Who would know that the dot had not been placed on the i at the time the word was written?
What process, he wondered, what forensic magic, would reveal it?
For he had no doubt that such methods existed; or, if they did not, that they would come into being at some future date.
For it was on that most powerful entity he pinned his hopes—upon that benevolent God he knew: when he referred to it by name, it bore a name too simple and mundane to compass its clear awesome power. Its quotidian name, the Future.
In the Future, methods would exist, he knew, to reveal all that had been hidden.
Methods would exist—for, no, we could not feel that they existed now. (Would not their current being detract from any potential redemptive aspect of their discovery? Yes, he thought, it would.)
Such methods would—though the groundwork might be allowed to have been laid (for what can build on nothing?)—have to come to light in years to come, brought into being for some other task; not, he knew, certainly, for the purpose of examination of his life, or of this letter; nor, perhaps, for the analysis of ink at all, but for some unconnected application. Then, he thought, at some point it would be discovered, as a matter of course, that such methods had a wider use, had many uses, one of which was the dating of ink.
Then, when the arcane became the open; then, at that golden time, the time of the Future, of Progress, of Change, of Heaven, in fact; in that time, then, when the processes existed, when the black ignorance of the present had been cleansed through a simple perseverance … then, yes, the technology would—he could not doubt it—exist to date the ink.
Then they would know that his confession bore a secret, different and, perhaps, in a way, more mysterious and deeper than the Simple Secret of his Soul—whatever that might be.
He’d fought with it.
Though driven by the urge to purify himself, though driven in each sentence, at each word, to speak the truth, he knew he lied. Every word, he thought, colored by the wish to defend, to extenuate, to distract. (“To distract whom?” he thought, but continued.)
In any case, to attempt both to cleanse and to defend himself, he wrote of his pride, and of his arrogance, and of his dishonesty in social dealings. He wrote of his offhand treatment of his wife, and wrote and wrote. At all times thinking, “I could continue transcribing these ‘sins of character’ interminably. For I know them to be true as they are endless. My sins are endless. But I am not cruel.”
And as he thought it, he wrote it:
“… mistreatment of those around me. And sloth.” But I am not cruel.
His written confession continued.
As he wrote, he was troubled by the reference to sloth.
For he knew himself to be hardworking. Not, certainly, like the factory hands, no. But hardworking. Dedicated, in fact. In the area, the administrative area, of his operations.
And not cruel.
Here, again, he was troubled, in a way different from that occasioned by his assertion of industry. For he knew he’d written the denial of cruelty for the eyes of some person or power in the future, which would have interest in him solely—he would have to admit it—as he was convicted of killing that girl.
And they might interpret this, his freewill confession, as a sign of his guilt.
They might—might they not?—magnify what he thought of and was ashamed to realize he thought of as his “flaws.”
No, no, his disingenuousness, his candor in the frank confession of his sins, was, and he knew it was, an arrogance.
And he might, he knew, in fact be guilty of those very sins the confession of which induced him to think he was pure of.
But not of cruelty. No.
And as he wrote it, he felt that he had transgressed. “I am not cruel,” he wrote, and felt that, here, the mechanism was inverted.
For he felt, in the heart of himself, that he was, in fact, not cruel. He had known cruelty, and had seen it, and could not recognize it in himself. But as he wrote in his confession “I am not cruel,” he felt the mechanism thus: Yes, but I have transgressed in the transcription, and my assertion must mask a cruelty of which I am unconscious.
He looked back up the page.
He saw that the i of “insight” sloped into the n, and that he had not dotted the i.
Though he knew that the word was clear enough from context, and was, in fact, most legible as it stood, he took the pen and put a dot over the i, which, through the delicacy of his touch, achieved the character of a minute flowery rhombus.
“Who would know,” he thought, “the dot was not placed on as I wrote the word?”
As he raised the pen, he admired the apparent unity of the dot and the letter.
He could not, “even in possession of ‘the facts,’” as he thought, see any inconsistency of color or form in the two.
“Someday, however,” he thought, “the science will exist,” and sighed. “But what would induce one to apply it in this case?”
He thought, “And what would it accomplish?”
He sat up, his feet on the floor, sitting up straight on the bunk. His confession on a writing board on his knees.
“Why would they ever be moved to examine it?” he thought; and, “The secret will die with me.”