The first thing Mia noticed about the Department of Administrative Oddities was that it seemed to be any other office building she'd ever tried to escape from. A drab, unremarkable gray rectangle with windows plugged so thick with grime that they seemed to filter out hope itself. But as soon as she was inside, the air had the faintest whiff of charred parchment and something sweetly metallic, like honey spilled along a blade. Not that Mia had the foggiest notion of what a sword in honey would smell, but it felt important, like a quiet promise that bureaucracy might, in the appropriate circumstance, be both threatening and beautiful at the same time.
She had been dispatched here on orders so vague they might have been written away in ink: "Take care of the Department. Ask questions. Do not depart." Of course, she had conditioned herself to recall with a memo that stated, "Ask questions. Do not depart." Because it was far easier to follow rules scribbled down twice, and copying never did appear to lend them an air of unavoidability. She looked at the reminder again before she went inside and hoped that it would admonish her for laziness.The waiting room was not as big as she expected, filled with stacks of forms leaning against the alls on their sides. On each pile of the constantly swelling mountain was a Post-It note: "Forms Not Yet Approved," "Forms Under Consideration," "Forms Waiting to Become Forms." Mia fought not to reach out and touch them; when she couldn't resist, she was confident that some kind of administrative landslide would sweep away her whole afternoon—or maybe even the week. The air was thick with paper shuffling itself, a murmur of whispery arguments about the merits of punctuation, and the occasional wheezy squeals as if from a creaky chair at the unseen rules.
A clerk shoved out of a squeaky spin circle with what appeared to be a clipboard—but on closer inspection, the clipboard was alive. It wriggled like a worm whenever she did any writing, occasionally taking small nips out of her pen. Mia instinctively retreated, but soon it nipped the tip of her sleeve, leaving a teeny-tiny smudge of ink she was fairly certain would then have to be prefaced with an official apology.
"Ah, and you're the new guest," the clerk said to him, not even looking up from a very stern curl of ink. "Sign in. Fill out forms 13-A through 13-Z, and then wait for additional forms to be distributed in relation to your forms. You can't protest the forms if you don't want to answer the forms in triplicate." His voice was practical, but it had the faintest tremble, as if he was sure the forms were already plotting some miniature rebellion.Mia nodded, not sure if she'd received anything. She did know the forms were certainly alive, because she could have sworn Form 13-C winked at her from the top of its pile. Or it was leaning, so it could comment on her handwriting. Either way left her with a condescending tingle that any patronizing would be answered in paper form.
She sat at a table so small it seemed to be taunting her from beneath the chair. A filing cabinet in the next room groaned in horror at her approach, and when she pulled out the first drawer, a stack of envelopes with not to people, but to things: "Fear," "Monday," "Socks That Disappear." She picked one up with "Monday" on it, and it shook as if it would cry. Mia smoothed it down comfortingly, and it steadied. This was clearly the type of office where compassion, on occasion, got you a temporary stay, but she felt the respite was fleeting. It was harder than it should have been to fill out the forms. The questions were abstractions, philosophies, or occasionally hostile: "On a scale of invisible to invisible, how visible is your understanding of paper?" and "If the village were a hat, would it be high enough to hold the moon?" She tried to respond truthfully, humorously, and once, in limericks.The forms seemed doubtful, muttering to one another in lines of thick, scribbled script.
By the time she came to Form 13-F, it had already started complaining about her handwriting, necessitating a re-done cursive in a manner employed only by manuscripts of lost kingdoms.
It was here that Mia learned the first of a long series of lessons: Administrative Oddities did not care about reason. Reason was a proposal, as if a polite ghost calling in for tea. Efficiency was the Department's love, provided that efficiency meant filling out the paperwork to be more complicated than the issue it was attempting to solve. Forms could debate, confuse, and sometimes refuse to post for reasons of conscience, all amidst the confusing mist of their own red tape. Hours passed—or maybe days; Mia no longer remembered how much time had elapsed since Form 13-L began reminding her. The ceiling tiles shifted back and forth like tectonic plates, opening here and there to show small vignettes: a pigeon reading a poem, a miniature reenactment of the day she'd arrived in the village, her own face smiling back at her with a practiced smile. It was another world's bit of performance art, done for no one but those who would dare look. Mia half-hungered to applaud without violating any rules that had been set. As the Assistant to the Deputy of Unnecessary Evaluations was soon to arrive, Mia was soon to tumble into a stack of papers, pretend to become one herself, a filing cabinet. The assistant was a tall, gangly man with arms that were completely removable.He moved to take her hand and, in the process, inadvertently slapped the nearby filing cabinet, which responded with a low, sorrowful moan.No one ever quite knew whether the cabinet actually hurt or merely repressed bureaucratic feeling, but Mia had learned years ago not to ask."New visitor," he said. "Yes. You're to sort the ineffable. That is your first task. Begin by discovering forms that hold attitudes towards you. They do. They are hidden. Discover them." His voice was soothing but firm, as if all those years of stenography had cumulatively deposited bulk into the air itself.Mia blinked. "Forms with attitudes?"“Exactly,” he said, glancing at a clipboard that had rolled off the desk and was now scuttling across the floor.
“You’ll need them to approve your paperwork on Sentient Bureaucracy Day. Also, watch out for forms that eat villages. It’s usually Tuesday.” This caused Mia to hesitate. She had not expected village-devouring forms. She had not expected to need to search for them herself, either. But she grasped a pen with tiny legs and set out hunting for them. Every step was a calculated step, a deliberate one, because the office seemed to slant ever so slightly under her feet, as if observing her progress along and counting her production. It was, in loose form, exhilarating. The first one she met was under a mountain of "Forms That Have Resigned," and it glared at her suspiciously. She had to compliment it on its looks before it would play along being signed. The second, which appeared to be named Form 13-H, had already consumed a miniaturized village square. Mia decided to grumble later—perhaps after it had been digested—because bargaining forms required patience, elasticity in breaking down baffling metaphors, and the occasional piece of performance art, which Mia picked up inadvertently when she was singing the alphabet in reverse iambic pentameter because she'd misheard a question. By lunchtime—though Mia reasonably suspected the Department wasn't really attuned to time limits—she'd dealt with forms grumbling about Mondays, squirrels, and even a rather vitriolic form of self-doubt.
Each of these required patient bargaining, sometimes a cup of tea, sometimes a riddle, and on one exceedingly tense visit, the recitation of the alphabet in iambic pentameter backwards.In the process, Mia was learning how to master the rhythm of this peculiar bureaucracy, coming to understand that adaptability here was more a matter of tact and intuition than of urgency.Lastly, after what she had thought might have taken weeks, but only did for three hours, Mia arrived at the Grand Filing Desk.
It was a humongous monument built entirely of piled-on disapprovals, rejections, and forms that had started their own paperwork society. The clerk, who had spent the last hour yelling at one very stubborn "Form That Wasn't Sure If It Was," approved with a nod. "Now you can submit your forms," he said to her. "But listen to me: every approval generates three new forms. That is how the Department expands. You're supposed to expand with it." Mia swallowed hard. She placed the forms on the desk with a delicate air, as if placing down sleeping kittens. The forms whirred, growled, and now and then tried to escape the desk, but in the end, they all agreed to be filed. The Grand Filing Desk shuddered with ecstasy and emitted small wisps of smoke that had the ambiguous scent of burnt cookies. She realized too late that there was a pattern, a weird kind of discipline to the anarchy.
Even the forms that had consumed copies from villages were now calm, humming quietly as if pleased with her proficiency.Fatigued but elated, Mia leaned back. Deep in the Department, a city she'd never visited had been destroyed by red tape, but she wasn't sure it would ever be rebuilt, in some improved way—or at least a bit more bureaucratic. She paged through her folder, "Attendee Progress That May or May Not," and hoped so was her own. Mia had made it through the Department of Administrative Oddities. She had filled out complaint forms, forms that hid, forms that whispered sometimes questions about things being. And she had found out a simple truth: in a world where papers devoured villages, and pencils roamed, the same line on which she walked every day marked what was needed and what was absurd.
It was exhausting, bewildering, but curiously emancipating, as if mastering a forbidden language that only the elite could decipher—and fewer yet survive. Coming out of the Department, her folder clutched, she noticed the revolving door grin at her. She grinned back. It grinned again. Somewhere in the building's depths, the forms were plotting the next twist of bureaucratic heroics, and Mia knew that where fantasy and bureaucracy go, she had just begun. This was not an end, but the start of a longer, stranger, infinitely more surreal journey.
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