Until Further Notice

I collect public notices the way other people collect stamps, except stamps don’t keep you up at night.

Advisories, warnings, cancellations, the minutes of a town council meeting where somebody moved that the matter be tabled — I keep them. Not the pretty ones. The flat ones. The ones written by a person who has been told, very clearly, not to alarm anybody, and who has therefore produced a sentence with all the emotional temperature of a parking regulation. That is the genre I love. The literature of not panicking.

You already know it. You’ve read it on a laminated sheet taped to a gas-station cooler. Out of an abundance of caution. You’ve heard it on the radio in the tone a man uses to read a hockey score. Residents are advised. It is the official register of the modern world, and it is doing something remarkable: it is telling you that something is wrong while working very hard to make sure you don’t feel that way.

Read closely, it is the most haunted writing we produce.

Consider the phrases on their own, out of context, the way you’d consider a line of a poem. Do not approach. Visibility near zero. Service interruption. Unconfirmed reports. Shelter in place. Until further notice. Say that last one to yourself a few times. Until further notice. It is a sentence with no end date. It doesn’t say when the thing will be over. It doesn’t say what the thing is. It just quietly opens a door in the calendar and declines to say when it will close. A boil-water advisory is a small thing, a nuisance, a couple of extra minutes at the stove. But the sentence it arrives in is a little masterpiece of dread: your water is not safe, we don’t know for how long, keep boiling it, and we’ll tell you when you can stop, which is not today.

That’s not gothic in costume. There are no ravens. It’s gothic in function. It is how a community whispers, on official letterhead, that the ground under the ordinary has shifted, and that there is, thank God, a form for it.

The other thing I love about the genre is that you are not allowed to write in it.

Almost nobody is. In this country the machinery that can actually interrupt your evening — Alert Ready, the system that has been able to seize the television and the radio since 2015, and your phone since 2018 — can only be operated by a short list of authorized government agencies. Environment and Climate Change Canada gets the weather. The provinces get the rest. You cannot issue an alert. I cannot issue an alert. The right to make every phone in a room scream at once is held, deliberately, by the state and by almost no one else.

Which is exactly why it feels the way it feels. When the phone on the table starts shrieking that flat electronic shriek — the one engineered by committee to be impossible to ignore and impossible to love — it does not feel like a message. It feels like the world itself clearing its throat. That’s the AMBER Alert at three in the morning that everyone complains about and nobody turns off, because the argument isn’t really about sleep. It’s about the fact that the calm machinery has, for a moment, decided to be loud, and some animal part of you sits up in the dark and asks: is it me? is it here?

Then it’s a licence plate in a city four hours away, and you lie back down, and you feel foolish, and you shouldn’t. That was the system working. The dread was accurate. It was just aimed at somebody else.

If you want to know what the language is actually holding at arm’s length, look at the morning it slipped.

On the thirteenth of January, 2018, at eight minutes past eight in the morning, the state of Hawaii sent every phone it could reach the following sentence:

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

It was not a drill in the sense that it went out over the real system to real people. It was, however, a drill in every other sense: a supervisor running an unannounced exercise at a shift change, a man on the phone doing a bad impression of U.S. Pacific Command, the phrase exercise, exercise, exercise somewhere in the noise, and one operator — a ten-year veteran — who heard this is not a drill and believed it, and pushed the wrong button on a screen that a later investigation found should never have let one tired person do that alone.

For thirty-eight minutes and thirteen seconds, Hawaii believed it was going to die.

Read the accounts of those thirty-eight minutes and you will find the whole of human behaviour compressed into a little over half an hour. People drove at a hundred miles an hour toward nothing. People put their children into storm drains. People called the numbers they call when there is nothing left to do but say the thing out loud, and they said it. One man had a heart attack. And the reason it took thirty-eight minutes to say never mind is almost too perfect to be true: there was no button for never mind. The system that could tell an island it was about to be annihilated had no built-in way to take it back. Somebody had to get on the phone and ask permission to send a second sentence.

Here is what I keep, from that morning. Not the missile that wasn’t. The four words. This is not a drill. We put that phrase into the emergency scripts on purpose, decades ago, precisely because the systems were tested so often — this is a test, this is only a test — that people had learned to hear the alarm and feel nothing. This is not a drill was the safety catch. It was the sentence that meant: this time, the flat voice is telling the truth.

And for thirty-eight minutes, it did. The horror in Hawaii was not made of fire. It was made entirely of language — a form, a code phrase misheard in a corridor, and four words that the reassuring machinery keeps in a drawer for the one morning it turns out to be real.

I want to be careful here, because this is the place where a person who loves this genre can start to sound like he thinks it’s all a marvellous show, and it isn’t.

The flat sentences are funny until they aren’t. Somewhere in this country tonight there is a kitchen where the tap has not been safe to drink from in years — where until further notice has quietly meant for a generation, where a boil-water advisory that would be a scandal if it happened in my town or yours has become the permanent weather of a place we have decided not to look at. That is the same genre. Same passive voice, same official calm. Residents are advised. And you find, if you sit with the phrase long enough, that its most haunted feature is the passive voice itself — because residents are advised never once tells you who is doing the advising. Who knew. Who decided. Who is, right now, not fixing it.

So I keep the notices. Not to laugh at them, though I do, sometimes, because the alternative is worse. I keep them because they are the truest writing a community does: the moment it tries to describe a danger it does not yet understand, in language calm enough not to start a stampede, and accidentally tells you everything about what it fears and who it is willing to leave holding the form.

The fog rolls in, and the ferry is cancelled, and the notice says due to conditions. The tap goes bad, and the notice says out of an abundance of caution. The missile isn’t coming, and for thirty-eight minutes the sentence in your hand says otherwise.

Something is wrong. We have a form for it. We’ll let you know.

Until further notice.

A note on the facts: the Hawaii false alert of 13 January 2018 and its aftermath are drawn from the FCC’s public report and contemporaneous coverage; Canada’s Alert Ready system is operated for the CRTC by Pelmorex. I get the numbers right on purpose. It’s the least the genre deserves.