October 11. I opened it after three days of thinking about it.
Friday's line, timed four minutes past five, was as it was. The object of the query is the 1997 December Central Archive Release Register and the result is consulted. Over the weekend it neither grew nor shrank.
At nine I ran the search. Three hundred and three. On the fifth it was two hundred and eighty-five, so eighteen in six days. Three a day.
At half past nine I opened it.
It opened. On 9 September I pressed the same place three times and it did not come; this time it came at the first.
The title is 'Central Archive Release Register' and the period is 1 December 1997 to 16 December. There are two hundred and nineteen lines.
There are five boxes. Date, material number, recipient, quantity, recorder. The boxes are the same as in the register in use now. The form has not changed.
All two hundred and nineteen recorder's boxes were filled.
At half past ten I went down to the stacks and took out the paper register. It is the one I copied in July and opened once more on 9 September.
I opened December. I counted the lines. Two hundred and nineteen.
I matched the dates. The same. I matched some thirty material numbers. The same. The recipient codes are the same and the quantities are the same.
Only the recorder's boxes differed.
On paper eighty-two are filled and a hundred and thirty-seven are empty. Counting took forty minutes. On the screen there are no empty boxes.
All the hundred and thirty-seven boxes had an entry. Reading fifty lines picked out, they are all Kim Do-gyeong.
The eighty-two on paper are Kim Do-gyeong too. The paper is handwriting and the screen is characters. A screen has no hand in it. If sameness is judged by the name alone, they are the same.
I went through the eighty-two on paper again one at a time. The hand was not one hand. Two hands wrote the same name. One presses the ends closed and one lets them run. Of the eighty-two, sixty-one are pressed closed and twenty-one run.
If the name is the same and the hands are two, there are two cases. One person wrote it running when pressed for time, or another person wrote that name on their behalf. On paper the two are the same shape. The register has no box for who wrote it. Where there is a name in the recorder's box, that name is held to have written it, and that holding is the form.
From half past eleven until twelve I sat over how the hundred and thirty-seven were to be written down. Not for want of words. The words are there. Write that the screen filled the paper's empty boxes. Written down, it is a thing I have written many times in eight months.
It is a thing written many times, and today's is different. What the screen has filled until now was figures. It filled view counts and index places and cards. Figures increase. Seeing something increase, one writes that it increased.
What was filled today is empty boxes. When empty boxes are filled, empty boxes decrease.
In July the empty boxes were a hundred and thirty-seven. On 9 September they were a hundred and thirty-seven. Today on the screen there are none. It is the first time in nine months that I have seen anything in this room decrease.
After lunch I looked out what I wrote in July and read it.
I had written that empty boxes are of two kinds. Empty for want of anyone to write, and empty for want of time to write. On paper the two are the same shape, so I wrote that it cannot be told which. I also wrote that it was a pressed month, by what I was told, so it would be the want-of-time kind.
There was a third kind.
A box the one who is to write has not yet reached.
A box empty for want of time to write stays empty for good. Time passes and does not come back. A box the one who is to write has not yet reached is filled when that one reaches it.
Then it means that a paper of two years ago waited until today. Waited is not a word in the form, so I did not write it.
Not having written it, I held the word a while. Waiting is something a person does. Paper lies. Lying and waiting are the same seen from outside and different from inside. I have no place from which to see that difference.
Only there is one more paper in this room that is held to be waiting. The note in the box under the desk. Its last page breaks off in the middle of a sentence, and in the box for the recipient it says the next records keeper. I received it in January. Nobody would think it strange to write that the note waited until I came. Where a recipient is written it becomes a thing that waited, and where there is none it becomes a thing that lay.
In the empty boxes of the December 1997 register no recipient was written. They are empty, so nothing is written. Which is why until now they were things that lay.
From two until three I went down the lines. I looked from 1 December in order.
The lines were not even. The first days run fifteen or sixteen a day, and past the tenth they fall off. Four on the fourteenth, two on the fifteenth, one on the sixteenth.
After the sixteenth there was nothing.
In the stacks I took out the 1998 register and looked at its first line. 5 January.
From 17 December to 4 January is empty. Nineteen days.
It is the year's end, so lines falling off is not strange. The third floor sends no requisitions in late December either. Only the shape of it coming down to one a day and then to nothing is not the shape of requisitions falling off. When requisitions fall off they thin to one in two days, one in three. This has one on the sixteenth and after it nothing at all.
This is what it looks like when the one who enters them is gone.
At half past three the third-floor man came down. Not for a signature; he said there was something he meant to ask while he was down.
After hearing what he meant to ask, I asked him something. Did he know whether there was a person called Kim Do-gyeong in the archive before the merger.
He said he himself came after the merger. I asked how many from before the merger are left on his floor and he said none that he knows of. He asked why I was looking.
There is a name in a register, I said. He said to ask personnel, then, and went up.
I asked personnel on 9 September. They hold only what is after the merger.
For eight months in this room the places to ask have gone one by one. The predecessor remains as a note with a sentence broken off, the rosters were destroyed in the winding-up, the personnel lookup does not have it, and there is nobody on the floor. What is left is the register.
Places to ask running out and things to ask increasing come together.
From four until five I did cards. I did a hundred and sixty.
At five I went back to the screen and looked at the last five lines. Two of the fifteenth, one of the sixteenth, and the two before them.
There was no name in the recorder's box of those five lines.
There was a four-digit code.
All five were the same four digits. I had no need to write those four digits on paper to check. They are in the recipient's box of the handover document and they go into the release register several times a day.
They are my four digits.