Kaya had been a reader of absence for sixteen years. She held a certification from the Institute, which meant she had learned to see the spaces that followed major creative acts: the specific voids left by completed novels, finished compositions, children grown and gone into their own lives. She worked mostly with artists. She was considered good at her work.
The composer's name was Rens. He was eighty-one. He had spent forty-two years writing a single symphony, revising it, throwing it out, beginning again, revising again, and had submitted the final manuscript to the conservatory three weeks before Kaya arrived at his apartment. The apartment was small and full of paper. He made coffee on a stove that looked as old as he did and did not turn it off when it was done, so the coffee had been going for some time.
She conducted the assessment the way she always did: methodically, without commentary, mapping each absence by type and approximate depth. Rens sat in his chair and watched her the way her subjects always watched: without impatience, sometimes with the mild curiosity of someone watching a procedure performed on a body that was no longer entirely theirs to worry about.
The absences were numerous. Some were things she could identify by type: the category of sensory experience most commonly given in the early stages of large creative projects. Others were stranger. One appeared to be the capacity for a particular kind of boredom. Several were in the register she associated with what her textbooks called memorial texture: the felt quality of specific memories, distinct from the memories themselves. The memories remained; only the weight of them had changed.
She made notes. She would write the report that evening. The report would document what was gone and what she could estimate had been there before, and it would note, as all her reports noted, that no reversal of any absence had been documented in the literature.
When she finished, Rens poured more coffee and looked at her across the table with eyes that had been looking at things carefully for a long time. He said: "And you?"
She looked up from her notes. "I'm sorry?"
"What have you given?"
"I'm not a maker," she said. It was what she always said when subjects asked, which they sometimes did, having spent an hour examining what creation had cost them. "I don't create. I document."
Rens looked at her for a moment without expression. Then he said: "You have spent sixteen years looking at what is no longer there. You have learned to see the shape of what was given. You have written, I assume, many reports."
Kaya said nothing.
"Do you think," Rens said, "that that is not a form of making?"
She sat with this for a moment. The coffee was terrible. She drank it anyway.
On the train home, she thought about the absences she had mapped over sixteen years: hundreds of them, in painters and architects and mothers and composers and people who had loved one person completely and spent everything in that direction. She had noted each one. She had named what could be named and recorded what could not. She had spent herself in the attention.
She opened her notebook. She turned to a fresh page. She held the pen over the paper for a long time. Then she drew a shape, an outline, the way you might draw around a thing to show where it was. She didn't know yet what the shape was the outline of.
She kept drawing.