December 12. Eight in the morning. The sample terminal had been on all night, and the cursor was blinking in the same place at the same beat.
The old terminal's cell was as it had been too. Set side by side, the two screens made it less clear rather than more which of them was doing what. One has a line and one has none. One has the grain and one has none. And the beat of the blinking is the same. How far the sameness goes, I did not try to measure. The measuring ended last week.
At nine the computer room took the usage records away. Before the transfer they have to set down how the terminal was used. The printout came in two bundles. One was the lookup log and one was the error log.
I turned the lookup log over. Everything I had opened all winter was there by date. Withdrawal registers, transfer rosters, film indexes. Even which minute past eight each morning I had opened what. The hand that numbered catalogues for twelve years will not have been recorded this finely.
I turned that bundle to the end and there was no record of a dispatch.
I turned the error log over too. If something had been pressed and had not gone out, it would be there. It was empty. All winter I pressed that cell countless times, and there were nights the hand pressed it by itself, and the machine had undergone none of it.
I asked the man from the computer room whether this model has a sending function. He said it does not. A lookup terminal, he said. The models with a sending function went to head office only, and the archive's was on the receiving side from the start. He pointed it out on the equipment list in his drawing. The list said so too.
So the cell I had been pressing all winter was never once in the company's books.
I spread the two bundles side by side on the desk. The lookup log was dense with minutes past eight in the morning and the error log ran to five sheets for four months. Most of those five were paper jams. A jam is a thing the machine underwent, and what I underwent all winter the machine did not.
I sat in front of that fact for a long time. The first thing I felt was close to relief. If it is not in the records, was it not a thing that never happened? The thought did not last. If it never happened, why did the head archivist go? Why did the two assistants go? Why did the rosters come true without a word out of place? Everything that happened happened, and only the machine did not undergo it.
If I did not send by the company's machine, what did I send with?
Put that way, the answer had already gone past several times this winter. The grain was there with the machine off. On a screen with no line the cursor blinks at the same beat. It was on paper and inside glass and in the habit of a hand. The reason there was no answer to which medium it was in is that it is not in a medium. It is in a seat. And what sat in that seat all winter was me.
The telegraph operator met the empty frequency from the receiving side. He took down what no one was sending, and taking it down he became a sender. I began at the opposite end. I sent where there was nowhere to send, the line went out with the recipient's column blank, and what went out came true. All winter I took that for something the machine was doing. Today two bundles of printout say otherwise.
The sender of the empty frequency was not someone on the far side. The person sitting in the seat that sent what the telegraph operator took down for sixty years was in this room.
I did not say the sentence aloud. Not for fear it would become something else, but because there was no one to say it to. The head archivist is gone and the two assistants are gone. The ear in this room that would take that sentence is one, and that one is the sentence's subject.
All winter I have called this seat by several names. The one who reads, the one who copies, the one who alters, the one who sends. Each time the name changed I took it that the name had followed what I did. Today it looks the other way round. The seat was there first and the hand that sat in it did those things in order. My predecessor sat in the same seat and went through the same order. The person changes and the order does not.
In the afternoon I sorted the third row of film cabinets. The reel that copied the telegraph log of sixty years back is in that row. I took it out and put it on the reader. It was a passage I had watched several times this winter. The calls he took down night after night. Today I looked at the hours of those calls.
The calls always came between three and four in the morning. The same hour for sixty years. I am not in this room at that hour. But the strokes my hand drew by itself all winter were always at night, and when I came in the morning they had been drawn during the night. What hour during the night means, I never once checked.
It is not that there was no way to check. Stay in this room tonight. Stay past three and I would know when the hand moves.
I decided not to. What would I do with knowing? If the hour matches, I am a person sending to him sixty years back; if it does not, the two seats are different seats. Either way the fourth day comes as it will. The hand that measured all winter stops measuring here, I wrote.
I turned off the reader and pulled the box out from under the desk. It is a box I have not opened often this winter. My working notebook sits on top of the four bundles, and inside the lid there are five stamp marks. The fifth was blank a long time and became mine at some point. I have no memory of pressing it.
I looked at the recipient's blank. The grain of that blank, where the next records-keeper is written, has been darkening a little through this month. Today it was darker than yesterday. Darkening brings up no name. Only that the blank was counting its own share regardless of what I become in four days. Closing the box, I looked once more at the five marks inside the lid. The sixth place had nothing pressed into it yet.
In the evening I set the two screens side by side again. The old terminal's grain and the sample terminal's black screen. One line is still not buried by the grain. My four digits, December, the sixteenth.
Looking at that line, I turned my eyes to the sample terminal. There was nothing on the black screen. Only one cursor blinking at the top left.
That place is where the first line will sit when a lookup screen comes up. In four days, when the line is connected, I will not see what comes up there first. That I will not see it, I wrote down today for the first time without flinching.