January 3. The first duty after the rollover.
The first of January is a holiday and the second was a Sunday, so this room was locked two days. The page on which the two hours after midnight are written is page two hundred and twenty-five, and today is page two hundred and twenty-six.
At ten past nine I put in the first report to head office after the rollover.
I entered the index item. The person said it would go into the post-rollover action list.
The pre-rollover list and the post-rollover list have different forms. The former list has a box for whether it is applied and the latter a box for whether it subsists. The same single item is in both lists and the boxes have different names.
At twenty past nine the third-floor man came down.
He wished me a new year and asked whether nothing had happened that night. I said nothing had. He said the papers had made a noise about it for months and it turned out flat, and laughed.
Hearing flat, I held that he was right. I went through the procedure's twenty-four in order and seventeen were finished and I waited at midnight and I wrote the six. One line was left over that goes into none of the twenty-four. It is the index.
After he went up I wrote that one line in the log. There is a box for it. It is the box for whether it subsists.
At half past nine three third-floor requisitions came.
What did not go out at year end has come at once. I brought them from the stacks, entered them in the register and took signatures.
A date goes into the register. The operational machine writes it in four digits, the third of January two thousand. Passed to the index it becomes two.
At ten I queried the index.
The first line is double zero. At dawn the day before yesterday there was one thing under double zero.
Today there are four.
I looked at the order within double zero. The three of the third of January come first and the one of the sixteenth of December after.
Until yesterday the first line of this list was the fifth bundle. Today the first line is a line I wrote at half past nine.
From half past ten until twelve I tried to write down what this is.
Standing in two digits, double zero is foremost. From today, everything written in this room is stored as double zero. Then every line written today stands at the front of the list.
For twelve months I was at the end of the list. Ninety-nine is the latest and what I wrote was always the last line. To find the last line one must go down, and going down is what I have done for twelve months.
From today there is no down. Written, it is at the top.
Becoming the oldest takes no time. A line written at half past nine is the oldest from half past nine.
In this room what was old was what time had gone into. Sixty-six years have gone into the lighthouse keeper's bundle and seventy-seven into the oldest of the four. That much went into the paper decaying and the thread parting and the writing bleeding.
Nothing has decayed in the line I wrote this morning. Only double zero has sat down in a two-digit box.
What is old, this list does not see by the paper. It sees by the number in the box. Seen by the number, today is the oldest.
At one I opened the copy.
The copy has been a day ahead for eight months. Today's page is dated the fourth of January. The year is two digits, double zero.
I looked at where that page stands in the list.
It was behind me.
The night before yesterday the copy stood in front of me. Today it is behind me.
Being a day ahead is a line behind in the list. Where the year is the same, the later date goes back. The copy always writes a date a day later. It goes back by being ahead.
What I learned in October fastens on again. In a box with no direction, ahead and back are the same place. Then it meant that a line a day ahead and a line a year and ten months back are the same. Today it means that being ahead is being behind.
At half past one I opened the box.
The fifth bundle is a hundred and seventy-seven pages. It has not grown for eighteen days since the sixteenth.
There is double zero in the year box of that last page. That double zero was the first line of this room's index until the day before yesterday. Today that line is fourth.
The three I wrote stood in front of it.
At two I asked head office about the separate volume.
Since the test machine is now right, they said to close the separate volume and bind it into the main one.
To bind them I set the two books side by side. October to December of the separate volume is year double zero and the same three months of the main book is ninety-nine. The same three months are written as two years.
Bound, one book holds two years. The main book has one year box.
At three I opened the right-hand material.
It was two hundred and twenty-six pages. The page added is dated the sixth of February 98.
On that page there was one sentence outside the boxes.
There is a box for writing what was corrected and no box for writing what increased after the correcting.
I looked at that sentence until half past three.
That is what I have asked of the form for eight months. I wrote that there is no box for whether a thing is a first, and no box for why, and no box for recollection, and no box for an order. All four are the same question.
Two years ago the same question stands in one line. That line is outside the boxes, so that person too could not find a box to write it in.
There is no box for writing that there is no box.
At four a head office circular came.
It is a general inspection of materials after the rollover. There are nine items and the third is inspection of recorders.
It says to extract the recorder of every material held and submit it as a list. It says this office's records in their entirety are included among the objects.
A list has never been extracted by recorder in this room. I have extracted by year, and by number, and by date. I have never set the name box up as a column.
I read the circular twice. It says this office's records in their entirety. This room's records are four. The log, the copy, the separate volume and the 1997 archive log. The separate volume was ordered closed today, so three.
The log is not registered as a material. For twelve months it has been in the third-floor cabinet and it has no material number. Without a number it does not come up in a query.
Being included among the objects of inspection, it must be given a number. Giving it a number is registering it, and registered today the year box is double zero.
What was written over twelve months becomes a material today.
At ten past four I registered the log. In the period box of the form I wrote from the fourth of January 99 and left the end box empty. Whether leaving the end empty is right I asked a year ago of the notebook, and it did not resolve then either.
In the recorder box I wrote my name. In twelve months I have never written that name in this room's records. I wrote by employee number and I wrote four digits.
At twenty past four I set the query running.
The result count came up.
It was six.
There are eight records in this room. The four bundles, the 1997 log, the fifth bundle, the notebook and the log I registered today.
Out of eight the names are six.