Permit Required for Closure

I will set down here a true account of how I came to be in Perdition and what I found there and what arrangements were made, as I have been asked by no one in particular to do so but feel the civic record ought to reflect the facts.

My name is Rooster Sillman of Tolar County and I was at that time engaged in the recovery of a man who had taken from me a roan mare, a leather valise containing six hundred dollars in banknotes and a certificate of deed to forty acres of bottomland along the Perdido River, and my second-best hat. The hat was not valuable. It was the principle of the thing, though I will admit the six hundred dollars also entered into my thinking.

The man’s name was Crashaw or Crawshaw — I had heard it both ways and he did not correct either — and he wore a black coat of the kind that suggests a man has been to a funeral recently or is planning to attend one in the near future. I had met him at a card game in Suttree’s place outside of Caballo where he presented himself as a land agent working on behalf of Eastern interests. He had fine hands. I noticed them because a man with fine hands playing cards at Suttree’s is a man who is either very good or very new, and Crashaw was not new.

He took my money and my mare over three hands I still cannot account for. The cards were ordinary cards. I checked them. He did not cheat in any way I could detect, which is not the same as saying he did not cheat. The deed to the bottomland he took by a method I am less clear on. I signed something. He produced a document and I put my name to it and when I examined the thing the next morning it was a bill of transfer for the forty acres, properly witnessed by two men I did not recognize but whose signatures looked legal enough. Memory is not a legal instrument, as Judge Henshaw once told me, and he was right, though it felt less right when it was my forty acres at issue.

I set out after Crashaw the following morning. He had a day’s lead on me. I was riding my first-best horse, a buckskin named Durable, and Crashaw was on my roan heading west toward the alkali flats, which was a poor direction for a man who did not know the country.

The flats are white and flat and offer no shade and no water for thirty miles. I had three canteens and grain for Durable and jerky for myself, which is not a meal but it is food. Crashaw’s trail was easy to follow. The roan had a nick in the left rear shoe that printed in the alkali like a signature. The wind carried the smell of hot mineral and nothing else. The flats do not support life in any form I could identify, though I was told once by a geologist that the white crust is full of organisms too small to see. I have always found this a troubling idea. A place that looks dead but is alive in ways you cannot perceive is worse than a place that is simply dead. A dead place is honest about its conditions.

I followed the trail for two days. On the second morning I found that two molars on the upper left side had come loose in the night and one of them fell out when I pressed on it with my tongue. I examined it. No rot, no crack. It had simply let go of my jaw as if the jaw no longer required it. I cut my jerky into smaller pieces and chewed on the right side and did not think much of it. Teeth fall out. I was forty-three years old and had already lost four to various causes and two more was not a crisis but a trend.

On the third day the flats changed. The white alkali gave way to a reddish hardpan cracked into tiles the size of dinner plates, and the tiles shifted underfoot so that Durable’s hooves rang and clattered. The sky was the color of old brass. Ahead of me, at a distance I judged to be eight or ten miles, a dark line on the horizon that might have been a ridge or the edge of something. I rode toward it.

By noon I could see it was a town. This surprised me. I had not expected a town out here and neither of my previous crossings had brought me this far west. A town does not appear and disappear based on one’s direction of approach. A town is there or it is not. This one was there.

I reached it by mid-afternoon. There was a wooden sign at the edge of town that read PERDITION — POP. 344 and below that, in smaller letters, EST. and then a date that had been painted over so many times the numbers were a brown smear. The buildings were frame and adobe, one street wide, with a livery stable, a general store, a saloon whose sign said CLAIMS OFFICE AND SPIRITS, a church with a steeple that leaned eleven degrees to the east by my estimation, and a scattering of houses that looked like they had been set down by a hand that was not paying close attention. Nothing was square. The church was not square to the road and the road was not square to the compass and the houses sat at angles to each other that suggested each had been built according to a different understanding of where north was.

I tied Durable at the rail in front of the general store and went inside. The proprietor was a woman of about sixty with white hair and hands stained with something I took to be walnut ink but later decided was not. She was reading a newspaper three years old with the attention of someone encountering the news for the first time.

“I am looking for a man in a black coat,” I said. “He would have come through here on a roan mare with a nicked left rear shoe.”

“He came through,” she said. “He’s at the hotel.”

“You have a hotel.”

“We have rooms above the saloon that Palmer calls a hotel. Whether they constitute a hotel in the legal sense I could not say. He charges hotel prices.”

I thanked her and went to the saloon. It was dark inside and smelled of lamp oil and cedar and something under both of those that I could not name, something organic and warm, like the smell of a root cellar in August. The bar was a plank across two barrels and behind it stood a man of considerable width who introduced himself as Palmer. I asked for whiskey and he poured me one and it was adequate. I asked about Crashaw.

“The man in black,” Palmer said. “He’s upstairs. Room two. He’s been there since he arrived and he’s paid through the week.”

“With what?”

“Cash money. Six hundred dollars in banknotes.” Palmer paused. “He said he had come into some funds.”

I set my glass down. “Those are my funds.”

“Well,” Palmer said. “That is between you and him. We don’t adjudicate financial disputes. That’s the county’s business and the county seat is in Solarville, which is eighty miles east, if it’s still there.”

“If it’s still there?”

“Solarville moves around. Not the people. The town. It has to do with the survey markers. The original survey was conducted by a man who was drinking and the lines he drew don’t correspond to the landscape anymore, and the town is legally obligated to be where the survey says it is, which is not always where it was yesterday.”

I did not know what to make of this and so I finished my whiskey and went upstairs. There were four rooms. Room two was at the end of the hall and its door was closed. I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again and tried the handle and the door opened and the room was empty. The bed was made. The window was open. On the bureau was a tin cup with water in it and next to the cup was my second-best hat.

I picked up the hat. It was mine. The sweatband had my initials in it where I had burned them with a heated nail, which is a method I recommend for marking property, as ink fades and tags fall off but a burn in leather persists. I put the hat on. It fit, but differently than I remembered. The crown seemed higher. I attributed this to the heat and the fact that I had been wearing my first-best hat for three days. A man’s head does not change shape, I know this, but a hat’s fit is a subjective matter and I was tired and had lost two teeth and was not inclined to pursue the question.

I went back downstairs. Palmer said Crashaw was probably at the well. Most people go to the well when they first arrive.

“I did not go to the well.”

“You’re not most people, I suppose. Or you haven’t been here long enough.”

He said the well was at the west end of town, past the church, near a stand of cottonwoods that should not have been growing there, as there was no visible water source to sustain them. He said anyone could use it, though what you got from it depended on what you asked.

“It’s a well,” I said. “What do you ask a well?”

“Questions,” Palmer said, and went back to wiping the bar.

I walked through town and observed several things I will record here. A man was repairing a fence in front of a house near the church. The fence had no gate and enclosed no yard — it was a line of posts and rails running parallel to the road for about thirty feet and then stopping, fencing nothing from nothing, and the man was replacing a broken rail with the seriousness of a man performing essential civic maintenance. Two women sat on a porch across the road shelling beans into a tin basin and neither of them looked up but one of them said, as I passed, “He’s the one from northeast.” The other said, “They’re all from northeast.” The first one said, “That’s what I mean.” This exchange was not directed at me. It was directed at the beans, or at the general fact of my presence, which the town had already registered and categorized in the way a body registers a splinter — not with alarm but with the understanding that a foreign object has entered and the tissue will now organize around it.

There was a dog sleeping in the road. It was missing its left rear leg but it was not injured — the place where the leg had been was smooth and furred, as if the leg had never existed, as if the dog had been built with three legs and was functioning as intended. I liked the dog. It was honest about its situation.

The well was a stone circle about three feet high with a wooden frame and a rope and bucket. Crashaw was not there. I looked in. The water was about fifteen feet down and it reflected my face, which I studied because I had not seen a mirror in some days. The jawline on the left side seemed softer than I remembered, as if the bone had receded where the molars had come out. I did not ask the well anything. I am not in the habit of speaking to infrastructure.

I found Crashaw that evening. He was in the church, sitting in the third pew from the front, his black coat folded beside him. The church was small and smelled of candle wax and old wood and the same warm organic smell I had noticed in the saloon. The preacher was not present but his shadow was. It lay across the floor near the pulpit, the shape of a thin man with his arms at his sides, and it moved with the light through the windows, though it was ahead of the light by a degree or two, anticipating where the sun would be rather than responding to where it was. I noticed this. I did not remark on it. A shadow is an effect of light and obstruction and if the obstruction is not present then the effect is anomalous, but anomalies are more common than people suppose and most of them have explanations that are simply not available to the observer at the time of observation.

“Crashaw,” I said.

He looked thinner than he had at Suttree’s. His face had narrowed and his fine hands were longer than I remembered, the fingers tapering to points that seemed impractical for card-handling or any other manual task.

“Sillman,” he said. “I expected you sooner.”

“I came as fast as was appropriate.”

I sat in the pew across the aisle from him because sitting next to a man who has robbed you suggests a familiarity that the circumstances do not warrant.

“I want my money,” I said. “And the deed. And the mare.”

“The money is spent. I paid Palmer for the room. The deed is in my coat. The mare is in the livery. You’re welcome to both.”

“You spent six hundred dollars on a hotel room?”

“Palmer’s rates are not what you’d expect. Everything here costs more than it should because everything here is more than it should be.”

“I came here because I was told about this place,” Crashaw said. “A man in Caballo told me about a town in the flats where the rules that govern other places are relaxed. Not absent. Relaxed. The way a muscle relaxes. It’s still there. It still has the same structure. It just doesn’t grip as hard.”

“I don’t care about the rules. I care about the deed and the mare.”

“Take them. I don’t need them anymore. I came for the town, not for the money. The money was the vehicle. I needed someone to follow me. A man pursuing another man across a wasteland — that’s the structure. The town responds to structures. Stories. If you come here alone, the town doesn’t notice you. But if you come as part of something — a pursuit, a pilgrimage, a flight — the town takes an interest.”

“I am not part of your structure.”

“You’ve been part of it since Suttree’s.”

I stood up. “I’ll take the deed and the mare and leave in the morning.”

“You can try,” Crashaw said, and the way he said it was not a threat but a statement of conditions, the way a man might say you can try to carry water in a sieve. Not hostile. Just informed.

I went to the livery and found the roan. She was in good condition. The stableman, a boy of about fifteen with a port-wine stain covering the left half of his face, had cared for her well. I paid him for the boarding — two dollars, which was reasonable — and told him I would be taking both horses in the morning. He said that was fine. He did not look at me when he said it and I do not think he meant it.

I slept in Room Two at Palmer’s hotel. The bed was comfortable. The room was warm, though there was no stove and the window was open. In the night I woke and found that another molar had loosened and I pulled it out with my fingers and set it on the nightstand. In the dim light I examined my hand and found that my fingers were longer than they had been that morning. Not dramatically. A quarter inch on each. The knuckles were the same. The nails were the same. The fingers were simply longer, as if they had been gently stretched while I slept, and they ached in the way that bones ache when they are growing, which is a pain I had not felt since I was thirteen and my mother gave me willow bark tea. I flexed my hands. They worked. The grip was the same. I went back to sleep.

In the morning I went to collect the mare and the deed. The deed was in Crashaw’s coat, as he had said, but now there was a second signature below mine, and below that a series of stamps and notations in ink of different colors that appeared to be county filings, land assessments, water rights, mineral rights, easements, and a notation that read: PROPERTY OF PERDITION MUNICIPAL TRUST — HELD IN ESCROW.

Crashaw said the town has an administrative apparatus. Things get filed. Once something enters the town’s system it acquires attachments. Your arrival was documented. Your pursuit was documented. It’s all in the civic record. The well keeps it.

I went to the well. I did not want to go to the well but the deed was now encumbered with filings I had not authorized and I needed to understand the administrative procedure for clearing them. This is the sort of problem that in any other town you would take to a county clerk, but the county clerk was eighty miles away in Solarville, which may or may not have been where it was yesterday, and Perdition did not appear to have a clerk’s office.

The well was as I had left it. The cottonwoods stood over it and their leaves moved in wind I could not feel. I leaned over the stone rim and looked down.

“I need to clear the filings on a deed,” I said. I felt foolish saying it.

The water rippled. There was no wind. The water was fifteen feet down and nothing had disturbed it, but it rippled as if something below the surface had shifted, and then the rippling stopped and the water was still and on its surface I could see words forming — not written on the water but reflected in it, as if written on the sky and the water was merely showing them to me:

FILING CANNOT BE REVERSED. PERMIT REQUIRED FOR CLOSURE. SEE OFFICE OF THE ASSESSOR, POSTED HOURS.

“Where is the office of the assessor?”

HOURS VARY. NEXT AVAILABILITY UNCLEAR.

“That is not helpful,” I said.

The water did not respond.

I spent the next three days looking for the office of the assessor. Palmer said the assessor worked out of his home but could not recall which one. The store woman said the assessor had been dead for eleven years but the office continued to function in an administrative capacity. The stableman pointed at a low adobe structure with no windows and a door painted the same color as the wall. It was locked. A sign read ASSESSOR — POSTED HOURS and below it HOURS POSTED AT OFFICE OF THE CLERK and below that CLERK’S OFFICE RELOCATED — SEE ASSESSOR.

On the second day my boots fit differently. My feet had not swollen but the boots were tighter across the toe and looser at the heel, as if my feet had redistributed their mass, the bones sliding forward. I removed the boots and the toes were longer and the arch was higher and the skin on the soles was thicker, almost like horn.

On the third day I saw the woman that everyone agreed had always been there. Her hair was dark and her face was the face of someone who had been standing in that spot so long that the spot had shaped itself around her, the way a river shapes its banks. She looked at me and said, “You’re the one who’s following.”

“I was following. I’ve stopped. I found the man. I’m trying to leave.”

“That’s the following. You’re following the leaving now. That’s still following.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you have a direction and the town is the thing between you and the end of that direction. The town is always the thing between.”

She went back inside the store and I ate my crackers on the bench and noticed that the church steeple was now leaning thirteen degrees to the east, which was two degrees more than when I had arrived. I was keeping track. Keeping track seemed important. If I could document the changes precisely enough they might remain changes rather than becoming conditions. A change implies a before-state and the possibility of return. A condition is just what things are.

Crashaw found me that afternoon. He was thinner still. His black coat hung on him like a curtain on a rod and his face had the angular severity of a man who has not eaten, though I had seen him eat a full breakfast that morning. The food was going somewhere but it was not going to Crashaw. He sat beside me on the bench and for the first time he looked afraid.

“You need to stop trying to leave,” he said. “The town registers your attempts. Every time you go to the well, every time you look for the assessor, the town documents it. You’re generating paperwork. The paperwork has weight here.”

“Paperwork does not have weight.”

“Here it does. I asked the well how to leave and it said: DEPARTURE REQUIRES SETTLEMENT OF ALL OUTSTANDING OBLIGATIONS. I asked what my obligations were and the list was four feet long. It reflected on the water and I had to read it like a scroll. Charges I’d never incurred, debts I’d never taken on. The town has been filing against me since I arrived.”

“Then pay them.”

“I gave Palmer six hundred dollars and he filed it as a deposit against future charges. Not a payment. A deposit. A payment settles a debt. A deposit creates an obligation to stay until the balance is drawn down, and the balance never draws down because the charges accrue faster than the deposit diminishes. It’s a perfect system. The town runs on it.”

I looked at Crashaw and saw that his fear was genuine and also that it did not change anything. He had brought me here. He had said so himself. The structure required a pursuer and he had made me into one and the town had recognized the pattern and opened its administrative mouth and swallowed us both. I should have been angry. I was not angry. I was tired, and my jaw ached where the teeth had gone, and my hands were sore with the bone-deep ache of growth, and I wanted to sit on this bench and eat my crackers and not think about permits or filings or the office of the assessor.

That night I lost another tooth. This one was a canine, upper right, and it came out clean, no blood, just a slight yielding like pulling a nail from soft wood. I set it next to the others on the nightstand. Four teeth in five days. I examined my jaw in the light from the window and found that the jawbone on both sides had receded visibly, the bone pulling back from the gum line like a shore eroding, and the gum tissue was smooth and firm where the teeth had been, not wounded, not healing, just smooth, as if the jaw was returning to a state it had occupied before teeth were introduced to it. A jaw without teeth is not a damaged jaw. It is a jaw that has been relieved of a function. I touched the smooth gum with my longer fingers and felt nothing unusual.

My gait changed the next morning. I noticed it walking to the store for provisions. My stride was shorter and my feet struck the ground differently, the heel barely touching before the weight shifted to the forefoot, which was now the main structure of the foot, the heel having diminished in proportion to the toes, which had continued to lengthen. I was walking like a man going downhill on flat ground. Palmer noticed it.

“You’re settling in,” he said.

“I am not settling in. I am buying crackers.”

“That’s what settling in looks like. Buying crackers. Learning the rhythms.”

I did not go to the well. I had learned that going to the well generated filings and filings generated obligations and obligations generated reasons to stay. Instead I went to the livery and checked on Durable and the roan. They were fine. Horses do not seem affected by whatever was affecting the people. Durable’s legs were the same length they had always been and his teeth were all present and his hooves were the proper shape and dimension. Whatever Perdition did, it did to people. Or to things that had the capacity to notice it, and horses do not notice things the way people do. A horse accepts its conditions absolutely. That may be a protection.

I tried to ride out on the sixth day. I saddled Durable and headed northeast, the way I had come in. I rode for four hours by my estimation, keeping the sun on my left, compass steady on northeast the entire ride, and at the end of four hours I was back in Perdition, approaching from the southwest, as if the flats had bent around behind me. Durable was not winded. We had not turned. The flats simply did not go anywhere except back.

I tried north. Same result. I tried south. Same result. Every direction led back to Perdition. The approaches varied — sometimes past the livery, sometimes past the church, once past a schoolhouse I had not seen before, though I never saw children — but the destination was the same.

Crashaw stopped trying to leave before I did. I found him on the bench outside the store on what I believed was the eighth day — though I had begun to suspect my count was off, as the daylight hours did not correspond to any season I recognized, the sun rising and setting at intervals that felt correct but did not add up to twenty-four hours when I tried to time them with my watch, which had stopped on the third day and would not restart — and he was reading the same three-year-old newspaper the store woman had been reading when I arrived. He looked up at me and his face was so narrow now that his eyes appeared to be on the sides of his head rather than the front, and his fingers, holding the paper, were six inches long at least, the nails curved and yellowish, and he held the paper with a precision that was less human and more specific — like a tool designed for one task.

“The well says three hundred forty-six,” he said. “That’s you and me. We’re in the count now.”

“Being counted is not the same as belonging.”

“In Perdition it is. The count is the census. The census is the civic roll. The civic roll determines tax obligation. Tax obligation determines residency. Residency determines belonging. It’s all filings.”

I went to the well. I know I said I would not, but I was now a counted resident of a town I had not agreed to reside in, and my body was changing in ways I could document but not arrest, and when your only source of information is inadequate you use it anyway because the alternative is no information at all.

“How do I leave?” I asked.

DEPARTURE REQUIRES SETTLEMENT OF ALL OUTSTANDING OBLIGATIONS. CURRENT BALANCE: $1,847.33.

“I do not owe anyone $1,847.33.”

ITEMIZED STATEMENT AVAILABLE AT OFFICE OF THE ASSESSOR. POSTED HOURS.

“The assessor is dead.”

ADMINISTRATIVE FUNCTIONS CONTINUE. DEATH DOES NOT VOID MUNICIPAL APPOINTMENT.

“I would like to speak to someone in authority.”

AUTHORITY IS VESTED IN THE MUNICIPAL CHARTER. THE CHARTER IS AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW AT THE WELL.

“You are the well.”

CORRECT.

“Show me the charter.”

The water rippled from the sides, the stone walls contracting slightly, and the water rose two inches and on its surface text formed, dense and small, paragraphs and clauses and subclauses, and the first line read: THE MUNICIPALITY OF PERDITION, BEING A BODY INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF NO COUNTY, STATE, OR TERRITORY RECOGNIZED BY EXTERNAL AUTHORITY, DOES HEREBY ESTABLISH THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES OF CIVIC GOVERNANCE, WHICH SHALL APPLY TO ALL PERSONS, ANIMALS, STRUCTURES, SHADOWS, AND OTHER ENTITIES WITHIN THE MUNICIPAL BOUNDARY, WHICH IS COTERMINOUS WITH THE VISIBLE HORIZON AT ANY GIVEN POINT OF OBSERVATION—

I stepped back. The charter was not a fixed document but a growing one, adding provisions as I watched, and by standing at the well reading it I was generating new provisions, and by generating provisions I was creating obligations, and by creating obligations I was filing against myself by the act of trying to understand the system that was filing against me.

The water settled. The text faded. The cottonwood leaves rustled in wind that did not touch my skin.

That night the preacher came to the hotel. He was a small man, smaller than his shadow, with a round face and mild eyes and the general demeanor of a man who has never been unkind and has never been useful. He sat on the edge of my bed — I had not invited him in but the door was open because the lock had been filed as a municipal fixture and I no longer had the right to restrict access, according to a notice Palmer had slid under my door that afternoon — and he said, “You’re not adjusting well.”

“I am not trying to adjust. I am trying to leave.”

“Those are the same thing, looked at from the right angle. Everyone who adjusts to Perdition began by trying to leave. You try and you fail and eventually the trying becomes a routine and the routine becomes a life and the life becomes a residency and the residency is all there is.”

“That is not adjusting. That is giving up.”

“In Perdition those are the same word. We only have the one.”

His shadow followed him out about a quarter-second late, as if it had been listening at the door.

I stopped counting the days. This was not a decision but an inability. The days in Perdition did not accumulate the way days accumulate elsewhere, each one stacking on the last to form a column you can measure. Here the days pooled. They spread out. They occupied the same space, so that a thing that happened on what I thought was the ninth day also seemed to have happened on the fifth and the twelfth, and I moved through time the way you move through a field: in whatever direction is convenient.

I still had Durable. I still had my guns. I still had the deed, though the filings on it had multiplied to the point where the document was now eight pages long, each page covered in stamps and notations and signatures in hands I did not recognize, and the original bill of transfer — the one with my signature on it — was now on page six, buried under assessments and liens and easements, a fossil in a stratum of paperwork, evidence of an earlier time when the transaction had been clear.

My teeth were gone. All of them. The jaw was smooth and gummed and when I closed my mouth the gums met in a seal that was firm and required no effort to maintain. Palmer served a corn mush at the saloon that was suitable. I did not miss the teeth. You do not miss a thing when its absence is comfortable. That is the definition of a thing you did not need, and I have always believed in traveling without unnecessary equipment.

My hands were useful. The long fingers could grip things at distances normal fingers could not reach, and the heightened arch of my feet made me surer on the uneven ground of Perdition’s streets, which shifted and buckled as if something beneath were breathing. Palmer told me I walked like the woman at the store, which I took to mean I walked like a person who had been here long enough that the ground recognized their footfall.

The feed for Durable cost two dollars a day. This was reasonable. The corn mush cost fifty cents. This was reasonable. The room at Palmer’s cost five dollars a night, which was not reasonable but was the rate, and the rate was filed and the filing was binding and the binding was municipal and the municipality was Perdition and Perdition was where I was. My cash was exhausted in what I estimated was three weeks, after which Palmer told me my charges would accrue against my tax obligation, which would accrue against my property, which was the forty acres of bottomland along the Perdido River, which I no longer had the deed to because the deed was now eight pages of municipal filings and the property had been incorporated into the Perdition Municipal Trust through a series of administrative actions I had not participated in but which bore my name.

I did not own the land anymore. The land owned me, in the sense that my obligation to pay for things in Perdition was now secured against a property that Perdition administered, and the administration of the property generated fees, and the fees were charged to me, and the charges accrued against the property, and the system was perpetual and self-sustaining and did not require my consent to continue because it had been filed and what has been filed is permanent and what is permanent does not need permission.

I saw Crashaw one more time. He was in the church, in the same pew, but changed to the point where I recognized him only by the black coat. He was thin to the point of translucency, light from the windows passing through the edges of him, and his fingers were eight inches long and curled around the back of the pew in front of him with the grip of something that grows rather than grasps — ivy, or root — and his eyes were on the sides of his head and he turned one toward me and the other toward the window and both saw me.

“The well says I’m an easement now,” he said. “Not a person. An easement. A right of passage across a property. I have no obligations because an easement cannot incur debt. I have no property because an easement cannot own. I am a legal fiction that permits movement across the town’s holdings without requiring a deed of transfer.”

“Are you all right?”

“I am performing my function. That’s the same as being all right, in Perdition.”

I left the church. The preacher’s shadow was on the steps, waiting for the preacher, and it looked at me. A shadow cannot look at you but this one did, tilting its flat dark head at an angle that indicated attention, and I nodded to it because you acknowledge what acknowledges you. That is a rule of courtesy that transcends anatomy.

I went to Palmer’s. The corn mush was on the stove. I ate a bowl. It cost fifty cents, charged to my account, filed against my property, secured by the Municipal Trust. The mush was good. Palmer makes it with lard and salt and a pinch of something sweet, maybe sorghum, and it coats the gums in a way that is satisfying when you no longer have teeth — nothing between you and the food, no mechanism of reduction, just the food and the surface and the acceptance.

My name is Rooster Sillman. I am a resident of Perdition, population three hundred and forty-six, though I have been told the number changes. I am employed by the municipality in a capacity that has not been specified but which involves maintenance of the civic record, which is kept by the well, and the well keeps good records, and I keep the well, which means I stand beside it and do nothing visible, which is a job in the sense that it has been filed as one and what has been filed is permanent.

The feed for Durable is two dollars a day. I pay it from my account. My account is secured against property I do not own, administered by a trust I did not establish, governed by a charter that writes itself. The numbers work out. In Perdition, the numbers always work out.

The price of feed went up this morning. Two dollars and fifteen cents. Palmer says the increase is due to supply-chain considerations. I said that was reasonable. Everything here is reasonable. That is the worst part, though I would not call it the worst part, because calling something the worst part implies a judgment, and judgment is an assessment, and assessments are conducted by the office of the assessor, and the assessor is dead, and his office is closed, and the hours are posted, and the hours are never.