The last was the operator. A remote wireless station on the East Sea, 1937. The log in which a dispatch caught amid the static bore a date not yet come. I had read the keeper's tide, the surveyor's shaft, the librarian's syllables again in turn, and now I reached 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 coming from an empty frequency, and at first only listened. To receive and never send was the one rule of that seat. But one night he struck the key and answered for the first time. And from that instant, dispatches dated tomorrow began to go out from his own hand. That the call the next watchman would receive from a callsign in no register was himself — he understood at the last.
Copying the log out, I saw the four bundles close at last into one sentence. The surveyor said it deepens when sounded; the keeper said it rises when it enters; the librarian said it spreads when read. And the operator said — it becomes a sending when answered. Measure, watch, read: those I had already done. I read to the end in November, and in December I marked the next ebb in advance. But I had not yet, not once, answered. I had told no one what I read in advance, laid no hand on a default I foreknew to stop it. I was still one who only received.
That was the one thing I confirmed at the end of the rising action. I am the fifth hand, I read the four logs to the end on purpose, I held the law as a single sentence. But I was not yet a sender. The operator's last rule — do not answer — I had not yet broken. Break it one fewer time, and perhaps I could remain one who receives. Perhaps.
When I had finished and lifted my eyes from the reader, the internal terminal I had switched off rang once. I knew what it was. A dispatch dated tomorrow. On the screen hung a line. The next merchant bank's suspension — the roster for that coming date the tide table and the shaft had pointed to yesterday. In the recipient field stood my employee number. And the sender field was blank.
A blinking cursor waited for me in that blank. Do not answer. But the roster arrived though I did not answer, and someone wrote it though I did not. I had already learned that in November. A blank sender field means no one has sent yet — not that no one ever will.
At the close of the rising action I had confirmed one thing. That I had not yet answered. But while I deferred answering, something else was quietly proceeding. As reading had spread into writing, writing was now spreading into every hand I wrote.
At first it was only my notes. In November, the "suspension" I had written split into separate letters and read apart. That had been a private memo; only I needed to see it. But come December, the splitting crossed over 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. They were figures 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" of twelve million dollars had slid a column among the other numbers, and become not twelve million but some other figure. I looked at the original again. The original was crisp. Only the copy had split. The act of copying, as it had made numbers grow, was now prying their digits apart.
I erased it and wrote it again. The rewrite split too. The third time as well. I could not make a clean record. The hand that had read the law to the end could no longer set down a single line free of the law. It followed everything I wrote. I was a records clerk. And if every record a records clerk makes splits 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 drew out the film I had copied last month. Early November, before I had yet read to the end. The me of then was clean, so that film would be clean too. I wanted to believe so.
But threaded on the reader, that film's figures too had split. A record from a month ago, plainly clean then. I had checked it twice at the time. Yet now the digits had come loose. The splitting did not spread forward only. It was spreading backward, too, into everything I had ever copied. The instant I read to the end had reached back and touched every past line I had written. Whatever I had once written was now, all of it, due to split.
The next day, the splitting left the page and crossed into speech.
Skipping lunch, I met Kang Min-seok in the records-room corridor. Same intake as me, two digits apart in employee number. A man who married last year, had a child in spring, and bought a home on a loan in autumn. He said he could not sleep these days. Because of the rumor that his own company might be on the next suspension list. I had already read that list. But do not answer — I did not say it. Instead I tried to comfort him, that it would be all right.
But the words that came from my mouth arrived apart in my own ear. It-will-be-all-right. Five syllables came loose one by one and settled in the air in some order other than the one I intended. The affliction by which syllables had arrived apart in the librarian's log was now happening not on paper but upon my own voice. I stopped speaking. Min-seok looked at me strangely. What did you just say, he asked.
I tried to speak again, but I was afraid. For I could not know what would come out.
Just then Min-seok, as if sunk in his own thoughts, muttered a sentence to himself. It was not the comfort I had been about to give. What he said was — the next one receives it under a name in no register. The sentence from the operator's log. The line I had copied out yesterday, but had never once spoken to him. Not knowing what he had said, he soon turned the talk to the weather.
I understood. The splitting was no longer only inside me. What I had copied leaked out through my voice, and crossed into the mouth of the one who heard my voice. Duncan's "us" had spread one letter further, to Min-seok. I was one who read and one who copied, and now what was copied was leaving the page and crossing into people.
As we parted, Min-seok waved. "Take care," that short phrase, sounded different to my fractured ear. Not take-care, but the-next. I did not look back. For if I looked, 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 — that was the price of not answering. One who only receives is not without guilt; he has only not yet written.
