The Uncarved Block
by Beckett Cole
Literary Sci-Fi / Speculative Fiction
He didn't gain a superpower. He lost a filter.
A burned-out data analyst has been practicing an obscure breathing technique from a fragmentary Chinese text for fourteen months. One Tuesday evening, doing dishes in his apartment, something in his mind that had been running his entire life quietly stops. Eli Marsh has not gained a superpower. He has lost a filter. The constructed nature of everything — social performance, institutional authority, the agreed-upon fictions that make civilization function — is now transparent to him. What he sees is not beautiful and not terrible. It is simply what was always there, once you stop not-seeing it. He is not the first person this has happened to. An inter-agency working group called the Coherence Group has been monitoring for exactly this event for fifty years. They have contained every previous case. They are very good at it. Now they are coming for Eli. And Eli has already told his sister.
Read the opening
Chapter 1
## Chapter 1: Tuesday
The plate had a chip on the rim at roughly two o'clock if you held it the way I was holding it, which was with my left thumb at six and my right hand doing the work with the sponge. The chip had been there for at least eight months. I had bought the plate as part of a set of four from a store on Canal Street that sold dishes and phone cases and extension cords, all of them arranged on tables outside the store in a way that suggested the owner had made a decision, at some point, not to distinguish between categories of thing. The set had cost eleven dollars. Four plates, eleven dollars, two dollars and seventy-five cents per plate. I had used this particular plate maybe three hundred times, which brought the per-use cost down to a little under a cent, which made it the most economically efficient object I owned, though I had not set out to calculate that and was not sure why I was calculating it now except that my hands were in warm water and my mind was doing what my mind did when my hands were occupied, which was to work the way a dog works a tennis ball — not to any end, just because the thing was there and the jaw was available.
The water was running at what I thought of as the right temperature, which was a temperature I had arrived at over months of small adjustments to the left-hand tap and which I could not have described in degrees but could identify immediately if it was wrong. It was not wrong. The water came over the backs of my hands and over the plate and carried the soap in a thin film toward the drain, and the soap made a particular pattern around the drain that was not quite a spiral and not quite a circle but something in between that I had never looked up the name for because I suspected it did not have one, or if it did it would be in a fluid dynamics textbook and knowing it would not change the pattern.
I rinsed the plate and set it in the drying rack. The rack was plastic and white and had sixteen vertical slots for plates and a separate lower section for bowls that I did not use for bowls. I used it for the lids of two pots I owned, because the lids fit better there than the bowls did, and the bowls I dried by hand and stacked directly in the cabinet, which was a system I had developed without thinking about it and then noticed I had developed and then, having noticed, continued to use, because it worked and because changing it would have required deciding to change it, which was a different kind of effort than the effort of maintaining it.
The sponge was from a dollar store on Mott Street. I had bought a pack of four. I was on the third. Each sponge lasted roughly six weeks if I wrung it out properly after each use, which I did, and roughly four weeks if I forgot, which I sometimes did, and the current sponge was in its fifth week and had the slightly compressed feel of a sponge that was approaching the end of its useful life but had not yet crossed the line into the territory where using it felt like a concession. There was a dark stain in one corner that might have been coffee or might have been the remnant of a tomato sauce I had made three weeks ago from a can whose label I could not now recall, and the stain had set into the foam in a way that wringing did not reach, and the edges of the sponge had started to fray along the seam where the yellow foam met the green scrubbing surface, the fibers separating like threads pulled from a hem. I would replace it by the weekend. I would buy another pack of four. The pack would cost a dollar. I would not think about the purchase again until I opened the cabinet under the sink and saw the remaining sponges and felt the minor satisfaction of having planned ahead, which was not really planning ahead but was buying four of a thing I needed one of, which is what stores on Mott Street were designed to make you do.
Upstairs, the man in 4C did the thing he did every evening at roughly this time, which was to cross his apartment from what I had decided was the bedroom to what I had decided was the kitchen, and the crossing took six steps, and the sixth step was heavier than the others because it landed on a part of the floor that was either damaged or hollow or built above a joist that had settled, and the sound it made was a sound I could have described as a thunk but that was more specific than a thunk — it was a thunk with a slight resonance after it, a secondary vibration that suggested the hollow was larger than the footfall, as if the space under his floor contained an emptiness that was slightly more generous than the one his foot was asking it to be. He did this at 7:04 most evenings. It was, I assumed, 7:04 now, though I had not looked at the clock on the microwave and did not plan to, because confirming it would have told me nothing I did not already know, and the small pleasure of being right about the time was a pleasure I preferred to leave unconfirmed, where it could continue to be a pleasure rather than becoming a fact.