August 23. The catalogue was still inverted.
In the morning a reply came from head office. A known symptom; a corrected version will come down during September. Until then use it as it is. Only the sorting is anomalous and no material has been lost, so there is no impediment to the work — that was the gist.
That there is no impediment is true. Whichever end the catalogue comes out from, the material one is looking for is found. One reads it backwards for ten days or so.
At nine I ran the search. One hundred and fifty-six. On the twentieth it was one hundred and forty-seven, so nine in three days. Three a day.
I decided to start the index work today. Seven thousand three hundred and forty cards remain and the deadline is the end of November.
Before starting I had to settle where to begin. The guidance says only to change two digits to four. Places where no year is entered at all are not in the guidance. What is absent is neither two digits nor four.
In the inverted catalogue, the front mass is those places. An empty column is read as 00 and stands at the front. Uncorrected, it will still be at the front after the rollover. Not being in the guidance, I judged it right to begin here even so.
At ten I pulled the front mass. Twenty-three.
All twenty-three are things I registered after January. In January I had nothing handed over, so I began by making a catalogue, and in making it I left blank what I did not know the year of. In eight months there has been no spare time to fill them in.
Four of the twenty-three were the box's.
When I registered the box in January I entered it as one item. Pnakotic Press salvaged materials, one lot. What was inside it I did not then know, and it had no registration number. Afterwards I entered the four bundles separately. The lighthouse keeper, the survey chainman, the telegraphist, the librarian. I left the year column empty on all four. The paper was damaged and no year was written on the covers.
Over eight months I have read those four many times. Reading them, I came to know their years. The lighthouse keeper's is thirty-four. The chainman twenty-three, the librarian twenty-four, the telegraphist thirty-seven. Dates are written in the body, so they come out if one is counting.
Today I had only to put them in the column.
From eleven I opened the four one at a time. To register a thing one needs a title and a quantity and a year, and to confirm the year one must open to the page and look. Having read them these eight months I know roughly where. I opened them anyway. To enter it one must confirm it, and to confirm it one must open it.
Opening and closing the four took an hour.
Four lines of entry record remain. It is a place that cannot be erased. Beneath the three lines of the year 1900 left by last week's test, today's four have attached themselves.
Coming back from lunch I pulled the catalogue again.
The four had gone to the back. Twenty-three went to the twenties, twenty-four beside it, thirty-four and thirty-seven to the thirties. In an inverted catalogue the old is at the back. So the four are within the last four.
What I did was write in the years, and having written them the four went from the very front to the very back.
I looked at that screen a long while. For eight months the oldest things in this room were those four. Until this morning those four stood at the head of the catalogue. Because I had not written the years down. I wrote the years and they went to their proper place, and the proper place is the back.
That sending them to their proper place was well done, I can see; and having done what was well done, what is left is that the front is empty.
From two I looked at what was left.
Sixteen of the nineteen were easy. Bulletins have the year printed on the cover. I put them all in within the hour. Putting them in, I watched sixteen lines sink towards the back of the catalogue. They went to the eighties and nineties and mixed in among the other bulletins. Once mixed, they were easier to find. That is what an index is for.
Three remained.
The first is my predecessor's note. Whether it is company material or personal effects could not be judged in January, so it was registered and left blank. The period written in the note runs from June last year to December 16. One writes 1998 and it is done. Only, there are two blank sheets behind it and those two have not been filled. Whether it is right to write a year that has ended on a thing that has not ended, I could not settle.
The second is the box itself. Pnakotic Press salvaged materials, one lot. The four inside are of the twenties and thirties, and the box came to this room last year. Whether the column is for the year of the material or the year the material came, the index form does not say. That is why I have left this column empty for eight months.
The third is the handover document.
It is what I received on taking the post in January. Rather than received: it was on the desk. As there was no one to hand over, the handing-over party's box is empty, and so is the date-of-handover box. The document is not completed, so it has no year.
At three I sat with those three.
The four I sent to their proper places. Of those three I do not know where the proper place is. The reason differs in all three. One because it has not ended, one because I do not know whose year is to be written, and one because there is no person.
At four I worked out one thing.
After the rollover, the year of any material this room newly registers is two thousand. Two thousand in two digits is 00, and 00 is nineteen hundred. Nineteen hundred is earlier than twenty-three.
After the rollover, everything I register will be written in ahead of the survey journal. Ahead of the four I sent to the back today. The corrected version is to come down in September, so the catalogue will find its proper order; even so, if the two digits on the index side are not all corrected, the same thing happens over there. That is the reason the deadline is the end of November.
Having written the arithmetic down I wrote one line more. What I did today was send the old to the back, and what I have to do in four months is stop the new from standing in front of it. Whether those are the same work or opposite work, I do not know.
At half past four the man from the third floor came down and talked about the rollover again. He has bought candles and water for the house. He said they tell you to take all your money out of the bank on December 31. I said he should do that. He asked what our room is preparing. I said we are making the years four digits. He asked whether that was all, and I said that was all.
Watching him go up, I thought about the four lines I entered today. That is preparing too. To prepare is to fix a place in advance to match what is coming, and in the place I fixed today the four oldest things went to the very back.
At five I pulled the catalogue one last time.
Three remained in the front mass. The note, the box and the document.
The top line was the handover document. The title box reads handover of the post of computer room records keeper, the handing-over party's box is empty, and in the receiving party's box are my four digits.
After eight months my four digits have come to the first line of this room's catalogue. What I wrote today was the years of four things.