December 10. Eight in the morning. A stroke stood in the place that had tilted yesterday.
One stroke. A single vertical in the last position. December beside it and the one before it were as they had been, and the only thing changed was that stroke. It followed the habit of my hand. I draw down from the top and press a little at the end to finish, and even the pressed mark was there.
The ink was not dry-laid. A stroke that soaks into paper blurs at the edge as it dries, and this one stood with an edge like a knife cut. I gave up asking whose hand drew it and when two days ago.
One stroke would not be read yet. A single vertical reads as one, and it reads as half of some other number. Lay another stroke on it and the reading narrows to one of them. I looked at it a long time. All winter I had taken the last position for something set not to come, and this morning the thing set not to come had half arrived.
The radio had been on all night. I had gone out yesterday evening without turning it off. Coming in this morning I found the low static that comes before broadcasting, and the grain lay over the static. The head archivist would have said it was quiet again today. With no one left to say it, there was no longer anything to argue about.
At nine the head office rang a second time. This time I took it. From next quarter the archive's material would be moved onto the computers. Registers, catalogues, film, handed over in order, and the originals cleared once each part had gone. The call was short and businesslike, and the date had not been fixed. I put down the receiver and looked around the stacks. The hand that had numbered these catalogues for twelve years went out yesterday, and now the catalogues are moving to another medium.
In the afternoon I looked at the sending column. A new transfer bundle stood there. One thing set it apart from yesterday's. The first four digits of the head line were the archive's code and the last four were mine.
There were no other lines in the bundle. All winter the transfer bundles had been several lines long. There was a day of eleven lines and a day of five and a day when it came down to two. Today it is one. A roster of one line is not something to call a roster. With one thing left in this room, there was one thing to send.
Last summer the terminal had brought up my number too. That was a lookup screen and I was on the side being measured. I did not know who was measuring, or why. Today it is not a lookup but a dispatch. Between sitting in the place that is measured and putting your own line on the roster with your own hand there was a year, and in that year I moved from the one who reads to the one who alters, and from the one who alters to the one who sends. Today the first line of the roster being sent was me. Becoming the one who is sent took no other hand than the sender's.
I set a fingertip on the line. It gave. The stroke was still soft.
Soft means it can be altered. Last month I altered a stroke in the head archivist's seat, and the stroke was as soft as this. The same hand does the same thing in the same place. Alter one stroke and my line drops out of the roster being carried over, and I gain a day. What a day costs, I learned last month.
That learning kept my hand where it was. Saving is not taking a man out of the chain; it is pushing him to the next cell. Then where is my next cell? Below the sending column one recipient's place stands empty. No face, nothing ruled in front of it or behind — the place of someone not in this room. Alter my line and the price goes there. When I saved the head archivist the price went to the two assistants, and the two assistants were in this room. The place that would take today's price has no one in it yet. To defer onto someone who is not there is to call them early.
I lowered my hand to my knee. Even lowered, I could not say it was I who decided it. All winter the hand had moved by itself more than once. Whether it did not move today because I held it, or because today's hand had nothing to move for, there is no way to tell. A stroke not altered and a stroke that could not be altered are the same line by evening.
The afternoon was like any other. Boxes taken in, catalogues numbered, film wound. Spread the paper under the glass of the stand, press the shutter, and the film winds one frame. Next face, shutter, next face. Twelve years ago the same sound will have been made in this room, and sixty years ago the sound of a key being pressed in another room. The sounds differ and the work is the same. I went on from the entry the head archivist had pointed out. Reading aloud the numbers he used to read, my voice sat at a different pitch. The same figures sound different from a man of twelve years and a man of one day. I think I know where the difference comes from. He read them expecting them to be there next time.
At four the heating went off. After it goes off, the door down the corridor opens and shuts twice, and today it was once. Whether that too had been in the sending column yesterday, I did not check. Checking is measuring, and it has been two days since there was anything to measure.
In the evening I looked at the cell.
A second stroke lay over the morning's. With two the position narrowed. The last figure was six. Joined to the ten before it, sixteen. December the sixteenth. The place that had known only the month all winter was read down to the day.
I did not count the days on my fingers. I knew without counting. Today is the tenth, so six.
The first thought after knowing it was six was not what to do. It was that I still do not know whether that line is calling me or whether I wrote it. The sixteenth being readable answered nothing. The date hardened and the question did not. What has kept me all winter was not an answer but a question, so the part that has not hardened is still there.
I looked at the recipient's place. The faceless place was a little darker than in the morning. Being darker did not show me who. Only that it too seemed to be counting something toward the sixteenth.
I turned the radio off. This time I turned it off before I went. What it means to leave sound in a room where no one is left to leave it on for, I think I understood today. Closing the door, I looked back once at the dark between the stacks. In six days the hand that numbers catalogues in this room will not be mine.