October 5. I finished the fifth drawer.
The card work began on September 13. At a drawer every three days, twelve drawers is thirty-six days. Today is the twenty-third day and five drawers are done, so it is running a little fast. The deadline is the end of November, so there is room.
What one does to a card is always the same. Draw the card, look at the year place. If 97 is stamped there, write 1997 beside it. Four strokes. Written, draw the next.
At nine I ran the search first. Two hundred and eighty-five. On September 9 it was two hundred and seven, so seventy-eight in twenty-six days. Three a day.
All morning I did the sixth drawer. About a hundred and ninety cards.
Doing it, the hand becomes practised and room for thinking opens. What I thought about today was what kind of work this is.
I look at 97 and write 1997. Work of looking and writing. What is on the card is moved onto the card. Only the place shifts sideways; the content is the same.
It is copying out.
If there is one thing I have learned in this room in eight months, it is that copying out makes things grow. Laying paper on the scanner in February was that, and copying files in March was that. In June, copying out an original to set a wrong line right, that original spread wrong again.
I wrote then that correcting is increasing. What I do today is the mildest sort of correcting there is. It does not set a wrong thing right and it does not fill a missing thing. It only writes the same year longer, from two digits to four. Not a particle of the meaning changes.
If the meaning does not change, I thought, perhaps it does not grow. There was one way to confirm that.
At eleven I pulled the first drawer and counted again.
Not six hundred and twelve. Six hundred and twenty-seven.
Fifteen more.
I filed two. Everything that has come into this room in nine months is written in the log. From September 13 until today there were two for the first drawer.
Thirteen are left over.
Finding the thirteen took an hour. I pulled the whole drawer, laid it out on the desk and matched it against the filing entries in the log. I drew out one at a time the ones that did not match.
Turning over six hundred and twenty-seven cards one by one, I saw halfway through that this work is counting. Counting raises. If I count to see whether it rises and it rises while I count, then today's fifteen may contain today's own share. Counting view counts in July I stood in the same place. There, opening was the same act as raising, and counting places in August it was not. Which of the two the cards are, I cannot know, this being the first time I have counted them.
Thirteen came out.
All thirteen had four digits in the year place. 1997, 1997, 1998, 1997, 1996; the rest were of that kind.
It was my handwriting.
There were no two digits beside them. What I do is write four digits next to the stamped two, so the cards I have done carry two digits and four side by side. These thirteen had only the four. They are cards written in four digits from the start.
I looked for the materials they point at. None of the thirteen has one.
Having written the last line I read it again.
They came out only from the drawers I had finished. The sixth drawer had a hundred and ninety done this morning and the rest not. I counted the sixth: six hundred and six, and having not counted it in August I do not know whether it has grown. The seventh through the twelfth I have not touched. Counting all six and matching against the log's figures, nothing diverged.
It grew only where I had put a hand.
I skipped lunch. Until three I sat writing out what makes this different from the earlier cases.
When I corrected the wrong line in June, what spread was the wrong line. The correction I put up was carried wrong again and spread, and so what there was to correct increased. Then what increased was work.
The thirteen cards that increased today are not wrong cards. They are correctly written in four digits. They are written to the guidance, and more neatly than mine. Having left no two digits behind, they will not cost a hand to strike out later.
What spreads has turned into what is correct.
Turn that over and it comes to this. Everything that increased in this room over eight months was something out of true. Being out of true it was conspicuous, and being conspicuous it could be counted. Today's thirteen are out of true nowhere. Had I not matched them against the log I should not have found them. Next time they may match the log as well.
When what is correct increases, one does not know that it has.
Having written that there are no grounds for correction, I sat a long while.
For eight months I have always had something to correct in hand. There was a wrong line, there was a figure that did not agree, there was an empty box. Try to correct it and it increased; leave it and it remained. Either way there was work.
Today everything that increased is correct. There is nothing to correct.
I did the arithmetic. Fifteen in thirteen days in one drawer is a little over one a day. Twelve drawers is some fourteen a day. What I correct in a day is two hundred. Correcting is far faster than increasing.
And what increases comes out already corrected. Then my share is only the original seven thousand three hundred and forty, and that ends in thirty-six days. The thirteen are not my share. The thirteen are already done.
The work is shrinking.
At four the man from the third floor came down for a signature. He asked whether it was going well and I said ahead of schedule. He said that was a relief and went up.
It is a relief. It is a relief, and after nine months I was given work with an end for the first time, and that work is going the way of ending by itself. When it ends I become a person who only reads again. I had that thought in August and wrote that it is not in the form. Then it was four months off.
At five I put the thirteen cards in an envelope and set it behind the drawer. I did not throw them away. That throwing away is increasing I learned on the seventh.
Writing the date on the envelope, my hand stopped a moment. I wrote October 5, and the year had to go in front of it, and whether to write two digits or four caught. For eight months in this room I have written only the month and the day on envelopes. I wrote four. It is what my hand has done all day, so it went that way.
Having written it, I saw that this envelope is the first paper in this room to carry four digits in my hand. What is inside it is thirteen cards I did not write.
At six I wrote the log and opened the copy.
Today's page was there. October 5, the year in four digits, two hundred and eighty-eight in the figure column.
Below it there was one more page.
The date was October 5. The year was four digits, the same. In the figure column was written two hundred and eighty-five.
It is the figure I counted this morning.