The Watermark is about a city that computes its poor as calories. And it is about the man who does the computing. His name is Anselm Wenger. He is thirty-one that winter. He is a clerk of the Relief Bureau, the best computer on the fourth floor of the Provident Building. By day he prices the poor in units of food. By night he sings in the cellars of the Quarter, and the Quarter sings back. And in his room over the baker's, he writes down what the tables could not hold. On slips. In a hand smaller than the Bureau's hand. The slips live in a tobacco tin. Two archives, then: the building's and the tin's. The year this book covers is the year those two accounts settle.
