The Copier and the Predecessor's Number

That day ended, like the others, with old ledgers going onto microfilm. The records room sat on the second basement level of the merchant bank's main building, where one panel of the fluorescent lights was always flickering. I sat at the camera stand, laid a leaf of a yellowed ledger flat beneath the glass plate, and pressed the shutter. The film wound on a frame with a soft click. Next leaf. Shutter. Next leaf. There was a kind of comfort in the work — the numbers held their places, and once I had copied a leaf, that leaf stayed where it was for good.

A records clerk at a merchant bank has one job — to copy what is about to vanish into something that will not. Ledgers past their closing, notes past their maturity, accounts settled and shut. Head office sealed them into a can of film for the storeroom, and in between I copied out the numbers. It was the autumn of 1997. Around then the people upstairs had taken to murmuring in the corridors — foreign currency, they would say, and short-term. Those were not words I ever had to copy. My work was the ledgers already finished. At least until then.

The desk in front of me had belonged to the clerk before me. I never knew who he was. The handover came through personnel as a single sheet of paper, and all he left behind was a half-sorted stack of index cards and a camera stand with its focus knob worn smooth from being left on too long. One day he simply didn't come in, and personnel logged the position as a resignation. No resignation letter was ever kept.

That afternoon a box came down to the records room from the main storeroom. Materials from a client that had folded, according to the conveyance slip. The client was a publisher — Pnakotic Press (Pnakotic 文庫). What business a merchant bank had had with a publisher, the slip didn't say. Only later did I learn the rest: the publisher had gone under with its debt to us unpaid, and the materials it had put up as collateral had washed into our storeroom.

The box was tied with cord, and the knot held the worn softness of a hand that had worked it often. I loosened it. Inside were four bundles — not printed books but logs, all written out by hand. One kept by a lighthouse keeper, one by a surveyor, one by a telegraph operator, one by a librarian. Each cover carried the same press's seal, and beneath it the same single line.

I ran my fingertip along the line. Something cold, like the basement air, slid down my spine. "A basement in October runs cold — nothing more to it," I told myself, reaching for a reasonable account of the chill that seemed to spill out of the box. The box wasn't cold because it sat there, I added; it had only been set down somewhere already cold.

That was when the predecessor's index cards came back to me — that half-sorted stack. I pulled them out and turned to the last one, to whatever he had been indexing when he stopped. In the classification line stood the publisher's name, already familiar.

Copy it out, but do not read to the end. His hand. No indexing clerk, sorting his files, writes down "do not read." An index is something you have to read before you can write it. I reached for a reasonable account of that line, and none came.

The last job of the day was a closing ledger head office had sent down, to go onto film. The ledger of a settled account. I laid a leaf beneath the glass and pressed the shutter — the leaf that carried the balance of a short-term foreign-currency borrowing. A number set down cleanly to its last figure. I fixed it on film and copied the balance by hand onto an index card. The number didn't lie. It was a settled balance, from a ledger already finished.

I set the day down like that and killed the lights in the records room. The flickering panel flickered once more, last of all, and went dark.

The next morning I collated the short-term foreign balance I'd copied the day before against the ledger. The frame on the film was exactly as I'd left it. The number I'd copied by hand onto the index card was exactly as I'd left it. But the balance on that leaf of the ledger — the leaf settled and shut, the one that would never be written again — had gained a figure at its end.

I read the new last figure three times over.

The short-term foreign borrowing balance I'd copied the day before. The film frame was as it had been; the number in my own hand on the card was as it had been. The two matched each other. What didn't match was the ledger. That one leaf alone — settled, shut, never to be written again — carried one extra figure at its end.

I reached for a reasonable account. Someone had cut a correction slip and revised the balance — even a closed account can take an after-the-fact correction. I opened the corrections register and found the account number. There was no correction against that leaf. Not that day, not the day before; no one had touched the account.

To believe that was all, I needed something to check it against — the same account, copied by someone before me.

I pulled out the predecessor's index cards again — the half-sorted stack. The day before I'd looked only at the last card; now I went through from the front. He had been a careful man. One card per account: balance, date, even the film can's number. The card for the short-term foreign borrowing sat near the middle of the stack.

He had copied that balance in July of that year. Four months earlier.

And the number he had entered in July was the very number the ledger had reached that morning, one figure the larger.

I held the card up to the lamp. I hadn't misread. The short-term foreign balance my predecessor had copied out by hand four months ago, and the balance the settled ledger had climbed to on its own that morning, matched to the last figure. The ledger hadn't grown. The ledger had climbed — late — toward a number someone had already set down four months before.

The basement chill rose into my fingertips. I reached for a reasonable account, and none came.

Below the balance field, my predecessor had written a line in small characters. But it had been struck out — not in pencil, scraped away with the edge of a blade, the grain of the paper lifted where it had passed. I tilted the card into the light. Through the scraped place, the shape of the pressed-in writing surfaced.

The next card's number. I turned the words over. In July he had set down, ahead of time, the number of the next card, the one not yet written — the number the settled ledger would take four months to climb toward. He knew where it came from. That was why he scraped it out.

The single line he'd left on the last card now read another way.

I had taken it for a warning about the four bundles from Pnakotic Press — don't read the old logs to the end. But what he had been copying was not logs. It was ledgers. What he warned against reading to the end were the numbers — the figure that fills one cell and runs on into the next, and the next.

I looked again at the short-term foreign borrowing card. He had set down the balance and the film can's number, and in one corner, with an arrow, the number of the next card. His habit, threading the index along. The number the arrow pointed to should have been in the next slot of the stack.

I went looking for the card with that number.

It wasn't there.

The next card the arrow pointed to was nowhere in the stack. In its place was only a gap, the width of one missing card. Either someone had drawn it out — or the card meant to be written had never been written.

I laid a finger in the empty slot. The gap, one card thick, was cold — plainly colder than the cards on either side.

As long as that slot stayed empty, the arrow had nowhere to land. But by my predecessor's habit, that next card would have carried an arrow of its own, pointing on to the one after. The number ran on from card to card, pointing to its next before it was ever written.

That day I couldn't bring myself to turn off the records-room lights. I had already begun to guess where the card from the empty slot had gone — into the very can my predecessor had last been winding through the camera. Into the film that, on the day he didn't come in, was never wound to its end.