The print specifications took one afternoon to draft and three days to reconsider.
The size had been easy: 9x12 inches, a format large enough for the photographs to carry the corridor's proportions without distortion, small enough to hold in both hands and turn. Saddle-stitched, not perfect-bound — the study should open flat, lie flat, not resist the reader's hands. Thirty-three pages: one per photograph, one for the thirty-second frame — Chae's caption, formatted identically to the other thirty-one — and one more for the afterword, which appeared as page thirty-three without a label identifying it as an afterword. It was a page that came after the photographs. The reader would understand what it was without being told.
These decisions had been made in the first afternoon and not reconsidered.
The cover had taken the rest of the first day. The corridor, empty. Late afternoon light, the specific quality that appeared in the corridor between 3:30 and 4:45 PM from October through February, when the angle of the sun through the western window at the corridor's north end produced a long horizontal cast across the plaster wall. Bok had photographed this condition approximately two dozen times across the eight months of the study, always in addition to the day's primary work, always with the sense that the corridor was most itself at that particular hour when the light was doing something the corridor's occupants rarely had occasion to observe.
The cover photograph was taken on a day when Bok had arrived at the corridor at the right moment and found it entirely empty — no maintenance staff, no residents moving through, no one using the corridor as a through-path. The plaster wall on the north side had the long horizontal cast at its full extent: the light entering from the western window and reaching nearly to the eastern end, traveling the corridor's full thirty meters and losing brightness gradually rather than cutting off. It was not a dramatic photograph. The corridor was a corridor. The light was doing what light did in that corridor at that hour. The cover was this.
The spine was blank.
These decisions had also not been reconsidered.
The distribution list was the problem.
Twenty copies. Bok had chosen twenty because it was a number that implied selection without being so small as to imply exclusivity. Twenty copies would go to people with a specific relationship to the corridor. This logic was clear when stated. Its application was where the difficulty began.
The building manager was straightforward. He had tolerated the study without asking for explanation — had seen Bok in the corridor early on a Monday morning in May, asked what the project was, and accepted "a photographic study of the corridor" as a sufficient answer. For eight months after that he had occasionally acknowledged Bok's presence with a nod when their paths crossed. He would receive a copy.
The relay junction maintenance technician was more complicated. Bok had seen him in the corridor forty-some times over the eight months — always moving through, always with a purpose that had nothing to do with the study, always without acknowledging that there was a study being conducted alongside his work. He was part of the study's condition: a person with a professional relationship to the junction, which was the corridor's largest infrastructural feature, which meant he had a relationship to the electromagnetic field that the junction produced and that the corridor's plaster walls had been conducting for however long the junction had been in service. He should receive a copy. Bok had never spoken to him. Bok did not know his name.
The building manager would know how to reach him.
Chae was obvious. Chae was the thirty-second frame. The afterword in every copy was Chae's words, unsigned. Chae should have a copy and should not need to be told why.
After those three, the list became less clear. There were others with relationships to the corridor that Bok knew about — a resident who had passed through the corridor at consistent times across several months, always at a specific hour, always in the same direction, whose routine had become part of the study's rhythm without their knowledge. The woman who moved into the building in October: her first weeks had coincided with unusual light conditions, and five photographs from that period Bok considered among the study's strongest. There were others Bok had observed but not catalogued by identity.
And there were people with relationships to the corridor that Bok did not know about yet. The list should not be finalized until after the instrument test.
Gu's measurement work would bring different people into contact with the corridor — people from the Lent District's acoustic research network, possibly the relay network's field engineering team if Gu determined that the convergence-point findings required their expertise. These people would have relationships to the corridor through the instrument rather than through the study. The relay field had been a condition of the photographs for eight months; a person who understood what the field was doing would bring a different kind of relationship to page 28 than anyone else on the list.
There was also the question of the residents Bok had not tracked by name: the man whose routine brought him through at 7:45 AM on weekdays without variation, whose presence in three photographs across the spring had given those photographs a quality of regularity they would not have had otherwise; the pair who passed through in opposite directions at approximately the same hour on Sunday mornings and who had, twice, been in the corridor at the same time without appearing to notice each other. Bok had a relationship to these people through the study. They had a relationship to the corridor through their lives. The question was whether that gap — between being observed and being given a copy of the observation — was a reason to include them or a reason not to.
Bok left twelve copies unassigned. Not because there were no candidates — because the right twelve required knowing something that the instrument test would provide, and possibly something else that Bok could not yet name.
The twenty copies themselves hadn't been printed yet. The specifications existed; the printing would happen after the instrument test, when the list was closer to complete. There was no urgency. The study was finished. The edition didn't need to exist on any particular schedule. It needed to go to the right people, and some of those people were still becoming identifiable.
Chae asked Bok, when Bok mentioned the print run, whether Bok had considered a copy for the corridor itself.
Bok thought about this for a moment. The corridor didn't have an address. It didn't have an inbox. A copy left in the corridor would be picked up by someone passing through, or it wouldn't, and in either case the corridor hadn't received it in the way a person received something.
But Chae wasn't wrong that the study's real recipient was the corridor. Every copy would go to a person. The corridor would receive twenty copies through those people, filtered through their particular relationships to it, arriving in twenty different contexts that all had the corridor as their common point. The corridor would receive the study the way the corridor received everything: through the people who moved through it, who maintained it, who passed through it on their way to somewhere else, who measured it with instruments, who spent eight months photographing its walls at dawn and at the hour when the late afternoon light traveled its full length.
The twenty copies were, in this reading, the corridor's copy, distributed. Not twenty copies and one corridor copy — the corridor's copy was the twenty copies. The study couldn't be given to the corridor directly; it could only be given to the people who moved through it, and through them it would arrive at the corridor from twenty directions simultaneously.
Bok told Chae this. Chae said: "Yes. That's what I meant."
Bok thought about the relay junction maintenance technician again. His professional relationship to the corridor was the junction itself — the infrastructure that occupied the northwest end of the corridor and produced the field that the corridor's walls had been conducting throughout the study. If the study's cover showed the corridor in late afternoon light, and if Photo 28 was the image that held the corridor's relationship to the junction's peak-load field, then the technician's copy of the study would contain, among thirty-three pages, the one page that most directly documented the condition his work maintained. He might not recognize it. He might recognize it immediately. Either way, the corridor's relationship to the junction would arrive at him through the study, coming from the opposite direction than usual — not from the junction outward through the walls, but from the photographs inward through the page.
Bok filed the specification and went back to the distribution list. Eight names now, twelve still open. After the instrument test.
The printing shop Bok had used for the exhibition catalog six years ago was still operating, still on the same block in the southern part of the Seam. Bok had walked past it three times in the months since returning to active work without going in. The conversation with the printer would involve explaining the project, and explaining the project meant deciding what the project was.
It was a photographic study of a corridor in Building K. Thirty-one photographs taken over eight months, each made at a specific moment in the corridor's ongoing life. The photographs were not composed in the traditional sense — Bok had not arranged the corridor for any of them, had not removed what was present or introduced what was absent, had not controlled the light or the people. They were records of moments that had already been happening when the camera arrived. The camera had been a presence in those moments. It had not made those moments happen.
The printer would want to know if there was a text. There was the afterword. Bok would not describe it as the afterword.
The printer would want to know the purpose of the edition. Twenty copies, privately distributed. Not for sale. Not for exhibition. The study was going to the people who needed it. The printer would have encountered projects like this before — small editions, private distribution, the making done for reasons that didn't require a market. Printers in the Seam had seen everything.
Bok drafted the conversation in a notebook: dimensions, binding, paper weight, ink, quantity. Everything that could be answered before walking in the door. The variables were technical; the technical questions had technical answers. What the project was could stay outside the conversation. The printer would produce what the specifications described. The photographs would arrive in the corridor's recipients' hands in the correct format.
The notebook sat on the desk beside the distribution list. Eight names confirmed. The print run would happen after the instrument test. Three weeks, perhaps four.
In the corridor itself, at 4:15 PM on a Thursday in February, the light had done what the cover photograph showed it doing. Bok had been present that day. Had not taken a photograph — the study was already complete by then. Had stood in the corridor for eleven minutes and watched the horizontal cast reach its full extent, then begin to recede as the sun's angle changed. Had counted the people who passed through during those eleven minutes: four. None of them looked at the wall.
The wall had not required them to. The corridor was not performing for its occupants. It was doing what it had been doing for however long it had been a corridor — conducting light and sound and the relay junction's electromagnetic field and the transit of people who lived in the building or maintained it or were passing through for reasons of their own. The study was twenty copies of the record of that conduct, going to people who had some relation to it, filtered through the hands of those twenty people, arriving at the corridor through every direction at once.
This was what Chae had meant when Chae said yes, that's what I meant.
Bok closed the notebook and set it on the desk. The distribution list: eight names confirmed, twelve open. The instrument test: seven days. After that, the printer.
Chae had come to the corridor the night Bok told them about the afterword.
This had been six weeks earlier, before the print specifications were drafted, before the distribution list existed as a concept. Bok had described the thirty-second frame over a message: Chae's words, in the caption format. Page 32. No attribution. Chae had read this twice and then written back asking if Bok was in the building.
They had walked the corridor together at 9 PM, after the building's evening hour when traffic through the corridor was lowest. Bok had not brought a camera. Chae had not brought anything. They had walked from the eastern end to the western end and back, which was sixty meters at Bok's measured pace, and during that walk Chae had not said what Chae was thinking and Bok had not asked.
At the relay junction, midway through the second return pass, Chae stopped.
"I've walked through here hundreds of times," Chae said. "I didn't know what the wall was doing."
Bok didn't answer. The junction's faint operational hum was audible at that distance in the evening quiet. The plaster wall on the north side was in shadow.
"Photo 28," Chae said. Not a question.
Bok had told Chae about Photo 28 — the accidental photograph taken at 11:01 AM during peak relay load, the plaster wall in the near background showing a quality that Bok had not achieved deliberately in any other photograph of that wall. A quality of response, as though the wall's surface was doing something. Bok had not been able to explain it precisely. The explanation would require knowing more about electromagnetic fields in plaster walls adjacent to relay junctions than Bok currently knew, which was why Gu's instrument test was significant.
"Photo 28 is page 28," Bok said.
Chae looked at the wall. "What did you see?"
"I don't know yet," Bok said. "That's page 28."
They had walked back to the eastern end and parted there. Chae had not asked to see the photograph. Bok had not offered to show it. Page 28 was what it was; what it meant would clarify over time, or it would remain unclear, and the study would hold it either way — an image at the interior of a sequence that the sequence had not yet produced an explanation for.
The study was not an explanation. It was a record. The record held what had happened in the corridor across eight months, including what Bok had not understood at the time of making.
Twenty copies would go to twenty people. Some of them would see what Bok saw in Photo 28 and understand it. Some of them would not. One of them — the relay junction maintenance technician, whose name Bok still didn't know — might look at page 28 and recognize what the wall was doing from his professional relationship to the junction. He might not. The study was not asking anyone to understand it. It was offering a record to people who had a relationship to the thing being recorded.
The corridor was the thing being recorded.
Twenty copies. After the instrument test. The printer was available.