A Partial Catalogue of Lacunae

A twelve-second gap in the audio recording. The tape runs normally on either side; the gap is not silence but an absence of signal. Whatever was said in those twelve seconds has never been established. The people present at the recording do not agree on whether they remember what was said. Two say they remember clearly. Their accounts do not match.

Three pages, water-damaged, between what is now called Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. The chapter numbers were adjusted by a later editor. We do not know if the original text was numbered at all. We do not know if what we call Chapter 5 was meant to follow what we call Chapter 4, or if something else came between them that did not survive.

The name she gave. He heard it wrong and did not ask her to repeat it, because he thought he had understood. He realized his mistake some hours later. By then he had no way to reach her. He is the only person who knows this. In his memory, she has no name.

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Whatever was decided at the meeting of 14 March. The minutes record only: "Various matters discussed and resolved." Those present have since died. Those decisions, whatever they were, have had consequences that we continue to live inside of.

The word that was on the tip of his tongue. The word he could describe the shape of — the sound it almost started with, the weight of it in the mouth he imagined it in, the thing it named: the specific quality of light in late afternoon when it comes through west-facing windows and catches dust suspended in the air. He died without finding it. It may not exist in any language. If it does not exist, we have been living inside it unnamed.

Approximately four years — from roughly age eight to roughly age twelve — of which she has no memory whatsoever. Not traumatic, her therapist confirmed after a thorough investigation; simply gone. The years existed. Photographs prove this. She is in them. She appears, in the photographs, to have been happy.

The other half of the conversation. The recording device only captured one side. What we have is as follows:

The middle panel of the triptych. Stolen or sold in 1943, depending on which account you trust. Its current location is unknown. The two surviving panels each depict a figure who appears to be looking toward where the middle panel would be. Art historians disagree about what the figures are looking at. Whatever it was, it held their attention completely.

The last two hundred pages of the novel, burned by the author in 1979. When asked why, she said: "It already knew how to end." She never clarified. In the decades since, at least fourteen different endings have been reconstructed, proposed, or imagined by scholars and readers. Those who love the book tend to have strong opinions about which is correct. None of them are.

The shadow definitions. Every word carries, alongside its dictionary meaning, a private meaning — the thing it means to one specific person because of one specific moment, an association so deep and bodily it feels like the real definition. When that person dies, their shadow definition dies with them. Amber meant something to someone. Window meant something to someone. Tuesday meant something to someone. We do not know what we are losing. We lose it without noticing.

The bird. There was a bird, everyone agreed — just before it happened, a bird. No one described it the same way twice. Large or small, they were uncertain. Dark or pale, they could not say. What kind of bird, no one knew. By the time someone thought to look for it, it was gone. The bird appears in every account. It is consistent in only one detail: it was there.

The reason it ended. Which was not what any of them said afterward. Which was small and unglamorous and would have made the whole thing smaller to know. The gap is held open deliberately. Some lacunae are not lost; they are chosen.

This entry. By which we mean: the thing this catalogue cannot catalogue — the lacuna in the list of lacunae, the gap that demonstrates the gap. There are absences we have not thought to record because we do not know they are absent. This entry holds that place open. It is the blank page at the end of a book, which is not part of the story but without which you would not know the story was over.