Kurt Vonnegut — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

The clock in the Bureau of Sentimental Records ran backwards, and everyone who worked there agreed this was for the best.

It sat behind glass in the sub-basement, a brass thing the size of a phone booth, its gears turning counterclockwise with a patience that made visitors feel judged. Nobody remembered installing it. There was a plaque. The plaque said MAINTAINED BY VOLUNTEERS. Nobody had ever volunteered.

Dr. Ansel Whit was the Bureau's chief archivist, a man who had once been promising. He wore the same gray cardigan on Tuesdays and Thursdays, alternating with a slightly grayer one on the other days, and he liked to walk the stacks after the interns went home, trailing one hand along the spines of folders the way other men might trail a hand along a fence in the country. He believed the clock was proof of something. He was never able to say what.

"It's not broken," he told people. "It's corrective."

The Bureau's official function, per the brochure, was Modern Compatibility Reconciliation, which meant it ran the algorithm that matched the county's unmarried adults with each other for a small processing fee. The brochure used the word "spark" four times and the word "synergy" eleven times and never once used the word "loneliness," though loneliness was the only raw material the place actually processed.

Applicants filled out a form. The form asked for height, income, favorite film genre, tolerance for cats, five-year plan, willingness to relocate, stance on in-laws, blood type. The blood type question had been added by a previous director who believed in omens. Nobody had removed it. Removing things from the Bureau's forms required a subcommittee, and the subcommittee had not met since the Ford administration.

Once submitted, the form went into the clock room.

This was the part visitors were not shown. The clock did not tell time so much as untell it. Every profile fed into the machine came out the other side aged backwards by exactly one year, its answers subtly rewritten — a divorce erased, a dead pet resurrected as merely "at the vet," a listed weakness for gin quietly changed to "social drinker." The algorithm matched people not to who they were, but to who the clock decided they had recently, technically, been.

Whit called this "gentle recalibration." He said it the way a man says grace before a meal he suspects is poisoned.

Into this arrangement came a young man named Deshawn Purdy, who did not believe in gentleness, recalibration, or, particularly, love, but did believe in margins.

Purdy had noticed that a profile run through the clock twice came out two years younger and, more importantly, statistically irresistible — the algorithm, faced with a version of a person before their worst mistakes, matched them with three, sometimes four, candidates instead of the usual one. He had discovered this by accident, feeding his own middling profile through the machine a second time out of boredom, and watching his match count triple.

He began to offer this discovery, quietly, at forty dollars a run.

"You're not lying," he told his first customer, a dental hygienist named Carol who wanted, badly, to be twenty-six again in the eyes of the system. "You're just letting the machine see you before you knew better."

Carol paid in cash. She came back the following week for a second pass, and then a third, until her profile, according to the ledger, described a woman roughly fourteen years old with a full-time job and two prior engagements. The Bureau flagged this eventually. Bureaus always do, eventually.

Whit found the ledger by accident, the way he found everything of consequence — while looking for something else, on a Thursday, in the gray cardigan.

He did not report Purdy. He sat with the ledger for a long while under the humming lights, listening to the clock in the next room complete its slow, exact, illegal subtraction of a Tuesday that had already happened.

"You understand," Whit said later, to Purdy, in the tone of a man delivering a eulogy for a stranger, "that the machine isn't rewinding them. It's just agreeing to forget."

Purdy shrugged. He had a rogue's shrug, economical, already halfway out the door.

"Forgetting's a service," he said. "I just found the ticket window."

Whit did not argue this. Arguing required a position, and he had given his up sometime around his second marriage, filed now, no doubt, three or four backward-years deep in someone else's folder.

The clock kept ticking the wrong way. The forms kept coming. Somewhere in the county, two strangers were about to meet on a Friday, each holding a profile describing a person one year younger, one grudge lighter, one marriage shorter, than the person who would actually arrive.

The Bureau called this a match.

Vonnegut, if he'd been consulted, might have called it Tuesday.

Which, as it happened, was the very day the ledger in question surfaced, three towns over, in the office of a dental hygienist named Carol. Carol did not know she was fourteen years old, according to that ledger, and would have been offended to learn it, since she flossed daily and paid her own taxes and had, by any reasonable accounting, aged in the normal direction her whole life.

She only knew that the men the Bureau sent her were getting worse.

The first had been a widower named Gerald who talked about his boat. The second had been a widower named Gerald who talked about his boat, but a different Gerald, a coincidence the Bureau's brochure called "Synergy in Action" and Whit privately called a filing error nobody wanted to trace to its root. The third had been nineteen years old and enthusiastic about a video game involving a plumber, and Carol had sat across from him at the Bureau-recommended café — the one with the maroon booths, the one that gave a ten percent discount to matched couples as a show of civic good faith — and felt something in her chest fold up like a lawn chair.

She went to Whit's office. This was not standard procedure. There was no form for it.

"I'd like my file," she said. "I'd like to see what it says about me."

Whit did not tell her that this request had a name in the Bureau's internal manual — Section 12, Subsection C, "Applicant Requests Self-Knowledge, Handling Of" — and that the recommended response was to offer coffee and change the subject. He had never once followed Section 12, Subsection C. He went and got the ledger instead, the real one, the one with Purdy's forty-dollar entries in a handwriting that leaned forward the way a man leans when he's already left the room.

Carol read it standing up.

"I'm fourteen," she said, in the voice of a woman reporting a leak.

"Cosmetically," Whit said.

"I have a mortgage."

"The machine doesn't see mortgages. It sees who you were before you knew you'd need one."

Carol set the ledger down with the particular gentleness people reserve for things they would like to throw. She did not cry, because crying, Whit noted, required believing the machine's opinion of her mattered, and some deep unbureaucratic part of Carol apparently still did not.

"So fix it," she said.

Whit explained, in the tone of a man reading aloud from a manual he had authored and no longer trusted, that there was no forward setting. The clock only ran one way, which was backward, and had done so since before anyone currently employed by the Bureau had been hired, and that the subcommittee empowered to authorize structural repairs to Bureau equipment had not convened since 1976, on account of the chairman's death, which the subcommittee itself had never been formally notified of, since notifying it required the chairman's signature.

"Then who do I complain to?"

"Me," said Whit. "I'm who you complain to. I don't do anything about it. But I'm an excellent audience."

Purdy was found two days later, not by the Bureau's internal auditors, who did not exist, but by Carol, who had gotten his number from the dental patient he'd sold a second-pass profile to the previous spring, a man named Hollis who was, according to his file, an infant.

She did not hit him. She considered it, she said later, the way a person considers a large purchase — seriously, and then not at all.

"You made me fourteen," she said.

"I made you findable," Purdy said. "The system doesn't want people. It wants profiles it can solve. I just gave it an easier equation."

"I have a job. I have a car."

"So does the fourteen-year-old. On paper."

She left him standing in the Bureau lobby, under the brochure rack, next to the framed photograph of the previous director, the one who'd believed in omens, and went down to the clock room, where she was not supposed to be, and stood in front of the glass, watching the gears go the wrong way with the serene, patient wrongness of a man reversing down a one-way street convinced he has the right of way.

Whit found her there. This did not surprise him. Everyone came to stand in front of the clock eventually, the way people stand at the edge of a canyon they have no intention of jumping into, just to feel the pull.

"It doesn't care what it takes from you," she said. "It just takes it politely."

"That's the Bureau motto," Whit said. "Roughly."

He did not fire Purdy. There was no mechanism for firing anyone; the org chart, like the subcommittee, was a rumor. He simply changed the door code to the clock room, a gesture with the practical weight of a man locking one door in a house with no walls.

Purdy found a new margin within the week — a bakery three blocks over ran loyalty punch-cards on a similar backward-dated honor system, and a punch-card, he discovered, was a kind of clock too, if you squinted.

Carol got a new profile. It said she was thirty-one. This was closer to true.

She matched with a man who listed his own age honestly, which the Bureau flagged as an anomaly requiring a supplementary form.

They filled it out together, at the maroon booth, no discount applied.

Whit went home in his grayer cardigan and did not think about any of it, in the specific, disciplined way a man doesn't think about a wound he can still feel the exact shape of.

The clock kept running backward in the sub-basement. Nobody had volunteered to maintain it, and nobody ever would, and it did not require anyone to, since the only thing it had ever really needed was somewhere quiet to keep forgetting, on schedule, forever.