Standing at the machine

The machine stands against the wall of a private flat in Almaty, four hours of road from my kitchen, and it is complete in a way I had stopped believing in: the body, the keyboard, two drives, a plotter. About thirty disks sit in a stack beside it, none of them mine, like a pile of mail for a tenant who moved out. I drove over yesterday morning. A collector in Almaty owns it, and that is all the identification this post will carry, because there is a real address behind that sentence and I am only a woman with a blog. The machine I can describe. The person I will not.

It does not come up. No vertical sync, not in all the years it has stood in that room, and nobody has ever seen it run. I was told so before I got in the car, and I got in the car. There was no attendant here, no rope, no school class filing through: only a flat with the curtains open and a machine in it that owed me nothing. I put my hands on the keyboard because I had driven four hours to do exactly that. The keys have travel. They go down and stay down a moment, the way a good lock does.

My own disk stayed in the bag in its paper sleeve, where it has been in two cities this year. I wanted the screen to come up, and the wanting was not polite about it: low down, unreasonable, uninterested in how kindly the room was treating me. Afterward I sat in a cafe with my photocopies and my notebook and behaved like a person doing research, which is a thing I am extremely good at behaving like. The one complete Iskra with drives and disks that anybody can point to is four hours from my flat, and it is dark. There is nowhere else to drive.

Tonight I opened the laptop in a rented room and went after an archive that a dead link says is gone. A snapshot had kept it. The commit is called 880.rar exists after all, which is the closest thing to luck this has had, and luck is not a method. Tomorrow I go back to the sector reader.