The Disposition

About the Novel

The novel is one night in one room. At five minutes to ten in the evening, a young woman arrives at a permitted wildlife rehabilitation facility on a hill above Puget Sound, sits down in the office chair across the table, and says almost nothing until morning. At eight, a state Inspector will come up the gravel with a form the law requires her to serve, and she will be polite, and she will take the records. Everything between those two clock points is the woman who holds the permit, talking: fifty-three years old, twenty-two years on the hill, the keeper of a green ledger whose every line ends in one word from a fixed column, and the only person alive who can tell the whole story of the eleven children that ledger quietly holds.

She tells them one at a time, in an order she has chosen for a reason the book keeps until it hurts. A boy delivered by his great-aunt with one bag. A girl with six placements behind her who walked into a February and became a nine-day search. A boy whose father was found, which is the good ending, the one the whole operation exists to earn. A boy who broke the facility's oldest rule by giving the animals names, and a boy who did something in the dark that the file reduces to one line and an attached report, and a boy who arrived under an emergency form and left in a county car at ten past one in the morning. Under all of it sits the line she falsified, in ink, on purpose, and the night is her one chance to say why.

The engine of the book is stated in its first chapter and honored to its last: nobody in this story is lying, and nobody in it does anything wrong. Every person in the chain behaves correctly, competently, at the speed the procedure requires, and a child dies anyway, and a government record is false anyway. The horror the novel offers has no villain in it, because a villain would mean the machine was misused, and the machine was not misused. The book is about what the machine does when every operator is decent, and about the distance between a life and the word that survives it.

Green Point, its county, and every person on that hill are invented. The six words are not, and the ledger is not, and the treaty ground under the property is not. The novel carries exactly one invention beyond its people, declared openly in the back matter, and everything else that sounds institutional is institutional. The reader is owed that distinction on the first page that can make it, and the novel makes it there.

About Fractional Fiction

Fractional Fiction is a series built on a single method. Each novel takes three works of the public domain, breaks each one down to the load-bearing structure under its story, the engine that made it move, and raises a new book on those three frames, bound by one present idea and carried on contemporary research and consequence. The fraction is the relation: three old numerators over one new denominator. None of the sources is hidden and none is mere decoration. A reader who knows the originals feels them working under the floor; a reader who has never met them finishes the book already halfway into all three.

The Disposition is the eleventh novel in the series, following The Dying Grove (mycorrhizal networks and forest consciousness), The Inheritance (transgenerational epigenetics and family secrets), The Kinship of Strangers (population genetics and identity), The Held Land (Black land dispossession and inheritance), The Corollary (women's peace activism in World War I), The Somnambulist's Prophecy (disorders of consciousness and foreknowledge), Civility Certified (bureaucratic violence and institutional exclusion), Standard Deviation (algorithmic governance and surveillance scoring), The Likeness (voice cloning and the fabricated voice), and The Wergild (the man-price and the debt American law never billed).

Source Material: A Sketchbook, a Genealogy, and a Descent

The Disposition raises its one night on three works of the public domain, each supplying a different organ, all three converging on the idea named in its title: the single word a record keeps when a life moves on, and what choosing that word does to the person holding the pen.

Emma-Lindsay Squier, The Wild Heart supplies the ground and the surface. Squier's 1922 collection of Puget Sound animal sketches, with an introduction by Gene Stratton-Porter titled 'Some Youngsters Find the Wrong Parents,' was written, in the novel's geography, eleven miles from the office where the woman is talking, and the narrator has been arguing with it since she read it at nine years old. From Stratton-Porter's introduction the novel takes its governing law, that a wild thing which stops fearing us cannot go home, and from Squier's own chapters it takes the whistle-trained rabbit shot by a stranger, the seal given away barking from a boat's hold, and the clearing kept open on a hill trail for a lifetime so the ferns would not close over the place where something happened. The narrator's verdict on that book, that every act of feeding in it is an act of binding, is the verdict the novel then turns on her.

Hesiod, Theogony supplies the deep plot. The oldest family record in Greek literature is a list of who was born to whom and what became of each, which is to say a ledger, and its plot is the oldest plot there is: generation after generation, warned about its children, devours them, and is replaced anyway by the child the machine missed. That succession is the novel's moral physics, running under every system that receives a child it fears and files what it receives, and the book's second epigraph is the Muses' own confession from the poem's opening, that they know how to speak many false things as though they were true, and true things when they will, which is the novel's crime stated as a method.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno supplies the shape and the address, read in the English Longfellow made in the years after his wife died. The retrospective chapters descend like rings, each child a circle deeper, a teller walking one silent listener downward and promising that the worst is further in. The poem's contrapasso, the punishment fitted to the sin, is re-keyed for the world of forms, where nobody is burned or frozen and everybody is summarized, and the novel's commission is Ciacco's plea from the sixth canto, rendered by the narrator herself: when you are back in the sweet world, carry me into the minds of other people. The listener says almost nothing all night because Dante says almost nothing all poem. Witness is the job.

Research Domain: The Permit, the Treaty, and the Carried Cell

The novel is grounded in the working record of wildlife rehabilitation, where permits, annual returns, and the six-word disposition vocabulary are the actual instruments of the trade, and in the treaty geography of Puget Sound, from the 1855 signing on the sand at Point No Point to United States v. Washington, the 1974 ruling in the Western District of Washington, affirmed in the Fishing Vessel case, that made tribal governments co-managers of the water and stands quietly under the authority of the novel's tribal Biologist. Its late chapters rest on cited science: microchimerism, the decades-long persistence of a child's cells in the mother who carried them; the chemosignaling of human fear, which can be smelled; and the overwriting of earliest memory by the growing brain itself, recoverable, so far, only in mice. Behind the whole night sits the moral luck problem, the question of whether a person can be guilty of an outcome chance delivered, framed in the paired essays of Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams that anchor the novel's Bibliography, alongside Angela Bourke's account of Bridget Cleary, the last of the book's real ghosts.

Excerpt

Five minutes to ten in the evening. The office at Green Point. The form is on the table, and the chair across from the woman is no longer empty.

The form is on the table between us and it is dated for eight o'clock.

You can read it from where you are sitting. There is no seal on it and no signature I do not recognize. A man I have worked beside for twenty-two years signed the top line at four this afternoon and told me on the phone that it was procedural, and he used that word twice, and I did not argue with him because he is not wrong. Everything that happens tomorrow will be procedural. The Inspector will come up the gravel at eight with a clipboard and a printed inventory, and she will be polite, and she will take the records.

So we have tonight. That is the whole of what we have, and I am going to spend it talking, and you are going to sit there and let me.

You should understand that nobody in this is lying. That is the thing I want in early, before the rest of it, because if you leave here tonight thinking that some person did this to some other person you will have got nothing from me at all. The Neighbor looked out a window. A man was asked a question and the Director answered it. At eight tomorrow the Inspector will drive up the gravel with a form that a statute obliges her to serve, and she will be sorry, and she will serve it. Every one of them is doing the correct thing at the correct speed. That is what I have to tell you about, and it took me eleven years to see that it was the thing, and I saw it too late to be of use to anyone.

Further Reading

For more on the themes explored in The Disposition, see these related works from the Boles constellation:

Only the Good-Hearted are Heartbroken · Homeward · Ten Sixty-Nine · The Magnificent Loser

About the Author

David Boles is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher. He was born in Nebraska and lives in the New York City area, where he has written and published under the David Boles Books imprint since 1975. He holds an MFA from Columbia University, where he trained at the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies, and he has been a member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and of the Authors Guild and PEN America.

With Janna Sweenie he co-founded an American Sign Language program at the City University of New York School of Professional Studies and co-authored the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series. His work spans fiction, drama, cultural criticism, and institutional history, including the Fractional Fiction novels, of which The Disposition is the eleventh.

He writes daily at bolesblogs.com. Boles.com stands at the center of his constellation of projects, and the full catalog lives at bolesbooks.com.