encounters · 2 min read ·
The Misprint
At 03:33 the Cantor printed every name in Murrow. Not all of them had died.
The night shift log for 1–2 November 1987 is kept in a steel box in Stack 1. It is the only page in the Archive that clerks are permitted to read aloud, because, as the note taped to the lid says, *everything on it has already happened.*
00:10 — Shift begins. O. Varga on duty. Rain.
01:42 — Cantor indexing backlog of October certificates. Normal.
02:58 — Tube pressure fluctuating. Engineers notified (no answer).
03:00 — Cantor typing without input. Continuous paper feeding at full speed.
03:07 — Paper reads as a list of names. Alphabetical. Murrow residents.
03:12 — My name is on it. Line 41,207. Cause of death: blank.
03:19 — Telephone ringing in every office on every floor. Did not answer.
03:26 — The list has reached the Ws. Paper is eleven metres across the floor. I have stopped trying to tear it.
03:31 — Ink smells of the sea.
03:33 — Cantor stopped. Lights out. Loud sound from the direction of the harbour, like a book slammed shut.
03:34 —
The rest of the page is blank. Not empty: blank, the way a form is blank, waiting.
At 03:33 that night Pier Nine collapsed into the harbour. The official report blames rotten pilings and a spring tide. It lists the casualties as nil, because no one was on the pier at that hour. It does not explain why fishermen afterwards pulled up coats, shoes and handbags in the nets for weeks, or why the harbour master's ledger for that night, like the clerk's, ends at 03:34.
The eleven-metre list was never found. What the Archive keeps instead is a single sheet torn from it, framed, behind glass in the stairwell. It holds forty names. Thirty-nine of them have since died, on dates nobody could have predicted, in ways that match — to the letter — a cause of death typed beside them in a typeface the Cantor does not own.
The fortieth name is still alive. The cause of death beside it is a smudge, as if someone had tried to wipe it before the ink dried and only managed to make it wider.
Clerks pass the frame every night on the way down. Nobody is quite sure whose name it is. Every few years someone says it looks a little like theirs.
The ink, they say, is still wet.