LOST Chapter 18: The Torn Page

Read chapter 18 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

She put it on the kitchen table between us and smoothed the fold with two fingers and stepped back. I looked at it. The paper was old, not archive-old, not fragile, but the particular age of paper that has been kept somewhere cool and dry and has taken on the quality of its storage, slightly stiff, slightly yellowed at the margins. The writing was in a good administrative hand, the kind that comes from years of keeping the same kind of record in the same kind of book, consistent and legible and entirely ordinary except for the content. The content. My name. My full name, which I do not use casually and which appears in relatively few documents because I have never been someone who accumulates documents, no institutional affiliations, no formal publications, no conference registrations, the deliberate minimal paper trail of someone who found early that institutions had a way of turning independent theoretical work into something the institution owned. My full name, in this record, with a date beside it. I had seen the date before I read the name and had assumed I was misreading the format, that the day and month and year were arranged differently from how I expected. I had adjusted my reading and come back with the same date. Then I had read the name. I said: this is a shrine donation record. Nao said: yes. I said: this date is thirty years before I was born. Nao said: yes. I said: so the implication you're drawing from this is that someone, thirty years before I existed, donated to this shrine in my name. Or that my name appears in this record for some other reason. Or that this is a different person with the same name. Or that the record has been altered. Or that there is some archival error that I am not familiar with the specific mechanisms of but that could plausibly produce this. Any of those explanations accounts for the data without requiring. I stopped. Nao was looking at me with an expression I had not seen on her before, which was difficult because she had a large repertoire of expressions and most of them I was still mapping. This one had something in it that took me a moment to identify. Something between amusement and the specific patience of someone watching a process they have watched many times before. She said: without requiring what. I said: without requiring the conclusion you're drawing from it. She said: which conclusion is that. I said: that I was here before I was born. Which is not a sentence that should be possible to say. She looked at the page. Then she looked back at me. Then, very quietly, she laughed. It was not a long laugh or a loud one. It was the laugh of someone who has heard something that is genuinely funny to them for a reason that is not funny to the person who said it, the laugh that happens when two people are looking at the same situation from distances that have no overlap. I had heard Nao laugh once before, during the afternoon visit, at something I had said that was not intended to be amusing and that I had not gone back to examine because the afternoon had had too much else in it. Now she was doing it again and I sat across the kitchen table and waited for it to finish. She said: you know what's interesting. I said: several things are interesting. I would like to know which one specifically. She said: most people, when I show them the page, argue about the date. Whether the date is right. Whether there's an error. Whether I could have misread it. You went straight to alternative explanations for why a date that you are prepared to accept as correct might not mean what it appears to mean. I said: because the date is legible and the handwriting is consistent and there is no obvious sign of alteration and arguing about the date would be the less productive entry point. She said: right. You went straight past the question of whether the fact is true to the question of whether your interpretation of the fact is correct. Which is. She paused. I said: which is what. She said: it's a much