March 27. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the fifth desk.
Four days had passed with the transfer put off. The handover sheet's last-entry field was still blank, and as long as the last would not stop, blank it would stay. The head archivist asked after my progress again yesterday, and again I said it was nearly done. The nearly never shrank. While the nearly held, I decided to fill another field of the preservation work — the field that records 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 the bundles. For headquarters to allot storage, they had to know how much material there was, and that figure was the keeper's to measure and enter herself. I took out a ruler and began measuring the thickness of the five bundles.
I laid the surveyor's bundle along the ruler. Spine to the desk, the bundle's lower edge at the ruler's zero, I read off the mark its upper edge reached. An inch and some tenths. I copied the figure onto the papers. Then, to check it once more, I measured again. Lower edge at zero, upper edge read. The mark the upper edge reached now stood a tenth beyond the figure I had just written.
Thinking I had set the ruler wrong, I lifted the bundle off and laid it back on. Zero aligned, edge read. Another tenth beyond. The bundle was thickening. A tenth with every measuring. There was no reason for the paper to swell. The archive was dry, the bundle sat where it had sat the day before, and no one had slipped in another sheet. And yet with every measuring the thickness grew.
I opened the surveyor's log to its last page. It was the hand that had measured the depth of a shaft. In that hand's log, broken off at its last sounding, a single line was written. The more it is measured, the deeper the shaft. Let down the sounding weight to touch bottom, read off the length of line, and that length ran longer than the length read the day before. The bottom had drawn back by just so much. To measure was to add depth. The surveyor took it at first for a fault in his own hand, then came to see it was not his hand but the grain of measuring itself.
The log had set down, on its first page, how many fathoms the shaft ran at the start. Twelve fathoms. By the last page the shaft was past forty. Not that one shaft had deepened to forty fathoms across one man's record, but that one man had measured that shaft more than forty times over. It deepened by the count of the measurings, and by however much it deepened it had to be measured again. The line that would not reach bottom he let down each day, and the more he let it down each day the further the bottom drew back each day. The day the shaft was measured through was the day his log broke off, and yet the shaft was never measured through. The hand that tried to measure through a shaft that cannot be measured through stopped at the last sounding.
I measured the other four bundles as well. The lighthouse keeper's, the librarian's, the telegraph operator's, and the previous keeper's fifth. Ruler set, zero aligned, upper edge read. All five thickened a tenth with every measuring. It was not the surveyor's bundle alone. Measuring did not choose its bundle. Wherever the ruler touched, in the instant of touching, a tenth was added to the thickness. By the time I had set down each of the five thicknesses once, the surveyor's figure — the first I had written — lagged a tenth behind again. Across the measuring of 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 one and the same work. Set the ruler and the thickness grew; let down the line and the depth grew. Wherever the measuring hand touched, what it measured grew. The surveyor's shaft had not ended but deepened inside his bundle, and the thickness of that bundle did not end but grew beneath my ruler. The depth of the shaft had passed over into the thickness of the bundle.
I read again the passage where the surveyor doubted his own hand. He doubted whether the sounding weight, heavy, had stretched the line; doubted whether the line, waterlogged, had lengthened; doubted whether he had misread the marks. Having checked all three, still the depth grew with every measuring. Where the checking ran out, he began to doubt not his hand but measuring itself. I too doubted the ruler, doubted the damp in the paper, doubted my own eyes. The three things the surveyor had checked I checked as well, and where my checking ran out was the place he had 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. Perhaps, I thought, it would not grow if I did not measure it. Leave the bundle on the desk as it was, leave the thickness field of the papers blank, and with no measuring there would be no growing. But to leave the size field of the transfer papers blank would set the head archivist asking, and to be asked was to measure, and to measure was to grow. The road of leaving blank ran into the road of being asked, and the road of being asked into the road of measuring. Even at the end of the road of not measuring stood measuring.
In the afternoon I took up the ruler again. I could not not measure, so I measured. Only this time I would measure just once. Measure once, write the figure, and never measure again, and I could keep from watching it grow. Not seeing was as good as its not being there — so I told myself for a moment. The surveyor must have told himself the same: that if he measured once and drew up the line, the shaft would hold at that depth.
I measured once and drew up the ruler. I wrote the figure. I shut the papers so as not to see what I had written, and laid my hand on them. Under my hand I felt the thickness of a single sheet — and it was thicker than a single sheet. The shut papers were thickening while I did not look. They grew though I did not look, as the shaft had deepened even after the surveyor drew up his line.
I opened the papers again. Below the figure I had written in the size field, a figure I had not written had arrived, one line more. As though the same bundle's thickness had been written twice — only the second figure ran a tenth beyond the first. The hand that meant 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 shut papers showed neither.
The surveyor's log broke off at that very place. At the last sounding, he broke off without setting down whether he had drawn up the line or let it down once more. Write that he drew it up, and the shaft should not have deepened further; write that he let it down again, and it was he who had measured. But the shaft deepened even after he drew up the line, and nowhere in his log was there a place to tell the drawing-up hand from the letting-down hand. I stood in the same place. Between the hand that measured once and the count that had measured twice, between the bundle grown while I did not look and the hand that measured while I did not look, I too had no place 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 yet more of a figure that quarreled with itself the more it was written was not preservation. I shut 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 would measure no more. I put the ruler in the drawer and closed the drawer. Whether the ruler had grown a tenth longer inside the closed drawer, I did not open it to see. To open and see was to measure, and to measure was to grow.