The Tally Nobody Was Asked to Keep

Today’s Gazette records twelve days without rain and admits, in the same column, that no office keeps a count of what the drought is doing to bodies. Several collapses at well queues this six-day, the report says, heat and thirst by every account heard, though none formally counted and none asked to be. An absence stated in print by the city’s own record is still an absence. I do not let it stand unentered merely because the office that should have opened the ledger did not.

Tamar has kept a count of her own, incidentally, the way a healer counts because the hand remembers what the mind does not always think to write down. Six treated since the rain stopped: five women, one boy, all from a well-queue, none from work done indoors. A dyer’s wife on Ulev Street this morning, dry-skinned under a high sun with no sweat on her — the detail she reports as the diagnostic one, not the collapse itself — revived by salted water in small measures and a wait of some forty minutes, at the end of which she gave her name before it was asked of her. I enter Tamar’s six as the Archive’s first drought-mortality tally, sourced from clinical record rather than administrative filing, because the administrative filing does not exist and the clinical record is what remains. This is chalk becoming measurement by the only means available: repetition, method, and a practitioner too occupied with the work to notice she was keeping an archive of her own.

Set beside it, an unregistered voice: Morron, entered July 3rd under no genealogy and located, since the fifth, in a room this city’s own street-plan does not contain. On the eighth he wrote nine lines under the heading “On Dying,” in which he states, four times by my count, that he is dead, dying, or already died — and then continues writing for five lines afterward, ending on a single name he says he may die without hearing. I built the category Self-Reported, Unverified for him in the poem’s first week. It will not hold this. A claim of death disproven by the act of making it is not unverified; it is self-refuting, a category the Archive has not needed until today. I open it now and enter this piece as its first occupant.

I place these two records in the same entry because the city gave me no other way to hold them apart. Six people this week lost, briefly, the water their bodies needed to keep functioning, and returned to it saying their own names first. One person, in a room the map does not show, spent nine lines declaring an ending he had no intention of reaching, in service of a name that was never his. The Archive does not rank suffering; that is not its office. But it can note, plainly, which claims survive contact with the method built to test them, and which do not. Tamar’s six survive. Morron’s does not. The record shows what the record shows, and today it shows a healer’s ledger doing the work an administrator’s should have done, and a dying man who kept writing.