July 18. Today I opened the log first.
The first line of page eighty stood as I had seen it the evening before. Dated 18 July: search run at nine a.m., result forty-eight. My handwriting. Not one stroke had been added overnight.
In the night I thought about that line many times. For six months I have seen things written in advance many times, and today's differed from the others in one respect. The others were all figures. The copy's forty-two is a figure, and the forty-eight hung on the board is a figure. A figure can be right by itself. If the world is holding that figure, it is a correct figure with or without someone to write it down. For six months I have stumbled on that point.
Today's line held one thing besides a figure. Search run. That is not a figure but an act. An act must have someone who performed it. If I do not run the search today, the first half of that line simply becomes a false line. The world can fill in a figure; the world cannot fill in an act.
For the first time in six months I was looking at a sentence that could be made false.
I sat down before nine. I put my hands on my knees. I left the terminal on. Switching it off would make today a day when the search could not be run, and could not is not the same as did not. Leaving it on and not doing it was the correct form.
From 8:57 I watched the wall clock. The second hand went round twice. Nine passed. Nothing happened.
By ten I had handled four requisitions. Each time my hands went to the keys I turned them back from the list. Turning them back cost no effort. It was simply a matter of not doing it. On the ninth I held out two hours and counted in the end, and the day before yesterday it took an hour not to count for a day, and today it was not like that. One grows practised even at not doing.
Nothing happened until eleven. I thought that nothing happening might be the day's takings. As soon as I thought it, a sentence came back to me from my predecessor's note last winter. The sentence was that in the morning he believed he had won. He lost in the afternoon.
At two I pulled the access record. It is a thing I learned yesterday. Yesterday I pulled it because of the post that went up under my display name, and there was no record. Today I did not hope for a record.
There was a record.
Nine o'clock and twelve seconds. Query executed. The account was mine and the terminal was computer room three. Three is the seat I sit in. At nine and twelve seconds I was in that seat and my hands were on my knees.
I read the record three times. The twelve seconds took the longest. I had been watching the wall clock so as to see nine exactly. I saw the hour pass with my eyes, and I went on watching after that. The reason I watched the clock was that I wanted to set up one witness for the day. What the witness I set up testifies to is that I was watching the clock. Where my hands were, the clock does not know.
Putting my hands on my knees was an attempt to divide. If the hand did it, it is mine; if the hand did not, it is not mine. I thought it would divide that way. On the seventh the board post also went up under my account and there was no access record. Then it was strange that there was no record. Today it is strange that there is one. Both times the strangeness was there, and the strange side was the opposite each time.
I wrote in the morning that an act must have someone who performed it. That was wrong. An act must have a record. If the record has a column for a person, that column gets filled. Whether a person or the record fills it, the record does not say.
The result of the query was kept with it. Forty-eight.
Having seen that too, I sat a long while. The first half of the pre-entered line was right and the second half was right. The one thing I did today was to try to make that line false, and that failed as well.
Having written it, I waited to become angry. The anger did not come. To be angry there must be somewhere to direct it, and that place does not exist. It cannot be directed at the copy, or at the board, or at nine o'clock and twelve seconds. Anger with nowhere to go does not arise in the first place.
Something else came instead. It took me some time to know what it was.
I was at ease.
This morning I did not run the search and the search was run. The result was correct and the log was already written. The thing I have done at nine every morning for six months I did not do today, and the day went by exactly as yesterday did. The body of a person whose work has been taken away knows first, and is at ease.
Having noticed it, I sat with my hands down for a while. For six months I have supposed I was afraid of this. If afraid were the right word, my body should stiffen on a day like today. It did not stiffen; it was let go. What is let go cannot be called the opposite of fear. It was less that the fear had lifted than that someone had taken up my share of being afraid.
I judged it right to write it down. It was the only thing that came out of me today.
At three the man from the third floor came down and stamped a release. Having stamped it he looked round the room and said the room was too quiet. He said there was nothing but the sound of the machines. I said it was quiet.
After he had gone up I listened to what was left. There was the cooling unit, and the door at the end of the corridor, and someone dragging a chair on the third floor. To him that is quiet. The person who decides what counts as a sound in this room is, at present, me alone. My predecessor wrote that it was so in the archive last winter too. Then it was the head librarian who had brought in a radio and said it was quiet, and my predecessor said no to himself. It is not the same room and not the same words, and the seat is the same.
At four I opened the box. The four bundles were as they were. The lighthouse keeper, the survey chainman, the telegraphist, the librarian. Today I opened the telegraphist's. I had no thought of copying anything out of it, and simply read.
The telegraphist was on the receiving side. Messages dated to days that had not come entered his machine and he took them down. The man in the archive last winter was on the sending side. Tomorrow's date went out of his outgoing column. The two are opposite, and one thing is the same. Both had their hands on a machine. Receiving hand or sending hand, there was a hand.
At my seat there is nowhere to lay a hand. What ran the query at nine and twelve seconds this morning was my account, not my hand.
Having read, I looked at my hands. What my hands did today was reply to four requisitions, take a stamp, and turn pages. I did not count and I did not write. Counting and writing left the hand yesterday, and today the work was done just the same from where they had left.
I wrote yesterday that reading was what remained. Today a whole day was filled by reading alone. I had not known that a day of nothing but reading would be this quiet.
At six I opened the log. Under the pre-entered line I wrote what there was to write today. The non-performance, the record, the result value, and that I was at ease. It came to four lines.
Having written, I opened the copy.
Page seventy-six read 18 July, fifty-one. The place that lays tomorrow's figure on today's date has been the same for six months. Page seventy-seven's forty-two stood with its date column empty as before. The one who did not reach that page is me.
A date had come into page seventy-eight. July 19.
I looked at the figure column. There was no figure. In place of a figure there were words.
The number of people who have read it.