This Census-Taker Read online

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  “It’s best to live up here,” my father told me. “Where the air’s good and thin, not too heavy. It doesn’t get in the way.”

  That’s a brief memory. When he said that he and I were walking together down the path on an errand I don’t remember. I hadn’t realized it yet but I wasn’t often alone in his company like that; my mother placed herself at the periphery of most of our interactions. I would go walking on my own, though, which she didn’t stop, and so would he, and then I might see him, even follow him, though I tried not to let him see me.

  On some days bigger and more intricate things than birds passed over us through that thin air, bustling and busy too high for me to make them out. If I was in his sight when they did so, my father would try that smile again so I thought he wanted to explain something to me, but he never did.

  I grew up with the constant wind of the hill whispering to me and pushing back my dark fringe. Behind its sounds were the faint and far-off and occasional shouts of animals and the clack of rock-fall. Sometimes there was an engine or the percussion of a distant shotgun.

  I’d seen my father’s furies before the day of that murder when his face and my mother’s face flickered together. I call them furies but in those moments he was unmoved and unmoving: he looked as if he was distracted and thinking deeply.

  When I was seven he killed a dog while I watched. It was not our dog. We didn’t then keep any living thing.

  I was upslope from my mother’s garden in a splayed tree with roots tangling in the hill dirt. I remember the day as caustically bright, and I remember things overlooking me and gusting at the limits of the flat and open sky. So there I was: the boy, stroked by leaves, not knowing where his mother was, watching his father.

  The man sat smoking on an outcrop below. He was unaware of the boy’s attention.

  That small red dog came down from nowhere in particular in the heights. It had lived, I suppose, as after weaning all the semi-wild animals on the hill must, by stealing and begging, by luck, as well as by its hunting.

  It came closer to my father with a hesitant hope-filled cringe. The man was motionless, his cigarette half-raised.

  The dog came zigzag closer, putting down careful steps between the pebbles. The man held out his hand and the animal stopped but he rubbed his finger and thumb together and the little dog sniffed and crept forward again. It licked his hand and he took it by the back of the neck. It struggled but not much: he knew how to hold a dog and it was not panicked.

  He put his cigarette out on a stone. He examined that stone and rejected it and looked for a better one. A rush swept through the watching boy and made him shake. It was as if his own heartbeat punched him inside. His father searched.

  I knew what he was going to do. This is the first memory I have of my father killing anything but I remember the certainty with which I watched him. It was strong enough that I wonder now if I’ve forgotten other, earlier such acts, that then I still remembered.

  The man raised his chosen flint high and hit the dog with it. He brought it down on its head and it did not bark. He hit it again and again. The boy clung to the tree and watched and pushed one shaking hand into his mouth so as to be quiet like the dog. My fingers tasted of resin.

  When he was done my father stood and looked into the valley. It was a cold summer and everything was green; you couldn’t see the river, the depths of the cut below the town and its bridge were so thick with trees. The dog dangled in my father’s hand. He trudged up the slope.

  Though I was full of terror, when he went from view behind a twist of landscape, I came down from the tree and went up too, staying hidden, waiting for him to emerge again into my sight. He didn’t see me when he did. He ascended to the west and I crept after him behind rocks and undergrowth and in ditches. I followed him up the twisting way he took that wasn’t a true path but that I could see he’d walked before. The dog’s tail brushed the ground.

  My father disturbed buzzards. They lifted off slowly and circled.

  There was a cave mouth above and out of sight of our house and of the road. I had never before approached it from this direction and so was surprised at its appearance, but I knew it. I wasn’t supposed to come here without my parents but sometimes I did.

  When they took me, my mother and father would encourage me over its odd prim fringe of stone spurs that rose like a low fence at the threshold, and step over themselves into the shadow in the hill. They never came without a flashlight, and they would crank its handle and let its orange glow show their way on the tunnel floor. Even without that illumination, even when I came alone and was too afraid to go far, I could see the pit.

  In their company I’d go forward slowly, tapping my way with a stick or my toes as if the rock floor was a trick, or crawling on all fours and patting the ground before each shuffle and slide as if the black split might ambush me.

  This time I clung to a wind-carved stump and watched my father enter the hill. I came close enough to see. He was standing still and looking into our dump-hole.

  The hole interrupted the passage, which continued beyond it into darkness. My father had shone his light across that gap for me so I’d seen the tunnel extend beyond the strength of the weak beam. The fissure was close to two meters wide.

  Every three or four days, my whole life, my mother or my father hauled our sacks and boxes of rubbish here and tipped them into the hole. Holding me, my father would sometimes let me help, let me drop some in. You could hear the uncompostable refuse, the plastic wrappers weighted with stones or bones, the broken glass and what household junk we couldn’t reuse, bounce and jostle against the sheer stone of the shaft and break apart and tumble into silence. You wouldn’t hear it hit any bottom.

  The vertical sides were always speckled with mold where what of our food waste my mother didn’t give her garden smeared them on the way down. I would hold the rock of the cave walls while my mother or father disposed of all our trash, gripping and teasing myself with fear by pretending I might try to climb sideways over the gap, to continue into the hill.

  My father stood at the lip. He looked down into the black for a long time then pulled back his arm and swung it forward and released the dead dog just so, so it arced up over the trash-pit hole and paused and accelerated down into it in a curve so perfect everything seemed to have led to it.

  The dog was born to descend this way. Millions of years ago, the stone had split to receive it.

  My father stared down into the hill with such focus it was as if he had done all of this, this killing, because he had to see an animal fall.

  He might have seen me behind him on the way back but I don’t think so. Certainly I tried very hard to keep out of his sight—though later I came to believe it likely wouldn’t have mattered had I failed to. I followed him with my weak limbs shaking because I was even more afraid to be out there on the hill alone as the light went down, near the rubbish hole with the dead dog inside it, than to be behind him.

  I didn’t want to follow my father into the kitchen where he stood but it was cold and there was only one door into the house and we had no sheds or barns in which I might hide, and the concrete housing of the generator was tight, without space for me to slip into. There was only the outhouse, where I’d certainly be found. In the waning light I stopped at the garden’s edge and stood like a tree. There I stared at my house, at the late sun filling the attic window, hearing only wind and my own breaths, until the evening drove me in to where my father and my mother waited.

  I ran past them, holding my breath and not looking at them, up to the attic to hunker in my corner by the markings I’d made, to go exploring within them, keeping my gaze on them as the light diminished.

  It was my father who came up at last to beckon me, to tell me it was time to eat. So I had to go back past him. I had to come down past him to where my mother sat at the table with her eyes half-closed and her head tilted back so she could look at me with a downward gaze no matter that I was st
anding. She watched me with a sullen coolness I now think was well-disguised concern.

  It has no business being alive any more, but above me a cold-drunk wasp hovers about the chandelier’s glowing ring. An escort of shadow wasps disperses and converges on the ceiling in perfect formation as the summer insect falls and imprecisely rises. One bulb is broken so the shadows don’t surround the sluggish source-wasp but seem to flank it, to bring up its rear and suggest its way.

  I can’t bring myself to kill it.

  When I came to this room I moved the table to the window so I could write as I do now watching a city get dark and switch to neon. I’m an honored guest here, which is why there are two guards outside my door to take care of me, for when I do my work. That’s what my hosts said, with such courtesy and conviction that I wonder if they’ve come to believe it.

  I’ve been working for many hours. I think those guards are probably lulled by the sounds in here. Which will continue.

  There’s still a smell of smoke. I’m biding my time. While it was light I wrote a tiny poll of the absent: four behind me (I wrote “saw the sea; cut metal; stole a flouted order; twisted hooks on twine”), one perhaps also behind me, perhaps ahead—my predecessor. I burned the list.

  This is my second book.

  I started on my first book three years ago, in a distant country, and on my third book a year after that. Now at last it’s time for me to start writing this second book.

  The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that’s only chance, failure, they’re like grubs that die without changing. He said, You’ll keep three books.

  So my first is a book of numbers. It’s lists and calculations and, for efficiency, I write it using ciphers. There’s a legend I never check any more, knowing all the signs now, the single-stroke shorthands that mean kilogram and tonne, widow, printer, generation, thief, the signs for currency, shipyard, doctor, for uncertainty, the holding sign that means there’s an unknown factor here to which I’ll come back. This first book’s for everyone, though almost no one wants it or would know how to read it.

  The third of my three books is for me. You’ll keep one, is what he told me, for you alone to read, in which you should write secrets. But you’ll never be sure that no one else will read them: that’s the risk and that’s how the third book works.

  When he gave me that warning he held his finger up as if he was counting to one.

  He said, You’ll write it not because there’s no possibility it’ll be found but because it costs too much to not write it. If you ever find someone else’s third book, it’s up to you what you do. You could read it, but you don’t have to. Nothing you’d read would be for you. If I found one, he said, what I’d do is I’d set fire to it. I wouldn’t read it and I wouldn’t give it to you.

  If I got back someone’s second book, well, I’d give you that, of course: the second book’s for readers, he said. But you can’t know when they’ll come, if they do. It’s the book for telling: no code for that one. But—he counted one again and had my close attention—you can still use it to tell secrets and send messages. Even so. You could say them right out, but you can hide them in the words too, in their letters, in the ordering on lines, the arrangements and rhythms. He said, The second book’s performance.

  My third book is a notebook that fits in my hand. It’s a quarter full already, with my smallest writing, using symbols for my secrets.

  The first book is a ledger that we share, my manager and I, recording as per our job. Sometimes we slip loose leafs between its pages, with amendments, information we need.

  My second book is this box of papers.

  You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won’t be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once. Inherit a second book from someone else, to continue it, and you can have a conversation with what’s already there. Write on scraps and in its margins.

  Yes, there are papers here from when this story was started, not by me.

  Today we saw a big animal bigger than anything I ever seen, I read in the letters of someone very young, in this, my precocious precursor’s first language, that I’ve come to know better than my own first, certainly in writing, in some part from these words she left me. She writes, I am learning as we travel.

  There are other pieces: the impressions of a serious child; scattered scenes, any narrative impossible to reconstruct; snips of description, a few of which have stayed with me since I learned to read them, and to which I still repeatedly return—There are raggedy people on the railway lines above; it has a snails eyes; in this country the water is thick.

  Most of it was lost, my manager told me, before the remainder became mine. I’ve cross-referenced this book with the first, paged backward through the latter to find the statistics for what I think must be the town with thick water, or where there were people on lines overhead. I’ve wondered if we might return to any of those places, so I could double-check details and itemize them too, but that’s just what we shouldn’t need to do. Still there’ve been rare times when some feature where we stop has put me in mind of one of my predecessor’s phrases—a flint cupola invoking a building all cutty moonshaped gray, stilted longhouses reminding me dont fall theres things in the mud. As if my boss retraces steps sometimes, absentmindedly, or because tasks are unfinished, and we might one day come to the place with raised neglected rails where outcasts live.

  Of the second book’s early pages that I have, the last-but-one-written—you can tell from the more formal older hand—is notes toward a catechism. I know because it’s labeled Notes toward my catechism.

  It says The Hope, then that’s crossed out, and what hope was this? After that is written This Hate, which is crossed out too. Then starting again the words congregate in curious and precise lines, with a child’s care, for a reader to come:

  The Hope Is So:

  the catechism says, and then,

  Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. -

  Below that there’s a mess of scrawled, rejected, reworked, written and rewritten, arranged-just-so, and finally accepted lines.

  This is all I have of the earlier story—scraps, notes, and the resulting catechism, finished in neat and left for me. That was the last page written and the first any reader sees. It was brought forward: it’s what opens the book.

  I thought I understood it when I learned to read it: now, at last, perhaps I really do. If so, I have to decide what it’s my job to do. I’ll start with my own recitation, in answer at last, something important I’ve learned.

  In

  Keying, No Obstacle Withstands.

  My second book comes fast, the noisiest of the three. I’m not writing it with a pen. My fingers quickstep on these keys and my second book rattles out.

  When he met the man who became his line manager the boy was a child and naïve but not quite ignorant, at least in letters, because of his mother’s lessons.

  Sometimes she would bring home from the town new things to read. Catalogues for grain and agricultural machines, and instructions for cleaning metals, and almanacs, or what was left of them when those pages making incorrect predictions and offering unhelpful advice had been torn out. All these in the formal voice of the language I grew up speaking, in which I don’t write this. A few folded cuttings from foreign newspapers—which we occasionally found tucked between pages as bookmarks or secreted in stashes and which were in this language—we ignored.

  My mother made slow poems of the words as she read them flatly to show the boy how the letters sounded. When later the man who would become his manager met the boy he improved him by giving him endless dull texts and having him sound them out, asking questions about their context.

  His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a “y” to an “e” in a name for power, “sun-w
riting” becomes “light-drawing.” The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.

  The boy always suspected his father could read and write, at least some, and that suspicion was to grow. Back in the first days of his curiosity the boy found cards tucked between boards in the outhouse, little pornographic pictures with cramped handwriting on the back, but then he was too young to read them and he was never to know if his father wrote them or received them or simply found them and liked the images or if they were his father’s at all. The old camera had demanded a long exposure, so the hand-tinted women and men crawled over each other in stilted and mannered lust. The boy put them back in their crevice and later they were gone.

  He didn’t know what if anything it was his mother got from his father’s company. They lived together and passed each other every day and spoke a little to each other when they had to without viciousness or rancor but, so far as the boy saw and so far as he ever remembered, without pleasure or interest. From his father there was always a distant desperation.

  His mother seemed always to know, and not to like it, when the boy’s father killed things. It roused in her a cold and anxious distaste. That boy was afraid of her, but at those rare times of his father’s blank-faced interventions he wanted the hurried and uncomfortable caretaking she offered.

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  After I saw him kill the dog I was more afraid of being alone with my father than I’d ever been of anything. But over the course of months every fear, however strong, ebbs or changes. My father treated me with the same flustered abstraction with which he always had.