Form 19

Elias Park lived in a residential tower identical to forty other residential towers, and he answered his door already smiling, which is a thing that almost never happens to an auditor. People who open the door to a grey-suited auditor do a particular sequence with their faces. First the recognition of what the grey means. Then the fast involuntary inventory — what have I felt, what have I said, what did the sensors catch. Then the careful arrangement of the features into something that reads, on the score, as cooperative-but-unremarkable. I had watched nine hundred people do that sequence. I could have done it for them. Elias Park did none of it. He saw the grey, and he understood the grey, and he smiled anyway, and he said, "You'll be here about the number. Come in, I've got the kettle on." His apartment was the standard unit. Same dimensions as mine, same issued furniture, same single window looking onto the same grey weather. But he had done something to it that I could not, at first, identify, and it bothered me the way a wrong note bothers you before you have found it on the keyboard. I stood in his doorway and catalogued the room — bed, table, two chairs, shelf, the sanctioned objects in the sanctioned places — and I could not say what was different. "You're trying to work out what's wrong with it," he said, pouring water. He was not mocking me. He sounded delighted, the way you sound when a friend is close to a good answer. "Everyone does. Sit down, Auditor. It'll come to you." "Citizen Park, this is an assessment, not a—" "It's tea," he said, "and an assessment. The two aren't enemies." He set a cup in front of me, the issued cup, and sat down across the issued table, and folded his maintenance-rough hands, and waited, comfortable as a cat, for me to do my job. So I did it. I asked the questions on Form 19, the Positive Deviation schedule, which I had never used and had to read from the screen. Had he experienced a change in employment? No. A change in relationship status? No. Had he begun a sanctioned wellness regimen, a sanctioned faith practice, a sanctioned course of medication? No, no, and no. Each no nudged the form toward its conclusion, which was that Elias Park had no permitted reason to be happy, and an unpermitted happiness is, in the Office's grammar, simply a fault that has not yet been located. "You're going to run out of boxes," he said kindly, when I reached the end of the schedule. "Form 19 assumes the happiness came from somewhere the Office already knows about. Mine didn't." "Happiness doesn't come from nowhere, Citizen Park." "No," he agreed. "It came from somewhere. It just isn't a *where* your form has a box for." He turned his issued cup a quarter-turn on the issued table. "Do you want to know? Honestly? You can write down whatever you like afterward. But you came up here with a face like someone who's never been asked a question she couldn't file, and I find I'd rather tell you the truth than help you fill in the form. It's the difference, in the end." I should have terminated the assessment. The protocol for an uncooperative subject is clear and I knew it the way I knew my own number. Instead I heard myself say, "The difference between what?" And that was when I saw what was wrong with his apartment. There was nothing on the walls — there is never anything on the walls, decoration is an Expression and Expressions are scored — but the issued grey paint, low down by the table where a sitting man's hand would rest, had been worn. Worn pale, in a small soft patch, by years of someone putting their hand there. By Elias Park sitting in this chair, day after day, touching the wall beside him for no reason the Office could score, simply because it was his wall and his hand and his quiet life, and it had pleased him to. "The difference," Elias said, watching me find it, "between a person and a number. Drink your tea, Auditor. I think you're closer to the answer than anyone they've sent me yet."