The Index That Lies
A back-matter apparatus mourning the book that was cut away
I had reached the back of the novel, where the index waits like a servant holding the coats of everyone who has left.
An index is a promise of order, an alphabetized oath that everything named within can be found again on request.
I looked up a minor character, a lamplighter, and the index sent me to page seventy-one, courteously and precisely.
On page seventy-one, however, no lamplighter appears, and no lamp, and no street on which a lamp might conceivably stand.
A is a thread the ties between two places, trusting the reader to follow it without cutting it.
This index's threads, I discovered, were tied not to the novel I had read but to a novel I had not.
Under "betrayal" it listed nine pages; on none of the nine does anyone betray anyone, and yet the nine cohere.
Read in the order the index prescribed, those unrelated pages assembled a second story, beneath the first.
is the naming of a thing by something adjacent to it: the crown for the king, the page for the whole event.
The index worked by gone rogue, letting a page number stand for a scene that existed only in its listing.
, its close cousin, lets a part speak for a whole: a sail for the ship, an entry for a chapter unwritten.
Each index entry was a part standing for a whole that the visible book had, at some late stage, declined to contain.
, in ordinary prose, is the web of pronouns and repetitions that stitches one sentence to the next.
Here had migrated out of the sentences and into the index, which held together what the pages had let fall apart.
I began to read the book backwards through its own index, entry by entry, as one reconstructs a face from its shadow.
A is a system that sorts the world into kinds, and every quietly legislates what may exist.
This index's admitted events the narrative had exiled, granting them citizenship in the republic of the back matter.
Under "the child who was never born" it listed a single page, and that page, in the novel, is devoted to a locked drawer.
The drawer, the index insisted, was the child, by a so tender it could only have been composed in grief.
I understood, at last, that the index was not describing the book; it was mourning the book that had been cut away.
Somewhere between manuscript and print, a second novel had been excised, and only its index had survived the surgery.
The , whether from love or from spite, had refused to update the apparatus to match the amputated text.
So the index lies, if to lie is to point steadily at what is no longer there, at a room whose house has been demolished.
But it also tells the truth, the only surviving truth, about a book that the visible book was built to bury.
A is the thing a sign points to, and these signs pointed, with perfect fidelity, at referents that had been erased.
To trust the index over the text is to trust the mourner over the murderer, the over the tidy official account.
I copied the index out by hand, entry by entry, and in copying it I wrote, without meaning to, the vanished novel entire.
The book you are holding, reader, has an index too, and you have not yet checked whether its pages say what it claims.
Turn to the back; look up your own name; and tell me, if you dare, what page it sends you to, and what you find there.