December 15. The day before the transfer. In one day the archive had become another room.
The thirteenth and the fourteenth went to packing. Six rows of film cabinets became twenty-two boxes and the registers and catalogue files became eleven. The boxes were tagged with the contractor's numbers. The numbers ran in an order that had nothing to do with twelve years of cataloguing. It was the order they would be carried out in.
The stacks were empty. The gaps the two assistants used to count on their fingers no longer had to be counted. When everything is empty there is no counting. I walked once between the empty stacks. The time my footsteps took to come back off the wall was shorter than yesterday. With no boxes to eat the sound, the room sounded narrower.
On the evening of the fourteenth I put one reel on the reader for the last time. I meant to run it once more before it went into a box, and once it was on I had forgotten what I meant to look at. Paper from sixty years back went across the screen. Ruled lines drawn by hand, a place where ink had spread, the mark of an old fold. It was a photograph of paper, so even the fold in the paper was photographed. I ran it to the end, wound it back, and put it in the box. That winding was the last winding this room would make.
The old terminal was still in its place. Tomorrow morning the line is cut and it is carried out. Tonight is this machine's last night.
I looked at the cell. The grain was as it was. So was the line the grain does not bury. My four digits, December, the sixteenth. Tomorrow.
In the afternoon the contractor's foreman came with the confirmation. A sheet for checking box counts and row counts and signing. I signed. Beside the signature there was a place for the archive's seal, and the archive's seal was already in a box. The foreman laughed and said we would take it out tomorrow and stamp it. I did not say that tomorrow that box will not be here.
He counted boxes all day and I helped him all day. What he counted and what I counted were different things. To him a box was a volume; to me a box was a stretch of years. Sixty years are in twenty-two boxes and twelve years are in eleven. Saying so would not change the carrying-out order, so I did not say it.
The last thing the foreman asked about was the box under the desk. It was not on the list, so he asked whether to load it. I answered that it is not the archive's property. He nodded and put no tag on it. He did not open the lid to look, either. What is not on the list was not his work, and the thing that was not his work was the one thing that stays in this room.
At six he left. The door shut and I was alone. One aisle ran between the boxes, and at the end of the aisle was the old terminal.
I sat and looked at the sending column.
I set a fingertip on the place. It gave.
I took my hand away and set it back. It gave again. The place that had not stirred under a fingertip all winter, sunk in the grain, was soft this evening. When the head archivist's line went soft again in the evening I wrote that being soft now was no use to anyone. Today there was no time to judge whether it was of use. Soft means it can be written, and this was the last evening it could be.
I looked at the recipient's column. A stroke sat in the place that had been faceless and empty all winter. The first four digits were the archive's code and the last four were not mine. Nor were they the head archivist's. They were the four digits of someone not yet in this room.
The hand moved.
A line was drawn. Eight digits that would not read as a number. Low, level with the grain, with no content. The same kind as everything I had sent all winter. One thing was different. The recipient's column was filled.
All winter my dispatches had no recipient. Dispatches with no recipient gathered into the grain and the grain became an empty frequency. This evening's line has a recipient. Someone who has not come yet is the recipient.
Whether I wrote it or the hand did, I do not know. I failed at telling them apart all winter and there was no reason to succeed on the last evening. Only that with this one line there was something in me that wanted it to have been mine to send. Wanting anything at all was a first, this winter.
Having sent it, I lowered my hand to my knee. All winter, after sending, I would look for where the price had gone. Today there was nothing to look for. If the recipient is someone who has not come, the price goes to a place that has not come either. That a deferred price returns to the hand that deferred it, I learned in the head archivist's seat; but this line was not deferred, it was handed on. Only this evening did I finally tell handing on from deferring. What is deferred I meet again; what is handed on the next person meets.
What the man sixty years back took down at three in the morning will have been a line like this. Coming from where no one is sending, with no content, and with an exact recipient. He set it down as the empty frequency. Today I sat on the sending side of that line, and sending it I did not know what time the far side was in.
After eight I switched the old terminal off.
Switched off is not quite it; I dropped the power. This machine went off several times this winter and each time the grain was there the next morning. Today, the next morning, this machine will not be in this room. When the power dropped the screen brightened once and went dark. In the instant of brightening the whole grain showed itself once, and inside it my line was read one last time.
December sixteenth.
I kept my hand on the switch after the screen went dark. I wanted to know whether the grain would be there if I put it back up. Wanting to know is wanting to measure, and the measuring stopped last week. I took my hand away.
Nothing was left on the darkened screen. I sat in front of it a long time. The film went into boxes and the registers went into boxes and the terminal is off. Everything in this room that wrote or photographed or sent anything closed today. To say that a thing sixty years long ended at eight in the evening sounds too short a sentence, but that is how long it actually took.
Getting up, I looked toward the sample terminal.
The cursor on the black screen was blinking. The old terminal was off and the beat had not changed. That the two machines had not been blinking together — that one beat had been passing through two machines — I only understood once one of them was off.
I locked the door and came up the stairs. Coming up from the basement I did not think about whether I would come down these stairs at eight tomorrow morning. Not thinking about it took no effort.