The last was the telegraph operator. A remote wireless station on the East Sea, 1937 — the log in which a single dispatch, caught out of the static, carried a date that had not yet come. I had read the keeper's tides, the surveyor's shaft, the librarian's syllables again, each in turn, and now I came to the fourth and last hand: the end of the order I had been told to read in.
In the operator's log, where a callsign should have stood, was a single sentence. Do not answer. He heard a call come off an empty frequency and, at first, only listened. To receive and never send was the one rule of that seat. But one night he tapped the key and answered, for the first time. And from that instant, dispatches dated tomorrow began to go out from his own hand. The call the next man on watch would take from a callsign on no register was himself — and that he understood only at the end.
As I copied the log out, I watched the four bundles close, at last, into a single sentence. The surveyor said: measure it and it deepens. The keeper: let it rise and it fills. The librarian: read it and it spreads. And the operator — answer it and it becomes a sending. Measuring, watching, reading: those I had already done. I had read to the end in November, and in December I had marked the next ebb before it came. But I had not once, yet, answered. I had told no one what I had read ahead, and laid no hand on a default I already knew was coming, to head it off. I was still one who only received.
That was the one thing I had settled by the end of the four logs. I was the fifth hand; I had read all four to the end on purpose; I held the law now as a single sentence. But I was not yet a sender. The operator's last rule — Do not answer — I had not yet broken. Hold off breaking it just once more, and perhaps I could stay one who receives. Perhaps.
When I had finished and looked up from the reader, the in-house terminal I had switched off chimed once. I knew what it was. A dispatch dated tomorrow. A single line hung on the screen: the next merchant bank's suspension — the roster for that coming date the tide table and the shaft had pointed to the day before. In the receiver cell stood my employee number. And the sending column was blank.
A cursor blinked in that empty cell, waiting for me. Do not answer. But the roster had arrived though I did not answer, and someone had written it though I did not. November had already taught me that. A blank sending column means no one has sent yet — not that no one ever will.
By the end of the four logs I had settled one thing: that I had not yet answered. But even while I put the answer off, something else was quietly going forward. As reading had spread into writing, writing was now spreading into everything my hand set down.
At first it was only my working notes. In November, the word I had written — suspension — came apart and read as separate letters. That had been a private memo, for my eyes alone. But as December came on, the splitting crossed into the official ledgers I copied for the bank.
This morning I copied a page of the short-term foreign borrowing ledger onto microfilm and checked it over. The figures were ones I had written out cleanly, by my own hand. Yet on the reader's screen, one digit had come loose from its place. The 2 in twelve million dollars had slid a column over among the other numbers and become some figure other than twelve million. I looked back at the original. The original was clean. Only the copy had split. The act of copying, which had once made the numbers grow, was now prising their digits apart.
I erased it and wrote it again. The second copy split too. So did the third. I could not make a clean record. A hand that had read the law to its end could no longer set down a single line free of the law; it clung to everything I wrote. I was a records clerk. And if every record a records clerk makes comes apart — then I was carrying it into the bank's ledgers, into the film the next person would read, copying it in.
In the afternoon, with dread, I pulled out the film I had shot the month before. Early November — before I had read anything to the end. I had been clean then, so that film would be clean too. That was what I wanted to believe.
But threaded onto the reader, that film's numbers had split as well. A record shot a month before, plainly clean at the time — I had checked it over twice, back then. And now the digits stood apart. The splitting did not spread forward only. It was spreading backward too, into everything I had ever copied. The moment I read to the end had reached back and touched every past line I had ever written. Whatever I had once set down was now, all of it, due to come apart in its turn.
The next day, the splitting left the page and crossed into speech.
Skipping lunch, I ran into Kang Min-seok in the records-room corridor — same hiring class as me, two digits apart in employee number. A man who had married last year, had a child in the spring, and taken out a loan for a home in the autumn. He hadn't been sleeping, he said. There was a rumor his own firm might land on the next suspension roster. I had already read that roster. But — Do not answer — I said nothing of it. Instead I tried to reassure him: it would be all right.
But the words out of my own mouth reached my own ear in pieces. It—will—be—all—right. Five syllables came loose one at a time and hung in the air in an order I had not meant. The affliction from the librarian's log — syllables arriving apart — was happening now not on paper but over my own voice. I stopped. Min-seok gave me an odd look. "What did you just say?" he asked.
I tried to speak again, but I was afraid — I could not know what would come out.
Then Min-seok, as if sunk in his own thoughts, muttered a sentence half to himself. It was not the reassurance I had been about to offer. What he said was — the next one receives it under a name on no register. The sentence from the operator's log. The line I had copied out the day before and had never once spoken to him. With no idea what he had just said, he soon turned the talk to the weather.
I understood. The splitting was no longer only inside me. What I had copied had leaked out through my voice and crossed into the mouth of the man who heard it. Duncan's "us" had spread one letter further — to Min-seok. I had been one who reads and one who copies; now what was being copied was leaving the page and crossing into people.
As we parted, Min-seok waved. "Take care" — that small phrase came to my fractured ear as something else. Not take care but next. I did not look back. If I did, I felt, I would see on his back a line not yet drawn — and that he did not know I had already read that line was the price of not answering. One who only receives is not guiltless; he has only not yet written.
