The Abnormal That Never Ends

When an abnormality is first discovered, most people want to believe it is a one-time event.

There is one extra thing somewhere, you remove it, and everything returns to normal. The cause is quickly found, the response is handled efficiently, and all that remains is a slightly awkward atmosphere. That kind of storyline is easier to understand, and it soothes the mind.

Reality is usually slower than that.

What you thought you erased appears again.
The place you thought you fixed collapses in a different form.
The number of reports increases, but the amount of reassurance does not.

What I was watching belonged to that kind of abnormality.

Something was wrong.
That much was certain.
But no one clearly grasped how far the wrongness extended, what had to be stopped, or where it was coming from.

At such moments, people tend to separate into two kinds.

Those who focus on erasing the thing right in front of them, and
those who ask how that thing had been able to exist there at all.

The first group probably looks busier. They move quickly, and the result is momentarily visible. Removed. Fixed. Restored. Confirmed. The verbs pile up, and with them comes the appearance of action.

The second group is less noticeable in the moment. They want to stop the whole system first, observe first, preserve evidence first. Visible results do not always appear immediately. Depending on the room, they can even look excessively cautious.

And yet it is always the second set of questions that turns out to matter most.

Why did it appear there at all?
Through what path does it keep returning?
What is visible, and from what point onward are we no longer seeing?

If those questions are avoided and only the thing in front of you is repeatedly erased, the abnormality begins to acquire something like a personality. It waits until you are tired, shifts form slightly, and returns. As though it had been watching the motions of your repair all along.

There was someone on the ground who kept sending records.

We fixed this part.
Another area had been rewritten.
We are checking now.
We rolled it back for the moment.

The wording was always sincere.
And precisely because it was sincere, it was painful to read.

That person was the one bearing the strongest weight of the fact that something was wrong.

The uncertainty of the cause, the slowness of judgment, these things should have been held at a higher level. Someone should have been there to stop what needed stopping, to say clearly what was not yet visible, to refuse to leave the unknown as merely unknown.

And yet in moments like that, another sort of composure often appears at the center of the room.

It is all right, we are watching it.
We understand the situation.
We are proceeding while keeping the whole in view.

Each time such words were placed into the room, everyone relaxed for a second.
And in the space of that second, the abnormality quietly grew a little more.

For a long time I observed this structure from a slight distance.
There are things you can see only because you are not inside the center of movement.
There are things you can see only because you cannot put your hands on them.

Erasing is not the same as stopping.
Fixing is not the same as ending.

When that distinction is never shared, and yet the room keeps moving, people become tired in a very strange way.
Their hands are moving desperately, but nothing feels as though it is progressing.
Reports increase, but reassurance does not.
The more involved someone is, the shorter their words become.

The abnormal that never ends may not refer only to the phenomenon itself.
It may also describe the condition in which response continues without ever reaching the right question.
That condition itself may be one form of abnormality.

Looking back, the most frightening thing was not the thing that kept breaking.
It was the fact that even in front of the breaking thing, the performance of the room was protected first.

The people on the ground were tired.
The records were accumulating.
And yet the center always continued to look calm.

Whether that was true calm,
or only the preservation of a calm appearance,

I still could not say for certain back then.
But I could certainly see the difference.