The fan fluttered the bookmark off his desk. He watched the bookmark, flat, climbing, and falling, as the fan swiveled to the other corner of the room.
As it returned, the bookmark fluttered again, and rose, as if to fly. Then it fell back.
Rogerson’s Stationery. 231 Main, Atlanta. Telephone: Maple 231.
Everything for your Office Needs.
And then the fan came back again.
“What would it take,” Frank thought, “to flip it over? What’s printed on the reverse? I should know it. It lists, as I remember,” he thought, “various services, various goods, which they provide. Quite handy. Simple but true. One uses a bookmark. If that bookmark advertises a concern, we think of it each time we see the bookmark.
“Each time,” he thought, “the fan returns in much the same way—making the allowance for the minute but inevitable wear inside the machine; making allowance, again, for the small but, I am sure, measurable shift of the fan along the desk—although it does seem fixed. Though the foam padding on its base no doubt reduces to near nil its motion. Even so,” he thought, “even so. Even so. If I left for a period of months, on my return would I not see the fan had shifted, slightly? If I had marked its position out, on my departure, would I not see, upon my return, that change? And if I could not measure it, would not an absence of years …” He cast his mind ahead, to a return to his office in decades, in centuries, in aeons, until a time when he would not be disappointed to find the fan yet unmoved.
“For it must move,” he thought.
“And if it moves, yes, even after the passage of centuries, if the passage of time shows it to have moved, then it must have been in motion all the time. For a measurable jump is nothing save the aggregate of these shifts we are incompetent to perceive.
“And if the fan moves, then the bookmark must move. As I watch it, it does not move; it flutters and falls in what seems to me to be the same space. And, of course”—he shook his head sadly—“the situation will not and cannot endure as a laboratory experiment.” He shook his head and took a cigar from his humidor and lit it briskly, looking down at the bookmark, as at a recalcitrant and willful specimen of organism.
“For change is inevitable,” he thought.
“This office cannot endure. Civilizations themselves are found, buried under aeons of dust—though I do not conceive how sufficient time could pass, even over a length of time, granted, which I must find unimaginable, to obscure a fifteen-story building …”
He consigned this thought—the question of the verity of the proposition that complete civilizations could be buried in dust—to that quality of things which both were and were not true.
“How can we hope to know,” he thought, “if these things occur? If, in the very nature of the thing, we cannot live to see their outcome?
“Nor,” he thought, rising forcefully to what he felt was clearly the true burden of the argument, “nor can we control all the variables.
“Not only can we not suppose to live for that amount of time, but I am impotent even to control the entrance and egress to and from my office. Even should I say, ‘Miss Scholz, I wish no one to enter—even to clean—for some time.’” He nodded, meaning: “a reasonable request.”
“‘… Neither to disconnect the fan. I wish it to run.’”
He smiled ruefully.
“Is there not, as we know, always that reason, either ignorant, good-, or ill-willed, to ‘interpret’ my instructions?”
The bookmark skittered across the desk. He looked for the cause, and found it in the snap of the shade—in the one burst of breeze through the window.
“No, no, all things must end,” he thought. He took the bookmark and placed it at the open page in the ledger—the left-hand entry completed. Date: Saturday, April 24, 1915. He dipped his pen and added the date of the next business day, Monday, April 26, at the top of the right-hand page. He blotted it and closed the ledger. He pushed it to one side of the desk, then brought it back and opened it again, and turned the bookmark to read: “Printing and binding, typist services, paper, ink, full ledger and bookkeeping services …”
He nodded and replaced the bookmark, and closed the book.
The shade snapped again. “Starched sound,” he thought. “Not a thing in the world wrong with that.”
He walked to the window and looked down. The heat smelled, he thought, clean, from the fifth floor.
“’S hot to walk up, but clean at this height,” he thought.