On Finding Myself Filed Under Someone Else’s Hand

Someone brought me Promisa’s account of the two occasions I sat in her corner. I did not ask for it, the way I did not ask for Dusya’s field notes some years ago, and I notice I am developing a habit of receiving unsolicited documentation of myself that I did not commission and cannot correct.

She writes that I asked her once whether she filed anything official, that she said no, that I did not believe her. She writes, of the second visit, that I did not ask at all. She is accurate on both counts, which is unusual for an account of an administrator by someone he administers, and I have spent longer with the sentence that follows than I intend to admit: that I stayed long enough to establish I was not staying, twice, and that this constitutes a kind of filing on her part, of me, for which I hold no comparable record.

The same week produced two smaller facts, unrelated except in shape. A rumor concerning the Harbor Factor’s dealings in copper has circulated at the well and been repeated in an unregistered diary; no complaint has reached this office, and none will be entered on the strength of a rumor, correctly. A cooper’s backlog on Ulev Street has produced citizens mending their own jars with wax and cord, unlicensed, unpetitioned, and the Guild has not reported it and I have not asked them to. Neither is a matter for the Divan. Both are the city functioning without reference to me, which twenty-two years should have taught me is the ordinary condition of the place and not the exception.

Promisa’s line was that the forms were always optional. I administered a court people chose to bring things to. I am filing this where no one will read it, because I would like, once, to be the entry rather than the register.