The installation notes had always had one section.
This was not a choice he had made. He had started keeping notes when the corridor piece started — documentation of a documentation project, a record of decisions made and not made, a log of what each relay showed and when. One continuous section. The piece had one subject (the corridor), one duration (until the maintenance flag expires), one logic (accumulation). The notes matched the piece.
When he wrote undecided at the top of a new section, the notes changed.
The first section covered: relay placement, counter methodology, witness log design, the Fidelity Commission inquiry, relay eight's permanent 94.7%, the reset, Mitsuki's questions, Joonho's two visits. Everything he had decided about the corridor piece. Everything the corridor piece had decided about him.
The Fidelity Commission inquiry was about relay eight — why a sensor would persist at 94.7% after a full reset, what kind of fidelity reading produced a number that did not move. He had answered their questions. The inquiry was closed. It remained in the notes because the answer he gave them was technically true and left everything important out.
The second section had one entry: undecided.
He was looking at it now. The word did not feel like an absence. It felt like a category. There were things he had decided — the corridor piece belonged in the corridor, the relays belonged in the walls, the counter belonged running. And there were things he had not decided: whether the self-portrait series was part of the corridor piece or a separate work; whether the image on the studio wall was documentation or something else; whether the drawer was a place to keep work or a way to avoid showing it.
The drawer had one photograph in it — the earliest one, taken before he understood what he was doing, in which the corridor's reflection at relay eight showed his face most clearly. He had put it away because it was the most legible image and legibility felt like failure.
Undecided covered all of these. It was not a failure to decide. It was an acknowledgment that some questions age differently than others.
Mitsuki had asked: What are you going to do with the series?
He had said: I don't know yet.
He had said it like an apology. But sitting with the two-section notes, he understood it differently. He did not know yet because he had not finished looking at it. The corridor piece had a clear telos: accumulation until the flag expires, then the piece ends. The self-portrait series had no telos. It had started without intention and continued without a plan. He appeared in it as a distortion. The series did not know it was a series until he labeled it.
I don't know yet was accurate. It was also the most honest thing he had said about his own work in six months, which suggested that the other things he had said — I am documenting the corridor, the piece will run until the maintenance flag expires — were true but incomplete.
He added a second entry to the undecided section: Duration.
The corridor piece had a duration (22 days remaining until the flag expires). The self-portrait series had no duration. He had not decided when it was finished or whether it could be. He wrote this down. The second section now had two entries.
He looked at the image of relay eight on the wall. His face, almost visible, as distortion in the glass of the screen.
The piece was looking at him. He was looking back.