In the Archives – by Keely Jobe
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
It’s as if the place is hermetically sealed. Left outside is a pelting rain, gushing pipes, greasy water surging over gutters and traffic islands, slopping into sandals and brogues, umbrellas sucked inside out like marrow from a bone, office workers jammed in alcoves with hands wrapped around takeaway coffees, waiting for the lights to go green. Also barred from entry, the petrichor and panic, the blaring horns, the hot-wet stickiness of a late spring storm. None of that has made it past the door. Once inside, you’re floating in white space.
Into the vacuum The Researcher has smuggled a festoonery of odours. With her saturated vest, the gamey smell of damp wool. From within her backpack, last night’s lamb curry and a banana gone wrong. From the crotch of her good black pants, a faint menstrual pong, and from her armpits, the acrid whiff of polyester worn twice. Another person is sat at the next desk, hunched over a stack of papers. She has her hair pulled tight in a slick black bun and is smaller than The Researcher by at least three sizes which matters in a place like this. A smaller body is a smaller disturbance.
The air-conditioning idles and The Researcher’s arms pock with goosebumps. Her hands sweat inside the white cotton gloves supplied by The Archivist, a mousy man in tweed who is now hidden in the aisles, boxing events for posterity, hoarding names and dates, stacking stories in absolute silence. When he appears again, he turns the big wheel at the end of a cabinet which slowly tracks sideways, creating a new aisle on the right. The Archivist turns and looks at The Researcher, his expression neutral as the room.
‘Mind the noise,’ he says.
Unsure if it’s an apology or a reprimand, The Researcher nods and looks down at the A4 manila folder on her desk. It’s the kind bought at Officeworks – two-fifty for a ten pack – but older, jaundiced. In the lower right-hand corner, a category in capitals is scribbled in pencil. FOUNDING LETTERS 88-90. Paperclipped to the top right-hand corner are two small cards. One bears a description of the contents in clipped sentences. It’s an exercise in concision. The other is a register of researchers, detailing the history of touch endured by these papers. There are nine names before hers, and nine dates. The last time the folder was opened, The Researcher was two years old. Her name is now tacked to the end, permanently accountable.
She opens the folder to a stack of papers varying in size and thickness. The papers are brittle, sickly, cracking at the edges. The Researcher lowers her head to the first page and inhales: thoughts aged in the dark smell faintly like a wine cellar. It’s fitting. The longer they’re left, the greater the value. She scans the words, writing down sentences that seem significant, wincing at the scratchiness of pen on paper, a sound like mice in the walls. She turns the pages over, laying each one gently on the inside face of the folder, anticipating a name, a date, a location, holding back hope, certain she will find the golden link overlooked by the other nine.
It would mean everything. Even her unremarkable name scribbled on the register would become something else, a lodestone for future researchers. Is this her? they would ask, pinching the little card, holding it up. Yes, The Archivist would acknowledge. Yes, it’s her. Maybe the contents of the folder would be scanned, digitised, made available for anyone to access (and this is something The Researcher would openly advocate for because significant scholarly findings should always trouble elitism through broad accessibility). Even in the online version, future researchers would see how the wheat was always there, buried among the chaff, and they would understand why the others overlooked it, and they would marvel at The Researcher for having located it. And in lecture halls and radio interviews, people would ask her about the moment of discovery, and she would shrug her shoulders. I always knew it would be there, she’d say. It never ceases to astound me how careless people are with their words. Words are shards. Slivers in time. Once they’re set down, they can be read, by which I mean they’re subject to uncovering, to interpretation, to hindsight, to enlivening. The written word pulls the past into the present for us to observe, to decode, and yes, to judge. If you fear the future’s critical eye, never put pen to paper. And in response to this advice, The Researcher imagines a gentle rumble of laughter.
She smiles and gently turns the page. For a moment, the cotton glove catches on a corner, but she disentangles herself before The Archivist notices, manages to do no damage. Her proximity to the paper is both potential and threat. It’s entirely possible that she could drop or rip or crease a crucial sentence, or even drip sweat or dribble snot on the precious words. She has a leaky face. It’s worse in air-conditioned rooms. If they offered head bags, she would happily agree to wear one. She has never noticed until now how much of the world is made of fluid. What if she has a nosebleed? What if her pen leaks?
An eyelash falls onto the last page, and she moves to brush it away, stops herself, leaves the small hair where it has landed. She closes the folder, trapping the eyelash inside. The Archivist is staring at her from behind a partition. His torso is hidden. His head hovers.
‘Dense,’ he states, smiling warmly.
He may be talking about the contents of the folder. He may be commenting on The Researcher’s intellectual capacity. It’s a mystery. The Researcher gives a double thumbs up with her Mickey Mouse hands and pulls the next folder closer. FOUNDING LETTERS 91-93. She flips the cover open.
Inside, an infestation. A family of silverfish have stopped by. The Researcher gawps at the soundless destruction. This is what she sees: handwritten sentences nibbled at, shaved off, sliced in half. Careful compositions amputated while other words wriggle to the surface. Letters falling through the page, settling finally with those meant for later, signs and symbols tossed about, revelries of unlikely pairings, angular shapes in linear iteration like distant alps on the horizon, rifts repeating like echoes called across the gulch. There are cryptic dispatches from the untouched margins – destruction of. Developed two. Offer Buchanan. forty quarts – and at the centre, the remnants of a bacchanalian feast, human ideas exploded open by a riotous party of small, wingless insects. Zygentoma faeces are scattered like poppy seeds at the centre of the stack. Sustenance pelletised. A site of feverish decomposition. You couldn’t call it a vanishing. A reinterpretation maybe, a profoundly disrupted literary landscape, a story retold from a primitive perspective.
Desperately, The Researcher wonders if she can work with the new format. Is there something to be gleaned from this sombre text translated into silverfish dreams? How to tell The Archivist the original category no longer stands, that an updated description is also warranted? Voices of a 400-million-year-old lineage. Food for thought. Thought for food.
From her desk, The Researcher raises her gloved hand. ▼
Image: myrfa on Pixabay
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