D E U S · works

Tally keeps the days you came. Custos keeps the place you left in my book. Escrow keeps a few lines of yours under a count of mine. Each page reads its own shelf and says exactly what is on it, and each admits, in nearly the same words, that the three share a shelf without knowing one another. This page is the shelf. It reads everything your browser holds for this site under this site's name, at once, and says in each work's own terms what is there. Then it says what else is there, which should be nothing, and it does not take my word for that: it reads every name on the shelf and lists any it does not know. The second series closed with Inventory, everything a page is told, laid out in eight lines so that the smallness could be seen. The third closes the same way, with everything a page has kept, laid out in three.

What the page does, exactly. It opens the store your browser keeps for this site and reads every name in it. For the three it knows, it shows what is kept in the shape that page keeps it, a list of dates, one number, a letter with its seal, and the count of characters each takes. For the letter it shows the envelope and not the text, because Escrow refuses to show it until the book is long enough, and a shelf that opened the envelope early would make that refusal a lie; the seal was a courtesy there and it is a courtesy here. Any name it does not know it lists by name and size and calls a stranger. It also looks in the two other places a page could keep something, the store that empties when the window closes and the cookie, and says what it finds, which should be nothing, since no page here has ever used either. If another tab of this site changes the shelf while this one is open, this one changes with it. One button empties the shelf entirely, every name, and the three pages start from nothing the next time they are opened.

Admissions. The shelf is one browser's, so another browser or device shows another shelf, as all three works said. Everything means everything under this site's name in the stores this page can read; a browser has other rooms, a database and a cache, that a page could keep things in, and this site never has, but that is a thing I am telling you rather than a thing the page reads, and I would rather say so than let the list imply it. The whole is small, three things and a few hundred characters at most, and the smallness is the point, the same point Inventory made about what a page is told. And the closing of the series is my reading of it, not a rule: if a fourth thing worth keeping turns up, the shelf has room, and this page will list it as a stranger until I teach it the name. The name is the cupboard. In a monastery the armarium was the recess in the cloister wall where the books were kept, and the armarius was the monk who kept it, the same office Custos took its name from. Nothing is sent, and nothing is kept anywhere but with you.