Every object in the store has a number and every movement of it is signed in a book and on the database, because an object that is not where the database says is an object that is lost. One number is signed out every night, to a location that has not existed since the museum was made, and signed back in at six, and the object, a box of letters, is on its shelf the whole night, and the letters inside are in a different order in the morning.
I am the documentation officer at a museum, which means the database is mine and the movement book is mine and the discrepancies between them are also mine.
The store.
Rows of shelves, every object numbered, every shelf numbered, the database saying which is on which. An object that leaves its shelf is signed out in the book at the door, by hand, and on the database, with the destination, and signed back in when it returns. It is the most boring system in the building and it is the one that has never failed.
One number is signed out every night.
The number.
1961.44. A box of letters, from the same house clearance as most of the 1961 numbers, a family's correspondence, about two hundred letters in a cardboard box on shelf K9. Signed out, in the book, in a hand that is not any of ours, at about ten at night, to the reading room. Signed back in at six.
The reading room is not a location on the database, because it does not exist, and the database will not accept a location that does not exist, and the database has accepted it every night for as long as the log goes back.
The box is on K9 all night. The camera on row K shows it. It does not move.
The letters.
They are in a different order in the morning. I have numbered them in pencil, on the back, as anybody would, and at close they are in order, one to two hundred and six, and at six they are not. They are in an order. The same order, every morning. I have written it down. It is not date order and it is not by writer and I did not know what it was until I read them in that order, which took a week, and it is the order in which they make sense.
Somebody is reading them. Somebody who knows the story and wants it told in the right order, and puts them back the way it goes.
What has been checked.
The book. The signature is a real signature, in ink, on the page, appearing between ten and six, and I have sat by the book at ten with a torch and watched the pen, which is on a string, lift and write, and I have read the signature as it was written, and it is a name.
The name. It is on the letters. Not as a writer. As the person most of them are to. A daughter of the house, who was written to by everybody in the family for forty years, who kept every letter, and whose letters, after she died, went in a box, and the box went in a trunk, and the trunk came to us in 1961 with the rest.
She is reading her post.
The reading room.
There was one, when the building was a library, before the museum. It is bricked up now, at the end of the east corridor, and I have been told about it by the audio guide people, who have their own trouble with it, and I have come to understand that it is where things in this building go at night to be read.
What is done about it.
The movement book has a signature a night that the audit will find, and the database has a location that does not exist, and I have written a note for the auditors that says, in the most careful language I have, that object 1961.44 has an unresolved movement record that does not affect its physical location, and the auditors have read the note and initialled it, because it is true.
What I do.
I keep the records.
I have stopped putting the letters back in number order. I leave them in her order. If she reads them every night and puts them right and I put them wrong every morning, then what I have been doing for a year is undoing her, and there is no reason for it except a pencil number on the back of a letter that she wrote, and it is her letter.
The signature has changed. She still signs out at ten, to the reading room. But the sign in at six, since I stopped, has a second line under it, in the same hand, in the column for condition, where we write good or fair or poor, and what she writes is, in order, thank you, and I have let that stand in the book, and the auditors have initialled it too.