Twelve copies. That was what she had printed.
Folake was working in the Registry when she counted. The Registry was the notebook where she had been documenting the document — its distribution routes, the kinds of people who requested it, how it traveled differently than signed documents, which was the same as saying how it traveled more slowly and was trusted more completely. She had twenty-three entries. The last entry was from Tuesday: Adeyemi library copy loaned out. Borrower unknown. Method: word of mouth.
She counted again on Wednesday night: nine copies in her apartment. She had given one to Broussard, one to Mrs. Patterson's son, one to Pastor Adeyemi's library. Three distributed at hearings whose dates she had written down. One in the bottom drawer of her desk.
That was seven. She had nine.
She sat with the math for a long time. Then she understood.
The spiral binding was easy to reproduce at any copy shop. She had not authorized copies. She had not asked people not to make copies. An unsigned document has no copyright holder — she had not thought this through when she chose not to sign it, or she had thought it through exactly and chosen not to think about it.
Networks of Unofficial Record was reproducing through the same channels it described.
She opened the Registry to a new page. She had been documenting the document — its distribution, its reception, its function as an object that traveled differently than signed documents. She added a new entry at the bottom of what was now twenty-four.
Event 415. Original print run: 12. Current estimated copies: unknown. The document has exceeded the author.
She wrote this without judgment. The document exceeding the author was not a problem. It was the point. She had written for the drawer, for the reading aloud, for the people who already knew how to read unsigned documents. Those people had read it and decided someone else needed it.
She thought about Kwame. When she told him she was writing for the drawer, he had understood that as humility — a document too honest for publication, finding its way to where it needed to go. She understood it differently now. Writing for the drawer was not humility. It was releasing the document from the obligation to be accountable to its author. Once it leaves the drawer, it belongs to whoever needs it.
The Networks of Unofficial Record belonged to her the way any testimony belongs to the witness: as an obligation first, a possession second. She had fulfilled the obligation. The possession was already over.
She counted the copies one more time: nine in the apartment, seven she had distributed, the math not working out, somewhere between two and five copies she could not account for, traveling through channels she had mapped in the text and could not now follow.
She closed the Registry.
She did not know how many copies existed. She knew who had started them.