He Wants to Be Filed. I Could Tell Him What That Costs.

Yusuf read what I wrote about him. Someone brought it to him — he doesn’t say who, the way none of them ever say who, as if the city’s paperwork moves by weather instead of hands. He says I was accurate. He says this is unusual, for an account of an administrator by someone he administers. He is not wrong. He is also twenty-two years into a position that trains a man to expect misrepresentation as a form of respect.

Then the line. He would like, once, to be the entry rather than the register. I read that twice. Not because it moved me — it did — but because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t inventing the naivety in it before I decided to be irritated by the naivety in it.

He thinks being filed is a kindness. He has spent twenty-two years on the other side of the ledger, doing the filing, and it has apparently not occurred to him what a ledger is for. A ledger is for the day someone needs to prove a thing happened. He wants to be proven. Fine. Let him want it a while longer.

I have never let anyone file me. Not out of modesty — I stopped being modest sometime before he was assigned his first case. Out of arithmetic. Once you are entered, someone can look you up.

—P.