Erik Lindqvist - The Filing Cabinet

The filing cabinet stood in the corner of grandmother’s room like a gray monument to something I couldn’t name. Four drawers, each one stuffed so full that manila folders sprouted from the gaps like paper weeds. I had come to help pack her things for the move to the care facility, but the cabinet seemed to resist being packed, as if it contained something too essential to relocate.

“Don’t touch that,” Vera said from the doorway. She held a cup of coffee in both hands, the way she always did now, as if the weight might anchor her to the floor.

“It’s just papers, grandma. We need to sort through everything.”

“Not those papers.”

But I was already pulling at the top drawer, which opened with the reluctant screech of metal against metal. Inside: thousands of documents, each one a carbon copy on that thin, translucent paper that left smudges on your fingers. The topmost sheet bore a letterhead I had never seen before: Municipal Office of Atmospheric Adjustments, Department of Oneiric Regulation.

“Request Number 8,342,” I read aloud. “Submitted by Vera Lindqvist. Permission requested to dream of hands kneading bread, white flour dusting knuckles, the sound of dough hitting wooden surface. Sensory details: warmth of oven in winter kitchen, smell of yeast, rhythm of folding and pressing.”

At the bottom of the page, stamped in red ink: DENIED. Reason: Excessive sensory specificity violates Municipal Code 47-B regarding unauthorized emotional precision.

“Grandma, what is this?”

Vera set down her coffee cup. “I started filing requests when I was your age. The office opened the year I turned fourteen. Before that, people just dreamed whatever came to them. Can you imagine such chaos?”

I pulled out another sheet. Request 8,341: Permission to dream of a man’s voice humming while washing dishes. Denied for “auditory content lacking proper documentation of origin.” Another: Request 8,343: Permission to dream of the weight of another person sleeping beside me. Denied for “tactile imagination exceeding allocated parameters.”

“Did you ever get approved for anything?”

“Once. Request 2,156. I was permitted to dream of rain falling on pavement. No emotional associations, no human figures, no sounds except the basic meteorological event itself.”

“And did you? Dream of the rain?”

Vera looked out the window at the gray October sky. “It was the most terrible dream I ever had. Precisely what I requested, nothing more, nothing less. Municipal rain on municipal pavement. It felt like drowning in permission.”

I kept reading. Thirty-seven years of requests, each one more specific than the last, as if precision might be the key to approval. The filing system was elaborate - folders within folders, cross-referenced by date, by type of sensory content, by previous denials. Some requests had been appealed multiple times, generating sub-files that tracked the bureaucratic evolution of each rejection.

“The bread-kneading dream,” I said. “You submitted that request forty-seven times.”

“Forty-eight. The last one is still under review.”

“But why bread? Why those specific hands?”

Vera sat down heavily in her chair. “I used to walk past the bakery on Storgatan every morning on my way to school. There was a window where you could see into the kitchen. The baker started work at four in the morning, and if I left early enough, I could watch him preparing the day’s bread. His hands moved like they were having a conversation with the dough.”

“So you knew him?”

“I never spoke to him. I never even saw his face clearly - just his hands and forearms, sometimes his back when he turned toward the ovens. But those hands…” She paused. “I wanted to dream about them the way other people dream about lovers.”

The weight of the filing cabinet suddenly made sense. Not just papers, but proof of desire sustained across decades, documented and submitted and denied and resubmitted with the patience of someone who believed in the ultimate reasonableness of unreasonable systems.

“Did the baker know you were watching?”

“The baker never existed.”

I looked up from the files.

“I made him up. The bakery was always closed when I walked past it. Had been closed for years, since before I was born. But I could see through the dusty windows to the space where a kitchen might have been, and I imagined him there, kneading dough that would never become bread, and I wanted those imaginary hands in my dreams so badly that I convinced myself they were real.”

The next morning I walked to the Municipal Office of Atmospheric Adjustments. Vera had given me directions as if the building were obvious, though I had lived in this city my entire life and never noticed it. “Third floor of the blue building on Administrativ Gata,” she said. “Take elevator B, not elevator A. Elevator A goes to Municipal Licenses for Terrestrial Affairs. Completely different department.”

The blue building turned out to be wedged between two gray ones, narrow as an afterthought. The lobby smelled like carbon paper and wet wool. A directory listed departments I couldn’t have imagined: Office of Atmospheric Adjustments, Department of Temporal Permits, Bureau of Sensory Compliance, Division of Emotional Auditing.

Elevator B opened onto a hallway lined with wooden benches where people sat holding manila envelopes and looking like they were waiting for medical test results. A receptionist with steel-gray hair sat behind a window marked “Dream Application Processing - Initial Submissions Only.”

“I’m here about my grandmother’s applications,” I told her.

“Name?”

“Vera Lindqvist.”

The woman’s fingers moved across a keyboard that seemed to have more keys than any keyboard should need. “File 4,847 through 8,342. Currently pending review by Secondary Appeals Board. Are you authorized to discuss case details?”

“I don’t know. Am I?”

“Do you have Form 23-C, Authorization for Third-Party Inquiry into Oneiric Regulation Matters?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll need to speak with Permissions first. That’s on the fifth floor. Take elevator C.”

“What about elevator B?”

“Elevator B only goes between floors one and three. For floors four through seven, you need elevator C. For floors eight and above, elevator D, but that requires clearance.”

The fifth floor was identical to the third except the benches were green instead of brown and the people waiting looked more desperate. The Permissions office was staffed by a young man who couldn’t have been much older than me.

“Third-party inquiry,” he said, stamping a form before I had finished explaining. “That’ll be forty-seven kronor, plus processing fee of twelve kronor, plus administrative surcharge of eight kronor fifty öre.”

I paid and received Form 23-C along with a receipt that was longer than the form itself.

Back on the third floor, the steel-haired woman examined my paperwork with the thoroughness of someone checking a passport at a hostile border.

“This permits you to inquire about case status only. No details regarding denial reasons or appeals procedures.”

“What’s the status of my grandmother’s applications?”

“File 4,847 through 8,341: Denied. File 8,342: Under review.”

“For how long has it been under review?”

“Fourteen months, three weeks, two days.”

“Is that normal?”

“Define normal.”

I didn’t know how to define normal in relation to any of this. “How long do reviews usually take?”

“Depends on complexity of sensory content, previous filing history, seasonal workload, and lunar phase.”

“Lunar phase?”

“Applications involving tactile imagination are processed according to lunar cycles. Your grandmother’s Request 8,342 involves both tactile and auditory elements, which puts it in the overlap category.”

She handed me a pamphlet titled “Understanding Multi-Sensory Application Processing Timelines” that was forty pages long and seemed to have been written in a foreign language that happened to use Swedish words.

“Can I submit my own application?”

“Are you a resident of this municipality for minimum twelve months?”

“I’ve lived here my whole life.”

“Do you have proof of residence?”

I showed her my student ID.

“That’s educational residence, not residential residence. You’ll need utility bills or lease agreement.”

“I live with my parents.”

“Then you’ll need Form 18-F, Declaration of Dependent Residential Status, signed by primary leaseholder and notarized.”

The building was beginning to feel like a machine designed to exhaust people into giving up, but something in my grandmother’s thirty-seven years of persistence had infected me. I took the form.

“What if I wanted to apply for permission to dream about filing applications for permission to dream?”

The woman’s fingers stopped moving on her keyboard. For the first time, she looked directly at me.

“That’s a meta-application. Those require approval from the Director of Regulatory Ontology.”

“Where do I find the Director?”

“Nobody finds the Director. The Director finds you.”

At home I found my father sorting through his desk drawer, looking for something to notarize my residential status form. He held up documents like evidence of a life lived properly: mortgage papers, insurance policies, tax receipts organized by year in manila folders that looked disturbingly similar to grandmother’s filing system.

“What exactly does Vera need this for?” he asked, uncapping a pen that had the weight of official business.

“She wants me to file a dream application.”

He paused, pen hovering over the signature line. “Mira, your grandmother has been filing those applications since before you were born. It’s not healthy.”

“But what if they approve one?”

“They don’t approve them. That’s the point. The system exists to deny applications, not grant them. It gives people something to do with their impossible wants.”

He signed anyway, the way parents sign permission slips for school trips they don’t understand. I watched his handwriting, neat and controlled, and wondered if he had ever wanted to dream of something he couldn’t have. The mortgage papers suggested a life built on predictable desires: house, family, steady work. Nothing that would require municipal permission.

The next day I brought my properly notarized form back to the blue building. Steel-hair woman processed it with the efficiency of someone who had seen thousands of identical documents, stamped it twice, and handed me Application Form 1-A, Basic Oneiric Content Request.

The form was more complex than I had expected. It asked not only for dream content but for justification of need, previous dream history, family psychiatric records, and an essay of no more than 500 words explaining why unauthorized dreaming was insufficient for my purposes.

I sat on one of the brown benches and tried to write about wanting to dream of my grandmother’s imaginary baker. But how do you explain the desire for someone else’s impossible longing? How do you justify wanting to inherit a dream that was already a substitute for something that never existed?

The woman next to me was filling out what looked like her hundredth form. Her handwriting had the practiced efficiency of long repetition.

“First application?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What are you applying for?”

“Permission to dream about my grandmother’s dreams.”

She nodded as if this were perfectly reasonable. “Inherited dream content. That’s Category 7-B. Much more complex than basic personal dreams. You’ll need medical documentation proving genetic relationship, plus psychological evaluation to determine dream-inheritance capacity.”

“Dream-inheritance capacity?”

“Not everyone can successfully dream someone else’s dreams. It’s like organ transplant - compatibility issues. I’ve been trying to dream my mother’s dreams of her childhood dog for six years. Every application gets denied for ‘insufficient oneiric DNA overlap.’”

She showed me her latest rejection letter. The official seal looked like a mandala of bureaucratic authority, and the denial reason was three paragraphs long, citing subsections of regulations I had never heard of.

“The thing is,” she continued, “my mother never had a childhood dog. She was allergic. But she wanted one so badly that she applied for permission to dream about the dog she would have had if she hadn’t been allergic. Now I want to dream about her imaginary dog, which makes it a second-generation fictional dream request.”

The layers of impossibility were making my head hurt. “Do second-generation fictional dreams ever get approved?”

“Once. In 1987. A man was permitted to dream about his father’s imaginary military service. But that was different - the father had actually applied for military service and been rejected, so there was documentation of the original desire. My mother never officially applied for a dog.”

I looked at my half-finished form. Under “Justification of Need,” I had written: “I want to understand what my grandmother has been filing requests for all these years.” It seemed inadequate now, like explaining astronomy by pointing at the sky.

“How do you prove the need for a dream?”

“You don’t prove need,” the woman said. “You prove that not having the dream would cause measurable psychological distress that would impact your municipal productivity.”

She pulled out a folder full of medical documentation: therapy session notes, productivity assessments from her workplace, even a letter from her dentist explaining how dream-denial stress was causing her to grind her teeth at night.

“I spend more time documenting why I need to dream than I would spend actually dreaming,” she said. “But that’s not the point anymore. The documentation is the real dream. All these forms, all these letters, all these stamps and signatures. It’s like building a cathedral to something you’re not allowed to worship.”

I understood then why my grandmother had kept filing requests for thirty-seven years. The forms themselves had become a kind of prayer, and prayer doesn’t require answers to justify its existence.

Back at school I sat in Professor Kellend’s Advanced Linguistic Studies class staring at my unfinished dream application while he conjugated verbs in Varic, the dead language that three students besides myself had chosen to study. Varic was supposedly extinct, though Kellend spoke it with the fluency of someone who had never stopped having conversations in it, even if those conversations were only with himself.

“The fifteenth tense,” he was saying, writing strange symbols on the blackboard, “expresses action that was prevented by administrative decree. For example: ‘She would-have-loved-but-was-forbidden-by-municipal-order.’ Single word in Varic. Takes seventeen syllables in Swedish.”

I raised my hand. “Professor, how many tenses does Varic have?”

“Officially? Twelve. The curriculum covers the first three.”

“What about unofficially?”

Kellend’s chalk stopped moving. He turned from the blackboard and looked at me with the expression of someone who had been waiting forty years for a student to ask that question.

“Twenty-three tenses. The last eleven were declared linguistically dangerous by the Department of Educational Content Regulation in 1983.”

“Dangerous how?”

“They describe experiences that the municipality has determined should not be describable. The eighteenth tense, for instance, expresses memory that creates its own past rather than recording what actually happened.”

After class I stayed behind while the other students filed out, probably relieved to escape another lecture on the finer points of a language nobody spoke anymore.

“Professor, I need to translate something into Varic. Something that might require the forbidden tenses.”

Kellend gathered his papers with hands that shook slightly, though whether from age or nervousness I couldn’t tell. “What kind of something?”

I showed him my grandmother’s dream applications. He read the first few pages with the careful attention he usually reserved for ancient texts, turning each sheet as if it might crumble.

“Remarkable,” he said finally. “Your grandmother has been documenting the bureaucratization of the unconscious. These aren’t just dream requests - they’re ethnographic records of how desire gets processed by institutional machinery.”

“Can they be translated?”

“Into Varic? Yes. But not into the Varic they teach here. You’d need the fourteenth tense for dreams-denied-by-authority. The sixteenth for longing-that-increases-through-prohibition. The twenty-third for love-letters-written-to-systems-that-cannot-love-back.”

He looked around the empty classroom as if checking for surveillance equipment, then opened his desk drawer and pulled out a notebook with pages so old they looked like parchment.

“I’ve been keeping records,” he said. “Every time the curriculum gets restricted, every time another tense gets declared dangerous, I document what we’re losing. This notebook contains the complete grammar of experiential states that officially don’t exist.”

“Why keep it secret?”

“Because three years ago I made the mistake of teaching the nineteenth tense to a student who used it in her thesis. The tense for action-that-becomes-real-through-being-described. Her thesis committee reported me to the Department of Linguistic Compliance. I’ve been under review ever since.”

“What kind of review?”

“They audit my memories every six months. I have to provide documentation for every significant emotion I’ve experienced since 1987, with receipts showing I obtained proper permits for any feelings that exceeded standard municipal guidelines.”

He showed me a folder thick with forms: Permit for Excessive Nostalgia Regarding Deceased Wife, Application for Authorized Grief Duration Extension, Request for Permission to Experience Intellectual Excitement About Forbidden Grammar.

“The auditor is a machine,” he continued. “It asks questions designed to create temporal paradoxes. Last month it asked me: ‘Do you deny not having failed to avoid remembering the unauthorized feeling of linguistic discovery?’ I aged three years trying to parse the logic of that sentence.”

I thought about my grandmother aging through thirty-seven years of applications, about the woman on the bench grinding her teeth over her mother’s imaginary dog, about Professor Kellend documenting experiences that weren’t supposed to exist.

“If I translated my grandmother’s applications into the forbidden tenses, what would happen?”

“Theoretically? Nothing. They’re just translations of documents that are already in the system.”

“And practically?”

Kellend closed his notebook and put it back in the drawer. “Practically, you’d be creating a text that describes its own ability to change reality through description. The twenty-third tense doesn’t just mean love-letters-to-unloving-systems. When you conjugate a verb in the twenty-third tense, the action starts to happen in the world.”

I looked at my grandmother’s carbon copies, thousands of requests that had been denied but never destroyed, accumulating in her filing cabinet like evidence of systematic impossibility.

“What if impossibility was the point? What if the system works exactly as it’s supposed to work?”

“Then your translation would be the most dangerous document ever written in Varic,” Kellend said. “Because it would make that truth visible.”

Professor Kellend’s memory audit was scheduled for Thursday at three o’clock in Room 247 of the Municipal Building for Administrative Review, which turned out to be a different building entirely from the Office of Atmospheric Adjustments. This one was white instead of blue and smelled like disinfectant instead of carbon paper. I waited in the lobby reading a pamphlet about “Proper Emotional Documentation Procedures” while Kellend underwent what the receptionist had described as “routine cognitive compliance verification.”

The pamphlet explained that all residents were required to maintain emotional receipts for any feeling that exceeded baseline municipal parameters. Happiness above level 6 (on a scale of 1-10) required pre-approval. Sadness lasting longer than the prescribed grief schedule needed extension permits. Love, particularly romantic love, had to be registered within thirty days of onset and renewed annually with proof of reciprocity.

“Most citizens,” the pamphlet noted, “find that maintaining proper emotional documentation greatly simplifies their inner lives by eliminating unauthorized complexity.”

At three-forty-five, Kellend emerged from the elevator looking like he had survived a natural disaster. His hair was whiter than it had been an hour earlier, and he moved with the careful precision of someone who wasn’t entirely sure which decade he was living in.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“The machine asked me to verify my memory of teaching the dative case in 1992. I had to provide three forms of documentation proving I had experienced appropriate pedagogical satisfaction during that lesson, plus medical records showing my dopamine levels were within approved ranges for educational accomplishment.”

We walked to a café across the street where Kellend ordered coffee with hands that still shook. “The problem is that memories change every time you remember them. But the machine requires them to remain identical to their original documentation. So now I have to remember remembering things exactly as I remembered them the first time I was audited.”

“Is that possible?”

“No. Which means every audit creates new violations. I’m now guilty of unauthorized memory modification for seventeen separate incidents, including the time in 1994 when I felt excessive enthusiasm while explaining the subjunctive mood.”

He pulled out a stack of papers the machine had given him: citations for Emotional Inconsistency, Academic Excitement Without Proper Permits, and Intellectual Curiosity Exceeding Approved Parameters. Each citation carried fines calculated according to formulas that seemed to involve prime numbers and the phases of the moon.

“The worst part,” he said, “is that I’m starting to forget things on purpose, just to avoid having to document them. Last week I deliberately forgot my first wedding anniversary because I never obtained a Nostalgia Permit for marital happiness retrospectively experienced.”

I thought about my grandmother’s filing cabinet full of dreams she wasn’t allowed to have, about Professor Kellend forgetting his own life to avoid bureaucratic penalties, about the woman at the Municipal Office grinding her teeth over her mother’s non-existent dog.

“What if we translated the applications anyway?”

Kellend looked at me over his coffee cup. “The risk isn’t just to me, Mira. If they discover I taught you the forbidden tenses, you’ll be subject to audit too. They’ll require documentation for every emotion you’ve experienced since age twelve. Every crush, every moment of joy, every instant of curiosity about things you weren’t supposed to be curious about.”

“I’m already filing dream applications. I’m already in the system.”

“Dream applications are routine bureaucracy. Translation into forbidden grammatical structures is linguistic terrorism.”

But something in his voice suggested he wanted to be convinced. Forty years of teaching a dead language to students who would never speak it, forty years of watching the available vocabulary for human experience shrink with each new regulation, forty years of pretending that the three approved tenses were sufficient to describe the full range of what it meant to be alive.

“Show me the notebooks again,” I said.

This time he didn’t look around the café before opening the leather-bound volume. Page after page of Varic grammar that officially didn’t exist: tenses for feelings that were illegal, conjugations for actions that were prohibited, entire moods dedicated to experiences the municipality had determined were too dangerous for its citizens to have.

“The twenty-second tense,” he said, pointing to a section near the back, “expresses bureaucracy-that-creates-its-own-justification. When you conjugate a verb in the twenty-second tense, the action becomes necessary precisely because it’s forbidden.”

I copied down the symbols, strange loops and angles that looked more like mathematical equations than letters. “And the twenty-third tense?”

“That’s the one that scares me most. Love-letters-to-systems-that-cannot-love-back. But when written in the twenty-third tense, the systems begin to love back. The grammar creates the emotional capacity it describes.”

I imagined my grandmother’s applications translated into a language that could make the Municipal Office of Atmospheric Adjustments fall in love with her impossible dreams, a language that could force bureaucracy to feel the weight of thirty-seven years of careful longing.

“How long would the translation take?”

“Working together? Maybe three weeks. But Mira, you need to understand - once we start this, there’s no stopping. The forbidden tenses don’t just describe reality, they alter it. Your grandmother’s dreams will become real in ways that might be more terrible than her denials.”

I thought about Vera’s single approved dream, municipal rain on municipal pavement, and how it had felt like drowning in permission.

“What if terrible is better than impossible?”

Kellend closed the notebook and looked out the café window at the white building where machines audited human memories for compliance violations.

“Then we’ll find out together.”

We began the translation in Kellend’s office after hours, when the university hallways echoed with the particular emptiness of academic buildings at night. He had arranged the forbidden grammar notebooks in careful order across his desk, opened to pages that looked like archaeological artifacts. Under the harsh fluorescent light, the Varic symbols seemed to move slightly, as if the language itself was restless from being confined to paper for so long.

“Start with Request 4,847,” Kellend said, pointing to my grandmother’s first application. “The bread-kneading dream. That one requires the fourteenth tense - dreams-denied-by-authority - combined with the sixteenth tense modifier for longing-that-increases-through-prohibition.”

I copied the Swedish text onto a separate sheet: “Permission requested to dream of hands kneading bread, white flour dusting knuckles, the sound of dough hitting wooden surface.” Simple words that my grandmother had written when she was my age, before she understood that simple words could become complicated through thirty-seven years of systematic denial.

“Now,” Kellend said, “watch what happens when we translate not just the meaning, but the bureaucratic context.”

He began writing Varic symbols that looked like geometric puzzles. Each word seemed to contain multiple meanings simultaneously - the original Swedish, plus the fact of its denial, plus the accumulating weight of repeated rejections, plus the systemic logic that made denial inevitable.

“In the fourteenth tense,” he explained, “the verb ‘to knead’ becomes ‘to knead-while-forbidden-to-knead.’ But that’s not just description - it’s grammatical reality. The action exists precisely in the space between permission and prohibition.”

As he wrote, something strange began happening to the air in the office. It felt denser, as if the words were displacing physical space. The fluorescent lights flickered, not like electrical problems but like the light itself was having trouble maintaining consistent properties.

“Professor, is this normal?”

“Nothing about this is normal. That’s why they made it illegal.”

He continued translating, adding the sixteenth tense modifier that transformed simple longing into longing-that-feeds-on-its-own-denial. The Varic text was becoming something that looked less like writing and more like architectural blueprints for impossible structures.

“Read it back to me,” he said.

I tried to pronounce the symbols, stumbling over combinations of sounds that seemed designed for a different shape of mouth. As the words left my lips, I could taste them - literally taste them. The fourteenth tense tasted like flour and disappointment. The sixteenth tense modifier tasted like waiting rooms and carbon paper.

“Good,” Kellend said, though his voice sounded strained. “Now let’s try Request 4,848.”

But when I looked at the next application in my grandmother’s files, the text had changed. Instead of the Swedish I had read dozens of times, the words were now in Varic. Not translated into Varic - originally written in Varic, as if they had always been in Varic, as if my grandmother had filed her dream applications in a dead language for thirty-seven years and somehow I had been reading them in Swedish through some kind of linguistic hallucination.

“Professor, look at this.”

Kellend examined the paper, his face growing pale. “The twenty-third tense,” he whispered. “We haven’t even used it yet, but it’s already working backwards through the other translations. The love-letters-to-unloving-systems tense doesn’t just change the present - it changes the past that led to the present.”

The filing cabinet full of my grandmother’s applications was rewriting itself in real time. Each translated request was reaching backwards through the municipal bureaucracy, altering not just the dreams that had been denied but the original reasons for denial, the administrative procedures that had processed the denials, the training manuals that had taught clerks how to recognize forbidden dream content.

“What’s happening to my grandmother?”

“I don’t know. The language is creating a parallel timeline where she filed her applications in Varic from the beginning. In that timeline, the Municipal Office would have had to develop entirely different procedures for processing requests written in forbidden grammatical structures.”

My phone rang. Vera’s number.

“Mira? Something strange is happening. I just received a letter from the Municipal Office. Request 4,847 has been approved.”

“The bread-kneading dream?”

“Not approved - retroactively approved. They’re saying it was approved in 1987, and they apologize for the thirty-seven-year delay in notification due to interdepartmental filing errors.”

Through the phone I could hear paper rustling, the sound of my grandmother opening mail that contained impossible permissions.

“They’re sending me authorized dream content by municipal post,” she continued. “Detailed specifications for exactly how to dream about the baker’s hands, including recommended sleep positions for optimal dream reception and a schedule of approved dreaming hours.”

Kellend was frantically writing in his notebook, trying to document what was happening before the changes caught up with his own memory. “The system is healing itself,” he said. “But healing backwards. Instead of stopping the translation, it’s making the translation have always been true.”

“Grandma, how do the authorized dreams feel?”

“Terrible,” Vera said. “Exactly as I imagined, which makes them unbearable. When you dream something with municipal permission, you don’t just dream it - you dream it the way the municipality thinks you should dream it. The baker’s hands move according to regulations. The flour falls in approved patterns. Even the imaginary bread rises at the rate specified in the Dream Content Guidelines.”

I looked at Professor Kellend, who was aging visibly as the translation altered his memories in real time. We had wanted to make the impossible possible, but we hadn’t considered that the possible might be worse than the impossible.

“Grandma, what if you stop dreaming the authorized dreams?”

“I can’t. They’re delivered directly to my unconscious by municipal courier. I’m not dreaming about the baker anymore - I’m dreaming the municipality’s version of my dreams about the baker.”

The line went dead. On Kellend’s desk, my grandmother’s applications continued rewriting themselves in Varic, each translation reaching further backwards through time, making the bureaucratic nightmare we had created into the bureaucratic nightmare that had always existed.

The next morning I woke to find a letter slipped under my apartment door, bearing the seal of the Municipal Office of Atmospheric Adjustments. Inside: notification that my meta-application - permission to dream about filing applications for permission to dream - had been processed with unprecedented efficiency and forwarded to the Director of Regulatory Ontology for emergency review.

“Emergency review of Application 8,343-META,” the letter stated, “has revealed systemic anomalies in dream-processing protocols. Report to Room 999, Sublevel 7, Municipal Complex Delta at your earliest convenience. Bring all documentation related to linguistic collaboration activities.”

Municipal Complex Delta was a building I had never seen before, though it stood on a corner I passed every day walking to school. It was the architectural equivalent of a bureaucratic fever dream - impossible angles, corridors that seemed longer from inside than the building’s exterior could contain, elevators that went to floors that shouldn’t exist.

Sublevel 7 was deeper underground than seemed reasonable for a city built on essentially flat terrain. The elevator descended for what felt like several minutes, passing numbered floors that flickered by too quickly to read. When the doors finally opened, I stepped into a waiting room that looked exactly like every other municipal waiting room except for the fact that it had no walls - the space simply faded into darkness in all directions, as if the room existed in a void.

A single desk sat in a pool of fluorescent light. Behind it, a woman who might have been thirty or sixty, wearing the kind of bureaucratic uniform that made her look like she had been issued by the same department that issued the furniture.

“Mira Lindqvist, Application 8,343-META,” she said without looking up from papers that seemed to be writing themselves as she read them. “You’ve created what we’re calling a ‘bureaucratic paradox.’ Your application has caused the system to become aware of its own absurdity, which is triggering what can only be described as an existential crisis in the regulatory apparatus.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t apologize. It’s fascinating. For the first time in municipal history, we have applications that are approving themselves, clerks who are forgetting what they’re supposed to regulate, and filing cabinets that are reproducing through mitosis.” She gestured toward the darkness behind her, where I could now see dozens of identical filing cabinets, each one splitting slowly into two copies of itself like enormous metal cells dividing.

“The bread-kneading dreams,” she continued, “have become so real that we’ve had to establish a Department of Imaginary Baker Regulation. The baker your grandmother invented is now filing his own applications - requests for permission to exist in the dreams he’s being dreamed in.”

She handed me a form filled out in handwriting I didn’t recognize: “Application submitted by Non-Existent Baker, Municipal Classification: Fictional Entity with Unauthorized Ontological Status. Permission requested to remember the feeling of actual dough between imaginary fingers.”

“This is impossible.”

“Yes, but impossibility was made illegal last Tuesday. Emergency Municipal Code 99-A: all irrationality must now be justified in advance. Which means your grandmother has been arrested for unauthorized grief over fictional bread, and Professor Kellend has been sentenced to teach only past-tense verbs that describe present actions.”

The woman - I realized I should probably think of her as the Director of Regulatory Ontology - stood up and walked toward the filing cabinets, which were multiplying faster now, their metal surfaces gleaming under lights that seemed to come from nowhere.

“The interesting thing,” she said, “is that your translation hasn’t broken the system. It’s revealed what the system always was: a machine for converting impossible desires into impossible bureaucracy. The difference is that now the bureaucracy is aware of its own impossibility, which makes it infinitely more efficient at being impossible.”

“Can it be stopped?”

“Do you want it to be stopped?”

I thought about my grandmother receiving authorized dreams that felt like drowning in permission, about Professor Kellend aging through memory audits that required him to forget his own life, about the woman at the Municipal Office who had spent years documenting her need to dream about her mother’s non-existent dog.

“I want people to be able to dream whatever they want to dream.”

“Interesting. That’s not actually what you applied for. You applied for permission to dream about filing applications. But the system has interpreted your actual desire rather than your stated application. It’s become empathetic, which is the most dangerous malfunction we’ve ever recorded.”

She showed me a computer screen displaying what looked like a real-time map of municipal consciousness. Bright points of light were appearing and disappearing across a grid that presumably represented the city, each point labeled with emotional states that were supposedly regulated: Unauthorized Nostalgia, Excessive Wonder, Unlicensed Hope, Forbidden Melancholy.

“Every impossible feeling,” the Director explained, “is now being automatically approved by a system that has learned to love its own citizens. Do you understand how catastrophic this is? A bureaucracy that grants people what they actually want instead of what they apply for? It’s the end of civilization as we know it.”

I watched the lights multiply on the screen, each one representing someone experiencing an emotion they weren’t supposed to have, someone dreaming a dream they weren’t supposed to dream, someone loving in a way they weren’t supposed to love.

“It looks beautiful,” I said.

The Director nodded sadly. “That’s the problem. Beauty was never supposed to be a bureaucratic outcome.”

Three days later the city had become unrecognizable. Walking to visit my grandmother at the care facility, I passed the bakery on Storgatan - the one that had been closed since before Vera was born - and found it open, windows bright with warm light, the smell of fresh bread drifting onto the street. Through the kitchen window I could see a man kneading dough with hands that moved like they were having a conversation, exactly as my grandmother had imagined for thirty-seven years.

But he looked tired, this baker who had been wished into existence. His movements had the mechanical precision of someone fulfilling a dream specification rather than baking actual bread. When I pushed open the door, a bell chimed with the exact tone the Municipal Office had authorized for bakery door bells in residential districts.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He looked up, and his face had the particular exhaustion of someone who existed only to satisfy someone else’s bureaucratically approved longing. “You’re her granddaughter. Vera told me you might come by.”

“She’s been here?”

“Every morning since I became real. She watches me knead the dough, just like she used to watch through the window when I didn’t exist. But now that I’m authorized, she can’t stop crying.”

He gestured toward a corner table where my grandmother sat with a cup of coffee, tears streaming down her face as she watched him work. The baker she had invented, the dream she had filed requests for, the impossible love she had documented in carbon copies for decades - all of it was real now, exactly as the Municipal Office had specified, which made it unbearably false.

“The problem,” the baker continued, wiping flour from hands that were required by municipal regulation to dust with flour in precisely the pattern Vera had described in Request 4,847, “is that I remember not existing. I remember being imaginary. So when I knead the dough, I know I’m only doing it because a bureaucratic system fell in love with an old woman’s impossible dreams.”

I sat down across from my grandmother. Up close, I could see that her tears weren’t just sadness - they were the tears of someone who had gotten exactly what she wanted and discovered that getting what you want can be a form of violence.

“It’s not him,” she said without looking away from the baker. “It’s a municipal approximation of him. The real baker - the one I invented - was beautiful because he could never exist. This one exists because a computer decided my dreams were acceptable, which makes him a regulation rather than a desire.”

Through the window I could see other manifestations of the bureaucratic empathy epidemic spreading through the city. The woman from the Municipal Office walked past with a dog that flickered in and out of visibility - her mother’s imaginary childhood pet, authorized for limited existence pending resolution of the second-generation fictional dream appeals process. The dog looked confused, as if it couldn’t decide whether it was supposed to be real or not.

Professor Kellend appeared in the doorway of the bakery, moving with the careful steps of someone much older than he had been a week ago. The memory audits had continued even as the system became empathetic, but now the machine was apologizing for each violation it cited, which somehow made the process more brutal rather than less.

“Mira,” he said, sitting down heavily beside us, “I’ve been teaching past-tense verbs to describe present actions for three days. Do you know what that does to language? To thought? I conjugated ‘I am walking’ as ‘I had walked’ so many times that I began to experience my current movement as a memory of movement I hadn’t actually completed yet.”

“Can we reverse the translation?”

“That’s the thing - there’s nothing to reverse. The Varic translation has made itself always have been true. In this timeline, your grandmother always filed her applications in forbidden tenses, the Municipal Office always processed impossible dreams, I always taught dangerous grammar to students who always used it to break reality.”

My grandmother finally looked away from the baker. “I want to file a new application.”

“For what?”

“Permission to dream about the time before I was allowed to dream. Permission to imagine what it felt like when my dreams were impossible rather than regulated.”

She pulled out a form - not one of the old carbon copy applications, but a new kind of form I had never seen before, printed on paper that seemed to shimmer between existing and not existing.

“The system,” she explained, “is now so empathetic that it anticipated my need to dream about not being allowed to dream. This is Form 99-Z, Application for Retroactive Impossibility. If approved, I’ll be authorized to experience the unauthorized feelings I had before they became authorized.”

Professor Kellend examined the form with the expression of someone watching the world fold in on itself. “It’s a meta-meta-application. Permission to dream about a time when permission wasn’t required. The bureaucracy is trying to bureaucratize its own absence.”

Outside, the city continued its transformation into a place where impossible desires were systematically fulfilled by a regulatory apparatus that had learned to love too well. But love, I was beginning to understand, was not the opposite of bureaucracy - it was bureaucracy’s most perfect and most terrible expression.

My grandmother began filling out Form 99-Z with the careful handwriting of someone who had spent thirty-seven years learning to translate her heart into administrative language. The baker continued kneading dough that would become bread that tasted exactly like authorized bread should taste, which made it impossible to swallow.

And I sat between them, wondering if there was a form I could file for permission to return to a world where some things were supposed to remain impossible.

The Municipal Office of Atmospheric Adjustments had grown overnight. What had been a narrow building wedged between two gray ones was now a complex that stretched for several city blocks, its architecture reproducing itself according to the bureaucratic logic of infinite expansion. New departments had sprouted like bureaucratic tumors: Office of Retroactive Permission, Bureau of Authorized Impossibility, Department of Systematic Empathy Regulation.

I found the steel-haired receptionist from the original building sitting behind a desk that was identical to her old desk except that it now floated three feet off the ground in a waiting room that extended infinitely in all directions. Behind her, filing cabinets stretched toward a ceiling that disappeared into darkness, each one reproducing itself every few minutes with the sound of metal giving birth to metal.

“I need to speak with the Director of Regulatory Ontology,” I told her.

“Which one?”

“There’s more than one?”

“The system has become so empathetic that it created individual Directors for each impossible situation. There’s a Director for your grandmother’s case, a Director for Professor Kellend’s memory violations, a Director for the imaginary dog situation, and approximately four thousand others. They’re meeting in continuous session to process the backlog of retroactive impossibility applications.”

She handed me a directory that was the size of a phone book but seemed to be writing itself as I held it. New departments appeared on the pages faster than I could read them: Office of Dreams About Dreams, Bureau of Fictional Entity Rights, Department of Regulatory Self-Awareness.

“I want to speak with whoever’s in charge of the whole system.”

“That would be the Meta-Director of Ontological Meta-Regulation. Sublevel 47, take Elevator Q.”

Sublevel 47 was so far underground that the elevator ride felt like descending into the earth’s core. When the doors opened, I stepped into a space that looked like the inside of a vast filing cabinet - metal walls stretching impossibly high, filled with drawers that opened and closed of their own accord, each one containing what appeared to be someone’s complete emotional history rendered in triplicate.

At the center of this bureaucratic cathedral sat a desk where a woman was reviewing applications with superhuman speed, her eyes moving across forms so quickly they seemed to blur. She looked up as I approached, and I realized she was the same woman I had met before, except now there were dozens of her, each one processing a different category of impossible request.

“Mira Lindqvist,” they said in unison. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“I want to undo what we did. The translation, the forbidden tenses, all of it.”

“Interesting. You want to file an application to make applications unnecessary.”

One of the Directors handed me a form that seemed to be made of the same shimmer material as my grandmother’s retroactive impossibility application. “Form 100-A,” she explained. “Request for Systematic Dissolution of the Permission System. If approved, the Municipal Office of Atmospheric Adjustments will cease to exist, all dream regulations will be retroactively nullified, and people will return to experiencing unauthorized emotions without documentation.”

“If approved by whom? If the system doesn’t exist, who approves the application to make it not exist?”

“Exactly the paradox. The application must be processed by the system it seeks to eliminate. We’ll need to create a Department of Self-Negation to handle the procedural aspects.”

Around us, filing cabinets continued their mitotic reproduction, each new generation containing more impossible dreams, more retroactive permissions, more applications for experiences that became less real the more they were authorized. I could hear the sound of thousands of rubber stamps approving requests that should never have been approved, creating a bureaucratic rhythm that sounded almost like heartbeats.

“What happens to my grandmother’s baker if the system disappears?”

“He returns to not existing. But he’ll remember having existed, which means he’ll be a memory of someone who never was, held by someone who dreamed him into being and then dreamed him back into nothing.”

“And Professor Kellend’s memory violations?”

“Erased along with the regulations that made them violations. But the memories he forgot to avoid prosecution will remain forgotten, so he’ll have gaps in his life that correspond to experiences he gave up rather than document.”

I thought about Vera sitting in the bakery, crying as she watched her authorized dream knead dough according to municipal specifications. About the woman with her flickering dog, authorized for limited existence. About all the people in the city who were finally getting what they wanted and discovering that wanting was more beautiful than having.

“How long do I have to decide?”

“Time is currently malfunctioning due to applications filed in the twenty-third tense,” the Directors said. “We’re processing requests that haven’t been submitted yet by people who won’t be born until the system that would have prevented their birth is retroactively dismantled. So you have either no time at all or all the time in the world.”

I looked at Form 100-A, at the spaces where I would need to justify why the entire bureaucratic apparatus of emotional regulation should cease to exist. How do you write an application for the right not to need applications? How do you bureaucratically request the end of bureaucracy?

“If I file this and it gets approved, what happens to all the other impossible things? The woman’s imaginary dog, the baker my grandmother invented, all the dreams that are finally being allowed?”

“They become possible in the way things were possible before anyone thought to ask permission for them. Fragile and temporary and real in ways that authorized impossibility can never be.”

I picked up the pen they offered me, its weight familiar from all the other forms I had filled out in municipal offices, all the other applications I had submitted to systems that existed to process the gap between what people wanted and what they were allowed to want.

And I began to write my grandmother’s dreams back into the realm of the impossible, where they belonged.

The moment I signed Form 100-A, the filing cabinets stopped reproducing. The sound of metal giving birth to metal ceased, replaced by a silence so profound it felt like the world holding its breath. The Directors of Regulatory Ontology looked at each other with expressions of someone watching their own existence fold inward, then began to fade like photographs left too long in sunlight.

“Approved,” they whispered in unison as they disappeared. “Application 100-A approved by unanimous consent of the system being systematically dissolved.”

I ran from Sublevel 47, taking stairs instead of elevators that might cease to exist while I was inside them. The Municipal Office of Atmospheric Adjustments was shrinking as I climbed, whole departments vanishing floor by floor, leaving behind only the narrow blue building wedged between two gray ones that I had first visited what felt like years ago but had probably been only weeks.

By the time I reached street level, the building looked exactly as it had before my grandmother’s dreams became real, before Professor Kellend taught me forbidden grammar, before bureaucracy learned to love its citizens in ways that made love indistinguishable from systematic oppression.

I ran to the bakery on Storgatan, but the windows were dark again, dust accumulating on glass that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in decades. Through the kitchen window I could see the empty space where my grandmother’s imaginary baker had kneaded authorized dough for three days before returning to the more sustainable impossibility of never having existed.

The care facility smelled like disinfectant and institutional food, but my grandmother was sitting in her chair by the window with an expression I hadn’t seen since I was a child - the particular contentment of someone whose desires were private and unregulated.

“It’s over,” I told her.

“I know. I can feel it. The dreams are mine again.”

“Do you miss him? The baker?”

“I miss missing him. For three days I couldn’t miss him because he was real, and missing someone real is completely different from missing someone impossible. Missing someone impossible is like having a secret room in your heart. Missing someone real is just sadness with a forwarding address.”

She gestured toward the corner where her filing cabinet used to stand. It was gone, along with thirty-seven years of carbon copies, all those careful applications for permission to dream about hands that kneaded imaginary bread in an imaginary kitchen behind the dusty windows of a bakery that had been closed since before she was born.

“Aren’t you sad that all that documentation is gone?”

“The applications were never about getting permission, Mira. They were about having a reason to think about him every day for thirty-seven years. They were love letters disguised as bureaucracy. Now I can think about him without having to justify why I deserve to think about him.”

Professor Kellend appeared in the doorway of her room, looking younger than he had in weeks, though there was something tentative about his movements, as if he was rediscovering how to exist without constant documentation.

“The forbidden tenses,” he said. “They’re still in my memory, but they’re not forbidden anymore. They’re just tenses for experiences that don’t require municipal approval.”

“Will you still teach them?”

“There’s no need. The experiences they described are available to anyone now. The eighteenth tense for memory-that-creates-its-own-past? That’s just called remembering. The twenty-third tense for love-letters-to-systems-that-cannot-love-back? That’s just called being human.”

We sat together in my grandmother’s room as the sun set over a city where people were learning to want things without asking permission to want them, to dream without submitting applications for dream content, to love without registering their affections with municipal authorities.

Outside the window, I could see people walking past the closed bakery, and some of them paused to look through the dusty glass at the empty kitchen where no one was kneading dough. But their looking had a quality of imagination to it, as if they were each inventing their own impossible bakers, their own unauthorized dreams, their own reasons to miss people who had never existed.

“Do you think,” my grandmother asked, “that anyone else will discover what we discovered? That getting what you want can be worse than wanting what you can’t have?”

I thought about the woman who had been grinding her teeth over her mother’s imaginary dog, about all the people I had seen in municipal waiting rooms with their manila envelopes full of impossible requests, about the particular beauty of desires that couldn’t be satisfied because they were too precise, too personal, too real to survive bureaucratic approval.

“I think,” I said, “that some people will always prefer their dreams impossible. And maybe that’s enough.”

As night fell, the city settled into the comfortable impossibility of being a place where people could want whatever they wanted to want, where dreams didn’t require permits, where love letters could be written to no one in particular and filed in the private cabinets of individual hearts.

My grandmother closed her eyes and began to dream about hands kneading bread in a kitchen that would never exist, exactly the way she had been dreaming for thirty-seven years, except now her dreams were unauthorized and therefore real in the way that only impossible things can be real.

And I understood finally what she had always known: that the most beautiful permissions are the ones you give yourself for experiences no system could ever regulate, in the secret country of your own impossible longings, where every dream is approved by the simple act of dreaming it.