Next of Kin

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 04

Sorting strips under the raking window light

The insurance firm had been dead for nine months by the time Lin signed for the keys. She rode the freight elevator up alone and stepped out onto a floor that smelled of dust and old toner, where the cubicle dividers still stood in their tidy grid as if the staff had only stepped out for lunch in another decade.

The shredded paper was everywhere. It rose in soft drifts against the baseboards and lay in pale tongues across the carpet. Someone, in the last days of the company, had fed the cabinets through the machines in a kind of panic, and the strips had spilled out faster than they could be bagged. Lin's brief was small and specific. One claims file had been flagged as orphaned in the receivership audit, and the trustee wanted it reassembled before the floor was cleared.

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ImaReadFolio 03 — 04

The half-finished face and the weak-tea light

ImaReadFolio 04 — 04

The tape made a small sound as it took. In the empty building, in the long quiet of a floor no one owned, it was the sound of someone, somewhere down a corridor, answering.

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She set up at a long table by the window, where the raking afternoon light came in sideways and lifted every torn edge into relief. She emptied the first sack onto a tray. The strips were the width of a fingernail, foxed unevenly, some printed in a typewriter face she had not seen since childhood. She put on cotton gloves and began.

In the first week she sorted only by paper. Bond went with bond, manila with manila, the thin onionskin of carbons into a separate pile. She learned the handwriting of one woman the way you learn a voice through a wall, the loop of the lowercase g, the way the comma fell short. Lin laid out the matched strips on black felt and aligned them by the bite of each tear, edge clicking softly into edge, the small physical relief of a true fit.

By the end of the second week a medical examination form had assembled itself across her table. Height, weight, the resting pulse of a young woman in good health. Then a letter of resignation, polite and bloodless, dated two springs later. Then a postcard, never stamped, never sent, the picture side showing a harbor Lin did not recognize and the message side bearing only the word soon, written and underlined and written again.

She worked late. The cleaners had stopped coming to that floor. At night the building made the small settling sounds of a thing no one owned. Lin began to keep a thermos and a folding cot, and she stopped going home on the nights when a piece was close to locking in.

In the third week the photograph began.

It came up slowly, the way a face comes up through water. At the center of the file, where every claims jacket carried its identifying portrait, the fragments she had been setting aside as too small or too uncertain finally began to find each other. A corner of jaw. The dark crescent of an eyebrow. The catch of light along a cheekbone where the studio lamp had touched. She worked with tweezers now, lifting and lowering, and the soft drop shadow each strip threw on the felt was the only motion in the room.

She knew the mouth before she knew she knew it. It was the mouth from the framed photograph on her own hallway wall, the one her mother kept turned slightly toward the door, the one Lin had passed every morning of her life without quite looking at. Her mother at twenty, before the city, before Lin, before the rooms they had shared in silence at the end.

Lin sat back. The face on the table watched her from under the half-finished hair, calm, unsurprised. Outside the window the light had gone the color of weak tea.

She did not finish that night. She walked the corridor from end to end, past the dark cubicles and the dead photocopier and the noticeboard where someone's birthday memo had yellowed in place. When she came back she opened the front of the claims jacket and read, for the first time, the cover sheet she had already pieced together a week earlier without seeing it.

The policy had been taken out in the year of Lin's birth. The premiums had been paid in full and then, by handwritten instruction, suspended. The beneficiary line carried Lin's own name, in an ink that had foxed darker than the paper it sat on, older somehow than the form itself, as if it had been waiting in the strip for the rest of the document to catch up.

She understood it then in one slow piece. Her mother had bought this policy the year a daughter arrived. Her mother had taken it back, by hand, into the smallest pieces a hand could make. Her mother had carried those pieces across a city and slid them into the files of a company she must have known, even then, was the kind of company that would one day fold. She had hidden the claim inside the failure. She had trusted the failure to outlast her.

A daughter who had learned, eventually, to put torn paper back together would come looking, or would be sent, and would sit at a long table by a window and recognize the face fragment by fragment until there was nothing left to recognize.

Lin reached for the last strip. It was no bigger than a grain of rice, a sliver of the cool light along the temple, the place where the studio lamp had finally cleared the shadow. She set it down. She pressed a length of archival tape across the seam with the flat of her thumb.