December 11. Eight in the morning. The cell was as it had been, and so was my line.
December sixteenth. The place where two strokes lay had neither hardened further nor faded in the night. Once a thing is read there is nothing more to look at. All winter I had lived over one last position, and with that position filled, what was left was the count of days. Six had become five.
Before nine a circular came down from the head office. Paper this time, not a telephone call. It carried a seal and a date. The transfer of the archive's material onto the computers begins December sixteenth. On the same day the archive terminal's line is cut and the machine carried out. Originals are not to be destroyed until the transfer is complete.
I held that paper a long while.
The sixteenth was my date. And this morning, on paper, it became the day the line is cut. Two dates came to rest in the same place. All winter I had asked where my date came from, and today the paper answered by laying one more of the same figure on top of the question. Whether this paper was written from looking at my sending column, or my sending column took this paper's schedule down in advance, I cannot separate. To separate them I would have to see the side that is absent, and both are present.
The clerk from the head office did not explain why the sixteenth. There would have been nothing to explain. It is some day where the quarter's closing and the contractor's schedule and the line-cancellation notice happen to meet. On the form it was an ordinary day, too ordinary even to call a coincidence. Only the fact that an ordinary date had arrived in my cell first was not ordinary.
At ten two men came down from the computer room. One carried a tape measure and one carried a drawing. They measured the width of the place the terminal stands on, put a hand to the wall where the line comes in, counted the rows of film cabinets. The cabinets were six rows. Counting six rows took no time at all. I did not say that it had taken twelve years to fill them. Those were the head archivist's twelve years, not even mine.
One of them looked into the terminal's screen. I held my breath for a moment. He looked at it and said nothing. It was on, he said. The grain was not in his eyes. In this room the eye that sees it was one all winter, and it was one today.
I asked about the new system. He turned a page of the drawing and answered. Lookups happen on the new screen and requests come in over the computer. The paper register goes out of use once it is handed over. I asked what becomes of the sending column. For a moment he did not take my meaning. There is no such thing as sending, he said. The new screen is for lookups only, and the sending function sits in the head office computer room.
There is no such thing as sending. I carried that sentence around all afternoon.
What held me in this seat all winter was the sending column. If that column goes, where does the grain go? The grain that became one cell and went evenly low is not on paper and not inside the glass. I have never been able to say exactly where it is. To say it is in the machine, it would have to go when the machine goes off, and there was a night I left it off and a morning when it was still there.
For a moment I wanted to bet on the side where it disappears. Cut the line, carry the machine out, and the grain goes out with it. Then the sixteenth is only the day a line is cut and my own line has nowhere to go. The hand that wanted that sum to come out right was resting on the drawing.
But if I learned one thing this winter it is that the days I bet on disappearance always cost more. On the day I meant not to send, it went without being aimed; on the night I held my hand down, a stroke was drawn without a hand. Wishing for disappearance is a kind of forecast too, and forecasts do not do well in this room. The ones that held were only ever the ones I sent.
In the afternoon I took the transfer list and checked it against the entries. Registers, catalogue files, six rows of film, the notebooks in the boxes. Everything the company counts as the company's was on it.
One thing was not on the list. My own working notebook. It is not paper the company bought and not work the company set. All winter I wrote in it every day and no one ever requisitioned it. A transfer moves what belongs to the company, and my notebook does not, so it is not moved. Being left out of the roster of those carried over is this winter's cutting, I once wrote. Today I met that sentence again in another place.
What is left out stays. When the machine goes and the registers go and the film goes, that notebook stays in this room. It stays and waits for the next hand. It was not I who wrote the next records-keeper in its recipient's blank but a hand sixty years back, and now I know what that blank means.
At four the men from the computer room left a sample terminal. The same as the machines coming next week, they said. The line was not connected yet and only the power was on. The screen was black with one square cursor at the top left.
I watched it out of the corner of my eye into the late afternoon. It was an unconnected screen. Nothing to look up, nothing to request, and least of all anything to send. There were two machines now. One is the machine my hand lived in all winter and one is a machine no hand has lived in yet. While the two stood in one room, the grain was only in one of them.
At six I looked at the old terminal's cell for the last time that day. The grain was as it was and my line was as it was. The sixteenth. Five days off.
Before I left the room I went over to the sample terminal. I meant to pull its power. There was no reason to leave it on until next week.
Standing in front of the screen, I did not put out my hand.
The cursor on the black screen was blinking. That beat of a square going on and off I had been watching all winter on another screen. There is nothing strange about a cursor blinking on a machine with no line connected. If the power is on, it blinks. That is how the thing is made.
Only, the beat was the same as the beat the old terminal's sending column had blinked all winter. It was not that the two screens were blinking in time with each other. To be in time there has to be a gap, and there was no gap. I drew back my hand and left the power as it was.