The Matter of Alignment

as observed, endured, and partially enabled by Alistar Corvus

The winter inventory always begins with good intentions and ends with handwriting I do not recognize.

We gather because the lake has withdrawn its consent. Ice presses its authority against the shoreline. Wind takes up residence in the trees and refuses to pay rent. Fieldwork recedes, and in its absence we turn inward, toward shelves and cases and drawers, toward the reassuring fiction that if we can align our instruments, the world might be persuaded to align back.

The Annual Winter Equipment Inventory and Calibration of Research Assets is meant to be a continuity exercise. An act of care. A hedge against drift. It is not meant to be theatrical. And yet, every year, it develops a personality.

This year’s personality arrived early, carrying binders.

George E. Bjork was already in the room when I arrived, arranging his materials with the deliberation of a man setting a bone. Three binders. Tabbed. Labeled. Indexed. He set them down gently, as though sudden movement might startle the margins. I noted, not for the first time, that George treats paperwork the way some people treat faith. Not symbolically. Literally.

I cannot claim innocence here. I was irritated, yes, but irritation is often just admiration that refuses to dress formally. George’s devotion to procedure exceeded even my own, not in competence but in purity. Where I treat bureaucracy as an instrument, George treats it as a condition. I use process to achieve order. George preserves order so that process may continue uninterrupted.

That difference matters.

I assigned tasks. I emphasized scope. I used words like “efficient” and “straightforward,” which should never be spoken aloud in winter, and certainly not in the presence of a man who considers efficiency a moral claim requiring documentation. Each attempt I made to compress the work, George expanded—not out of defiance, but out of care. He was not slowing us down. He was protecting the procedure from our impatience, including mine.

This, more than anything, was the source of my irritation. George was not challenging authority. He was outflanking it with compliance.

The first hour went well. Too well. Instruments were inspected. Gauges responded. Bearings turned. The anemometer behaved like an anemometer. This success created a dangerous surplus of confidence.

That was when Eleanor arrived.

She came in without apology, snow clinging to the cuffs of her jeans, wearing a faded Pokémon t-shirt beneath her coat. Not ironic. Not curated. Just Pikachu, slightly cracked from too many wash cycles, smiling cheerfully into the face of institutional gravity. Sensible tweed would have made a statement. This was something else entirely.

George noticed immediately.

He did not comment. This restraint should be recorded.

Eleanor caught my eye, took in the table of instruments, the binders, the posture of the room, and mouthed, Oh no. I nodded once. Understanding passed between us, quiet and complete.

“Are we color-coding today,” she asked, dropping her bag under the table, “or is that a next-year innovation?”

George looked up, genuinely startled by the idea that color-coding might be deferred.

“These tabs are provisional,” he said carefully. “They correspond to asset class, not condition.”

“Good,” Eleanor replied. “Because condition is a vibe.”

I should have intervened. I did not.

I assigned Eleanor to the barometric gauges in what I believed was a harmless attempt to introduce levity through delegation. This was a mistake.

“Which one’s the reference?” she asked.

George slid one forward. “That is the primary reference.”

“And the other two?”

“Secondary and tertiary,” he said. “For confidence.”

Eleanor lifted the tertiary gauge, turned it upside down, and peered at it. “Does it know it’s tertiary?”

George paused. “It does not,” he said at last. “But we do.”

She set it down gently. “Then we’re good.”

The gauges, as before, disagreed.

“We should document the divergence,” George said, already reaching for a pen.

“Or,” Eleanor offered, “we could acknowledge that air is chaotic and move on with our lives.”

I cleared my throat. “We will document the divergence.”

She looked at me. I felt judged. Correctly.

As the morning progressed, the room filled with the soft sounds of calibration: the click of cases, the scratch of pencil, the low murmur of disagreement conducted in civil tones. I watched George initial entries with careful satisfaction, each mark an affirmation that the world, at least on paper, remained legible.

During the anemometer calibration, Eleanor leaned back in her chair, arms crossed. “You know,” she said, “most people would just check if it spins.”

“It is not about spinning,” George replied. “It is about how it spins.”

“And yet,” she said, “it spins.”

George wrote something down. I did not ask what.

At some point, a ruler appeared on the table. No one admitted ownership. It was later revealed that George had brought one “in case the existing ruler proved unreliable.” It had not. But redundancy, to George, is not about need. It is about peace.

By midmorning, we had three barometric gauges and no consensus. George suggested averaging. Eleanor suggested lunch. I suggested coffee. George clarified that his thermos was not coffee but imported African lowland tea. This explained several things retroactively.

Lunch intervened, as it always does. When we returned, the table looked as though a modest but determined storm had passed through it. Instruments remained aligned. People less so.

And this is where I must admit my own failing. I corrected a label that did not require correction. I debated a variance I could not meaningfully explain. I initialed a page twice because the first set of initials felt emotionally incomplete.

Eleanor, meanwhile, began doing something quietly subversive. Without instruction, she started grouping instruments not by category, but by story. The compass that always behaved went together. The gauge that sulked sat alone. The depth sounder that had been dropped years ago but never admitted it rested slightly apart, as if in quiet reflection.

I almost stopped her.

I didn’t.

At one point, she borrowed George’s ruler to line up three notebooks. She returned it immediately, aligned precisely with the edge of his binder. This small act earned her a look of profound gratitude. I noted, with some concern, that alliances were forming.

My irritation deepened, but it had nowhere clean to land. George was not obstructive. Eleanor was not disrespectful. The only person truly unsettled by the proceedings was me.

I had created the structure. George had honored it too completely. Eleanor had ignored it without malice. And I found myself caught between them, resenting George for refusing to bend and Eleanor for bending without consequence.

When we finally concluded, we declared success. This was technically true. Everything functioned. Everything was accounted for. The lake, unmoved by our diligence, remained frozen.

As we packed up, Eleanor pulled on her coat and waved once. “See you when the ice gives up,” she said, and left without signing anything.

George watched her go.

“She didn’t initial her section,” he said.

“I know,” I replied.

He hesitated. “Should I—”

“No,” I said. “Let it stand.”

He nodded, making a note anyway. I pretended not to see it.

Later, as the light thinned and we restored the room to order, I felt the familiar mixture of relief and recognition. The inventory had done its work. Not just on the equipment, but on us. We had argued. We had agreed. We had pretended that order was something you could finish.

I locked the room. George took an empty binder home “to reorganize.”

The instruments will be ready in spring. Of this I am confident. As for us, we remain within acceptable tolerances.