Off Course
City archivists document what power wants preserved, but when reports flood in about unauthorized stories pinned to trees across Cleveland, one archivist starts collecting them after hours, discovering that some movements can't be archived because they're still moving, still breathing, still pulling people off their designated paths.
---
The first report came Tuesday. Someone had stapled pages to the oak outside the courthouse. Chanson pulled them down with latex gloves—city protocol for handling vandalism. Twenty-pound copy paper, already soft from rain.
She was supposed to photograph and file. Instead, she sat in her car reading about a father teaching his daughter economics with soap bubbles. The daughter said numbers were bubbles too. They popped.
Chanson's father had said something similar in 2008, right before he stopped eating. Stopped trying. Stopped.
City Archives, Fourth Floor, Municipal Building. Her desk faced a brick wall. Eleven years, $42,000 annually. Her apartment cost $1,400 monthly for 400 square feet above a check-cashing place. The math of her life: always subtraction.
By Thursday, she'd collected seven more stories. Different trees. Same signature: "Oyparaploo." Made no sense. She googled it. Nothing. Added them to her filing system: "Vandalism—Public Property." But kept copies in her bag.
"Getting weirder," Mr. Fitzgerald said, her supervisor. "Mayor wants them gone but documented first."
"I'm documenting."
"Good. Quick and clean. We've got real work."
Real work: preserving city council minutes where they voted to demolish public housing. Real work: filing permits for luxury condos. Real work: making the official record that erased the unofficial city.
Saturday, off the clock, she went to Randall Park Mall. Abandoned since 2010. Once the largest in America. Now the largest absence. The stories mentioned it.
She cut her hand getting through the fence. Blood on her khakis. Found people inside.
"You're the archives lady," someone in an inflatable unicorn costume said.
"How—"
"We've seen you collecting the stories."
The unicorn led her deeper. Every dead store was alive with something else. In the old Spencer's, a woman was teaching children to fold bankruptcy forms into birds.
"Chapter 7 or 13?" a kid asked.
"Doesn't matter. They all fly the same."
In the food court, someone she recognized—the museum janitor, saw her sometimes when working late—was arranging garbage into patterns.
"This is art?"
"This is garbage. But we're treating it like art. Changes both."
Chanson took notes. Not in her official notebook. On her hand. Would wash off. Would remember anyway.
A child, maybe eight, paint everywhere, looked at her notebook.
"You writing about us?"
"I'm archiving—"
"Dead things get archived. We're not dead."
True. Whatever this was, it wasn't dead. Wasn't dying. Was actually growing.
She spent the next week following threads. The bankruptcy court where people were doing something with benches—she couldn't tell what. A dive bar where a woman played violin made from fishing line and wood. The Contemporary Museum where someone had written questions on the walls and nobody had painted over them.
"Why does entry cost more than minimum wage?"
"Which board member owns the refinery?"
Questions she'd never thought to ask. Questions that, once asked, couldn't be unasked.
Her supervisor called. "Where's the report?"
"Still collecting."
"It's been two weeks."
"These aren't isolated incidents. They're connected."
"To what?"
She didn't know. That was the problem. Or the point.
At Jefferson Elementary, she found what might have been the first story. Or the last. A child's drawing. Dinosaurs dancing with pizza. Everyone inside bubbles. Labeled: "ON TO OFF CORSE."
Misspelled. Perfect.
She went back to the mall. More people now. Living there maybe. Teaching each other things. A banker showing people how to tie fishing line into knots.
"This is debt," he said. "Can't untie it. Can only carry it different."
A girl, maybe thirteen, teaching someone to paint with motor oil.
"It dissolves things. But makes them pretty while dissolving."
None of it made sense. All of it made sense.
"What is Oyparaploo?" Chanson asked.
Everyone looked at each other.
"It's this," someone said.
"It's us," someone else added.
"It's a word Madison made up," a woman said. "Or found. Or dreamed. Doesn't matter."
Madison. The child with paint. Who might be Maybe from the stories. Who might be real. Who was definitely real, standing there, eating a sandwich.
"Did you write the stories?"
"Some. Others wrote others. Everyone signs them the same."
"Why?"
Madison shrugged. "So they belong to everyone."
Chanson went home. Her apartment full of copies now. Stories, photos, notes. The official report unwritten. The unofficial city sprawling across her floor.
She started writing her own story. About finding the stories. About following them. About discovering the city she'd been archiving wasn't the real city at all. The real city existed in abandoned malls and dive bars and questions written on museum walls.
Monday, she went to work. Told Fitzgerald she couldn't archive something still happening.
"Everything's still happening until it stops," he said. "Your job is to make it stop. On paper. Fixed. Filed."
"I can't."
"Then you're fired."
She'd expected it. Eleven years. No severance. At-will employment. At-will termination.
That night, she pinned her own story to the courthouse oak. About the archivist who went off course. Who found the real city. Who chose the living over the documented.
Someone would find it. Would follow it. Would end up at the mall or the court or the museum. Would become part of whatever Oyparaploo was.
She started going to the mall daily. Not teaching—she didn't know anything worth teaching. Just helping. Holding things while people tied knots. Adding to the garbage arrangements. Writing questions on cardboard.
"You were the archivist," someone said.
"Still am. Just archiving different things."
"What things?"
She gestured at everything. The mall. The people. The stories still being written.
"Things that won't hold still."
Winter came. The mall was cold. They burned wood in barrels. Illegal but warm. She learned everyone's names. Or the names they used. Or the sounds they answered to.
Madison showed her more stories. Hidden ones. Written on walls, on skin, on the inside of abandoned stores.
"These won't last," Chanson said.
"Nothing lasts. That's why we keep making more."
Spring. The city tried to demolish the mall. People chained themselves to the pillars. Not protesting. Just being there. Just continuing.
The demolition was postponed. Then forgotten. The city had other absences to create.
Chanson never went back to official archiving. But she kept collecting. Stories, moments, connections. Put them in boxes. Not organized. Just together. The way the movement was together. No leader. No plan. Just people doing something because doing nothing was death.
She wrote on the last page of her last notebook: "Off course is the only real course."
Then tore it out. Pinned it to a tree. Let it go.
Someone would find it. Would follow it. Would discover what she'd discovered: that the real city lived in the spaces marked for demolition, that the real archive was the one nobody paid to maintain, that going off course was the only way to find what was actually there.
Still there.
Still moving.
Still refusing to be filed under any category.
Still Oyparaploo, whatever that meant.
Still.
---
The real archive isn't in filing cabinets but in abandoned malls and bankruptcy courts and stories pinned to trees, collected by people who've gone off course from their designated paths, discovering that some things can't be preserved because they're still happening, still transforming, still pulling people off their safe routes into the dangerous, necessary territory of the undocumented real.
