VIII. THE DEFENDANT IS TIME

VIII. THE DEFENDANT IS TIME

The Department transferred N. to Hearing Room 4. There was no judge, only a table with two chairs. On one sat the clerk. The other was for N. “You have appealed the temporary closure of File 47-B.” “I did not appeal anything.” “You continued thinking about it.” N. understood that here thought and paperwork were interchangeable crimes. The clerk opened the file. “State your complaint.” N. said, “Gabriel is alive, but the person in the video is gone.” “Correct.” “Then your department cannot track continuance.” “Correct.” “Then what is the point of it?” The clerk folded his hands. “To give your fear a building, so that you may eventually leave the building.”

N. laughed angrily. “So none of this is real?” “Reality is not our department.” “What is?” “Administration.” The clerk produced a blank form titled DEFENDANT. “Whom do you hold responsible for the disappearance of the people you saw?” N. almost wrote Death. Then he thought of Gabriel, alive and absent from himself. He wrote Time. The clerk nodded. “Common answer.” “Has anyone won?” “Against time?” “Yes.” The clerk considered this with bureaucratic seriousness. “Several have requested postponements.” N. waited. “They died before the hearing.” The clerk stamped the form: CASE ACCEPTED. For the first time N. understood the joke and did not find it funny.

The hearing began with evidence supplied by N. himself. A childhood photograph. His first school identification card. A recording of his tenth birthday. A voice message from years earlier in which he laughed in a way he no longer laughed. “What is this?” N. asked. “Exhibits.” “Against time?” “Against your claim that disappearance happens only to other people.” The screen showed ten-year-old N. blowing out candles. He had forgotten the shirt, the room, even the cake. His mother’s younger voice called from behind the camera. N. covered his mouth. “Where is he now?” asked the clerk. “I am here.” “That was not the question.” N. hated him then, because the clerk had found the exact cruelty N. had been inflicting on strangers.

“Where is the boy?” the clerk repeated. N. looked at the child on the screen. “Gone.” “Dead?” “No.” “Alive?” N. could not answer. The boy smiled at someone outside the frame. “You demanded a stable status for everyone you encountered in old images,” said the clerk. “Provide one for yourself.” N. felt trapped by grammar. Every tense betrayed him. I was. I am. I will be. None could hold the whole person. “I continued,” he said finally. “Into what?” “This.” He heard Gabriel’s answer in his own mouth and understood why the old man had raised both hands as if presenting evidence too ordinary to defend. The clerk closed the file. “Adjourned until you stop confusing continuity with sameness.”

Outside the Department, N. called his mother. “Do you have the old birthday videos?” “Somewhere.” “Can we watch them?” She was quiet. “Why?” N. almost said because I need to know where I went. Instead he said, “I want to hear your voice from then.” His mother laughed softly. “My voice is here.” “I know.” “Do you?” He closed his eyes. There was something merciless about the living when one had become too devoted to archives. They kept interrupting memory with presence. He told her he would visit Sunday. After hanging up, he did not check an old video for nearly six hours. The interval felt enormous, almost healthy, and therefore suspicious.