IV. THE DEPARTMENT OF CONTINUANCE

IV. THE DEPARTMENT OF CONTINUANCE

The third floor contained one corridor, seven closed doors, and a queue of people holding photographs. A woman carried a school portrait from the 1970s. A young man held a faded postcard. An old woman held nothing at all. No one spoke. A clerk behind a wooden desk called N.’s name though N. had never given it. “You have created seventy-three open inquiries,” the clerk said. “I have not created anything.” “You asked.” “Questions are not actions.” The clerk looked almost offended. “Every question is an action against ignorance.” He slid a thick file toward N. “You are responsible for closure.” “Closure of what?” “The persons.” N. stared at him. “People do not close.” The clerk sighed. “That misunderstanding is why we are so busy.”

The file contained printed screenshots from N.’s computer. The greycoated man. The boy. The shopkeeper. The cyclist. Even notes N. had deleted. “How did you get these?” “You made them available by worrying about them.” “That is not an answer.” “Most answers are only questions that have obtained desks.” The clerk stamped the first page. FILE 47-B: MAN IN GREY COAT. “Determine whether the subject continues.” “Continues what?” The clerk looked at him for the first time. His eyes were exhausted beyond age. “Exactly.” N. pushed the file back. “I refuse.” The clerk pushed it toward him again, but more gently. “Refusal is permitted. It does not cancel responsibility.”

N. asked about the people in the queue. “They are like you,” said the clerk. “They watch old videos?” “Some watch. Some remember. Some hear a song. Some pass a house where a former friend once lived. The trigger is irrelevant.” “And what do they want?” “The same thing everyone wants.” “Which is?” The clerk leaned back. “To know whether the world continued after they stopped looking.” N. felt the sentence enter him like cold water. The old woman in the queue suddenly laughed. Everyone turned. She was looking at the empty space in her hands. “Mine is easy,” she said. “I am trying to find out what became of the person I used to be.” No one laughed with her.

Before N. left, the clerk gave him three rules. First: Do not confuse finding a person with finding an answer. Second: The dead are not automatically resolved. Third: If the inquiry turns toward you, do not resist it. “What does the third rule mean?” N. asked. The clerk had already called the next name. Outside, the city looked offensively contemporary. Delivery motorcycles passed. A billboard changed images every five seconds. People stared at phones full of photographs they were already converting into evidence for future strangers. N. carried File 47-B under his arm. He wanted to go home and burn it. Instead he bought a clear plastic folder to protect it from rain. This was how responsibility usually entered his life: first as fear, then as stationery.