July 19. In the morning I opened the copy and the log side by side.
The first line of log page eighty-one stood written in advance in yesterday's form. Dated 19 July: search run at nine a.m., result fifty-one. Today I had no thought of making that line false. I tried yesterday and it did not work.
Copy page seventy-six: 19 July, fifty-four. Page seventy-seven's forty-two, its date column still empty. Page seventy-eight held the date that came yesterday and the words that came yesterday. July 19, and in the figure column, the number of people who have read it.
At nine I ran the search. Fifty-one. The same as the pre-entered line.
After that I sat a long while. This is the second time the copy has written words in a figure column. The first was ten days ago, page seventy-seven, the figure of a day not counted, and it was filled in the next day with forty-two. Before it was filled I did not count for a whole day. If the copy writes words, I go on to do the thing the words point at. Ten days ago I did not know that. Now I do.
The number of people who have read it is not a countable number. What I have counted every morning for six months is the number of posts that come up on the list. Posts can be counted. People do not come up on lists.
There was one countable thing. The posts on the board carry view counts.
At eleven I opened the board. Five posts stood under my display name. The first post of the fifth, two corrections, the post of the day before yesterday that I did not put up, and one from yesterday. Yesterday's I did not put up and there is no access record. I no longer write such things down separately.
I opened the five one at a time and wrote down the view counts. Forty-eight, sixty-two, thirty-one, fifty-five, thirty. The sum was two hundred and twenty-six.
Having written it down I saw that the five openings I made today were inside the two hundred and twenty-six. A view count rises by one at the moment of opening. The five times I opened in order to count are inside the counted number.
Then the number before I counted is two hundred and twenty-one. One subtracts. Only, to see whether two hundred and twenty-one is right one must open again, and opening raises it by five again. Subtracting and confirming push each other away.
Six months ago I stood in the same place. It was the day I was making the second column of the comparison table. To count one must open, and opening raises the views, I wrote then. Then the thing counted was posts. Today it is people. When I counted posts, my opening did not raise the number of posts. When I count people, I become one of them.
Before lunch I handled five requisitions. The third floor asked for the 1997 release register. I took it out, copied it, and replied.
While copying I looked once at the December pages. That month's releases ran dense and several of the recorder columns stood empty. I have heard it was a hurried month. An empty column is empty not because there was no one to write but because there was no time to write. On paper the two kinds of empty column are the same shape.
While I was doing that I counted nothing. The view counts will have been rising while I did not count. Who opened them I do not know.
At two I opened the board again. To see whether two hundred and twenty-one was right I opened the five once more. Forty-nine, sixty-three, thirty-two, fifty-six, thirty-one. The sum was two hundred and thirty-one. Five had risen, and the five I raised.
At three I opened the copy.
The words on page seventy-eight had been erased. In their place stood a figure.
Two hundred and thirty-one.
Not the two hundred and twenty-six I counted in the morning. The figure that came of opening them again at two o'clock to confirm. The copy did not write the number I counted; it wrote as far as my counting again after I had counted.
I looked at the number a long time. Ten days ago the copy knew I would not count and had held forty-two from the day before. Today it knew I would count twice. It knew I am the sort of person who counts once, mistrusts it, and counts again.
All morning I stared at the words the number of people who have read it wondering how to count them, and the number was rising, while I stared, because of the words. Counting is a thing that gets counted. Until yesterday I held that counting and writing had left my hand and that reading was what remained. Reading is not what remained. From today it is what gets counted.
At four I opened the box. Today I opened not the four bundles but the note laid on top of them. My predecessor's note. When I first opened the box in January I saw that the last page broke off in the middle of a sentence, and I have read it many times since.
Inside the back cover of the note there are seal impressions. In January I counted them and wrote down five. The sixth place was empty.
Counting today, there were six.
The sixth impression was shallower than the five before it. There was no ink on it, only the mark of paper pressed. Whether someone pressed it, or whether in six months the paper took that shape from being pressed against, I could not divide. I did not suppose I would be able to.
I closed the note and opened the four bundles in turn. The lighthouse keeper, the survey chainman, the telegraphist, the librarian. All four carry the same line printed below the last page. I have seen it many times from January until today and passed it over as the publisher's stock phrase.
We are watching a little further.
Yesterday I wrote that what a person is called when only reading is left is nowhere in the four bundles. That was wrong. It is not inside the four bundles; it is outside them. All four carry that one line, and the line is not the speech of any of the four.
To be watching is not to be measuring and not to be writing down. The lighthouse keeper measured, the chainman measured, the telegraphist took down, the librarian copied out. All four did something with a hand. At the end of those four records there is attached one line in which no hand did anything.
It says we. That is several. Outside the four there are several, and those several neither measure nor write, but only watch.
The word for a person with only reading left was here. Not in the place I searched for six months but in the place I turned past every day for six months. It is not that it stays hidden while one searches and shows itself on the day one stops; it was not in the place one searches, and so it was not seen.
Whether I am entering those several, or whether the word was waiting for me, I did not settle. If it is entering, then I entered on some day, and nowhere is it written which day. If it was waiting, then that line was there before I took the post in January, and that is true as well. It is printed, so it was there.
At six I opened the log. Under the pre-entered line I wrote today's. The two view counts, the copy's two hundred and thirty-one, the six seal impressions, and the one line at the end of the four bundles, copied as it stands.
Having copied it out I stopped my hand. Copying out is increasing. That much I have learned in six months. And yet this line is attached to all four whether I copy it or not, and being printed it is already in many copies.
Going to close the log, I opened the copy once more.
Page seventy-nine had appeared. The figure column was empty. A date had come into the date column.
July 20, and the year in two digits. Not ninety-nine.
Zero zero.