The Continuance Office

The Blackhawk County courthouse annex had been built in 1974 by people who believed in cinder block, and on the second morning of January 2051 it still smelled of them: floor wax, radiator dust, burnt coffee from the treasurer's office, and the faint electrical warmth of a building that had been rewired four times and never quite forgiven anyone. Mara climbed the stairs to the second floor with a cardboard box under one arm and a key in her left hand, and stopped at a frosted-glass door at the end of the hall.

Someone had lettered it by hand, years ago, in gold paint that was flaking at the edges: CONTINUANCE OFFICE. REGISTRAR. Below that, on a strip of label tape, newer: KNOCK. HE'S USUALLY IN.

Mara peeled the label off, folded it once, and put it in her pocket. Then Mara unlocked the door.

Two rooms. The front one had a counter with a bell on it, three plastic chairs, a rack of pamphlets (Your Continuance and You, What the Registrar Reviews, When It's Time to Let Go), and a window onto the courthouse square, where the county Christmas tree still stood in the snow with half its lights out. The back room was the office proper: a steel desk the color of old teeth, four gray file cabinets, a green banker's lamp with a pull chain, a wall calendar from Hovland Hardware still turned to December, and on the windowsill, in a cracked blue pot, a pothos that had been allowed to grow until its vines ran along the top of the radiator and halfway down the wall.

The chair behind the desk was empty in a way that chairs usually aren't. It had been sat in for five years by the same man, and it had taken the shape of him, and nobody had told it he was gone.

Abe Lindahl had been the first registrar of continuances Blackhawk County ever had. Before that he'd been county recorder for thirty years: deeds, liens, marriages, plats. When the state began licensing continuances in 2046, the county had needed someone to review them, and it had asked the man who already knew where everyone's paperwork was. He had done it for five years. On December 31 he had retired, effective at five o'clock, by a letter of two sentences to the county board, and had declined to say why to the board, to the newspaper, or to the young woman from the auditor's office who had asked him at the courthouse Christmas party. Mara had been hired from the list in a week, which in county time was the speed of light.

Mara knew the law the way everyone in the state knew it, which was to say from the news and from the pamphlets, and then, in the last month, from the certification course in Des Moines: six days in a hotel conference room with eleven other new registrars from eleven other counties, learning the difference between a family license and a business license, between drift and damage, between a transcript correction and a late addition. The instructor had been a former registrar from Story County who had said on the first morning, "Most of this job is sitting with people. The rest is paperwork. Don't let anybody tell you it's about the machines." Mara had written that down. Mara had not been sure, at the time, whether to believe it.

On the desk, squared to the edge, sat a single sheet of paper: a typed list headed Active Continuances — Blackhawk County — 40. Names, license numbers, renewal months. Beside it, the cabinets. Forty files. Forty dead people, licensed to keep talking, and every one of them due to come across this desk within the next twelve months to be renewed, or not.

Mara set the box down on the empty chair and looked out of the window at the square: the tree, the snow, the brick storefronts with their Monday-morning lights coming on, and beyond the roofs, gray and flat and moving, the Blackhawk River, running high for January between its levees.