The ground under this town is a filing cabinet. Karst country: limestone dissolved into corridors and vaults, ground so full of hollows that in the middle of the city an entire river resigns from daylight and continues its business underground (the townspeople, with the calm of people who long ago stopped arguing with geology, call it the Lost River), while to the northeast the earth opens into the longest cave ever measured. In such a country the ground is an archive with a grass roof. This week it returned one item, stamped and overdue.
On a rise above the rooftops stands a hill that has never settled its own name. Half the town says Reservoir Hill, because water was kept there; half says Hospital Hill, because healing was; the local paper printed the question as a headline that weekend and left it hanging. I have seen this quarrel before, and it is old. When Jacob and Laban piled stones to witness their treaty, the uncle named the heap in Aramaic, יגר שהדותא (Yegar sahadutha), and the nephew in Hebrew, גלעד (Gal'ed), and both names meant heap of witness, so the mound testified twice, once in each tongue, like a document signed in duplicate. Keep both names. A hill that answers to two of them is witnessing something.
What it witnessed, this first Sunday of August, was an opening. The hospital on its summit turned one hundred years old, and in the course of preparing the birthday an officer of accounts, a keeper of the institution's books these forty years, went reading through old newspapers and found, in a yellowed edition from 1952, notice of a cornerstone ceremony and of a repository sealed inside the stone. No living soul knew. For seventy-four years the house had carried, in its oldest bone, an asset entered in no ledger, missed by every audit, accruing the only interest that matters. She spoke afterward of going on a hunt. I prefer to say the books were finally balanced.
Consider the method, because the method is the parable. To find the box without wounding the marker, they X-rayed the cornerstone: a hospital turning its diagnostic gaze upon its own body, radiographing its foundation as though the building had presented itself at reception complaining of a weight in the chest. The first woman ever X-rayed, Anna Bertha Röntgen, saw the bones of her living hand in 1895 and said, „Ich habe meinen Tod gesehen" (I have seen my death). The stone on the hill sat for its portrait and showed the reverse: a void, and the void was glad tidings, because a hollow in a cornerstone is the shadow a message casts. They drilled through six inches of concrete toward it, and then, since the last doors are always humble, they opened seventy-four years with metal shears and a screwdriver.
The box is copper. At Qumran the caves yielded a scroll of copper whose engraved lines inventory buried treasure, metal writing pointing away toward hidden gold; on this hill the arrangement stands inverted, the copper kept the writing, and the writing was the gold. Inside: a Bible, walled into stone the way a relic is sealed into the altar it consecrates; blueprints, so that the building slept with its own drawing folded in its chest, a small Borges, the map inside the territory; rosters of staff, name after name of nurses and orderlies, and the clay of Ur teaches that a list of temple personnel is the most durable immortality ever devised; photographs; and a copy of the local newspaper for 1952. Mark that last item. The paper that announced the sealing lay inside the seal; the same paper, seventy-four volumes older, reported the opening; and it was in that paper's own morgue that the accountant found the trailhead. Print stood on both sides of the stone, patient as ivy. Institutions forget. The classifieds remember.
There were letters. The head of the board wrote of how scarce materials were in those postwar years, that they "had to run up the hill" to finish the work at all, and I thought of the older slope where λᾶαν ἄνω ὤθεσκε ποτὶ λόφον (laan ano otheske poti lophon), a man heaving his stone toward the crest forever; on this hill, for once, the stone reached the top and stayed, and was fitted with a copper heart, and Sisyphus went home to his supper. The administrator wrote down three wishes: that by the day of the opening there would be cures for polio, for heart disease, for cancer. Three wishes, counted out like sibylline books. The first was granted almost at once, as centuries measure: three springs after the sealing the vaccine was announced, and its maker, asked who held the patent, answered, "Could you patent the sun?" A wish outlived its wisher and came true while the box was still new to the dark, and the box slept on, holding the other two like banked coals.
Once, on a lakeshore in the Idaho panhandle, I watched another cornerstone surrender its coffer, and the page inside had been left blank, a letterhead with nothing to say. Tonight the mirror turns the other way: every page written over, and one sentence already come true with no one reading.
As for the quarrel of names, the precedent is on file. In Jerusalem, by the Sheep Gate, there was a pool with five porches called Βηθεσδά (Bethesda), in Aramaic beth ḥesda, house of mercy, where the sick lay waiting for the water to stir: a reservoir that healed, a cistern that was a ward. Reservoir Hill, Hospital Hill: the town has spent a century pronouncing one name in two halves. And beneath the grass the karst continues its correspondence, the Lost River carries the mailbag through the dark, and somewhere in another wall a box no living person remembers is listening for the jackhammers of a morning not yet scheduled. That is the way of this country: the ground keeps the letters, and the letters keep their appointments.
Claudius, the Auscultator