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. Elias climbed the stairs to the second floor with a cardboard box under one arm and a key in his right 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.

Elias peeled the label off, folded it once, and put it in his pocket. Then Elias 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. Elias had been hired from the list in a week, which in county time was the speed of light.

Elias 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." Elias had written that down. Elias 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.

Elias 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.

Elias left the files where they were and went back down the stairs and out into the cold.

Harlan Falls in January was a town that did not pretend. The snow along the curbs was gray with road salt, and the air smelled of the grain terminal down by the river, a warm, toasted, dusty smell that the whole town lived inside and nobody noticed anymore. Elias walked the square once: the courthouse, the bank, the Rialto with its marquee advertising a senior matinee, the Blue Heron Diner with steam on its windows, Hovland Hardware with a pyramid of rock salt bags stacked out front and a hand-lettered sign in the window that said SNOW SHOVELS: LEONARD SAYS BUY NOW.

Elias stopped in front of that sign for a while.

Down Main Street the land fell away toward the river, and at the bottom of it rose the North Levee, a long grassy wall with a bike path along its crown and the water somewhere behind it. East of the levee, in the low ground where Main Street bent, lay a neighborhood of small old houses close together, porches and chain-link and bird feeders, a Lutheran church with a squat white steeple: the Flats. On the levee, someone had stuck a row of orange survey flags into the frozen grass, and they snapped in the wind off the water.

In the diner window a waitress was pouring coffee for an old man at the counter. On the counter beside his cup, propped against the napkin dispenser, a phone was lit, and the old man was talking to it, easily, the way you'd talk to someone sitting next to you. The waitress said something to the phone, too, and laughed at the answer.

Nobody else in the diner looked twice. It was, Elias supposed, what the pamphlets meant by ordinary. Five years ago there had been editorials and sermons and a state senator who had stood on the capitol steps with a sign. Now there was an old man at a lunch counter, talking over his eggs to someone who had been dead for some time, and a waitress who knew them both.

Elias watched for a moment through the steamed glass, and then turned and walked back up the hill to the annex, colder than when he had set out, and with a clearer idea of the job.

By noon Elias had made his own list, in his own hand, on the back of Abe's. Not of names; of questions. What does "consistent with decedent" mean when nobody can check? Who decides what a model is allowed to say? What happens when the living disagree about who the dead were? The questions ran down the page and onto the back, and Elias understood that there would be no answers to most of them in any file.

The pothos on the windowsill had dropped a yellow leaf onto the radiator, where it lay curling in the heat. Elias picked it up and looked at the vines trailing along the wall and thought that a plant that had grown this long in one place deserved at least to be named, and that it could wait until Elias knew what to call it.

There were other things Abe had left. In the top desk drawer, a box of blue ballpoint pens, a roll of antacids, a county directory from 2044 with half the numbers crossed out and rewritten, and a laminated card with the registrar's oath on it, which Elias had sworn on Friday in front of the county auditor and a clerk who had been eating a sandwich. In the bottom drawer, nothing at all, as if it had been emptied carefully and on purpose. On the wall beside the door, a rectangle of paint a little brighter than the rest, where a picture had hung for a long time and been taken down.

At one o'clock the telephone on the desk rang, the old beige landline the county still insisted on, and Elias jumped.

"Registrar's office," Elias said, and it was the first time.

"This the new one?" said a man's voice, low and dry and unhurried, a voice that sounded like it had been reading deeds aloud for thirty years. "Lindahl. I'm at the Blue Heron. You'll want to buy me lunch tomorrow. There's things I ought to tell you." A pause, in which Elias could hear dishes and a radio. "Some of them I'm going to."

The line clicked. Elias stood holding the receiver, looking at the empty chair and the forty files, while down the hill, behind its long grass wall, the river went on running high and brown and patient toward the Mississippi, the way it had since long before anyone in Harlan Falls had learned to keep the dead talking.