The Missing Page

The file ran to two hundred and six pages, and page fourteen was not among them. This had gone unnoticed for four years, which is less surprising than it sounds: the pages were numbered by hand, and a reader who begins at page one and works forward will read thirteen, then fifteen, and register only that the argument continues.

Kirsten noticed it because she was reading backwards. She had been looking for a date and had started at the end, and a document read against its own direction gives up its gaps at once.

What made the absence interesting was not the absence itself. Pages go missing in every archive; had it been page eighty or page one hundred and forty, nobody would have looked twice. Page fourteen sat between a decision and the reasons given for it.

Were it not for the numbering, the file would read as a whole. That is the difficulty with a removal that is done well: it leaves a document that makes sense. Only the count is wrong, and a count is the one thing nobody reads.

She wrote a short note and attached it to the front of the file. It said that page fourteen was absent, that this had been established on a given date, and nothing else. She did not write that it had been removed, because she did not know that, and a note that says more than it knows is worth less than no note at all.

The file went back on the shelf. Two years later somebody asked why the decision had been taken, and the note was the first thing they found.