Ballad of Elsewhere Province
Part One: The Counter Counted
First Count
The counter finds twelve spoons in a kitchen drawer that should hold seven. The extra spoons have initials. B.M. L.C. T.P. Someone else's grandmother's silver except not silver, that cheap metal that bends when you stir soup too hard.
The woman from down the hall was supposed to explain this but she's in the bathroom. Has been in the bathroom since noon. It's 4 PM. The bathroom is empty. The sound of water but no water.
The counter counts again. Thirteen spoons. No, fourteen now. The drawer holds more than it should.
The Notebook
The recorder keeps records. Tuesday: normal. Wednesday: normal. Thursday: delivery. Friday: delivery. Saturday through March 2024: delivery.
This is wrong. Delivery is not a day. The recorder knows this. Writes it anyway. Perhaps the days delivered themselves. Perhaps we're still learning what days.
Someone reads over his shoulder. "That's my handwriting."
It's not.
It is.
She's not there.
What the Collector Collected
The collector has a box of things from March 2020. The box is full. When you open it there's nothing but it weighs forty pounds. Weighs exactly what a year of isolation weighs if isolation was measured in pounds which it isn't except.
The investigator arrives. "What's missing?"
"Nothing's missing."
"Then why did you call?"
"I didn't."
The phone records show seventeen calls. She doesn't own a phone. Both true. The investigator's knee hurts. Rain.
The Store
The clerk works at the grocery. Worked at. The store sells food. Sold food. Sold.
Customers keep coming in asking for spreadsheets but this is a grocery. Was a grocery. The aisles are full of Excel cells now growing like mold on bread. The formulas calculate nothing. Output: #ERROR. Output: Thursday. Output: the sound of.
A regular customer shops here every Tuesday. She's buying milk. The milk expires before she pays. Been in line since March. The line has three people. The line has fifty people. The line has everyone who's ever waited for normal to.
The Discovery
The neighbor finds the same photograph in seven different apartments. It's a picture of someone's wedding. Nobody knows whose. Each apartment has it framed differently. One has it backwards. One has it burnt at the edges but the burn is painted on.
The photograph is of the neighbor's wedding.
The neighbor was never married.
Both.
What Got Filmed
The documentarian films the counting. Was filming. The camera runs but there's no memory card. Hasn't been memory since. She films the counter with his spoons. The count changes each time she reviews: twelve, thirteen, seven, forty-one, Wednesday, blue.
"What are you filming?"
"The way we forgot how to."
She doesn't finish.
Why the Tenant Left
The upstairs tenant moved out Tuesday. Still lives here. The apartment shows both. Furniture gone but impressions in carpet so deep they hold water when it rains. Mail arrives. Mail doesn't. The mailbox exists and doesn't.
Someone new lives in that apartment now. Has always lived there. Just moved in. The lease is signed 1987. The lease is signed tomorrow. The date keeps changing every time.
The Investigation Stops
The investigator can't investigate what isn't crime. The spoons aren't missing they're extra. The phone calls happened from no phone. The photograph is real of something that wasn't.
"What's the crime?"
"Time is."
"Time is what?"
"Time is."
He writes in his notebook. The notebook is the recorder's. The handwriting is someone else's. The words are nobody's.
Less
The counter finds fourteen spoons. Then fifteen. The drawer fills while he watches.
Woman still in bathroom that's empty. Water running. No water.
The recorder's journal: Sunday: Monday: Tuesday: _
The collector's box weighs more each day. Nothing added.
The store sells what it doesn't have to people who aren't.
The neighbor finds photograph eight. It's blank. It's the wedding. It's.
Even Less
Spoons multiply in empty drawer.
Bathroom door is is is.
Delivery delivery delivery delivery.
Box weighs what we.
Store was.
Wedding never wedding always.
Films nothing.
Gone still here.
Almost
Count.
Water.
Weight.
Store.
Photograph.
Camera without.
The Count Continues
Seventeen spoons in a drawer that nobody opens.
Eighteen.
Nineteen.
The counter isn't there anymore but the counting.
Twenty spoons.
Twenty-one.
Tomorrow someone will open the drawer and find exactly seven spoons.
They'll count twice.
Find seven again.
The extra spoons will be in other drawers, other houses, traveling.
Looking for their grandmothers.
Looking.
Part Two: The Tuesday Inventory
The Ring Situation
Céleste Wuanet counts forty-seven rings on Herb's table but he only owns one mug. The blue one. She brings casserole #48. The casserole has carrots this time even though nobody mentioned carrots. The rings have dates—03.15.20, 03.16.20, wait no that's not right. They're not dates they're.
Herb sees a clean table.
They're both right but Céleste's left knee hurts today.
Louise's Collection
Louise Campilla has jars. She labels them things like "Last choir practice before," and "Tuesday, regular Tuesday, 2019." She's seven minutes late to everything because in those seven minutes she exists in the empty rooms.
The jar labeled "Tuesday, regular Tuesday, 2019" smells like nobody was afraid of each other yet. Or maybe it smells like tuna fish. She can't tell anymore.
She said something to Herb once about this but he was looking at his table.
The Nothing-Jam Incident
Goon Ox makes jam. Everyone tastes nothing. Vera Marcus, who has a piano, gasps.
Margaret Chen walks through from a different story about derivatives and collapse, keeps walking.
Louise tastes it and whispers: "This is the jar I can't find."
They pass it around again. Everyone tastes their own absence.
Diop Mehta isn't there to taste it.
The Spot Nobody Mentions
Aisle seven between tomatoes and paste. The floor looks wet sometimes but isn't. It's 3/4 of a meter square.
Diop Mehta was buying paste. Or maybe tomatoes. His mother was in another country. Another time zone. Another. The phone was. His knees were. The paste fell.
Nobody stands there now. Tuesday, 3 PM.
Still Falling
Vera's sheet music—Chopin's Waltz in A minor—has been falling since Tuesday, March 2020. Not metaphorically. Actually falling but slowly. She plays the shadow it casts on the wall. Different songs at different hours. At 3 PM it sounds like her refrigerator humming. At dawn it sounds like.
She's been meaning to get the refrigerator checked.
She's been meaning to let the music land.
She's been meaning.
The sheet music might have already landed. She hasn't looked in eleven days.
The Contamination Spreads
Louise opens wrong jar—"February 2020, dental waiting room"—spills it into the nothing-jam. Now it tastes like the last time anyone worried about small things. Everyone who eats it remembers their final trivial complaint.
Thierry Pascal remembers complaining about his parking spot at work.
He doesn't work there anymore.
He doesn't work.
He doesn't.
The Kitchen That Isn't
Herb Kerren finds Louise in his kitchen except he calls it "space where cooking hypothetically" which isn't how anyone talks except it's how everyone talks now.
She's holding empty jar with today's date. "I've been looking for you," she says. Or maybe "I've been looking for." Or maybe just.
He's about to respond but notices the forty-seven rings all at once and forgets. They don't waltz but their bodies remember. Everything's in 3/4 time since Tuesday infected the world with its time signature. Their bodies lean.
"We're different now," Louise says or maybe Herb says it or maybe it's Céleste who walked in without knocking carrying casserole #49.
What the Inventory Reveals
Nothing.
They're arranging jars on a table with forty-seven rings or no rings or. The nothing-jam is there, lid still won't close. Céleste has a paper with math on it from when she was Margaret Chen but she's not Margaret Chen she's just Céleste who lives down the hall and brings casseroles and her knee hurts.
"We're making an inventory," Herb says to nobody in particular.
The sheet music lands or doesn't. The sound is or.
More Fragments
We are very pliable we survived by.
Someone's microwave beeps in another apartment. Maybe Uma Arouje's but she moved out. Or is still there heating the same cup of coffee forever. 4 PM. Always 4 PM.
Louise is seven minutes late to her own realization.
The forty-seven rings are still there. Or they're not. Herb and Céleste see different things and they're both.
Diop Mehta's spot in aisle seven is exactly the size of a waltz for one but nobody measures it so.
There's a brass tack on the floor. Bent at exactly the angle of social distancing.
Vera plays piano at 3 AM now. The neighbors haven't complained. The neighbors might have moved. Or died. Or they listen. Or the walls are. Or.
Tuesday keeps happening.
Ann June was supposed to be part of this but Ann June is.
The inventory continues but nobody writes it down.
Chaos Nelson would have written it down but Chaos Nelson is seven minutes late. Will always be seven minutes late. To everything. Even to not existing anymore.
The inventory isn't of things.
It's of how we held them.
How we hold.
Herb's blue mug sits on forty-seven rings on no rings on a clean table.
The blue mug is the only thing that stays.
Blue like Tuesday.
Blue like before.
Blue.
We are very pliable we survived by.
We are very.
We are.
