Nothing to Report - Griffin Paschall

The seventeen sentences are read to her at seven, and the first of them concerns weather that occurred in 1961, and in sixty-one years she has never once been told whether it is raining now.

Mr. Pring reads them. He is fifty-seven and there is a tremor in his left hand that arrived in 2004, the year of his divorce, which she is not supposed to know about, and which she knows about because a man who has read you the same seventeen sentences for thirty-one years cannot get to the ninth one without you hearing what it costs him that day.

The ninth of March was fine and clear with a wind off the water.

The dog was called Bramble and was black.

Your mother thanks you and sends her best regards.

Her mother has been dead for forty years. The sentence stays because removing it would be a change, and there is no mechanism in the world by which anything about her may be changed, and so a dead woman goes on sending her best regards every morning at four minutes past seven, in the voice of a man with a tremor, and the Standard says thank you, which is not one of the sentences but has been permitted since a subcommittee sat on it for fourteen weeks.

She is the Standard. There is no other word for her in the building and there has not been a name on any door she has used since she was four days old.

The kilogram used to be a lump of metal in a vault outside Paris. Platinum and iridium, a cylinder about the size of a plum, and it was the kilogram, all of it, the whole authority, and every scale on earth agreed with that plum or was wrong. Then somebody weighed it against its own copies and found that it had lost about fifty micrograms, which was impossible, because it defined the unit. It could not lose weight. Everything else could only gain.

So they wrote the kilogram out of matter and into a constant, and the plum went into a drawer, and that was the end of the last object that was allowed to simply be the measure.

She was fifty-four the year they did it. She had been the measure since before she could hold her head up, and nobody came down to tell her.

The Standard has been kept in conditions that do not vary. Same room, same lamps, the same meals in a fixed cycle, same water drawn from a reservoir the Bureau bought outright for reasons that had nothing to do with drinking. She has never chosen anything. Choosing is a variable. She has never seen the sea, which is a thing she knows about the way she knows about Paris, which is to say from sentence eleven, which mentions a harbor.

There is a form for the sea. There is a form for everything, and the form for the sea is older than most of the staff, and has been declined by every Registrar she has had, all of whom wrote the same two words in the box, which are Not Yet.

*

What they measure against her, nobody will say, because saying would be a change.

She understands the shape of it. You cannot detect a drift from inside the drifting. If every clock in the world slows together, no clock in the world can tell you, and the people who might notice are made of the same slowed hours as the clocks. If something began happening to human beings, some slow subtraction, everyone would lose it together and the loss would be invisible, and the word for what was gone would go with it, and there would be no one left who could say what the room used to have in it.

Unless you had held one person still.

That is what she is for. She is the plum in the vault. They bring her out twice a year and set her beside the world and see what the difference has become, and then they put her back, and the difference is written in a register she is not permitted to read.

The Bureau employs a hundred and forty people. Nine of them exist to eat what she eats, forty minutes before she eats it, to confirm that a cheese has not been reformulated. Two of them are dedicated entirely to the lightbulbs, of which the building holds a stockpile calculated to last until 2061, purchased when the manufacturer announced it was discontinuing the filament, in a fortnight so expensive it is still spoken of in the accounts department the way other buildings speak of a fire.

They tried, of course, to make another.

The replacement programme produced four candidates, and it produced them under the same protocol, and every one of them failed, and they failed in the same place, which was that they developed a preference.

The first liked the color yellow. That was all. A child of six who reached for the yellow one, whichever it was, every time, and reached for it faster in the afternoons, and the whole apparatus of the Bureau came down on that reaching like weather, and the file was closed inside a year.

The second was worse. The second was a girl who at nine began to perform being unchanged, having worked out what was wanted, and a person who performs stillness is moving.

The third they lost to a road.

The fourth is eleven and has, so far, no preferences at all, and is watched by a staff of thirty, and the Standard has been shown one photograph of her and has not been shown another. In the photograph the girl is looking a little to the left of the camera, at something outside the frame. The Standard thinks about her perhaps once a week, and has spent some years wondering what the girl was looking at, and has never once carried the thought to the end of itself, and thinking is permitted, and thinking is the only country she was ever given.

Mr. Pring is not permitted to say anything that is not one of the seventeen sentences.

He has broken that, in thirty-one years, four times.

In 1998 he said sorry after dropping the card.

In 2004 he said no to a question she had asked, and the question is not in any record because she asked it very quietly, and the no was not either.

In 2011, when his mother died, he came in and read all seventeen and got as far as the door and stopped with his hand on it, and did not turn, and said, She had a good one, at the end. She had a good one. And the Standard sat in her chair in the unvarying light and did not answer, because answering would have been a variable, and because the shape her not-answering made in that room was the largest thing that had ever happened in it.

The fourth is coming, and she has known it was coming since the spring.

Here is what she has not told them.

Three years ago she began to suspect that she had drifted.

She thinks she loves him. She has thought so since about 1996 and has been careful, for the better part of thirty years, to hold it at a distance she considered survivable, in the manner of a woman keeping a lamp in another room. And three years ago it came into the room.

If that is true, then she is contaminated. If it is true and she declares it, they void the register, and sixty-one years of the only reliable measurement the species has ever taken of itself goes into a drawer beside the plum, and the fourth candidate is eleven, and the arithmetic of the thing is that nobody now living will see another Standard come of age.

If she does not declare it, they will go on measuring the world against a broken plum for as long as she lasts, and they will write it all down, and they will believe it.

The fourth time Mr. Pring breaks it is on a Tuesday in the autumn, with the lamps at their fixed hundred and twelve, at four minutes past seven, immediately after her mother's best regards.

He puts the card down on his knee and looks at it.

"I've been asked to stop," he says. "They want a younger reader. The tremor's got into the delivery, they say. Cadence." He turns the card over, which is a thing he has never done, and there is nothing on the back of it. "There's a young man been doing the timing on it for a fortnight. He's very good. He's got a lovely voice, actually. He'll do it better than me."

The Standard sits with her hands in her lap.

"How long," she says.

"March."

"That isn't one of the sentences."

"No," says Mr. Pring.

Fourteen weeks they sat, once, on the question of whether she might be permitted to say thank you. Nine people eat ahead of her every day of her life in case of a cheese. There are lightbulbs in this building for the year 2061.

And they are going to change the voice, and no one in the hundred and forty will enter it in the register as a variable, because it has not occurred to any of them that he is one.

Outside the room, which she has never seen, it is either raining or it is not.

"Mr. Pring," she says, "in 2004 I asked you a question and you said no."

He does not look up from the card.

"I remember what I asked you."

"So do I," he says.

"Was it true, the no."

The tremor has got into both hands now, she sees, and she thinks with great clarity and no particular sadness that she has watched a man's entire body come apart over three decades at a rate of one morning at a time, and that this is the only long thing she has ever been permitted to look at, and that it has been, by an enormous distance, the most interesting object in the world.

"No," says Mr. Pring.

The Registrar comes on Thursdays. She is the fourth Registrar of the Standard's life and she is a decent woman and she has the sea form in a drawer, declined, with Not Yet in the box in her own handwriting, which she wrote herself, and has thought about most weeks since.

There is a procedure for a declaration. The Standard has known the procedure most of her life. It takes one sentence. You say that you believe you have varied, and you say in what, and the register closes that day, and everything behind you becomes weather nobody recorded.

The Registrar sits. The Registrar asks whether there is anything to report, which is the question she asks every Thursday, and which has been answered no two thousand nine hundred and some times.

And the Standard looks at this tired woman opposite her, and thinks about the thing they have never told her they were measuring, and finds that she has known it for years, the way you know the shape of a room you have never had a light in.

They were measuring one thing. Whether it is still in us. Whether a human being kept in a white room and fed on schedule and told seventeen dead sentences a day, with nothing to want and no permission to want it, would go on producing the thing anyway, out of nothing, against instruction, at enormous cost, for a man with a tremor who was not allowed to speak.

She is the experiment. She has been the experiment the whole time. And she has run for sixty-one years and she has produced an unambiguous result, and the result is yes, and the moment she reports it the instrument is void.

Somewhere in this building a girl of eleven is being watched by thirty people for a preference. One sentence closes the register and sends that girl back to whatever they took her out of. One sentence keeps it open, and the girl gets this room, and the lamps at a hundred and twelve, and a young man with a good voice to read her the weather from before she was born.

She knows what she is buying. She has known since the spring, and she has had every morning of the spring and the summer and the autumn to arrive somewhere else.

"Nothing to report," says the Standard.

The Registrar writes it down.

In March a young man with a lovely voice reads her the seventeen sentences and he is, as promised, very good.

The ninth of March was fine and clear with a wind off the water.

The dog was called Bramble and was black.

Your mother thanks you and sends her best regards.

"Thank you," says the Standard, at four minutes past seven, as permitted.

She sits in the fixed light. Somewhere in the building a woman opens a drawer and takes out a form about the sea and reads two words in her own handwriting and does not, this year either, change them.

And the Standard, who is called Ottilie, which is a thing nobody in the building has said out loud in her lifetime, carries the lamp back out of the room and sets it down in the other room where it has always been kept, and does not put it out, and comes back and sits, and will carry it out again tomorrow, and goes on being the only accurate thing left on earth for as long as they need her to be.