Chapter 12The Last Card Out

A stack of time cards, four hundred and thirty-one of them, was tied with an elastic band.

The elastic band had already gone brittle. Later someone touched it once, and it snapped into three pieces. Two stayed on the cards, and one fell into the bottom of a cardboard box.

The cards were stiff and beige, with two rows. The top row was printed “In”, and the bottom row “Out”. Each row was a line of slots, one slot for every quarter of an hour. The time clock swallowed the card and bit a hole in the matching slot. The edge of the hole was ragged, with paper fluff that the punch teeth had lifted on the way down. Nobody had cleaned it.

Lay the four hundred and thirty-one cards out in order, and the holes in the top row will crawl upwards.

On the first card, the hole was in the thirty-sixth slot. On the tenth card, the thirty-fourth. On the fiftieth card, the thirtieth. On the hundredth card, the twenty-sixth. By the two-hundredth card, the hole had crept up to the nineteenth slot, the one printed with the time seven o’clock sharp. By the three-hundredth card, the fifteenth. The last few dozen cards were all squeezed between the twelfth and thirteenth slots. Above that there were no more slots, only the top edge of the card.

It climbed evenly. Over four hundred days, it rose one slot on average every eleven days. It was never a big jump. Each time it was only a little earlier, so little that there was no need to tell anyone.

The bottom row was different.

The holes in the bottom row kept moving down. They went to the fortieth slot, then the forty-fourth, then the forty-seventh, and then they stopped on the hundred and sixth card.

On the hundred and sixth card, the hole in the Out row was in the last slot.

On the hundred and seventh card, the Out row was empty.

The hundred and eighth, the hundred and ninth, the hundred and tenth, and on through to the four hundred and thirty-first card: all empty. Three hundred and twenty-five cards had no holes in their bottom row. The paper was whole. There were not even the faint dents that the punch teeth leave.

※

That office was on the sixth floor, and it had been cleared out long ago.

What was left was not much: three cardboard boxes, an unplugged time clock, two chairs, and a wall clock that had not been taken down. The battery in the wall clock had leaked. White powder had crept out along the battery compartment, and the hands had stopped at seventeen minutes past four, so there was no telling whether it was afternoon or before dawn.

The things in the boxes could be put in an order.

At the bottom was a hardback duty roster. A label was stuck to the cover, with the months and years it covered written on it. Each cell in the table held one person’s name, all written with the same red ballpoint pen. From the first page to the last, the handwriting was the same and the pressure was the same. The strokes were neat and straight. Every character sat in the middle of its cell, and not one touched the ruled lines.

Above the duty roster was a stack of handover notes. The handover notes were for whoever took over the next day: how far the work had got, which file was in which drawer, which phone call had to be returned by what time. They were all in the same hand. On the backs of several of them, something else had been written: the paper feed of the photocopier at the end of the corridor jams on thick card, so hold it with a hand; the first cup from the water heater on the third floor is cold in the morning, so let one cup run off first; the lock on the fourth drawer has to be turned while it is pressed in.

None of this was on her responsibilities sheet. The responsibilities sheet was in another box: one A4 sheet, seventeen lines, not one of which mentioned the photocopier or the water heater.

The third box held the entire contents of one drawer, carried in along with its tray. Everything was still in its original compartments.

Left compartment: two rolls of clear sticky tape, one of them a third used up; three boxes of staples; a spare pair of shoelaces, black, round; six buttons in a small resealable bag, all different sizes, which had come off different shirts.

Middle compartment: two blister packs of painkillers, two tablets punched out of each; a box of plasters; a very small cross-head screwdriver with a ring of non-slip tape round the handle. The tip of the screwdriver was worn at an angle that leaned to one side, the kind of wear left by long use turning the same sort of screw. The lock cylinder of the fourth drawer had matching scratches.

Right compartment: a spare access card with no photograph; two pens, both red; a craft knife with its blade pushed out two notches. It had jammed, and would not go back in.

Nothing in this drawer was something she needed for herself.

Above the handover notes was a stack of sticky notes. Each was a very short sentence, written for a different person: “I’ve checked this one. It’s fine.” “I changed the figures here. The original is on the left.” “I’m in today. No need to hurry.”

The last one had been torn off the pad and stuck back on again. Its adhesive had been stuck twice, and its edges had wrinkled.

※

A joke had once been made in the corridor.

That remark left no physical evidence, but it left two things behind.

The first was a column in the duty roster. On the right of the roster was a column called “Last to Leave”, with one name filled in each day. Turning back through the pages, the names in this column changed often, four or five in a week. Only one name appeared more than the rest. In a month it turned up nineteen, twenty-one or twenty-three times.

That name belonged to one person. It was not hers.

The second was the trace of a sheet that had been pinned to the noticeboard. The sheet itself was long gone. The tape had left four corners, and the square inside them was cleaner than the board around it. Other notices from the same batch were still in the boxes. One of them was titled “Notice on the Basis for Counting Overtime”, and it had been issued three days after the hundred and sixth card.

One line of the notice read: For this department, the overtime hours for the month are based solely on the punch records in the Out row.

※

After the hundred and seventh card, the time clock lost half its work.

Someone had once stuck a slip of paper to the side of the time clock. The slip had come off, but the glue marks were still there, long and narrow. It could hold one sentence, not two.

From the hundred and seventh card on, this person put their card in every morning as usual, but did not put it in when leaving.

The reason for not putting it in could be read from the duty roster. After the hundred and tenth card, the Last to Leave column began to show blanks. At first it was blank for a day now and then. By around the hundred and thirtieth card, whole pages were empty. No one was filling it in any more.

No one was the last to leave.

Because the last person to leave had never clocked out, there was no record. With no record, no one filled in that column. Once the column had been empty for three pages, the next batch of duty rosters printed had the column removed.

The new duty roster was also in one of the boxes, lying on top of the hardback. It was two centimetres narrower than the old one, and it had one column fewer on the right. The edition number printed in the corner of the back cover was one higher than the old one’s.

No one pushed the second step. The second step walked on its own.

Since the Out row had no records, overtime for that month was zero. Since overtime was zero, there was nothing to deal with. From the third month, the line on the report was merged into the line above it. From the fifth month, that line was no longer printed.

In the boxes was an archive of the reports, two years of them. Turning to the fifth month’s report, the paper weighed the same as the ones before it, but there was one line fewer.

※

On the four hundred and thirty-first card there was a crease.

It was the only card in the whole stack that had been folded. The crease ran a little left of centre. It had been folded once and then unfolded, and the unfolding had been done with great care. The fold had been scraped flat from the back with a fingernail. The scrape marks lay in the fibres of the paper, slanting, one stroke after another.

In the same day’s file there was another sheet: a leave application form, blank, never filled in.

On the back of the form, someone had written a line in pencil, then rubbed it out. The graphite had sunk into the grain of the paper and would not come clean. Seen at a slant, three of the five characters could still be made out. The first character was ‘want’.

About that day, Personnel had left behind a list. Its heading read “Eligible for Annual Leave This Month”. It was sorted by department, and beside each name was the number of days left.

The list had been generated by the system according to conditions. The conditions were printed in small type in the footer, over two lines: on the register, on duty, and no irregularity in continuous attendance records this month.

Her name was not on the list.

In the system, someone who never punched the Out row had never left the company. Someone who had never left the company was always on duty. Someone who was always on duty produced no “anomaly”. Someone who produced no anomaly did not need rest.

Someone who did not need rest did not appear on the list.

She had gone and asked.

The physical evidence left at the counter was a small slip of paper: a photocopy of the “Annual Leave Application Procedure”, a quarter the size of an A4 sheet, copied very faintly, with a black streak from the machine down one edge. At that time the counter kept a stack of these, and whoever asked was given one.

In the bottom right corner of the paper was a dog-ear, folded over and then pressed flat again. The fold ran from the outside of the counter inwards. The paper had been flat when it was passed across. The person who took it had pinched that corner and folded it.

The first step of the procedure read: Please confirm in the system that you yourself are eligible to apply.

※

For the gesture of “a hand stopped halfway”, there is an earlier piece of physical evidence.

At the very bottom of her personnel file, a photocopy was tucked in: a staff rota from a convenience store, from the year she was sixteen. On the rota her name was on the night shift, three days a week.

On the back of the rota, the shop had printed a list of instructions on the same sheet, eight items in all. The sixth had been circled in red ink:

If shelves, display stacks or fixtures lean, please notify the shop manager to deal with it. Do not straighten them yourself.

Beside it, in smaller handwriting that was not hers, was another line: “If you touched it, you did it.”

The line was written carelessly, with the strokes joined up. The person who wrote it had probably only been explaining the rule.

That year the shop had one record. A row of shelves had tipped over, seventeen items were damaged, and in the outcome column it read “On-shift staff responsible”. The date fell on the ninth day of that rota.

From the tenth day on, her name on the rota was moved to another shift.

After that, nothing that could prove anything was left on paper. Only one thing could still be established. A person’s hand, reaching out, stops when it is about to touch something. It stops three to five centimetres short of the object, to check whether this touch will turn into somebody else’s trouble. The pause has a fixed length. Later, on Tokyo Tower, many people saw the same pause from tens of metres away. No one knew it had been learned in front of a row of shelves.

※

The building’s night patrol records had been kept for three years.

The record was a loose-leaf book, one page for each night. Floors ran across the page, and the three rounds ran down it, at ten o’clock, one o’clock and four o’clock. The person on patrol marked each cell with a sign. A black dot meant dark. A circle meant lit. A circle with a line across it meant lit and occupied.

Going through the three years, the row for the sixth floor was almost all circles with a line across them.

In the first half-year, black dots turned up now and then, three or four a month. After that they grew fewer, and the last one appeared in the same week as the hundred and sixth card. After that, over a thousand nights passed, and the sixth-floor row never once went dark.

In the middle of the second year the book changed its layout. In the new layout, the sixth-floor row came with a mark already printed in it: a circle with a line across it, set in the middle of the cell, so the person on patrol did not need to draw it. The note at the foot of the page was one line of small print: Floors that are always lit need not be recorded each night.

The person on patrol still went up every night. On one page, in a blank space, a line had been written in very small handwriting, beside the binding at the edge: “The people on the sixth floor are still here.”

There was no room for this line on the next version of the loose-leaf pages. The new pages had no blank margin.

※

The first shadow to be peeled away had a time, a place and a shape.

The time was three o’clock in the afternoon, in July of a certain year.

The place was the end of the corridor outside the sixth-floor office. There was a west-facing window there, and a horizontal sign hung outside it. At three o’clock sharp, the shadow of the sign came in through the window frame and lay slantwise across the floor, making a patch of dark one metre square.

From July to September, the patch of dark moved a little further in each day.

That afternoon at three, a person was standing in the patch of dark. He stood there smoking. At the end of the corridor was a freestanding ashtray, and the sand in it had many round marks where cigarettes had been put out. He was the person whose name had turned up in the Last to Leave column nineteen, twenty-one or twenty-three times in a month.

The shadow lay at his feet.

What came after could only be read from two things.

The first: the freestanding ashtray was moved the next day, to the stairwell. As it was moved, it dragged four marks across the floor. The marks are still there. Four of them, parallel.

The second: his resignation application. It was in the personnel file, dated October of that year. The reason box said “personal reasons”. Two words, written in the middle of the box.

There was no second signature on the application. The approval box was empty. That spot should have been signed by the longest-serving person in the department. In the system, the record for the longest-serving person read: on duty.

From that day on, one person in the office walked with clean ground under his feet. The fluorescent light was over his head. He stood right beneath it, and the light pushed everyone’s shadow out in every direction. Only the patch under his feet was empty.

One of his colleagues had once taken a photograph of the corridor, with him in the background. The photo was printed and pinned to the department noticeboard. Later someone took it down and carried it away. Four drawing-pin holes were left in the board.

※

The shop in the country was very small.

The shop faced south. It was one and a half rooms, and it sold rice, soy sauce, salt, a few kinds of cigarettes and, in summer, an extra chest freezer. A horizontal sign hung over the door. It was made of wood, and the lettering on it was his own.

At three in the afternoon, the sign cast a shadow.

The shadow spread in over the threshold from outside, one metre square, its edges slanted. Once three o’clock had passed, it began to shrink, and by twenty to four it was only as wide as the windowsill.

Every day he carried a stool into the shadow and sat down in it.

The stool was a folding one, made of aluminium. A crack ran across its plastic seat, and he had taped it over, three layers of tape. He sat in a fixed way. First he set the stool in the exact middle of the shadow, then he sat down, with both hands on his knees. He did not look at his phone, and he did not doze. He simply sat there for forty minutes.

Someone had once asked him whether he was sitting out in the sun.

He said, “Let me see if it’s still there.”

Seven years ago, when he first came, this shadow was not there. Then he sat in the doorway. Looking up was the sun. Looking down was the ground, and there was nothing on it. He had tried standing out in the open at noon. He had tried holding up an umbrella. He had tried switching on the light at night and looking at the wall. The ground was empty every time.

He had told no one about that time. He had only carried his stool out and sat for a while, every afternoon at three.

He did not notice straight away on the day the shadow came back. He sat down and stayed for ten-odd minutes. Then he looked down and saw a new edge beside his shoes. It was very faint, its outline blurred, but it moved when he moved. He lifted his foot, and it lifted too. He stood up, and it stood up with him, bending over the leg of the stool and then coming down onto the ground.

He folded the stool up, opened it again, sat down, and stood up again. He did this four times.

In the spring of the following year, the shop received a postcard.

It was the most ordinary kind, stiff card, a little worn at the four corners. Nothing was printed on the front. It was plain white, without even a line. The back had no sender. The address box held the shop’s address, written neat and straight, every stroke in the middle of its box.

There was a hole in the postcard.

The hole was punched in the bottom right corner. Its edge was ragged, with paper crumbs lifted by the teeth on the way down. One hole, and no second one.

On the time clock, the bottom right slot was the last slot of the Out row.

He kept the postcard in the till drawer, under the abacus. Sometimes he took it out and looked at it. What he looked at was the hole.

This afternoon at three, the shadow spread out as usual. He carried the stool out, set it in the middle of the shadow, sat down and put both hands on his knees. The wind made the sign rattle once.

He was holding the postcard between his fingers.