the exchange with nothing in it — "Etc. etc. etc…"

The scene's form is its content: an interrogation disguised as human interest in which nothing personal actually crosses the page. Steeply's thirteen questions are redacted to bare "Q"s, her courtesies collapse to "Etc. etc. etc.," and even the sentiment on the letterhead is a printed motto — care outsourced to a professional. Two people correspond and the entire substance is displaced into an endnote; what the documents themselves transmit is the pure apparatus of contact with the message evacuated. [sweep · shared-ground irony-sincerity]