The Watermark

About the Novel

The novel is one account year in an invented city. In the last week of the old account, the Provident Trust asks the Relief Bureau for a provision for the surplus, and Anselm Wenger answers with a computation that prices the Quarter's children by the dressed-weight table and covers the Basin's shortfall with the saving. He believes the document's perfection is its exposure: a scheme carried out in the Trust's own grammar, to the Trust's own conclusion, will be read by its first reader as a scream. The committee hears it as a plan, certifies it with a visiting expert from Chicago, and adopts it with the lanes' own correction printed as the Trust's rigor. That is the year's first lesson: a flawless indictment is the frame's favorite food.

Around the scheme the year runs its own accounts. The Quarter's songs, sold by the number at the Blue Anchor, under a clause that lets the news through. The Settlement on Stocking Lane, which feeds without files and reads the Bureau's letters aloud twice, the letter and then the person. A boy who gives his number before his name. A girl of the dye works who keeps the count, unpaid, because her hand does not shake, and who finds the error in the scheme's tables that the Trust's actuary missed. A printer's devil who sets the true line in type. And over the whole arrangement, the reservoir, the Basin, held in the shape of a dead woman's name, standing at its highest recorded level while the Trust holds its ceremony in the pump hall below the gate.

The novel's engine is the refusal of the handshake. The city raises a mediator to save it, a satirist to name it, and a devourer to exploit it, and it cannot tell the three apart, because they are one man. The book's answer is the anteroom: the head reads the hands' account and says the account is correct, and the price replaces the handshake, because a reconciliation that costs nothing is the frame's word for absorption.

The City, the Trust, the Quarter, and every person in them are inventions. The record underneath is not: the science of the tables, the casework at the windows, the settlement house's method, the moral economy of the crowd, the year money died, and the engineering of urban water are all real, and all of it is cited in the back of the book.

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 Watermark is the twelfth novel in the series, following The Disposition (a wildlife ledger and the eleven lines that belong to children), 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 Reservoir, a Devourer, and a Projector

The Watermark raises its account year on three works of the public domain, each supplying a different organ, all three converging on one ground: consumption, and the technologies of representation that make a human being discussable instead of present. The number, the carcass, the rumor.

Thea von Harbou, Metropolis supplies the city. The 1927 film, written by von Harbou with Fritz Lang and directed by Lang, with von Harbou's 1926 novel as the corroborating textual witness, gives the book the head on the height and the hands below, the machine that eats the workers, the prophet counterfeited, the flood that nearly drowns the children, and the handshake on the cathedral steps. The reservoir named for the dead woman is the film's Hel made into plumbing. The numbered worker 11811 becomes File 27451 and the boy who gives his number before his name. The false Maria becomes the Printed Voice, the Trust's edition of Wenger's own words walking the city in his name. What the book refuses is the ending.

Bertolt Brecht, Baal supplies the engine. Written in 1918 and first published in 1922 by Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag in Potsdam, the text of record for this book, the play is the poet as appetite: Baal devours the host's wine, the host's wife, the women who hope, and the friend who chose him, and the play ends without reckoning, in a hut, in rain, among woodcutters who leave for work. The book keeps the appetite that never repents, the drowned girl arriving by report, the play at drowning among the roots, the quarrel over the friend relocated into the edition itself, the pump men as the woodcutters, and the withheld reckoning as its ending.

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal supplies the written voice. The 1729 pamphlet computes the kingdom's poor as meat with perfect composure, and its engine is the reader's recoil: the arithmetic must be believed before it is recognized as monstrous. The book keeps the projector's register, the carcass arithmetic translated into calorie tables and the dressed-weight frame, the corroborating voices translated into the committee and the American efficiency expert, and the peroration of disinterest translated into a slip that surfaces as flotsam, read by a clerk who does not know its author. The book changes the recoil: it stages the failure of the gag, in the green room, in the rain, and then it stages the flood.

Research Domain: The Tables, the Count, and the Water

The novel's factual ground is the industrial city's own record. The physiology of hunger: the Minnesota starvation research of Keys, Brozek, Henschel, Mickelsen, and Taylor, the two-volume Biology of Human Starvation. The physics of crowds: Helbing and Mukerji's analysis of the 2010 Love Parade disaster. The engineering and finance of urban water: Schultz and McShane, Tarr, Cutler and Miller. The workhouse as famine policy: Crossman, Nally, Kinealy. The moral economy of the food riot: E. P. Thompson's 1971 essay and D. E. Williams's study of 1766, the record the book's fourteenth chapter stands on. The company town: the Pullman literature. The year money died in Germany: Feldman's Great Disorder and Ullrich's Germany 1923. The killing floor: Halpern and Fitzgerald. The stopwatch: Nelson and Bahnisch. Scientific charity: Bremner and Vincent. The settlement house: Jane Addams herself. The eugenics record: Barker and Greta Jones. And the eugenics era's social arithmetic is the age bands' true ancestor: committees of physicians, in rooms with good light, drawing the lines.

Excerpt

The last week of the old account. The fourth floor of the Provident Building. The files come up from the intake rooms at eight.

All winter the water stood over the Quarter, held in the shape the engineers had drawn for it, and the shape was a dead woman's name.

The reservoir bore the name Ottilie, after the Direktor's wife, who had not lived to see her basin filled. Her name went around the rim in letters of white stone, each letter taller than the men who cut it, and from the streets below, on the rare mornings when the air cleared of smoke, you could read the name the way you read the time off a church tower, without thinking about it, as part of the weather. The engineers called the water the Basin when they spoke of capacity and the Lake when they spoke of beauty. The Quarter called it the water, and knocked on wood when it was mentioned, though the wood in the Quarter was mostly somebody else's.

Further Reading

For more on The Watermark and the works around it, see these pieces from the Boles constellation:

The High-Water Mark on Main Street · The Dying Grove: A Novel Born from the Collision of Joyce and Mycorrhiza · The Inheritance: When the Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot · The Kinship of Strangers: When DNA Reveals What Identity Cannot Accept · The Fractional Fiction Series · The Somnambulist's Prophecy · The Likeness

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 Watermark is the twelfth.

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.