The site was a small park now. A street had been cleared here in 1944 and the gap had never been filled with buildings. The municipality had planted trees in the 1970s and added a bench in the 1990s. The archive had forty-three logged entries dating from the first survey in 1989, all Level 3, all describing strong historical presence associated with that period. Two archivists had described it as the most intense Level 3 site they had worked with in Europe. The access had not diminished in thirty-five years of documentation.
Weln sat on the bench. He had been sitting on it for six minutes. He was attending carefully to the space, the way he always did: breath steady, body present, no particular expectation. He had been trained by people who emphasized openness over effort. You did not try to access. You made yourself available.
He was getting nothing. He had gotten nothing on seven previous visits. He would note this in the log again and it would again be the only entry without any access description, standing out in the archive the way a blank page stands out in a manuscript.
He had a register gap in wartime sites specifically. He had identified this pattern three years ago, after his sixth blank entry at a different site, and had confirmed it subsequently. Sites from the late nineteenth century and earlier were fully accessible to him: he was a strong Level 3 perceiver in those registers, reliably above average. Sites from the twentieth century's middle decades were not. Whatever those spaces carried, he could not touch it.
He had colleagues who had register gaps of various kinds and they discussed it the way you discussed any professional limitation: matter-of-factly, with some curiosity. One theory was that register gaps were related to personal history, ancestral or otherwise. He had looked into this and found nothing helpful. Another theory was that they were simply structural, the way some people could not distinguish certain frequencies of sound, and that looking for a reason was as productive as asking why a particular ear was shaped the way it was.
He found he preferred not having a reason. The gap was the gap. He had forty-two other sites where he could do useful work.
He sat for another nine minutes, which was protocol. The bench was concrete. The trees were old enough to have character. A pigeon walked across the path without apparent interest in anything. At the end of the protocol time he took out his log and wrote "nothing" in the access column, the same word in the same column in the same hand for the eighth consecutive visit. He capped the pen. He stood up. He walked to the edge of the park and then back to the street, and the site was behind him, carrying what it carried, for the next archivist who came.