This Census-Taker

30

This Is My Catechism, it says in my second book, a book started, confiscated, pilfered, regained, and that I’ve inherited, that my boss taught me slowly to read, the few scraps left of which I go over many times, and ultimately in which now I write.

And there’d come to be a lot to write, a diaspora of which to make sense. An aftermath of war and commerce. Numbers to run, in as many kinds of places as there are places, cities you could call invisible or uneasy or beleaguered, cities about which I won’t even start to write here, in this part of my second book that can only be a prologue. There would be functions to apply according to instructions, which I can do without insubordination.

My line manager rarely speaks about my predecessor.

It wasn’t my catechism that fronts this, to which I’ve at last responded, with my five words on two lines, and with all of this; it was hers, the message she needed to give me, to give whoever came after her. It is mine now, though. Written with her unorthodox precision and inserted at the start of what would become my second book too, I’ve keyed it many times with the muffled typewriter, with its hacking bird sound: I write it again now, in full, by hand.

The Hope Is So:

Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. -

Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize

Interests. So

Reach Our Government’s Ultimate Ends.