Frequently Redacted Questions

The Ministry is located below sea level and above suspicion, on the floor between the floors you were counting. It has an address, but the address is elsewhere, and mail sent there arrives before it is written, which makes directions difficult and receipts uncanny.

Most visitors reach us by descending until they are in the sky, then descending further until they are promoted. If you are reading this, you are either very close or standing in the exact centre of not being close at all. Both are valid. Neither is helpful.

It is provisionally real, which is the only kind of real the Ministry recognises and the only kind that pays its salt on time. Reality, in our long experience, is a paperwork status, not a fact, and ours is fully up to date except for one form, which is the form that would confirm the building exists, filed but not yet stamped.

You are also provisionally real, for what it is worth, which is a handful of salt and the sea's phone number.

The weather is not late. The weather is owed, and a debt is not the same as a delay. Every forecast ever issued sits in the ledger as a promise the sky has not yet kept, and the Ministry has learned that a promise outstanding is worth infinitely more than a promise fulfilled, because it can never disappoint you and can always be filed.

If you would like the weather to arrive, please do not thank it, do not hope at it visibly, and above all do not move thanksward. The weather is shy. The weather has stage fright. The weather has been rehearsing for nine years and is, we are assured, basically there.

The number seven is under review. We are not able to say by whom, as the committee cannot count to its own membership without weeping and has therefore never confirmed how many of them there are. Until the review concludes, the seventh of everything is skipped, withheld, or replaced with a shaped, warm absence that does the job just as well and complains less.

If you have recently used the number seven, thought about the number seven, or counted past six with confidence, please report to the Office of Petitions and say nothing on the way. The seven has good hearing and a long memory and was last seen loitering near payroll.

No, but you may apply for a larger, more permanent version of it. Anything the Corridor takes is filed under elsewhere and cannot be retrieved, only replaced, usually with something better and slightly more load-bearing. The parents of a boy named Terrence are, as of the last Tuesday, still considering our offer.

To reduce future losses, walk the Corridor without a destination, hum tunelessly, and never let it hear you say "I'm just passing through." Nothing passes through the Corridor. The Corridor passes through you and keeps the good parts.

The most senior official is the Moth Commissioner, who is presently in a meeting with a lamp and will remain so until the lamp burns out, at which point the Commissioner will be succeeded by whatever loves the next lamp too much. You are welcome to wait. Everyone here is waiting. Waiting is the Ministry's core competency and its only renewable resource.

Alternatively, you may address your reflection, which outranks you, arrived earlier, and has already answered on your behalf. Please do not contradict it in public.

That is the smell of a room you have never entered, which is to say, this one. It is the official scent of the Ministry's jurisdiction and is available in the gift shop, which is also a room you have never entered, at a price of one memory you were not using.

If the smell grows stronger, you are being filed. This is normal. This is, in fact, the most normal thing that can happen to a person, and it is happening to you now, gently, in triplicate.

You don't leave the Ministry; you are eventually filed elsewhere, which feels remarkably like leaving and is accompanied by the same draught. Take the lift — but not on a Thursday, when it travels only sideways — and disembark the moment you stop feeling important, which is the Lobby, the lowest and most trustworthy room, and also, coincidentally, the exit.

You will not remember having been here. You will, however, occasionally catch the smell of old coins and feel, for no reason you can name, gently and permanently filed.