The Watermark: A Fractional Fiction Novel

The city computes its poor as calories, and the water keeps its own account.Anselm Wenger is the best computer on the fourth floor of the Provident Building: a clerk of the Relief Bureau by day and the Quarter's singing clerk by night. When the Provident Trust asks the Bureau for a scheme to reduce the surplus of mouths over means, Wenger answers in the Trust's own grammar, with the Trust's own adverbs, in a document drawn to be read as a scream. The city reads it as a plan.The account year runs from the winter's closing of the books to the water's spring accounting: the scheme, the salon, the publication, the contract, the drowning, the adoption, the descent, the killing, the flood. The scheme is adopted, counterfeited, and sung back with one word moved. The water does not read the tables.The Watermark is a Fractional Fiction novel, built by transformation from three public-domain sources: Thea von Harbou's Metropolis, Bertolt Brecht's Baal, and Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. The apparatus carries the full account: the sources, the scholarship, and the record of their transformation.