The twenty-seventh of November. Eight in the morning. In the sending column was a roster in my handwriting.
The hand had finished it over the night. The second line that began yesterday at the ninth stroke had filled its eight digits, and beneath it the third and fourth had followed. Counted, there were five lines. Five numbers lay in my handwriting, top to bottom, and in the date cell above them was written the twenty-seventh. Today's date. Until yesterday the date in the sending column had always been tomorrow's; today it was today's. The five lines my hand had written were not a forecast coming tomorrow but things coming today.
A little past nine the first line's matter came. At the top of the disposal sheet was the company of those leading digits. Since I had known from eight in the morning that it would come, I was not startled. The startling thing came from elsewhere. At eleven the second line's company came, and at one in the afternoon the third. Five lines, each with its own hour, filled the day in the very order written that morning. There was a timetable to a forecast becoming an event, and I had held that timetable in my hand since morning.
At the fourth line I tried something. When the hand had ruled seven of the fourth line's eight digits and descended to the last, I caught it by the wrist. The last stroke was not ruled. A number of only seven digits stood in the sending column. I wanted to see what became of an unfinished forecast. If what was not sent did not come, it would be a summoning; if it came anyway, a foreseeing. The question I had not parted in five nights, I meant to ask with one unfinished line.
At three in the afternoon the fourth line's company came. But not cleanly. That company did not go onto the disposal sheet; instead it was classified for a review of its disposal term, and delayed by a day. It neither fully came nor fully failed to come. A forecast written unfinished was realized unfinished. I looked at it a long while, but could not tell what it said. If the day's delay was because the last stroke went unruled, then stroke and event were joined. But if the company was to be delayed a day in any case and the hand had only read it unfinished in advance, then the stroke had followed the event. The unfinished test pointed at both answers. Summoning and foreseeing alike read into that one half-measure.
And now I could no longer run a proper test. To break the seal I would have to not send a line at all and watch whether its matter came. But the hand wrote of itself. I could catch the wrist and stop it a moment, but while I opened a box the hand rose again to the sending column, and every line I did not catch was ruled. Since I could make not one unsent line, I could not know what came when nothing was sent. There was no seat to compare against. The moment the sending ceased to be my will, the last test that had parted summoning from foreseeing vanished with it. The seal was now not a thing I could not open, but a door that no longer existed.
So what remained was only knowing. Reading the five lines in the morning, I knew the five matters that would come that day. What came at nine and what at eleven, down to the hour, I knew. But there was nothing to be done with the knowing. I could not stop it, and whether I could delay it, the one unfinished line did not settle. I had thought foreknowing was power, but the foreknowing of this seat held no power. I knew what would come, and knowing, waited. Watching the clock go toward eleven, already knowing the company that would come at eleven, I thought of the people attached to that company, still preparing lunch without knowing it. Between the seat that knows and the seat that does not, the knowing side was the heavier.
Before eleven I looked out the archive window a while. On the second floor of the building opposite was that company's branch. Through the glass I could see people coming and going, and one at the window was taking down something as he answered a telephone. I did not know what he was writing, but I knew which ledger his company would pass to at eleven. He kept the receiver on his shoulder, thinking today an ordinary day, and I stood at the window knowing today was that company's last. Over the same eleven o'clock, one man worked not knowing and one man watched knowing. When eleven came the man opposite hung up and left his seat, and at that hour the disposal sheet's second line came down. What joined his leaving his seat and the second line's coming down, I did not know, but that the two matters stood at the same hour, that much I knew.
Only the fifth line had not come. Through the whole afternoon the fifth line's hour did not arrive. I looked again at its leading digits. The first four had been companies' leading digits, but the fifth's were not a company's. Not a figure pointing to one company, but a higher figure counting several companies as a bundle. All winter the sending column's unit had narrowed from company to person, yet the fifth line spread the other way, wider than a company. What it counted I could not yet read, but that it was not one company's matter, the breadth of its leading digits told. The reshuffling was widening past a single company, toward a seat where company was traded for company.
In the evening the hand had already begun the first line of the twenty-eighth. I did not know when the fifth line would come, nor what its figure counted. I knew only that the hand had already begun to lay the next date's line above it. One of today's five had not yet come, and the hand was already writing tomorrow's. The forecast not yet come and the forecast newly emerging overlapped in the sending column, and I could not gauge which would become an event first. Only that the fifth line's wide leading digits, set beside tomorrow's line, looked wider still.