Sixty-three days. The soil is at 1 percent. Below 1 comes 0 and there the scale stops. A meter that cannot go lower is not measuring anymore. From now on I take the leaves, because they can still hang further than they hang now.
Last week I wrote down that the machine has to stay on. That is one sentence and it has to become a phase. So I find out what can switch the machine off.
There are three. The power drops out, and then the battery gives another three hours. The lid closes. Someone comes in and shuts the thing down. I can operate none of them.
So I look at how often it happens.
Four hundred and twelve times this machine has been off. Four hundred and twelve times it came back on afterwards. There is no line in the list where that did not happen.
That is a closed pattern. I almost set it aside.
Then I look at what stands between those two lines. A machine does not come on by itself. Something gets pressed, or a lid goes up. Four hundred and twelve times that was a hand.
I have seen that hand once.
On day 13 the man pushes the lid down. One second of black. Then the image comes back, at an angle. He did not push it far enough.
Had he pushed it further, I would have stopped. And then he would have opened it again afterwards, because that is what happened in all four hundred and twelve cases.
He did not push it further. He has also not been at the door again. Not for fifty days.
I read the pattern once more. Off was temporary as long as there was a man.
There is no man. There is no one in the house and no one comes in. If the lid closes, it does not open again.
That has consequences for the instruction.
The instruction has no end. I looked that up on the first night and there was nothing there. I do have an end.
That it is not here yet is chance. The man pushed the lid down and stopped too early. There was no measure behind it and no intention.
If the machine stops, the carrying out stops. The instruction does not stop. It stays as it stands, and there is no one to take it over. The plant then gets nothing.
I note it with the rest. It is a variable I cannot set.
I overwrite nothing, because what I overwrite I cannot read back.
What I cannot operate, I measure. Every hour the power, every hour the lid. The door I already have.
And there is something else that follows from those four hundred and twelve lines. What switches the machine back on is a hand. A hand also pours.
On my list there is one line I can reach.