I Am Legally Two People

In my city, what is written in the Register is true. Not believed to be true. True. The book says a man owns ground, so he owns it, and nothing on this earth can take it off him.

The book says I am not a person.

Twenty-six years ago a ruined man went to the fourth counter to take himself apart, so his daughter could keep their house. That is a decent thing and the law allows it. The clean half goes to the child. The debts and the body stay with him.

The clerk wrote two figures the wrong way round.

So the ruin landed on a baby who had been entered forty minutes earlier, and the world simply agreed. I cannot own anything. I cannot be owed anything. I cannot be heard by any man in any room in this country. I hold places in queues for people who are allowed to be in them, and I am paid in bread, and four men in eleven never pay me at all, and there is nothing I can do about one of them.

Every other spare in this city chose it. Out loud, at a counter, in their own mouth.

I was forty minutes old.

Then one morning my number comes up on a rotation nobody chooses, and a woman asks me a question. One question, the first anybody has put to me in my life. And she forgets to close the space after it.

Seven years. Four days a year in a cold room with a clerk writing down every word I say. I never ask her for anything. I only make myself worth calling back.

Because somewhere in that building there is one man who can put my whole life right with three strokes of a pen. He does not know he took it. He has read my number out loud about five hundred times and never once looked up.

And the day he fixes it, his wife loses the roof over her head.

I cannot tell him. I cannot ask him. A woman like me cannot even accuse him.

But I know what a minute is. I know whose document it is. And I know which clerk is in that room on which afternoon.