Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Then signs of unrest appeared in Alibia. And no one saw them sooner or felt them more keenly than Fluxman. It began with an outbreak of error in the telephone directory, which was the great love and labour of his life. It was an unprecedented plague, not just in the frequency of the error, but in its nature. Strange animals started creeping into his proofs, species of error he had never seen before — letters turned inside out, flares of coloured print in the gutters, numbers joined at the head or hip. Some batches of galleys contained errors so odd they seemed to belong to another civilization. He did everything in his power to contain the outbreak; but there were inexplicable relapses on the page proofs too, as errors sprouted afresh where they had already been weeded out. Nothing could have been more distressing to a proofreader. Yet Fluxman did not discuss the problem with his colleagues. He waited impatiently for their regular meetings and the opportunity to unburden himself; but when he arrived at the Café Europa, the sight of their familiar frowns always discouraged him. The plague would subside on its own, he decided, and kept his concern to himself.

*

In these same years, the printer’s devil at the Alibian Star was a young McCaffery. Every afternoon, it was his duty to carry the galley proofs of that day’s edition from the printing works to the council chambers, where an official appointed by the City Fathers would read and approve them. The scooter ride across town was a welcome break in the gloomy routine of the boy’s day, and he made the most of it, pursuing roundabout ways to prolong his pleasure, and then taking reckless short cuts to make up for lost time. More than one person, forced to leap from his path as he raced through a yard or down a staircase, predicted that he would come to an unhappy end, which he did.

On an autumn afternoon, in a little-used alley behind the football factory, he rode head first into a stone wall and was killed outright.

The next day, the Star carried a photograph of the dead boy sprawled in the wreckage of his scooter, with a babble of broken type from the wicker delivery basket scattered around, and the galleys washing over him like cheesecloth billows in a pantomime.

*

The spate of error in the Book did not abate. It grew steadily worse, until Fluxman knew that he could no longer keep it from the others. He convened a special meeting of the Society. He worried endlessly about how his statement would be received. Would they think that he had lost his senses? That it was some uncharacteristic prank for their amusement? Anticipating laughter or derision, he prepared a carefully worded speech and, when they had gathered in their cubicle at the Europa, he rose to deliver it, although such formalities were usually waived. His apprehensions proved groundless. He had scarcely begun to describe his campaign against phantom addresses and wayward dialling codes, when he was drowned out in a rumble of assent and relief.

‘You haven’t heard the half of it,’ said Figg. ‘I didn’t want to complain, but I’ve been spending every spare minute at the Babcock, and I’m barely one step ahead of a total collapse.’

‘Same here,’ said Banes. ‘I haven’t had a weekend off in months.’

They all began to speak at once. Without exception, they had noticed alarming changes in the records under their command; and each of them, with the modesty native to the profession, had kept it to himself and set about restoring order in his own way.

Everywhere the trends were the same: not just rashes of missing spaces or jutting hyphens or simple transpositions, but massive disturbances and transformations that seemed somehow wilful, that actually resisted correction. Figg had spent so many of his lunch hours in the stacks at the library reordering alphabetically, re-sorting by category, invoking Dewey, that he’d lost ten pounds. Sure that someone must be sabotaging the catalogues, he’d lain in wait for them three nights running, armed with nothing but a pencil. Unbeknown to him, Munnery was also awake in the early hours. He’d burnt a barrel of midnight oil, drafting and redrafting the maps of the city centre, reattaching the numbers of the houses to the proper doors and gates, reorienting the points of the compass. On the other side of town, Levitas had been slashing and spearing until his arm went to sleep.

What were they to do? There was no simple answer. Figg was for alerting the City Fathers at once. The problem was too big for the Society, he said. It threatened good governance and the survival of Alibia itself. Fluxman argued against him. Such faint-heartedness was unheard-of in their long history. In any event, it was not their way to make a public hullabaloo, to be thrusting themselves into the limelight. They should sustain their efforts behind the scenes. When the City Fathers required their help, they would know where to turn.

Secretly, the problem had shrunk in Fluxman’s own mind; now that the weight of it had been shared, it no longer seemed so daunting. There was something cheering too in the prospect of a request for help from the City Fathers. The Society was no longer shown the respect it had enjoyed in the days of secrecy and subterfuge. A public acknowledgment of their importance would be a good thing.

The majority went with the Master.

Then Levitas had them charge their glasses, although it had not yet gone nine, and drink the health of the paperwork.

‘To the Records!’

Later that evening, when some of the company had already begun to drift off, Munnery produced the photograph of poor McCaffery. It had touched him, the small body among the smashed alphabets, despite the irritation of the caption: ‘Art of God delays early edition.’ His colleagues shook their heads over that cruel blunder and lamented the boy’s misfortune, but failed to see what it had to do with their own troubles.

*

An official in the Department of Public Works by the name of Toyk studied the same photograph with a dry eye and drew his own conclusions. What held his attention was not the dead boy, but the wall against which he had dashed out his brains; more specifically, the point where that fatal wall, which was made of a distinctive yellow stone, joined up with another more ordinary panel of red brick. As the official responsible for granting licences and approving plans, Toyk took a particular interest in the city wall, and especially in the preservation of those sections of it that had survived from antiquity. There was a building regulation expressly prohibiting the erection of any structure so that it abutted upon the wall. It was clear from the photograph that the law had been broken.

The following day found Toyk in the alley behind the football factory. He expected to do no more than serve notice upon some refractory citizen to demolish his illegal hen-house, or have the Department do it for him. But what he saw instead struck him dumb.

Toyk was a land surveyor by training. He went home at once and unpacked his instruments, scarcely touched since his graduation to matters of regulation. He bore theodolite and spirit level to the industrial zone, where it did not take him long to verify what McCaffery had already proved by example and he himself had inferred from observation: the football factory was on the move. It had drifted off its foundations and floated away to the south, coming to rest against the city wall and sealing off the alley behind. The distance was not great, but the effect was dramatic. Who could tell where the building would have ended up had there been nothing to block its course? Perhaps it would have fallen into the sea?

Quietly, to avoid causing panic among the people of Alibia, who valued stability above all things, Toyk made a cursory examination of the surrounding blocks. He discovered that several other buildings had wandered away from their official locations. First thing Monday, he decided, he would make a report to his superiors and seek permission to broaden his investigations.