May 22. I copied it out myself.
At ten past nine I opened the register of items sent and received.
The twelfth page has not come. It is the eleventh day.
Eleven days have passed since the date that was given notice.
In the received column there is no fifth number for those eleven days.
At twenty past nine I looked for the procedure for comparison.
There is a procedure for comparing a transcript against the original. There is none for when there is no original.
Nor is there a procedure for comparing transcripts against each other.
For eleven days I looked for a procedure, and all I have confirmed is that there is none.
At twenty to ten I took out paper.
I entered that copying it out once is quicker than waiting for a procedure that does not exist.
There is no ground for it. If it is not entered it is not caught.
I decided to enter it.
At ten I laid out hand A's page eight and began copying.
I looked at one character and wrote one character. I counted the lines as I wrote.
At twenty past eleven I finished.
I counted the characters. A has four hundred and six. Mine has four hundred and six.
For an hour and twenty minutes I did not once take my eyes off it.
At half past eleven I laid the two sheets side by side and matched them character by character.
One character differs.
It is the depth field.
A has fourteen. Mine has sixteen.
At twenty to twelve I looked at my own writing.
They are strokes made by my hand. Down to where the pen pressed, they are mine.
I have a memory of writing fourteen. On the paper there is sixteen.
There is no place erased. There is no place written over.
It is writing made in one pass.
I looked at whether ink could differ in one character only. It is the same pen. It is the same colour.
There is no one to change the paper over. Until half past eleven I was alone in this room.
I counted the chairs. One.
At twenty past twelve I copied out another page.
Page nine. A page with no duplicate, and three numbers in it.
At ten to one I finished. I matched it character by character.
All three hundred and ninety-two characters agree. The three numbers agree too.
It is not that my hand always diverges.
At one I copied it out again.
This time I laid out hand B's page eight. B has fifteen.
At ten past two I finished. The character count is four hundred and six.
The depth field is seventeen.
At twenty past two I laid the four sheets out in the order they were written.
A, of March seventy-eight. B, of the same month. Mine, of this morning. Mine, of this afternoon.
Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.
The order of the copying and the order of the values are the same.
By one each time.
At twenty to three I opened the fields I was handed.
In January I was given five fields. The fourth I first entered in April.
The third is a field in which I have entered nothing yet.
I read the headings again. The first is what has been done so far, the second what comes next.
The third I have not read until now. The fourth is entries not remembered. The fifth is the one receiving.
Confirmation of whereabouts is in the second. The third holds no item at all.
I read the heading.
It says: places where the count does not agree.
Below it there is one more line. It says that where what was copied out diverges from the source, the diverging side is to be entered as the copy.
It is the hand of the one before me.
At three I looked at the date on the third field.
The day that line was first written is April of last year. The field came into being on the last day of October, and the line was carried over then from the log.
I came to this room on the second of January.
I was given this field in January and opened it for the first time today.
It is a procedure I was given before I underwent it.
At twenty past three I made the entry as the procedure has it.
Two of mine diverged, so two of mine are copies.
B diverged from A, so B is a copy too.
Whether A diverged from the original there is nothing to look at.
Three of the four are copies and one is unknown.
There is no field in the third for entering the original.
Nor is there a line for what to do with a thing once it is entered as a copy.
It does not say to discard it and it does not say to keep it. There is no field either for how many copies there have come to be.
There is a procedure for entering and no procedure for after the entering.
At twenty to four I took out the sixth sub-number.
I looked for the day the one before me first copied something out. The ninth of April last year.
The entry for that day says it diverged. It says one character.
Ten days later the heading of the third field came into being.
The one before me underwent it and then made the field.
I was given the field and then underwent it.
At four I opened the box.
Seven articles. Seven marks. Day four hundred and fifty-three.
The sixth field is nine thousand two hundred and thirty-three. The set's row was opened a hundred and thirty-two times yesterday and the imprint route ninety-one.
The right-hand material is seven hundred and twenty-five pages. The date of the added page is the twentieth of the sixth month of ninety-nine. The third line of page five hundred and thirty-nine has been blank a hundred and forty-five days. The original of the fifth bundle is a hundred and seventy-seven pages and has not grown for five hundred and twenty-three days.
At ten past four I counted the term for the reply on confirmation of whereabouts.
Ten days remain. There is nothing I have confirmed.
What I have done today is four transcriptions. The reply form has no field for transcriptions.
At twenty past four I bundled the material held unregistered.
It was eleven pages.
With both of mine in, it is thirteen.
I put in only one of mine. The one whose source was A.
The bundle has become twelve pages.
At twenty to five I entered the number of pages on the bundle's cover.
I entered twelve.
I closed the cover and opened it again. Twelve.
The notice said the twelfth page would come.
The twelfth page has not come. The bundle is twelve pages.
What my own hand wrote is standing in that place.