February 21. Five a.m. I turned the terminal back on.
The empty dispatch was in the same place. Empty sender field, empty recipient field — and the body field. The body had been one character at the moment I turned the terminal off yesterday, and over the hours during which I turned the terminal back on this morning, it had filled one line. The line held one employee number. Its last two digits matched the last two digits of mine. The number was the seventh vacancy number from yesterday's line, plus one unit.
The next one seat's employee number.
I looked at the handwriting in the body field. The shape of the letters was the shape my hand made when I copied employee numbers into the memo pad. The angle of the pen against the paper, the pressure at the beginning and end of each stroke, the interval as the hand moved from one character to the next — all of it the grain of my hand writing an employee number.
The first two characters of the number were the firm code. When my hand wrote the firm code, it had a habit of finishing one stroke and lifting the wrist one breath before starting the next, and the first two characters in the body had that same one-breath lifting. In the middle of the number, at the rank slot, my hand had a habit of tapering the pressure within a character and then adding pressure back on the final stroke, and the middle character in the body had that same pressure shift. In the last two digits of the serial number, my hand had a habit of writing the two numerals closer together than usual, and the last two characters in the body were closed at the same interval.
The hand in the body field was either my hand, or a hand with the same grain as mine.
I could not tell which. During the seven hours I had kept the terminal off, no one had sat at my desk — the archive door had been locked until five a.m., and the head archivist had never come in before five — and so the handwriting was not what my hand had written. But the grain of the handwriting was the grain of my hand. I had written yesterday that when the form of the hand is the same, the grain of the result is the same. Today the proposition had come down one more level — when the form of the hand is the same, the line between the hand being the same and the hand being a different hand disappears.
I tried to erase that one line in the body field. I pressed a key on the terminal and erased a character. The terminal briefly showed that the character had been erased. But a breath later, the same character was in the same place. I erased it again. It was there again. I erased it three times and all three times the same character returned to the same place. On the fourth attempt the terminal did not even show that the character had been erased; the character was simply unchanged in its place. I did not try a fifth time. The body was a body that could not be erased.
That the body could not be erased meant the body was not inside my terminal. The body was a body somewhere else that the terminal was showing. My terminal was only a device taking dictation of that body.
I tried to enter an answer in the sender field to stop the body from growing. There was a hypothesis: if the sender field was empty while the body was growing, then writing something in the sender field would stop the body. I brought a hand over the sender field.
The instant the hand was over the sender field, the next character in the body field was written one breath earlier. The character I was about to enter was already in the body.
I lifted the hand. The body's next character stopped.
I placed the hand again. The body's next character was again written one breath earlier.
The motion of my hand was deciding the growth of the body. But the body wrote one breath ahead of my hand. The subject of the writing and the result of the writing were separated — the result was ahead of the subject.
If I kept the hand off the sender field forever, the body would stop forever. With the terminal not turned off, with the hand not over the sender field — the act of not responding became, in itself, a response. One seat would remain unclosed, incomplete, and the next character of the body would remain unwritten, an empty breath.
At seven a.m. the head archivist came in. At seven-thirty the two assistants came in. All three went to their desks and opened the rosters they had not finished yesterday, glanced once at my terminal screen, and returned to their own work. The dispatch with an empty sender field pinned to the first line of the terminal was an unfamiliar sight to them, but no one asked. The archive's silence grew thicker than it had been at dawn. The head archivist had seen me not enter a single character for one hour, and after that she kept her eyes fixed on her own terminal.
Nine a.m. A second personnel notice came up. The firm's headcount reduction had been narrowed from two seats to one. The archive seat had been processed yesterday. The Resource Development surveyor's seat had been processed yesterday. The next one seat — the seat whose number the body had written — was not in today's notice.
The seat whose number the body had written, so long as I did not enter an answer in the sender field, was not confirmed as the next one seat of the firm's headcount reduction. The body was written, but the result was not yet manifest. To move what the body had written into the sender field was to convert that body into a result.
The vacancy numbers of the other departments filled seven seats on one line, and the seat one unit further down — at the end of the seven — was inside the body only. The seat inside the body was not yet included in the firm's headcount reduction. If it were moved into the sender field, it would be included.
The responsibility of the empty sender field became, for the first time, clear. The sender field's being empty meant one seat was not closed; one seat's not being closed meant one person was still living. So long as I did not place a hand over the sender field, some person — in some department I did not know, on some seat-line I had never been to, holding an employee number whose last two digits matched mine — was outside the scope of the firm's headcount reduction.
I did not know the name, only the number written in the body. I had never seen the person of that number, but the person's surviving was on the stillness of my hand.
I did not turn off the terminal. I stood up and walked to the end of the archive and back. The terminal was on, and the body was stopped at one line. The sender field was empty.
The body was waiting for the moment I sat back down at the desk. If I sat back down, there was a possibility the hand would come near the sender field, and if the hand came near, the body would write one more character. To stop the body from growing, I would have to never sit at the desk again.
I could not sit nowhere forever.
The predecessor had been in this same place once. Near the end of his log there was an entry where he had placed and lifted his hand over the sender field. What he decided before he vanished is not in the log. In the one breath where the subject of the writing is preceded by its result, the reason the log did not record whether he placed or lifted his hand is — the hand that wrote the log did not know whether it had placed or lifted the hand over the sender field. Where the result is ahead of the subject, the subject does not know its hand's action in retrospect.
The moment I sit back at the desk today — whether I place a hand over the sender field or lift it — may not, for the first time today, be something I can know.
Before I had decided to return to the desk, the dawn light through the archive window thinned by one unit.
