Chapter 25: Four Hundred Pages
The envelope came from the clerk's office with my name spelled right and my old inmate number under it in smaller type.
Four hundred and twelve pages.
I carried it up two flights at Cranmore House and pushed it under the bunk, and it stayed there sixty-one days. I know the number because I marked the days on the inside cover of my notebook.
Then I opened it.
I did not open it because I was ready.
I opened it because it was Tuesday and I had forty minutes before the 6:52 bus.
I sat on the floor between the bunk and the radiator, with my back against the cold end of it.
The floor was the only flat surface in that room that belonged to nobody.
Dorrie was asleep above me. Fifty-one, forgery case, snored like a bearing going out. She had eleven weeks left on her programme and she counted them out loud on Sundays.
I cut the tape with my thumbnail. We were not allowed scissors or razors.
The pages were three-hole punched and held with one black binder clip.
Somebody had copied them at a slight angle, so every sheet carried a grey band down the left edge.
I know that band. I make it four hundred times a day.
The first thing I did was not read.
The first thing I did was count.
I built stacks by document type and laid torn newspaper between them so they would not slide.
Charging documents. Eleven pages.
Police reports and supplements. Fifty-four.
Accident reconstruction, diagram included. Twenty-two.
Toxicology and hospital records. Nineteen.
Witness statements. Nine.
My statement. Three.
Plea agreement. Six.
Transcript of the plea colloquy. Thirty-one.
Presentence investigation report. Forty-four.
Judgment and commitment. Four.
Motions, orders, notices, proofs of service, correspondence. Two hundred and nine.
Four hundred and twelve.
The counting took thirty-one minutes. I missed the 6:52 and clocked in at 8:09 instead of 7:50.
Marisol said nothing about it.
She wrote 8:09 on the time sheet in blue pen and turned the sheet so I could watch her do it.
She did not forgive things. She recorded them and never mentioned them again.
Vega Bail Bonds was two rooms on Kesler Street, with the bail schedule taped inside the window, backwards, so it read from the sidewalk.
The back room was mine. A Fujitsu fi-7160, a monitor, a hole punch, and a tray for the staples I pulled. The tray was a margarine tub with the label soaked off.
Four hundred pages a day is not a figure of speech.
It is a number Marisol wrote on an index card and taped to the base of the monitor.
The feeder holds fifty sheets. Eight loads is four hundred.
You pull every staple. You flatten the folds with the flat of your hand, corner first.
You check for sheets stuck together, because two pages fed as one is a page that stops existing.
You scan. You rename: last name, first initial, case number, document type, date.
Then you put the paper back in the order you found it, which is the part everybody skips.
By the second week I could hear a double feed before the software caught it. The roller makes a softer sound.
That day I did four hundred and forty, because I had come in nineteen minutes late. Nobody asked me to.
I clocked out at 4:30 and reached Cranmore at 5:31, which is one minute later than the schedule says and one minute earlier than the bus has ever actually run.
Sign the clipboard. Breath test if your name is on the list. Dinner by 6:30. Curfew at 10.
My name was on the list. I blew a 0.00 while Ms. Prine wrote the reading on a form.
I initialled it. My initials are two letters and take under a second.
Then I went up and read the first stack. Eleven pages.
An information, an affidavit, an arraignment sheet, a notice of rights with a box checked. Every page carried a filing stamp in the top right corner, and every stamp was legible, which is rarer than it ought to be.
The box said I understood them. I did understand them. That was never the problem.
The caption spelled me Cassandra Ann Mercer and gave my address as the house on Delham Street.
Delham Street had been sold four years before I ever saw the page.
At 10:58 Dorrie leaned over the edge of the bunk and asked what it was.
I said, “My case.”
She said, “Any good?”
I said I would tell her when I got to the end.
I clipped the stacks, slid them under the bunk, and lay down to do arithmetic instead of sleeping.
Four hundred pages a day at work. Four hundred and twelve under the bed.
At my working speed, my whole life was a little over one day of scanning. I did not find that funny. I found it accurate.