March 27. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk.
Four days had passed with the transfer postponed. The last-entry field of the handover sheet was still blank, and as long as the last would not stop, that field would stay blank. The head archivist asked about progress yesterday too, and I said it was nearly done again. The nearly had not shrunk. While the nearly did not shrink, I decided to fill another field of the preservation work. The field that measures the size of the material.
The transfer papers had a field for the size of the material. Number of bundles, number of pages, thickness of bundles. For headquarters to assign storage space they had to know how much the material came to, and that figure was for the preservation keeper to measure and enter herself. I took out a ruler. I began measuring the thickness of the five bundles.
I set the surveyor's bundle on the ruler. Spine to the desk, the lower edge of the bundle at the ruler's zero, I read the mark the upper edge pointed to. One inch and some tenths. I copied that figure onto the papers. After copying it, I measured again to check once more. Lower edge at zero, read the upper edge. The mark the upper edge pointed to was one tenth more than the figure I had just written.
Thinking I had set the ruler wrong, I took the bundle off and set it on again. Aligned the zero and read. Another tenth more. The bundle was thickening. One tenth each time I measured. There was no reason for the paper to swell. The archive was dry, the bundle was in the same place as yesterday, and no one had slipped in more paper. And yet each time I measured, the thickness grew.
I opened the surveyor's log to the last page. It was the hand that measured the depth of a shaft. In the log of that hand, broken off at the last sounding, one line was written. The more it is measured, the deeper the shaft. Lower the sounding weight to touch the bottom and read the length of the line, and that length was longer than the length read yesterday. The bottom had receded by that much. To measure was to add depth. The surveyor took it for the fault of his own hand, then learned it was not his hand but the grain of measuring itself.
The log had written on its first page how many fathoms the shaft was at first. Twelve fathoms. On the last page the shaft was over forty. It was not that one shaft had deepened to forty fathoms over one man's record, but that one man had measured that shaft more than forty times. It deepened by the count of measurings, and by as much as it deepened it had to be measured again. The line that did not reach bottom he lowered each day, and the more he lowered it each day the more the bottom receded each day. The day the shaft was fully measured was the day his log broke off, but the shaft was never fully measured. The hand that tried to fully measure a shaft that cannot be fully measured stopped at the last sounding.
I measured the other four bundles too. The lighthouse keeper's, the librarian's, the telegrapher's, and the previous keeper's fifth bundle. Set the ruler, aligned the zero, read the upper edge. All five thickened one tenth each time they were measured. It was not only the surveyor's bundle. Measuring did not pick its bundle. Wherever the ruler touched, in the instant it touched, one tenth was added to the thickness. After I wrote the thickness of the five bundles once each, the surveyor's figure I had written first lagged one tenth behind again. While I measured all five, the first had grown once more.
My measuring the thickness of the bundle and the surveyor's measuring the depth of the shaft were the same work. Set the ruler and the thickness grew; lower the line and the depth grew. Wherever the measuring hand touched, what was measured grew. The surveyor's shaft did not end but deepened inside his bundle, and the thickness of that bundle did not end but grew on my ruler. The depth of the shaft had moved over into the thickness of the bundle.
I reread the passage where the surveyor doubted the fault of his own hand. He doubted whether the sounding weight was heavy and stretched the line, doubted whether the line had taken on water and lengthened, doubted whether he had misread the marks. Having checked all three, the depth still grew each time it was measured. Where the checking ended, he began to doubt not his hand but measuring itself. I too doubted the ruler, doubted the damp of the paper, doubted my eyes. The three things the surveyor checked I checked too, and where the checking ended was the same place he arrived at. The place of doubting measuring itself. In that place, measuring had become a thing that could not be stopped.
I set the ruler down. I thought perhaps it would not grow if I did not measure it. If I left the bundle on the desk as it was and left the thickness field of the papers blank, then there would be no measuring and so no growing. But to leave the size field of the transfer papers blank would have the head archivist ask, and to be asked meant to measure, and to measure meant to grow. The way of leaving blank led to the way of being asked, and the way of being asked to the way of measuring. At the end of the way of not measuring there was measuring too.
In the afternoon I took up the ruler again. I could not not measure, so I measured. Only this time I decided to do the measuring once. Measure once, write the figure, and not measure again, and I could keep from seeing it grow. Not seeing was as good as it not being there, I thought for a moment. The surveyor must have thought so too. That if he measured once and drew up the line, the shaft would stay still at that depth.
I measured once and drew up the ruler. I wrote the figure. I closed the papers so as not to see the figure I had written. I laid my hand on the closed papers. Under my hand the thickness of one sheet of paper could be felt. The papers were one sheet, yet the thickness under my hand was thicker than one sheet. The closed papers were thickening while I did not look. They grew though I did not look. As the shaft deepened even after the surveyor drew up the line.
I opened the papers again. Below the figure I had written in the size field, a figure I had not written had come, one line more. As if the thickness of the same bundle had been written twice, only the second figure was one tenth more than the first. The hand that decided to measure once had come to have measured twice. Whether someone had measured once more while I did not look, or the bundle had grown once more while I did not look, the closed papers showed neither.
The surveyor's log broke off at that same place. At the last sounding, he broke off without writing whether he drew up the line or lowered it once more. Write that he drew it up and the shaft should not have deepened further; write that he lowered it once more and it was he who measured. But the shaft deepened even after he drew up the line, and there was no place in his log to tell the drawing-up hand from the lowering hand. I was in the same place. Between the hand that measured once and the count of having measured twice, between the bundle grown while I did not look and the hand that measured while I did not look, there was no place for me either to tell them apart. The place where the surveyor broke off at his last sounding, I had come to stand in today.
I decided to stop writing the figures. To write more of a figure that disagreed the more it was written was not preservation. I closed the papers with the size field blank. The blank field would become a field to be asked about, but the asking was tomorrow's business, and today I decided not to measure more. I put the ruler in the drawer and closed the drawer. Whether the ruler had grown one tenth longer inside the closed drawer, I did not open to see. To open and see was to measure, and to measure was to grow.