She was not supposed to; she did it on her own time, in the ceremony room, with the door open, and after the first three months she started bringing a flask.

Two women in an unheated room at the back of a county building, turning pages, from 1989 forward.

The way you do it is that you do not read.

You cannot read; there are about two hundred entries in a book and forty books and you would be there until you died.

You scan the witness box and you are looking for a shape — a narrow, slightly backward-leaning hand with a crooked tail on the final letter — and after about four weekends you can find it at a rate of about a page a second.

I dreamed about it twice.