August 2. After twelve days the month and the day came back to the copy.
The twelve days before were all the same. On the evening of July 20 page eighty appeared, and its date column had no month and no day, only a year. The next day page eighty-one appeared and was the same. The day after was the same. Nine pages came one after another, and the date column of all nine held nothing but zero zero.
In that time I counted every morning. The rule held. On July 20 it was fifty-four, and today, thirteen days on, it is ninety-three. Three a day has not failed once.
Over the twelve days I tried counting those nine pages in several directions. With no month and no day one cannot count the pages as days. One can count them by page number. Counted by page number it is one a day, which is no different from days, and yet those pages carry no dates of their own. The days go by and the pages pile up, and the column that joined the two stands empty. With that column empty, what day it is comes from the calendar and not from the page. For six months the copy told me things I had not asked. The twelve days told me nothing.
At ten a second envelope came from head office.
It was the outcome of last month's form. The survey was closed and a plan had come out. The year places on the six items of equipment held by the computer room are to be changed from two digits to four. The year representation in the catalogue program is to be put in order. The deadline is the last day of November. The person responsible: the computer room's resident staff.
The resident staff of this room is me.
Having written it, I looked at the word responsible.
In June I corrected one line. A line of unknown origin had spread to sixteen of twenty, and to set it right I had to copy the original out. I copied it out and put it up, and it spread wrong again. That was when I learned that correcting is increasing. After that I corrected as little as I could. From the time a deleted post went to two places, I stopped deleting as well.
What I have learned in six months, set down in one line, is that. Touch it and it grows.
Today the company said to touch it.
Before lunch I telephoned head office. I asked whether the catalogue cards were included. I asked whether cards, being paper, were not beside the point whether the year on them is two digits or four. They said the cards get keyed in eventually. They said that when one keys them in one reads two digits and types two digits. So it is better, they said, to correct the cards to four digits first.
I put down the telephone and counted the catalogue drawers. Twelve. There are about six hundred cards to a drawer.
All afternoon I held that one question. Is it different when there is an order.
In June I chose. I could have left the wrong line and I could have corrected it, and I decided to correct it. So the increase became my share. Today there is no place to choose from. The form says responsible and there is a commencement deadline, and I am the resident staff.
If the hand that chooses and the hand that corrects belong to different people, whose share is the increase.
I thought of one way to divide it. Correct only what was ordered and leave untouched what was not. What the form names is the six items and the catalogue. The copy is not there. The log is not there. The board is not the company's, so it was never there. If I keep my hands off those three and correct only the catalogue, I can see which side grows. If what was ordered grows it is the share of whoever ordered it, and if what was not ordered grows it is mine.
In six months I have built five such devices and all five collapsed in the same place. The place of collapse is mostly the same too. Both sides come and sit in the box made to divide them. I built it anyway. Without building it there is nothing to ask.
I opened my predecessor's note. The record of the man in the archive last winter is inside it. All winter he tried one thing. Not sending. He put his hands on his knees and shut the drawer and weighed it down with a box. In the morning it worked and in the afternoon it fell apart. It came although he had not sent, only without aim, so that it chose as it pleased. What he wrote that day is that absence is a price too.
He tried not to choose and it became a choosing. I did not choose and have come to correct. The two look like different seats and the hand does the same thing. One had it happen while trying not to, one has it happen because he was told to. Neither ever chose.
At three the man from the third floor came down and took two registers. Seeing the envelope, he asked whether it was the rollover business. I said it was. He said he had read in the paper that aeroplanes fall out of the sky. He said the lifts stop too. I said we have neither aeroplanes nor lifts in this room. He laughed and went up.
Left alone, I thought about what he said again. What the papers are afraid of is stopping. A machine misreads the date and halts. In six months nothing in this room has halted. Far from halting, it has risen by three a day. If this room has anything to fear, it is not the stopping side but the other.
At four I pulled the first drawer and set it on the desk.
I took out a card. March 1997 material. In the year place is stamped 97. Beside it one writes the four digits. Four strokes.
Looking into the drawer I saw the cards were two colours. The front half is yellowed and the back is less so. I put my hand in where the colour changes and drew out a card. May 1998. Before it the hand is one, and after it another. It is the place where the archive changed people. Two hands went into this one drawer, and the later of them closed last winter. Since then the one who has put cards in this drawer is me. Three hands.
Only then did I see a little of what it is to correct seven thousand two hundred entries of four strokes. I have been given the work of making the years three people wrote down all one shape.
I did not correct the first card. The commencement report is due by the tenth, so there is no hurry. I pushed the drawer back and at six I opened the log.
I wrote today's, and opened the copy.
Page eighty-nine had appeared. The month and the day had come back to the date column. August 2.
The year was four digits. One thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.
I have not yet corrected a single place.