precision Lena found almost oppressive: the order in which she opened her drawers (third, first, second — never second first, because the second drawer stuck and required a specific angle of force that she could only achieve after her wrist had warmed up on the other two), the way she aligned her pen with the upper edge of whatever document was in front of her before reading the first word, the exact temperature at which she brewed her tea (not boiling — three minutes off the boil, which she timed with a small hourglass she kept on her desk despite the clock on the wall). These routines were not described as eccentricities. They were described as facts, with the same declarative flatness with which one might describe the orbit of a planet. Only Lena, reading from outside, could see the outline of a person who had organized her life so thoroughly that any alteration — any removed drawer, any confiscated hourglass — would register as a seismic event.

On Tuesday morning, Lena opened the manuscript to page 47 — the scene where the indexer discovers that an entry she added last week (the word “saffron”) is no longer in the index, and there is no deletion record, and when she asks Dahl about it he looks at her with an expression that is not confusion but something flatter, something that doesn’t see the problem.

Page 47 was there. The page number was correct. But the scene was different.

The indexer was not asking Dahl about saffron. She was updating a cross-reference for municipal water pressure. The paragraph where she noticed the missing entry — Lena was certain she had proofread it yesterday, had flagged a comma splice in the third line — did not exist. The page contained a different scene, one that read as if it had always been there, as if the version Lena remembered had never been written.

She checked her notes. In her own handwriting, in red pencil: p. 47, line 3 — comma splice. “The entry had been there, she was certain of it” should be “The entry had been there; she was certain of it.”

She looked at page 47. There was no comma splice. There was no sentence about certainty. The line did not exist.

Lena put her pencil down. She picked it up. She turned to page 46. She turned to page 48. She re-counted the pages — 412, the same number as yesterday. The manuscript had not gotten shorter. It had simply changed. Something had been removed and the remaining text had closed around the gap the way skin closes over a pulled thorn — seamlessly, without scar.

She made a note.

The pattern established itself over the following days. Each morning, Lena would open the manuscript to the page where she’d stopped, and something would be different. Not everything. Not large things, at first. A sentence here. A passage there. The indexer’s coworker Petra lost her rice crackers — one morning the scene simply described Petra sitting with her hands in her lap, staring at nothing, and the rice crackers were gone not only from that page but from every page where they’d appeared, as if the concept had been surgically extracted from the manuscript’s memory.

The manuscript did not acknowledge these changes. No character remarked on Petra’s empty hands. The text simply continued as if rice crackers had never existed within its borders — and that was the part that felt wrong in a way she could not put on a query slip.

She tried to tell her supervisor. Not Dahl — Dahl was a character. Her actual supervisor, Ingrid, who had assigned Lena this manuscript three weeks ago with no special instructions, just the brown envelope and a sticky note that said “Standard proof — timeline is Thursday.”

“The manuscript is changing,” Lena said.

Ingrid looked up from her screen. She had the particular expression of a person who has been interrupted mid-email and is calculating whether the interruption will take five seconds or five minutes. “Changing how?”

“Passages are disappearing. Overnight. The page count stays the same but the content shifts. Scenes I proofread yesterday aren’t there today.”

Ingrid’s expression didn’t change, but something behind it rearranged — a kind of filing motion, as if she were deciding in which drawer to place this information. “Are your notes inconsistent?”

“My notes are the only record. They reference lines that aren’t in the manuscript anymore.”

“Then your notes may be the error,” Ingrid said, and went back to her email.

Lena did not believe her notes were the error. She had been a copy editor for eleven years. She had proofread manuscripts in fourteen languages (she could read seven; for the other seven, she was checking formatting, line spacing, page breaks — the architecture of the text rather than its content). She knew the difference between a faulty memory and a text that had changed. The difference was in the hands: when she remembered wrong, her hands hovered over the page, uncertain. When the text had changed, her index finger went to the spot where a sentence used to start, found a different sentence, and recoiled — the way you pull back from a light switch in a room that has been rearranged.

She began keeping a second set of notes. The official annotations continued as normal. The second set was a private notebook in which she wrote down everything the manuscript lost. Not summaries. The exact sentences, as well as she could remember them. Where memory failed she left a blank: Something about the indexer checking the third drawer of the filing cabinet, finding it _________, Dahl standing in the doorway with his cardigan buttoned wrong.

The blanks worried her. She could remember that something was missing without remembering what. The shape of the absence remained — she knew a scene had involved saffron, she knew a passage had described the sound of rain on a particular kind of roof — but the sentences themselves were thinning in her memory, losing not their composition but their detail.

By the end of the second week, seventy-three passages had disappeared from the manuscript. Lena’s private notebook had grown to forty-six pages.

Some losses were small: a word substituted, a description shortened, the indexer rubbing her left temple with her thumb simply absent from a scene where it had appeared. Some were large: an entire chapter in which the indexer visited a museum closed for renovation and found, behind the barriers, a room containing objects from her index that should not have existed in three dimensions — things the world had lost, gathered in glass cases with typed labels. That chapter was gone. In its place, two pages of the indexer commuting home on a bus, noticing nothing.

Lena tried once more. Not with Ingrid. With the author.

There was no author. The title page listed none. The house’s metadata system listed the book as “commissioned work, anonymous.” Lena emailed production. Production emailed back: Author communication handled by editorial. Contact Renata Goss.

Lena emailed Renata Goss. She received an automated reply: Renata Goss is no longer with this organization. For inquiries regarding her projects, please contact —

The “please contact” was followed by nothing. Not a name. Not an email address. A sentence that ended at the edge of its own reference.

Lena printed the email. She put it in her notebook. She went home.

On the bus that evening she sat next to a woman reading a paperback with a cracked spine. The woman read with the intensity of someone using the book as a wall between herself and the other passengers, and Lena recognized the posture. But she watched this woman and felt a vertigo that had nothing to do with the motion of the bus. The woman turned a page. From where Lena sat, the words were too small to resolve, and the effect was of a woman reading blankness with perfect attention, her eyes tracking left to right across nothing.

Lena looked away. When she looked back, the woman was gone. The seat was empty. The bus had not stopped. Lena checked the seat. There was a warmth in the fabric, or she imagined there was. She did not write this in her notebook.

Her apartment had begun to lose things too, though she could not say when it started — whether the losses followed the manuscript’s, or preceded them, or whether they had always been happening and she had only now developed the organ to notice.

She did not come home to find furniture missing. She came home to find that the shelf above the stove, which had held six jars of spices, now held five. The dust pattern showed six circles; only five jars occupied them. She stood looking at the empty circle and tried to remember what had been there. Cumin, coriander, paprika, oregano, cinnamon. That was five. The sixth circle on the shelf meant nothing. She wiped it clean. By the morning after that the dust pattern had adjusted and there were five circles, evenly spaced, as if the shelf had always accommodated five.

She noticed because of the notebook. Without it she would have been Dahl — initialing the margins of a changing document without seeing the changes. But each time she opened the notebook she could feel the distance between what she’d written and what she could currently remember growing, and she could not tell which line was moving.

Her neighbor Falk, who lived directly below and who she saw most mornings in the stairwell — he carried his recycling down at 7:15, she left at 7:20, and their greetings had calcified over two years into a precise exchange: he said “morning,” she said “good morning,” they descended in parallel — Falk said something different one Tuesday. He stopped on the landing, his bag of sorted bottles clinking against his thigh, and looked at her with an expression she had never seen on his face.

“Did you used to have a different door?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your door. Was it — I thought it was a different color.”

Lena looked at her door. It was brown. Wooden. Standard. She could not say with certainty that it had always been brown, but she also could not say it had been anything else.

“I think it’s always been this color,” she said.

Falk looked at the door for another moment. Then he shifted his recycling bag to his other hand and continued down the stairs. “Probably right,” he said.

She did not write this in the notebook. She stood in the stairwell for thirty seconds after Falk’s footsteps had faded, her hand on the doorknob, and she thought: if I write this down, I am admitting that my door might have been a different color. She went to work.

The manuscript was 412 pages. She counted them every morning. 412. Always 412. The content drained but the container held. She began to wonder if the losses on one page meant gains on another. She checked. She counted words per page. The word count was dropping. Page 200, which had held 310 words when she began, now held 280. Page 201 held 295, down from 320. The pages were simply holding less, and the white space around the text was expanding the way a pupil dilates in darkness.

No one asked about the word count. The house billed by the page. 412 pages was 412 pages.

In the manuscript, the indexer had a conversation with Petra that Lena read three times. Petra — who by this point had lost her rice crackers, her desk, and her surname, and was now simply a woman who appeared in hallways — stopped the indexer on her way to the drinking fountain and said: “Do you ever feel like the building used to be bigger?”

The indexer said no.

“I mean physically bigger. More rooms. I could swear there was a room at the end of this hall, past the filing archive. A room with a window. I used to eat lunch there.”

“There’s no room past the filing archive,” the indexer said. “The hallway ends.”

“I know,” Petra said. “That’s what I mean.”

They stood in the hallway. Petra looked toward the end of it — where it ended in a wall painted the same institutional green as the rest of the building. No mark, no scuff, no tape residue from a sign that might once have been posted. A wall that looked like it had been a wall forever.

“Never mind,” Petra said, and walked away, and the sentence in which she walked away was the last sentence in which she appeared. After that page, Petra was not mentioned again. She simply stopped being referenced, the way a word drops out of usage — a thousand people independently deciding not to say it today, and then tomorrow, and then it’s gone.

Lena wrote in her notebook: Petra’s last scene, p. 287. Remembers a room that doesn’t exist. Asks the indexer. Gets no confirmation. Disappears from the text. She underlined “disappears from the text” twice.

She called her sister. It was the first time they’d spoken in two months.

“Have you noticed things disappearing?” Lena asked.

A pause. “What kind of things?”

“Words. Objects. Not stolen. Just — absent. Things that were there and then aren’t, and nobody notices.”

Her sister was quiet for long enough that Lena checked to see if the call had dropped. It hadn’t. Her sister was breathing.

“I think you need to take a break from that manuscript,” her sister said.

“I’m serious.”

“I know you’re serious. That’s what worries me. Lena, you’ve always been like this. You notice the thing that everyone else has agreed doesn’t matter, and you won’t let it go, and it costs you.”

Lena did not answer. Listening to her sister’s voice, she realized she could not remember her sister’s middle name. She had known it her entire life. She could feel the space it occupied — a three-syllable space, beginning with a soft consonant — but the name itself was gone.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’ll take a break.”

She hung up. She opened the notebook. She wrote: Elise’s middle name. Three syllables. S— or Sh—? Something with water? Check later.

She did not check later.

From the index of A Complete Index of the Remaining World, compiled in the margins:

Birdsong (early morning) — see p. 4, removed; see also Sounds, involuntary; see also Absence, compensatory silence filling space of

Candle wax — see p. 1, removed; see also Objects, translucent; see also Loss, things noticed only by their residue

Dappled (word) — see p. 1, removed; see also Language, specific losses; see also ———

Saffron — see pp. 47, 103, 206, removed; see also Indexer, the, moments of certainty; see also Spice jars, shelf circles; see also Memory, the difference between knowing something was there and knowing what it was

Museum, the (chapter) — see pp. 178-193, removed; see also Recovery, rooms of; see also Objects, recovered; see also ———; see also ———

You, the reader — see present moment; see your hands on the page; see the thing you were certain of this morning that you can no longer name

On day nineteen the manuscript changed during the hours she was reading it. She was certain of this because she had been in the middle of a paragraph — the indexer was describing a system of cross-references that her predecessor had built, a web of connections between index entries so dense that any single entry, followed through its chain of “see also” references, would eventually lead to every other entry in the index, a closed loop, a self-referencing totality — and Lena looked up to drink her coffee, which took four seconds, and when she looked back down the paragraph was different. Shorter. The system of cross-references was described as “a simple organizational tool.” The predecessor was not mentioned. The density was gone. The web had become a list.

She had not left the page. She had not closed her eyes. Four seconds. The time it took to bring a cup to her mouth and set it down.

She put her hands flat on the desk. She could feel the surface of the paper under her palms. The paper was real. The text on it was real in the way that text is always real — ink, fixed, physically present. But its content had the permanence of breath on glass. It was there, and it was there, and then a warmth passed over it and it wasn’t.

She opened her notebook. She wrote the paragraph as she remembered it — the predecessor, the web of cross-references, the closed loop. She wrote as fast as she could. Her handwriting degraded. By the third line she could feel the memory contracting, losing its periphery. She captured the center. She lost the edges.

That evening she went to the public library — a large one on the other side of the city, the kind of building that still smelled like the twentieth century: radiator heat, carpet adhesive, the musk of books handled by hundreds. She pulled an encyclopedia from the reference section — an old one, bound in red — and opened it at random.

The entry was for “Pantograph.” A mechanical device for copying and scaling drawings. There was a diagram. She read the entry twice, paying attention to each word not for meaning but for presence. She closed the book. She opened it again. Pantograph. The same diagram. The same words in the same order.

The relief lasted only until she tried to remember whether the encyclopedia had always had a red binding or whether it had once been green, and she could not answer, and the inability to answer was not the same as not knowing.

On the bus home she counted the stops — fourteen — and at each one she said the name under her breath: Karlsplatz, Hegelgasse, Schweglerstrasse, Johnstrasse, and so on, names attached to specific memories (the bakery at Schweglerstrasse where she’d bought bread every Sunday for a year, the bench at Johnstrasse where she’d cried after a dentist appointment, for reasons that had nothing to do with the dentist). She held the names in her mouth. She did not write them down.

The manuscript was now 412 pages of a different book than the one she’d started reading. The indexer was still there, and Dahl. The Bureau of Standard Revisions still existed. But its purpose had shifted. In the early pages, the Bureau had maintained an index of the world’s contents — a catalog of what existed. Now it appeared to be maintaining something simpler: a list of what was permitted to continue existing. The index was not a record. It was a permission slip.

No scene dramatized the shift. No character explained it. The manuscript had rewritten its own premises in the spaces between Lena’s readings, the way a house settles at night — small sounds, and in the morning the door frame is slightly crooked and you cannot say when it moved.

Lena did not flag this in her official annotations. There was nothing to flag. Subject-verb agreement held. Tenses matched. Continuity, within the current version, was flawless. The errors existed only in the gap between what the manuscript said now and what Lena’s notebook said it had said before, and that gap was not a proofreading problem.

She finished the manuscript on a Thursday. The last page — 412, as always — ended mid-sentence. Not in the way of experimental fiction, where an unfinished sentence is a statement. In the way of a text that had been longer and was now shorter. The sentence read: The indexer placed her pen on the desk and looked at the window, which showed

Which showed. No period. No continuation. Lena waited, half-expecting the sentence to complete itself if she looked away and looked back, the way the text had changed so many times before. She looked away. She looked back. The sentence remained broken. Whatever the window had showed was gone.

She checked her notebook. She had no record of the original ending. It had been lost — not from the manuscript, but from her. She had proofread the last pages weeks ago, in the early days, before she’d started the second notebook, and whatever the ending had been, she had no copy.

She sat with the incomplete sentence for a long time. The office was empty — past seven, the cleaning staff already gone.

She could write the ending. She had a red pencil and she had the manuscript and she could write, in the margin, the sentence that completed the indexer’s story. Which showed the street below, the trees still bare. Or: Which showed nothing, because the glass had gone opaque. Or: Which showed a room on the other side, identical to this one, in which a woman was placing her pen on the desk.

She could write any of these. She didn’t.

Instead, she read the manuscript’s last sentence aloud. In the empty office, with the cleaning smell of lemon and ammonia and the security lights casting their orange geometry on the floor, she said: “The indexer placed her pen on the desk and looked at the window, which showed.”

The words hung in the room. The sentence wanted to continue. It leaned forward. The “which showed” was a hand reaching for a railing that wasn’t there.

She said it again: “Which showed.” And again: “Which showed.” Each repetition made the incompleteness larger. She was testing whether the sentence, spoken aloud, existed more firmly than it did on the page — whether voice was a medium the erasure could not reach.

The sentence remained incomplete in every medium she put it in: on the page, in the air, in the notebook where she wrote it.

Lena turned in the manuscript on Friday. 412 pages, three sets of annotations (red, blue, green), thirty-one flagged queries for the author who did not exist. She handed the envelope to Ingrid. Ingrid put it in her outbox without opening it.

“Any issues?” Ingrid asked.

Lena considered the question. The manuscript had lost approximately 40 percent of its original content during the three weeks she’d been reading it. The word “saffron” no longer appeared anywhere in the text, and she could no longer remember what saffron smelled like, though she could remember remembering it.

“A few comma splices,” she said. “Nothing structural.”

Ingrid nodded. Lena went back to her desk.

A week passed. Another manuscript arrived — a novel about a family in coastal Norway, 288 pages, the kind of book that knew exactly what it was and did not change. Lena proofread it in four days. The sentences stayed where she left them. The characters did not vanish between readings.

She thought about the indexer. Not the one on the page — that indexer had been reduced to a woman at a desk with a pen, doing work the text no longer described. The indexer Lena thought about was the earlier one, the one with the hourglass and the drawer sequence and the tea brewed three minutes off the boil. That indexer had been a person. The later indexer was a shape. The manuscript had kept the noun and removed the life.

The notebook remained. She kept it in the bottom drawer, under a box of paperclips and a defunct stapler. She did not reread it. She was afraid — though she would not have used the word “afraid,” would have said “reluctant” — that the notebook, too, was subject to the same erosion. Or worse: that it was perfectly intact, and that she would read it and find references to things she could no longer recognize.

She left the drawer closed.

On Monday, a new manuscript arrived — an author she recognized, a novel about beekeeping in the Carpathians, an editorial letter attached. She opened it and began reading. The words were fixed. The characters did not disappear. She hated the stability.

She put the beekeeping manuscript aside. She opened the bottom drawer. She took out the notebook.

Forty-six pages, in her own handwriting, red pencil on cream-colored paper. The first entry: p. 47, saffron scene. The indexer notices the entry is gone. Asks Dahl. Dahl doesn’t see the problem. Original line: “The entry had been there, she was certain of it.” She could remember writing this but could not remember the scene it described. The words “saffron” and “Dahl” and “certain” were present in her notebook and absent from her mind, the way a phone number on a slip of paper survives the loss of the memory of whose number it is.

She turned pages. The museum chapter, Petra’s rice crackers, the indexer’s predecessor and the web of cross-references. The notebook described a manuscript she could not remember reading.

She closed the notebook. She put it back in the drawer. She picked up the beekeeping manuscript and found her place.

On Saturday morning she woke up and the apartment was as it had always been. Five spice jars on the shelf above the stove. A window that showed the street below. The sound of traffic and, somewhere, a bird — though she could not say what kind, could not say whether the category “birdsong” had once contained sub-categories or whether it was all it had ever been.

She made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table. The table had three chairs, though she lived alone.

The notebook was in the bottom drawer at work.

From the index, final revision:

Birdsong — see Sounds, general

Candle wax — see ———

——— — see ———

Loss — see present tense; see continuous; see also ———

Remaining, things — see above; see below; see