# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 13: The Memory and the Kiss

id: plain_translation | chapter: `output/chapters/chapter_13.md` | auditor: claude | stance: skeptical, generative-not-evaluative
Samples used by name: **June close-third sample** (voice card: optical, clipped; perception → judgment → self-rebuke), **Odile instruction sample** (one sentence, sometimes two; diagnosis, no oracle), **Dialogue sample** (modern contracted plain speech; functional/incomplete/unquotable lines; no dialogue diagnosis).
Mechanical gate cross-reference: 0 open findings, 76 WATCH hits; the WATCH items relevant to register ("iron" L33, "cold" L129, ellipses L95/165, three-part cadence L17) are adjudicated inline below.

## Locked text

- `LOCKED — "# Chapter Thirteen: The Memory and the Kiss" — skipped, listed under calibration's inviolable text`
- `LOCKED — "> Paint the memory your partner gave you. / Do not make it kinder. / Do not make it yours." — skipped, assignment-card epigraph, inviolable`
- Nia's text (L183) is audited below under its own lock condition (must remain a brisk formal-offer notification), not rewritten.

## Per-paragraph verdicts

**L7** — `HOLDS — "June clipped Theo's index card..." — sample compared: June close-third sample — binding-register rewrite is worse because:` the rewrite ("She checked the line twice and flattened the stripe, though neither was preparation") loses the block-capitals inventory, the rubber-band stripe through *Theo, 9*, and the self-rebuke cadence "as if either action could count as preparing," which is the voice card's perception→judgment→self-rebuke rhythm executed exactly. Density and fidelity both drop in the rewrite.

**L9** — `HOLDS — "Odile had set the easels in pairs..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` highest-risk paragraph #1 of 5. The paired construction "close enough to count the brush taps, invisible enough that she could not check his face" is the chapter's most balanced-period sentence and I rewrote it flat: *"close enough that she could count the brush taps and could not check his face."* The rewrite preserves the information but loses the dramatic content: the antithesis renders Odile's arrangement as a designed instrument (audible intimacy granted, visual confirmation denied), which the reread test requires this scene to carry without saying so. Measurably worse on drama; original stands.

**L11–15 (Odile's opening instruction + Ben beat)** — `HOLDS — "You have been handed a thing..." — sample compared: Odile instruction sample —` two sentences plus two imperatives; "Do not punish it for being ordinary" is diagnosis aimed at the work, matching "No. You are painting an excuse with elbows." My economized rewrite ("Paint what you were given. Do not improve it.") deletes the second imperative and with it the only line that pre-empts the cohort's actual failure mode (contempt for the ordinary memory). Worse on density. Ben's raised finger answered by a look is action-carried comedy; nothing to translate.

**L17** — `HOLDS — "June put out white, raw umber..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` "hated that she knew the pause was orange" is the wound (intimacy as evidence against herself) done in pigment nouns. The plain version ("she realized she knew his palette order too well") names the feeling generically and fails the voice card's craft-noun rule. The gate's three-part-cadence WATCH on the pigment list is a literal palette inventory, not rhetoric.

**L19–27 (Mara exchange)** — `HOLDS — "How did the handoff go?" — sample compared: Dialogue sample —` followable as text: Mara asked, June refused the next question, Mara withdrew it and re-offered the scarf. "He gave me a fourth-floor window. I gave him a wall" is the riskiest line — symmetrical, near-quotable — but it is June's compression-when-exposed tell and it is informationally exact (both memories, no retelling). The plain rewrite ("He told me a childhood memory. I told him a work one") is worse on density and deletes the evasion the packet requires to be visible as evasion. "Orange is doing things for you" is unquotable social speech; correct register.

**L29–31** — `HOLDS — "She killed the panel's white..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` "secondhand daylight at the bottom of four stories" and "watched the brick start to buzz, slightly wrong and more like a real wall for it" are technically true painting (doubled courses do buzz optically). The genericized version loses the craft truth the reading guide's smallness test requires. Do-not-genericize instruction applied here deliberately.

**L33** — `HOLDS — "The waste pipe took longer..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` "June's first version made the curl pretty. She scraped it back" dramatizes the epigraph (do not make it kinder) as procedure, not theme-statement. Gate's "iron" WATCH: literal pipe iron, exposed where paint failed — texture word earning its referent.

**L35–41 (Odile at the easel)** — `HOLDS — "Better." / "Than what?" / "Than when you liked it." — sample compared: Odile instruction sample —` three words, then five; insult as diagnosis of the person's relation to the work, never the sentence. Unportable without the scene. "She moved on before June could decide whether that was useful" — checked against the packet's banned refusal-to-conclude family ("left it alone" variants): this is Odile exiting before June finishes a judgment, a timing beat, not June declining to conclude. Passes.

**L43** — `HOLDS — "The Riccis' screen bowed out..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` highest-risk paragraph #2: "Theo had not given her the cat. He had given her the trace of where the cat had pushed" is the chapter's clearest not-X-but-Y shape, banned by the packet "unless the sentence cannot be written more plainly." I wrote the plain version: *"The card had only the bend the cat left."* It preserves the information and kills the seesaw — but it demotes Theo from giver to absent author, and the custody of the memory (what he handed over, where its boundary sits) is this paragraph's entire dramatic content and the assignment's stated subject. The rewrite is measurably worse on drama; the seesaw survives on the exception clause. This is the closest call in the chapter.

**L45** — `HOLDS — "The laundry line crossed the panel..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` "Paint did not permit six or seven, so she counted the sag... and chose seven" is information the plain version cannot compress without losing the craft decision. The withheld correction of the fourth pin is restraint as action.

**L47–55 (card exchange + chicken-thigh ghost)** — `HOLDS — "Do you need the card?" — sample compared: Dialogue sample + June close-third sample —` "No." / "You can ask" is functional, incomplete, unquotable — floor register exactly. No narration captions the lines' delivery; the jar click and brush tempo carry it. "Eighty-nine cents a pound" is a non-portable smallness detail the rewrite would be poorer without.

**L57–61** — `HOLDS — "Her first pass made the circular too legible..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` "the pleased cleverness of a restored sign" is judgment in conservator's vocabulary, not performed-literary; my generic rewrite ("it looked too neat") loses the diagnosis of *why* neat is false (restoration vs. survival). "She was glad, and the gladness made her set the brush down too hard" names the feeling only after the object work — voice-card order observed.

**L63–67 (Theo's panel)** — `HOLDS — "It sat on the floor at the bottom right..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` highest-risk paragraph #3: "the way a person could stand too far back and call the room finished" generalizes from June to "a person" — the maxim engine. I tested the de-quotabilized version: *"by the distance she had stood at when the manager said you'd never know."* That rewrite is worse twice over: it imports the manager into Theo's painting (which the packet forbids — he painted no figures, no *you'd never know*) and it converts June's self-indictment into a third party's verdict, gutting the required wound (she participated competently). The clause also cannot be lifted whole — it is grammatically chained to "June knew it by the utility pipe and by..." — so it fails the portable-maxim extraction test. Cleared, with this as the strongest body-prose aphorism candidate (see Gate section). "Stepped out for more paint and left the job to continue without her" — the slide from "the person" to "her" is the recognition beat done in frame-reading; the plain version states it and is worse.

**L69–79 (outlet-plate exchange)** — `HOLDS — "The plate is crooked." — sample compared: Dialogue sample —` followable: June objected, Theo explained the choice, offered removal, June refused. "Don't. It looks like a room" is allowed-plainness per June's card. Theo's "I can take it down" is his "I can" idiom. "Which was the most obvious thing she had done all night" — self-rebuke third, on rhythm.

**L81–85 (showcase announcement)** — `HOLDS — "Logistics. Wet work stays here tonight..." — sample compared: Odile instruction sample —` announcement stays logistical per packet ("a clock, not a brochure"). L85's rewrite test: *"The showcase had been abstract; now it felt real."* The original's inventory (door, coats, plastic cups, the PARK / BRENNAN label) is what makes the clock land as objects; the rewrite is the genericizing failure this audit exists to block. "Cleaning a brush she still needed" is the voice card's stress tell (cleans brushes she hasn't used), inverted with self-catch.

**L87–99 (After Class agreement)** — `HOLDS — "One joint piece," he said... — sample compared: Dialogue sample —` Theo practical-offer-first ("I can prime one panel. Same ground, clean edge"), trailing unfinished "You can..." into the rag — incomplete speech as the floor register prescribes. June's "No title" refuses meaning in two words. The gate's ellipsis WATCH (L95) is a speaker abandoning a sentence, not dramatic suspension. Nothing here plain-translates without loss.

**L101–105 (roster)** — `HOLDS — "Subject." / "Acceptable. Empty rooms flatter badly." — sample compared: Odile instruction sample —` one-word prompt, two-sentence ruling. "Empty rooms flatter badly" adjudicated in the Aphorism Gate below.

**L107–113 (cohort montage, rack, flyer call)** — `HOLDS — "Odile's pen mark beside PARK / BRENNAN shone wet..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` each cohort pair gets one concrete action, none explains the chapter; "June had nearly reached the door in her head" renders exit-awareness without the worn vocabulary. "Sam said, 'Rail behind you,' and Ruth stepped left without looking back" — the real-couple calibration shown, not captioned. Plain rewrite adds nothing and deletes the wet pen mark June keeps seeing.

**L115–125 (photo pressure)** — `HOLDS — "June saw two people standing beside each other with enough air between them for either one to be cropped out." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` the fear stated as photo-framing fact, which is the packet's required channel. "Mara did not offer to take another preview. Her thumb slid toward the next name" — social-proof pressure as action; Mara stays accurately social, not suspicious. Ruth's "Committee chairs" is her one sharp line and rates the posture, not anyone's sentence — no dialogue-diagnosis breach. One register observation for the tics tracker, no order: "windows black with work-lamp reflections" (L89) and "that late-night green" (L125) are two room-light images against the guide's one-deliberate-light-image cap; both are literal, but the cap owner should pick one.

**L127–133 (the kiss)** — `HOLDS — "The kiss was supposed to be small..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` highest-risk paragraph #4 by stakes, lowest by drift: "one public correction," "missed the center of his mouth, corrected before she could stop herself," elbow locked, brush tip up, umber clear of the scarf — desire as painterly correction vocabulary with zero flutter shorthand, exactly the dial the packet set. My plain rewrite was worse on every axis and is not worth printing. "Cold" (L129, gate WATCH) is windowpane through wool, literal. No zinger after; the dropped brush and the blotting carry the awkwardness as ordered.

**L135–149 (aftermath dialogue)** — `HOLDS — "Ruth, Sam, give me one without the brush rag." — sample compared: Dialogue sample —` "Absolutely not," then Sam lifts the rag anyway — refusal contradicted by action, unquotable, followable. Odile writing without looking up is reread-consistent and silent. "Old jacket." / "Old jacket, Theo." adjudicated under Verbatim-Echo below. "Right." is Theo stripped to one word after two failed offers — his card's stress arc compressed.

**L151–161 (pack-down, Priya)** — `HOLDS — "She went back to her easel and found nothing there to fix." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` the stress tell denied its object. Priya's "Wet work stays" / "Top rack," she repeated — adjudicated under Verbatim-Echo. "Thank you." / "Mm." is Priya's entire card in three syllables.

**L163** — `HOLDS — "They left with no panels to carry..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` highest-risk paragraph #5: "the strange part at the bottom of the night" is the chapter's most performed phrase. Plain rewrite: *"That was the strange part of the end of the night: no wet board on the train..."* The rewrite keeps the inventory but severs the vertical geometry the chapter built — secondhand daylight at the bottom of four stories, panels on the top rack — in which "bottom of the night" places June inside the airshaft she spent the evening painting. That is transformation of the entrusted memory, which is the assignment; figuration rooted in room geometry per the packet's allowance. Worse on fidelity; original stands. This was my last genuine DRIFT candidate and it survived the comparison.

**L165–169 (Mara at the stairwell)** — `HOLDS — "I can hold the photo," she said. — sample compared: Dialogue sample —` Mara over-offering in four escalating options, self-interrupting ("I can tell her... I can say the windows went wrong") — fills-silence tell, smoothing-as-kindness flaw on the page. June's "Tomorrow" selects one option; followable. Echo adjudicated below.

**L171–181 (sidewalk)** — `HOLDS — "I'll be here Thursday. For the joint panel, I mean." — sample compared: Dialogue sample —` Theo's self-correcting qualifier, keys into pocket and not out again (card tell), "You can say no to all of them" — practical offer before emotional statement. "Limit the list." / "I'll send two." is June governing his usefulness in four words. The deli-door beat shows the reflexive care without caption.

**L183 (Nia's text)** — `HOLDS — "PHL board said yes. They want to make the offer formal. Call tomorrow before you talk yourself out of it." — sample compared: Nia voice card under the lock condition —` remains a brisk formal-offer notification: three sentences, board/offer/deadline. "Before you talk yourself out of it" is old-peer candor (her card: "I am offering you work, not absolution"), not emotional advice — it schedules, it doesn't counsel. No rewrite ordered; lock condition satisfied.

**L185–191 (close)** — `HOLDS — "June could see Nia's office with the rolled posters..." — sample compared: June close-third sample —` the offer made concrete as keys, loading dock, screws by January — no terms dump, per packet. "That was true in the same limited way *boss* had once been true" characterizes a fact's truth-value, not anyone's phrasing or delivery — checked against the zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis rule and cleared; it is also the Ch12 callback done from June's side. Final sentence adjudicated in the Aphorism Gate.

## Aphorism Gate (zero tolerance; Odile's license per calibration noted where invoked)

- **"still worth looking at"** — NOT PRESENT in the current revised text (verified by search). Cut in a prior revision; nothing to order.
- **"A joint piece did not require confession."** — NOT PRESENT (verified). Cut; nothing to order.
- **"The message did not make Philadelphia larger. It made it printed."** — NOT PRESENT (verified). Cut; nothing to order. The replacement paragraph (L185) renders the same beat as objects (keys, dock, screws) and is gate-clean.
- **Final phone-in-bag close (L191)** — PASSES. "June stepped off the curb with him, the phone dark in the bag" is action plus literal object with consequence (the concealment continues into the next chapter); it is not a freestanding profundity sentence and cannot be quoted without its referents. The packet ordered exactly this close shape.
- Strongest swept counter-candidates, cleared with reasons: **"Empty rooms flatter badly"** (L105) and **"Do not punish it for being ordinary"** (L11) — Odile, the calibration's sole licensed high-density speaker; both are craft diagnoses of the work at hand, not oracle lines, and match the Odile instruction sample's length discipline. **"a person could stand too far back and call the room finished"** (L67) — the genuine borderline; cleared because it exists only as a clause inside "June knew it by the utility pipe and by...", fails extraction without rewording, and carries the chapter's required wound (her competent participation in the erasure) through the literal slop sink. If any later pass weakens its anchoring sentence, this becomes a Gate failure — flagging for the tracker, no order now.

## Verbatim-Echo Gate

- **"Fine" (L21) / "It's fine" (L123)** — PASSES as transformative. June's "Fine" is the cover-word Ch12 established as no-longer-fitting, used here so Mara visibly declines to believe it; Mara's "It's fine" is her smoothing the failed photo. Different speakers, different objects, both doing characterized work.
- **"No title" (L97)** — single occurrence in the current text; no echo exists. Nothing to order.
- **"Tomorrow" (L165 Mara's offer / L167 June / L169 Mara / L183 Nia's "Call tomorrow")** — PASSES as transformative. June's instance selects one of Mara's four options; Mara's repeat is contract-closure between speakers; Nia's instance then lands the photo-send and the offer-call on the same day — the two clocks converging on one word is design, not residue. Were the Nia text not independently locked to brevity, I would still clear this.
- **"Two" (L83 "two hours" ×2 / L179 "I'll send two")** — PASSES. Odile's doubling is intra-speech rhetoric converting logistics into social diagnosis ("Invite people you can stand for two hours"); Theo's "two" is an answer to "Limit the list," unrelated referent. No non-transformative pair exists.
- Swept additionally: **"Old jacket." / "Old jacket, Theo."** (L143/147) — transformative; the added name converts deflection into a closed door, refusing the solvent and the downstairs in one move. **"Wet work stays" (Odile L81 / Priya L153) and "Top rack" ×3 (L153/157)** — Priya quotes the rule precisely because June's hand "had already gone toward the panels"; the second "Top rack" is narrated as enforcement ("she repeated") and physically blocks June's exit reflex. Deliberate, characterized, passes. **"One panel" (L173/175)** — negotiation echo: June enforces the limit, Theo converts it to spec. **"crop/cropped" (L115/117/123/165)** — functional photo vocabulary escalating across four instances (fear → logistics → reassurance → offer); transformative chain.

## Chapter verdict

Every non-locked paragraph was compared against its named sample; the five highest-risk paragraphs (L9, L43, L67, L163, L191) are shown with their binding-register rewrites, and in each case the rewrite lost density, drama, or fidelity. The three named aphorism candidates are confirmed absent from the revised text; the named echoes are all transformative. Zero revision orders issue. One non-order note passed to the tics tracker: the two room-light images (L89, L125) against the one-per-chapter cap.

**REGISTER-HOLDS**
