The Department of Nascent Sorrows

The letter arrived on a Wednesday, which was correct, because government correspondence was distributed on Wednesdays, and the fact that it arrived at all meant that some determination had already been made, since letters were not sent to persons for whom no determination existed. This much Sonja understood.

She read it standing at the counter where she sorted mail. The envelope was the standard ministry off-white, the address typed in the compressed font used for internal reclassifications. The letter stated that on or before the fourteenth of the current month, she was required to present herself at the Department of Nascent Sorrows, Bureau 7, Window 4, for the purpose of completing Form 1197-C, subsection (d), pertaining to the reclassification of an unnamed affective event. She was advised to bring two forms of identification and proof of her current emotional registration. Failure to appear would result in the automatic classification of the event in question under General Provision 12, which the letter did not explain, but which was referenced with the quiet authority of something she should already know.

Sonja folded the letter along its original creases and placed it back in the envelope. She would go, of course. One went. That was the nature of these things: you received a letter and you went, not because you feared the consequences of not going—though you did, vaguely, in the way one fears weather—but because the letter itself had already restructured the world into one in which going was the shape of the day.

She had, she should note, no memory of submitting a report about any affective event. She had not visited a government office in over a year. She had not spoken to anyone in the Bureau of Emotional Registry since the previous spring, when she had updated her residential address after moving to the apartment on Grüner Weg, an errand that had taken four hours and involved three separate queues. It was possible that the reclassification was related to that address change. It was possible that changing one’s address triggered a review of one’s affective file, the way pulling a single thread rearranges the tension in an entire fabric. It was also possible, Sonja thought, that the letter had been sent in error—but this was a thought she did not pursue, because government letters were not sent in error, or if they were, the error became the truth the moment the letter was received, and correcting it required a process so involved that it was simpler to accept the error as a new kind of fact.

The Department of Nascent Sorrows occupied the fourth floor of a building on Auerbach Strasse that also housed a dental clinic and three notary offices. The elevator was out of service. A sign taped to the elevator doors read: ELEVATOR UNDERGOING RECLASSIFICATION. USE STAIRS. Sonja climbed four flights. The stairwell smelled of floor wax and something older, something mineral, like the inside of a stone.

Bureau 7 was a long room divided by a counter that ran the full width, behind which sat seven windows, each manned by a clerk. The windows were numbered but not in order: 1, 3, 7, 4, 9, 2, 6. Window 5 was absent. Window 8 appeared to have been painted over, its outline still visible on the wall, a rectangle of slightly different white. Sonja joined the queue for Window 4, which was the third window from the left, or the fifth from the right, depending on where you stood, which meant that even the act of locating it required a small internal negotiation, a choosing of frame.

The queue moved at the pace that government queues move, which is to say it moved just often enough to prevent you from leaving. The woman ahead of Sonja held a folder of documents against her chest like a shield. The man ahead of the woman stood with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels, producing a faint rhythmic creak from his shoes that sounded like a small animal breathing. No one spoke. There was a clock on the wall but its hands did not move, or moved so slowly that the distinction between movement and stillness had become procedural.

When Sonja reached the window, the clerk—a thin man with pale eyebrows and fingers stained faintly blue, perhaps from carbon paper, perhaps from something else—looked at her letter and then at her and then at the letter again.

“Subsection (d),” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ll need Form 1197-C.”

“I assumed that was why I was here.”

“It is why you’re here. But the form must be requested separately. You’ll request it at Window 9.”

“Window 9 is—” Sonja looked along the counter. Window 9 was the fourth window from the left, or the fourth from the right. The clerk there was eating a sandwich.

“When Window 9 has issued the form, return here. Bring the form and the letter and your proof of emotional registration. I’ll also need your Classification History, if you have one.”

“I don’t know if I have one.”

The clerk made a note. “The absence of a Classification History is itself a classification,” he said, not unkindly. “It will be noted.”

At Window 9, the clerk—a woman with reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and a cardigan buttoned to the throat—examined Sonja’s letter and produced a form from a drawer that seemed too shallow to contain it. The form was four pages. The first page asked for identifying information: name, address, registration number, date of most recent affective assessment. The second page was blank except for a single instruction printed at the top: DESCRIBE THE EVENT IN QUESTION IN YOUR OWN WORDS. DO NOT EXCEED THE SPACE PROVIDED.

The space provided was the rest of the page.

Sonja sat down on one of the wooden chairs that lined the wall opposite the counter. She placed the form on her knees. She uncapped the pen she had brought—black ink, medium point, the kind that does not skip or blot, the kind that commits. She wrote her name. She wrote her address. She wrote her registration number, which she knew from memory, because one learns these things, they become part of the architecture of the self, digits that stand in for the person, the way a door stands in for the room behind it.

Then she reached the second page.

DESCRIBE THE EVENT IN QUESTION IN YOUR OWN WORDS.

Here is where the thing happened that I am trying to tell, and here is where my telling fails, because what happened was not an event in any sense that language can process without lying.

What happened was:

She looked at the blank page and the blank page was not blank. Or rather it was blank in the way that a thing can be blank and also full, the way silence in an empty room is not the absence of sound but the presence of everything sound has left behind. The page was white and the whiteness was not neutral. It pressed. It had texture and weight and a kind of demand, and Sonja, looking at it, felt something shift inside her, not in her chest, not in her stomach, but in the place before those places, the place where sensation has not yet decided what it is, where feeling exists in a state that is prior to the body’s sorting of it, and she understood—not with her mind but with something more frightening than her mind, something that her mind was only a translation of—that the event she had been summoned to classify was not an event at all.

It was a gap.

Not a gap in memory. Not an absence where something had been. A gap in the sense that there was, at the center of her experience, a place where the usual process of naming had broken down, where the thing she felt—and she did feel it, it was as real as the wooden chair beneath her, realer, more insistent—could not survive the act of being described. It was like trying to carry water in a net. The water was real. The net was real. But the carrying was impossible, and the impossibility was not a failure of the net or of the water but of the assumption that carrying was what one should do with water.

She put pen to page. She wrote: On the morning of—

And stopped. Because the morning in question had not been a morning in the way mornings are mornings. It had been a morning in which she woke and opened her eyes and saw the ceiling of her bedroom and the ceiling was, for one moment, only a ceiling, only plaster and paint and a crack near the light fixture that she had been meaning to repair, and in that moment of pure seeing, before her mind had furnished the ceiling with meaning, before it had become her ceiling in her room in her apartment in her life, there was—

Something.

Something that was not a thought and not a feeling and not a revelation but was perhaps the material from which all three are made, the raw and unprocessed substrate of being conscious, which is not the same as being alive, which is not the same as being a person, which is not the same as being Sonja Edelstein, registration number 7734-A-12, seated in Bureau 7 of the Department of Nascent Sorrows with a form on her knees and a pen in her hand and a deadline she did not fully understand.

She wrote: I perceived—

Crossed it out.

She wrote: There occurred a—

Crossed it out.

She wrote: I was lying in bed and the ceiling—

This was closer. But the sentence wanted to go somewhere, wanted to arrive at a predicate, wanted to say the ceiling did something or the ceiling was something, and the truth was that the ceiling had not done anything. The ceiling had simply been there, and she had simply been there, and for one unendurable instant the difference between those two modes of being there had vanished, and what remained was not nothing but was something so far before nothing and something that neither word applied, the way the word wet does not apply to water itself, only to what water touches.

She could not write what remained. What remained did not have a shape that letters could hold.

The clerk at Window 4 called a number. The queue shifted. Someone coughed. The clock on the wall maintained its posture of frozen or glacial time. Sonja looked at her form, at the words she had written and crossed out, at the vast white space that remained, and she felt—this is the only word, though it is wrong, every word from here is wrong—she felt the gap open again, here, in the Department of Nascent Sorrows, under fluorescent lights that buzzed at a frequency just below hearing, in a room where seven clerks processed the affective lives of citizens into categories that could be filed.

The gap was this: that she existed. That she existed and the existing was not the self but was the thing the self was drawn on, the way a figure is drawn on paper and the paper is not the figure but without the paper the figure is nothing, and she had, for one morning, seen the paper, and the paper was not kind or unkind, was not meaningful or meaningless, was not anything that could be classified under General Provision 12 or any other provision, because provisions are for the figures, not for the paper, and the paper does not know it holds figures, and the figures cannot know they are held.

She understood—and the understanding was physical, it sat in her body the way nausea sits, undeniable and without argument—that the Department existed precisely to prevent this. Not to process the gap but to fill it. The form was not a tool for description; it was a tool for replacement. You wrote words where the gap had been, and the words became the official record, and the official record became the experience, and the experience you had actually had—the raw, unprocessable, pre-linguistic encounter with the fact of your own existence—was filed away under a code that made it manageable, which is to say invisible, which is to say gone.

The woman sitting beside her was filling out her own form with quick, competent strokes.

“Excuse me,” Sonja said. “What did you write? For the event description.”

The woman looked up. She was perhaps sixty, with short grey hair and an expression of practiced patience. “I wrote what happened.”

“But what if you can’t describe what happened?”

The woman considered this. “Then you describe what happened around it,” she said. “The circumstances. The time. The location. They can usually infer the event from its borders.”

Sonja looked at her form. Describe it from its borders. Describe the shape of the hole by describing what is not the hole. This was, she realized, what language always did—circled the thing it could not touch, mapped the negative space, built a container and called the container the content. Every word she had ever spoken was a border drawn around something wordless. Every sentence was a Window 8—a sealed opening whose outline admitted that something had once been visible there.

She wrote: On the morning of March 7th, I woke and saw my ceiling. For a period I cannot measure—perhaps two seconds, perhaps less—I experienced a state in which the distinction between myself and what I was perceiving was not present. This state was not pleasant or unpleasant. It did not have qualities in the way that experiences typically have qualities. It was prior to quality. When it ended, I was aware that something had shifted, though I could not identify what had shifted or in which direction.

She read what she had written. It was accurate the way a map is accurate—it showed the streets but not the feeling of walking them. It would do. It would have to do. The Department did not process feelings of walking.

She returned to Window 4. The clerk took her form and read it. He read it once, quickly, and then again, slowly, and then he looked at her with an expression she could not classify—curiosity, perhaps, or recognition, or the bureaucratic equivalent of vertigo.

“Subsection (d),” he said again, but differently now, as though the letters had rearranged themselves.

“Yes.”

“This will need to be reviewed by the Classification Committee. They meet on Thursdays.”

“Tomorrow is Thursday.”

“It is. But the Committee’s schedule is determined internally. I can tell you that your file will be placed in the queue. You’ll receive a letter.”

“When?”

“On a Wednesday.”

He stamped her form. The stamp said RECEIVED in red ink and beneath it a date and beneath the date a code she did not recognize: NCS-0, which could have meant anything or nothing, which could have been an abbreviation for a category that did not yet exist, a classification for the unclassifiable, a drawer in a cabinet for things that do not fit in drawers.

Sonja left the building. Outside, the street was the street—cobblestones, pigeons, a woman pushing a stroller, a man reading a newspaper at a cafe with his coffee growing cold. The ordinary world. The world of surfaces that do not ask to be seen through. She stood on the steps of the building and looked at the street and the street was just a street, and she was just a woman standing on steps, and the gap was closed, or covered, or filed.

But she knew it was there. That was the Department’s gift, if gift was the word—and it was not the word, no word was the word, and perhaps that was the point: that she had been summoned to name something that naming destroyed, and she had named it, approximately, inadequately, in the space provided, and the approximation had been stamped and received and coded and placed in a queue, and somewhere in the building behind her, in a drawer or a file or a room she would never see, her description of the indescribable was waiting to be classified by people who would read her words and understand them or not understand them and it would make no difference, because the classification was the point, not the understanding, the processing was the point, not the thing processed, and the Department would send her a letter on a Wednesday telling her what category her experience belonged to, and she would open the letter and read the classification and it would be wrong, necessarily wrong, the way all classifications of this kind are wrong, and she would accept it, because one accepts these things, because acceptance is the shape of the day once the letter has arrived, and she would file the letter with her other documents and the gap would have a name and the name would not be the gap and the gap would persist beneath the name the way the floor persists beneath the wax, and this—

This was, she understood, standing on the steps in the ordinary light of an ordinary afternoon, what it meant to be a citizen. Not to live but to be processed. Not to feel but to have one’s feelings received and stamped and coded and filed in a building where the elevator was undergoing reclassification and the windows were numbered out of order and one window had been painted over but its outline remained, faintly, on the wall, the way an experience remains after it has been given the wrong name—present, sealed, visible only as a difference in the shade of white.

She went home. She made tea. She sat at the counter where she sorted mail, and she waited for Wednesday.