Marcus Underhill

Marcus Underhill joined Snorbo the way a subordinate clause joins a contract: attached to something no one has since been able to locate. His intake form lists a prior role as signatory to an admissions policy governing which returned items Snorbo would accept, under what conditions, and by whose signature — but the signatory position was eliminated, then the department, then the intake desk itself, and Underhill simply carried on, admitting and rejecting by criteria he has internalized and can no longer point to the source of. The Editorial Office maintains that a man is not, strictly, a self-executing clause, but concedes that Underhill has never missed a deadline, never requested leave, and has three times admitted staff members who had otherwise been marked as departed.

His beat is a natural one: the things people take in and let go of, and the language wrapped around them. He reviews the guest bed that is always half a bed short of guests, the fourth suitcase, the wellness membership renewed automatically by a household that no longer uses it, and the €900 watch whose certificate of authenticity references a guild that dissolved in 1911, which references, in turn, the undersigned — who is, of course, him. He determines whether an item may be admitted, on what terms, and against which absent standard, then records the finding; the verdict itself is always present and always one entry further down, and the entry further down reads (as above). Colleagues report that a favorable Underhill review feels less like a recommendation than like being processed. The Office has asked him, gently, to stop stamping the drafts. He has not stopped. The stamp reads APPROVED, PENDING NO ONE.