July 3. I opened the log. Page sixty-nine.
What to write had not been settled yesterday and was not settled today. I wrote the page number and the date and left what came under them empty. I put it in the drawer that way.
I had taken it that leaving it empty meant not writing. But the page number was already written.
There are empty pages in the predecessor's notebook too. While scanning I read them as a break in the work. Busy, or ill, or forgot. I skipped the three empty pages and went on scanning from the next one.
Looking now, those three pages had numbers too. A number means the person opened the notebook that day. Opened it, wrote the number, and left what came under it empty.
I left mine for four days. My work went as usual in that time. I processed requisitions, wrote replies, finished registrations. I did not open the table. I did not open the copies. Open one and the figure goes up by one, and going up, it grows — that much I learned in June.
On July 7 I went back to look at the line.
It is truer to say I held out for four days against going. What I thought about through those four days was one thing: what fills the empty place in that line. And while I was thinking it I did not open the line, so I spent four days reading that line without opening it.
I opened the homepage where the text is typed out. The line was where it had been. Page sixty-nine, a date, and two figures. One was still eleven. The other had been filled.
Fourteen.
I read the figure three times. Three times it was fourteen.
After seeing the figure I ran the search. The same terms as June, in the same order.
Fourteen turned up.
Five days ago there were eleven. Three had been added in between. All three of the new ones were of the typed kind. Not posted as photographs but keyed in as text.
Two of the three were copies of an earlier copy. The person who put them up said so in a preface — they could not find the original, so they had written out someone else's post. One person copied it out, another copied that out, and a third copied out the second person's.
The third was different. Its paragraphs did not break in the same places as the others, and it had one line more. Where that line came from I could not confirm. Confirming it means opening the other thirteen again, and opening them thirteen times puts the figure up thirteen times.
That much is confirmation. Confirmation is my work.
What comes after it is not.
I saw the line first and counted after. That was the order. In June it was the other way. In June I counted and then wrote the figure into the table. In July the figure was there first and I went to confirm it.
It reads two ways.
One. Somebody counted before me and wrote it down. Anyone can count what has gone up on the internet. Read that way there is nothing strange in it. What remains is why that person put my log's page number on it.
Two. The figure was written first, and then there were fourteen. Read that way there is no way to explain it.
To separate them, do not confirm. See the written figure and do not count, and it stays unknown whether the figure is right or wrong. Left unknown, the second reading does not stand.
Except that I had already counted.
Could I have not counted? With a figure written in that line and my log's page number on it, could I have gone a day without counting? As someone who held out four days, I can answer that. One can hold out. Only, it was four days.
Even while holding out I was thinking about the line, and what the difference is between thinking about it and opening it, I no longer know well. There is the difference that the visitor figure does not go up. Whether that is the whole of the difference I do not know.
It does not follow that holding out four days was pointless. Over those four days the copies increased. They increased without my opening them. So my opening them is not the only cause of the increase.
Nor does it follow that my opening them is not a cause. Over those four days other people opened them, and I merely did not. The four days I did not open were four days other people did. There is no four days in this world that nobody opens.
I wrote out on paper what I can confirm from here. Written out, it came to one line. Nothing can be confirmed.
The man with the survey log measured the same place over and over. The figure grew one way, and he kept writing it down. I read that table as a record of error, then read it again in June.
Reading it a third time today, something else shows. He would have known what he was doing. He kept writing it down knowing. Do not measure and you do not know; not knowing, there is nothing to write; with nothing to write, the man has no reason to be in that place. A man who measures, if he stops measuring, stops being a man who measures.
I am a person who keeps records.
That the copy written out grows more, I set down in June. A photograph is something taken; a text keyed in has passed through a hand once more. The one a hand passed through gains more.
My log has never been put up anywhere. It is in the drawer and the drawer is locked.
And yet the copy holds my log's form. A page number, a date, figures set down without judgement. Not the form alone. The page numbers are following my log's numbers. Yesterday, when I left page sixty-nine empty, page sixty-nine in the copy had a figure in it.
If it has not been copied out, then what.
I am a person who copies things out. Since I took the post that is what I have done. Laid paper on the glass and photographed it, registered what was photographed, put what was registered on the internal network. If the one a hand passed through gains more, then the person whose hand has been laid on this material most often is me.
So it can also be read this way. It is not that I have copied it out. It is that I am being copied out.
After writing that sentence I sat for a long time. Writing it, it seemed to mean something; reading it back, I could not tell what. I did not delete it even so. Deleting is also writing, I read somewhere. I did not look up where.
Leaving work I finished page seventy. I wrote down what I did today in order and set down the figures. The figure for the next round I left empty. The page number is already attached to the place I left empty.
After writing it I opened the copy once more.
Below that line there was one more line. Page seventy. Today's date. And two figures. One was fourteen.
The other was empty.