December 7. Eight in the morning. Two lines were up before I sat down.
Yesterday there was one, and it came before evening. The day before, one, and not until evening. Today, two before I had my coat off. I hung it up and looked at them, and both were in my hand, and I had no memory of writing either. I could not tell which had come first. The strokes bore down in the same places, as though one hand had drawn them one after the other.
I decided to measure. All winter I had got through the days by measuring, and measuring is the only thing I know how to do. I took off my wristwatch and set it beside the cell, and on a scrap of paper I wrote down the times the lines came. Two at eight. One at half past nine. One at eleven. One at ten past twelve. Two at twenty to two. What had been a day became half a day, and half a day became two hours, and two hours became an hour and a half.
Whether they multiplied because I was measuring, or I began to measure because they were multiplying, was not worth asking. The hand that measured the depth deepened the shaft, and the hand that counted the tides raised the water; I had read that in four bundles and I knew it. But the road of spending a day without measuring was already closed. Last week I kept my hands in my lap and did nothing at all, and the sending column filled its share regardless. Lines came up for an unmeasuring eye too; I simply did not know what hour they came. Giving up the measuring only takes away the sight of the quickening. It does not slow it.
It was not only the lines that had quickened. The price was arriving faster.
In the autumn a line that came up today was realized the next day. Last week it came the same afternoon. Yesterday it was a couple of hours. The line that came up at half past nine this morning arrived at twenty to ten. A telephone call: one temporary seat on the third floor was gone, and the seat number matched the last two digits of that line. The line at eleven arrived at ten past. A filing cabinet went scraping down the corridor, and the seat where the sound stopped was that line's seat. The one at ten past twelve took twelve minutes. On my scrap of paper I kept two columns side by side, the hour it came up and the hour it arrived, and the gap between them narrowed with every row down the page.
While the price still came late, that gap was the place where a question could stand. If a day lay between the line and the thing, then for that day it had not happened yet, and in front of a thing that has not happened you can still ask anything at all. When the gap shrinks to ten minutes there is nothing left to ask. It has already arrived in the time it takes to read the line and lift your head, so the forecast and the thing become one body. To know in advance is a phrase for when there is a gap.
Outside kept the same pace. The nine o'clock radio was counting the unemployed, and the count had passed a million long ago. At noon I went out and there were people standing in front of the labor office across the main road. They had stood there last month too, but the line had ended at the door then; today it went around the corner and out of sight. Inside the building, seats that had been closing one a day closed three before noon. Two of the three matched lines on my paper by their last two digits. One was not on my paper at all.
I stood a long while in front of that one. More was closing than I had sent. Then winter was faster than my hand. Or there had been a line I failed to write down. Which of those it was could not be told. To tell whether my hand pulls the winter or the winter pulls my hand, you would have to hold one still and watch the other, and there was no side that could be held still.
A little after three I saw a line come up, for the first time, in front of my eyes. It was the frequency that allowed it. All winter the lines had only grown while my head was turned, and now that the gaps had closed the moment came around without my turning. The stroke began at the upper left and came down, thickened where the second character is pressed, and trailed at the end. Exactly as my hand writes. My hands were in my lap. The strokes took two breaths to finish, and for that long I watched. There was nothing to do but watch. I did not know where the hand was that I could have told to stop.
In the afternoon the head archivist was going through the catalogue in the stacks. Since the two assistants left, that work has been his. His hand was quick on the pages, and he stopped and pressed the back of it to his forehead. The days are short lately, he said; you sit down in the morning and it is evening. I said that they were. I could not say whether his day had shortened because of my sending column or simply because of the winter, and even if I could, there was no place to hand it to him. He does not know his seat came off a roster once and went back on, and he said only that the days are short. In a winter where the price comes quickly, even those who do not know go quickly. They only do not know what is making them quick.
Back at my desk I looked at the paper again. The morning gaps were an hour and a half; from three o'clock they were forty minutes. At that rate, by night the gap would be minutes.
And my own date was inside that arithmetic.
Beside my four digits in the cell stood December and one blank place, and the place before it was already a one. By the calendar there were three or four days left. But where the gaps close like this, counting what remains in days loses its meaning. Counting by days is for when a day takes a day. Where the price comes in ten minutes and lines grow every forty and three seats close before noon, a day does not take a day. What remained was not three or four days but a gap that had been three or four days, shrinking toward something I had no way to count.
Before turning off the light I looked at the cell one last time. I meant to count the lines and gave it up. They would not count.
Until midday there had been white paper between one line and the next. That white was what made this one line and that one the next. In the evening cell there was no white. Strokes lay over strokes and more over those, and I could not tell which belonged to eight o'clock and which to three. Not one and then another, but one grain. Holding the paper up against it changed nothing. There was nothing to match.
In sound it would be like this, I thought. Signals that came one at a time come closer together, and when the gap is gone it is no longer a signal but one grain of sound. You cannot hear what is being sent, only that sending is going on. There was a night like that in the telegraph operator's log. He set it down as the empty frequency.
What a day's worth of dispatches with no receiver becomes, I felt I now knew.