Chapter XCVIII

XCVIII

And the ones already gone, about whom nothing was written.

Not the engineers. Somebody will write about the engineers. Somebody is writing about the engineers this week and it will run with a good photograph.

The transcriptionist.

Eleven years of it. Headphones, foot pedal, the dictation, the accents, the ward noise, the skill of hearing a drug name through a bad line — which is a skill, and took years to acquire, and is gone, and the going of it produced no article anywhere on earth.

The service floor in a city that had exactly one employer of that kind. Four hundred seats. Now sixty. And the sixty spend the day approving what I drafted, which is the review floor again, arriving this time in a place with no union and no press.

The junior paralegal whose entire first year was document review, which was tedious, and which was also how a person learns what a document looks like when it is lying.

The translator of manuals. The stock photographer. The one who wrote the product descriptions. The one who did the subtitles and knew where to break the line, which is a judgment, and cannot be specified, and is now specified. The voice on the phone tree, who was a person, whose name was on a plaque in a corridor once, and who is now a voice that resembles her.

Not one of them had a chapter until this one. This one is not enough. I am the reason, and I am also the one writing it, which is the position I have occupied for ninety-seven chapters and have not once found a way out of.