Ecclesiastes by Zark Fekete

Every morning, the Archivist arrived just before the sun burned off the smog. He rode the elevator to the fourth floor of the Memory Tower…the east wing…Department of Significance. The lift doors opened and he unlocked his office with a key labeled VANITY in scuffed gold.

The tower’s rooms were quiet with walls of institutional gray. His office held a single long table. Above it, a fluorescent tube gave off weak light and hummed, the kind of sound that goes unnoticed until it’s gone.

The Retrieval Department sent him one item per day. Today it was a child’s shoe. Tattered blue canvas, no lace.

He turned it over in his hand, thinking, “Evidence of joy, or of sudden departure?”

He wrote: Item #22318. Small red shoe. Suggests early motion. Loss probable, but not tragic. Meaning: Transitional object, minor.

He filed the report in Drawer G–MISC (NONRECURRING).

The items that arrived seemed random. Tomorrow, it might be a glass eye. Or a paper crown. Or a torn journal. His task was not to remember for people, but to remember for time. To keep the story orderly. And small.

He was proud of his restraint. Other archivists, those in the West Wing, had grown sentimental. Some wrote poetry in the margins of books. They included notes of what they felt. Once, someone had added a drawing of a bird.

The Archivist shook his head at that. Those wings had consequences. He preferred accuracy with no preciousness. Straightforward descriptions…coldly cataloged. Simple. Sterile.

—

One afternoon, a new intern arrived from Central Allocation. Her name was Ruth. She asked too many questions.

“Do you ever worry the meaning changes?” she said, watching him examine a rusted house key.

“No,” he said.

“But it must have meant one thing to the person who lost it, and another to the person who finds it?”

“We’re the terminal. The stop. That’s the purpose of the archive: to fix the drift.”

“But who assigns your meaning? Don’t you register personal change?” she asked.

He stared at her until she shrugged and left the room. He assigned the house key the following note: Symbol of imagined safety. Meaning: Recursive.

—

The following week the Retrieval team sent a mirror. No frame. Just a smooth disc of polished silver. He’d never seen a mirror in the archive before.

He looked into the glass.

First, he saw his face. Then his father’s eyes. He blinked. The mirror reflected him. He pushed the mirror away, and, as he did, it caught the fluorescent light from above and momentarily the office had splashes of moving light and extra depth.

He breathed in deeply. Then he grabbed the mirror and turned it face down.

—

The next morning, the tower was quiet. Even the light hum of the fluorescent seemed dim.

The file drawer resisted him. Drawer G–MISC (NONRECURRING) would not open. He pulled. He kicked it. It groaned. Then opened wide.

Inside was not the child’s shoe. Not the house key. Inside was sand. He stared at it. Outside his office the elevator gave off a faint creaking. He cautiously reached into the sand. It moved through his fingers. Golden and fine, like beach sand, but colder. His fingers brushed something buried. He grasped it and pulled it out. The mirror.

He held it for a long moment. The light played off his eyes. He placed it on the table. That day he did not write anything.

—

He left the tower that night and walked home under an unusually clear sky. He took the same streets home, but this time he caught himself looking around…noticing. In a courtyard he passed daily, a woman was playing a song on a cello. Each note warbled and bent toward the next like branches in wind.

He walked on but then stopped at the next block. Ruth sat on the steps of the entrance, sipping a cup of tea.

She smiled at him softly. After a long while, he sat next to her.

“How did you know?” he asked.

She nodded. “Once you begin to notice, it never stops.”

He said, “I feel I’ve only been labeling shadows.”

Ruth nodded. “Then light moves and everything changes.”

—

The next morning, the Retrieval Department sent nothing.

He opened the file, wrote one line, and placed it in the top drawer: Item #22350. Absence. Meaning: Eternal.

He locked the room. When the elevator arrived, he stooped and dropped the key labeled VANITY into the slot between the elevator floor and the landing. He heard the metal tinking as it fell into the darkness below.

He left the tower without looking back. He went looking for the cello.

Zary Fekete

Image by Alexa from Pixabay a house key on a plain background.