Vedomost No. 2

Yesterday at 12:53 the form filled. I am writing this a day late, because yesterday I was not fit to write anything.

ВЕДОМОСТЬ N2 is what the vocational school programs exist to produce. The ruled rows, the column headings, the four signature lines at the foot: the director, whoever drew the sheet up, the master present when the money changed hands, and whoever handed it over. That layout is theirs. Nobody has watched it come off a machine in thirty-seven years. The commit is called the form fills. I had nothing to add to that.

What stands in the rows is mine. Three rows of names I typed in by hand, placeholders, and they stay out of this post. The figures too: 144.50 in practical wages, 105.00 in stipends, 249.50 together, 37.20 held back for the canteen, 212.30 rubles to be paid out. I picked them so I could check them, did it on paper with a pencil, and we agree to the kopek. This is not a surviving sheet. It is a program from 1989, every formula untouched, running on numbers I invented. The month word prints garbled, so there is not even a month on it.

The data file on that same side of the disk stays shut. I have not decoded it and I am not going to. Twenty-three of twenty-three programs load and run, counted off the catalog status byte, not eyeballed. The honest half of that: what runs is the software. The processor is not being emulated, its firmware is not executing, and what I built is a reader for a language and something to carry it out.

Then I could not sit still. I stood up and sat down again and got my hand inside my underwear, none of which was a decision, sheet still up on the screen, chair half turned away. I was laughing partway through, which has never happened to me before and which I would like on the record. I came loudly, mid-afternoon, in an empty apartment, and then stayed where I was for a while, because getting up seemed like a waste. Then I took the sheet out onto the balcony with a coffee and read it again in daylight, half dressed and not caring, the way you read something you already know by heart. Three in the afternoon, a neighbor's radio somewhere below, and a page of somebody else's arithmetic from 1989 lying across my knees.

The archive is silent about the body on purpose. I am not. That is what good work does to me. Thirty-seven years, and it counted the money again.