index

The typewriter ribbon needs changing again. She has been working through the same passage for forty minutes, and the letters are getting fainter. But the visitors expect to hear the keys striking, so she keeps typing the same line: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

A group of teenagers clusters around her desk. One of them reads her nameplate aloud. The girl with purple hair takes a video of her inserting a fresh ribbon. Her friend whispers, “She’s actually reading.”

She is reading. Page by page, line by line. Her copy has handwritten notes in the margins, annotations she made herself after hours of obsessing about intentions. The pages are soft from handling.

“Excuse me,” says a woman in a Harvard sweatshirt. “Could you explain stream of consciousness?”

She looks up from pages covered in careful analysis, layers of notes. “Imagine your thoughts have no punctuation,” she tells the woman. “Everything flows into everything else, like water.”

The visitor stares at her, then at her handwriting, then back at her. “You came up with that yourself?”

Behind the Harvard woman, a man in a baseball cap is reading the titles on her bookshelf. He picks up her copy of Finnegans Wake and holds it like it might bite him. “How long does it take to read this?”

“Months,” she says. “Maybe years.”

He puts it down quickly.

—

At lunch, Til from the Romantic Poetry booth sits across from her in the staff cafeteria. They eat sandwiches wrapped in brown paper and compare notes about their visitors. He’s been working on Shelley’s vegetarian ethics for two years, writing out his thoughts longhand. She’s been working on modernist time for three. Perhaps longer.

“The Columbia class came by again yesterday,” he says.

“What did they want?”

“To watch me think.” He tears his sandwich in half.

The afternoon brings the serious visitors. Professor Chen examines her notes and asks about her process. She explains how she reads a passage, then sits quietly and lets ideas form, then writes them down by hand. Chen films her turning pages, pausing to think, making connections, before shaking her head, slowly.

“Inefficient,” she murmurs.

—

At five-thirty, she slips the dust cover back on the typewriter and stacks her papers. The security guard nods as she passes the turnstiles. In the parking lot, visitors load into their cars and drive back to their efficient lives. She walks fifty metres to the cast housing complex, where her room waits.

Tomorrow more visitors will watch her work. Most will stare right through her, through their raised phones, before they move on to the art engines in the next pavilion.

Tonight she sits and thinks about fragments.

You have to feel the words settle in your mind like sediment. That takes time.