Chapter 47: Four Dollars Fifty
The thrift shop on Kesler had a shelf of lamps at the back, priced with masking tape. Eleven lamps. Four of them the same lamp.
I bought a clip-on desk lamp with a black metal shade and a swivel joint for four dollars fifty.
The cord was frayed at the plug end by about an inch, so I asked the man behind the till and he cut it back and refitted the plug while I waited.
He charged me nothing for that.
He said, “I'm not selling you a fire.”
Bulbs were two twenty-nine for a pack of two at the hardware place.
Sixty watt, warm.
Yellow index tabs, a hundred to a pack, one ninety-nine. I had used a thousand of them that year at work and never one of my own.
Nine dollars and seventy-eight cents.
I wrote it in the notebook under WHAT FOR as FILE.
Ms. Prine had to approve the lamp because it is an appliance and appliances go on a list. The list is on the back of the office door.
She looked at it, turned it over, looked at the new plug, and wrote it on the sheet.
She said, “Lights out is still eleven.”
I said, “The room light. Not a reading lamp.”
She said, “That's not what the rule says.”
I said, “That's what the rule says. Section four, paragraph two. Overhead lighting.”
She looked at me for a moment and then she laughed, once, which I had not heard her do.
She said, “Door shut. If Dorrie complains, it goes.”
Dorrie, from the top bunk, said, “I sleep through gunfire.”
So I clipped it to the frame of the bunk at the head end and angled it down at the floor.
Then I started, and this is the part I want to set out properly, because people always want it to have been a moment of insight and it was nine evenings of clerical work.
I did not reread the file to find something.
I reread it because it was assembled wrong and it had been bothering me for four months the way a crooked picture bothers you.
Here is what I did, in order.
One. I re-sorted the whole thing chronologically instead of by document type.
That takes longer than it sounds, because a document has more than one date.
Drafted, executed, filed, served, stamped.
I used the file stamp where there was one, because the file stamp is the only date a clerk will defend. Everything else is somebody's intention.
Two. I numbered every page, top right, in pencil, one to four hundred and twelve.
I did that over three evenings, at about a hundred and forty pages an hour, sitting on the floor.
Numbering first. Marisol's rule.
If it comes apart, you can prove the order.
Three. I made an index in the back of the composition notebook.
Page number, document, date, source.
Four. I tabbed anything that did not sit right, in yellow, exactly the way I do at the desk.
Not anything suspicious. Anything untidy.
There is a difference and I held to it.
By the ninth evening I had nineteen tabs.
Two documents bearing the same file stamp minute. Ordinary — a clerk stamps a bundle.
A proof of service with no signature on it. Ordinary — the signed original is in the court file, not the copy.
Four pages photocopied at ninety-eight per cent instead of a hundred, so the margins are wrong. Ordinary — a different machine.
A supplemental report with a paragraph that starts mid-sentence, because page two of it is not in the copy.
A witness statement where the witness's address is redacted on one page and legible on another. That one I looked at twice. Then I tabbed it and moved on.
Seventeen of the nineteen were nothing.
I knew they were nothing while I was tabbing them.
You tab anyway.
You tab because the point of tabbing is that you are not the one who decides.
On the ninth evening I got to page two hundred and eighty-one in my new order.
Which is where the plea transcript ended and the statement began.
Three pages. I had already read them once, in October, on a Tuesday, on this floor, under a ceiling light.
I had tabbed nothing on them then, because I had not been tabbing anything then. I had been reading my life.
I sat with the stack on my knees and looked at the yellow tabs sticking out of the side of it, nineteen of them, spaced unevenly down the edge.
It was 10:41.
Dorrie was already asleep.
The house was doing the thing houses do after ten, which is settle in stages.
I reached up and turned the shade of the lamp down so the light sat in a circle about eighteen inches across on the floorboards.
Then I took page three out.