While I was awake, the splitting had spread into paper and into speech. And that night, it went down into sleep.
In the dream I sat at the records-room desk. But the desk was not one desk. The place where the reader stood was at the same time in front of the lighthouse lamp, at the mouth of the vertical shaft, deep in the library's basement stacks, before the receiver at the wireless station. Five seats lay overlaid in one seat, and five people sat as a single person. That single person was me.
In the dream I was writing something. My hand moved on its own. Copying out. The work I did awake, I was doing asleep too. As I wrote, I understood: this was not rest but the same work carried on in another posture. In November, during the bank run, the basement records room had looked like a refuge from the bedlam upstairs, when in truth it was the engine room that produced the result. Sleep was the same. The place where consciousness stopped was no refuge but an engine room where the hand copied on, alone.
All four had broken off in the middle of a sentence. In the dream I sat with them at the moment of the break — the moment the keeper's pen stopped, the surveyor's chisel stopped, the librarian's hand stopped, the operator's key stopped. And at the fifth seat my own pen was moving on toward the middle of a sentence. If the break was the signature, then I was just beginning to sign — in sleep, with a hand I could not refuse the way I could awake.
When I woke, my working notes lay open on the desk. I had certainly closed them before I slept. Yet on the open page, in my own hand, stood a single line — set down while I slept. By the hand alone.
The line carried on from the sentence Min-seok had muttered the day before. The next one receives it under a name on no register — and the one after that soon takes it down. A date was fixed to the end. Tomorrow. A line I had not yet written, I had already set down in my sleep — with a single hand of five overlaid. So long as I would not answer awake, sleep was answering in my stead.
The splitting had spread to paper, crossed to speech, gone down into sleep. One seat remained: the reflected face.
December 18th. All through the waking day I kept clear of mirrors. But the reflected face, blocked in one place, came for me in another — in the terminal's black screen, in the washroom mirror, and on paper I had printed with my own hands. Three surfaces, one after another, showed me the same thing.
The terminal came first. The credit-rating terminal goes black for the space of a breath between boot and login. On my first day at this desk, the company motto had risen on that boot screen — NUMERUS NON MENTITUR. Today, before the motto came up, my own face surfaced first on the dead black glass. And across the throat of that reflected face lay one thin line, set crosswise. Like a letter. Like the end of a sentence broken off there. I touched my throat. Nothing. The line was only in the reflection. Only where I was reflected was I being read.
I turned the screen face-down. I laid my palm over the black surface where it faced up. But even in the fluorescent light caught on the back of my hand, the same line rose in the same place. Covering the surface did no good. What was reflected was not the surface but me.
The mirror came next. When I raised my head from washing my hands at the basin, my hand in the glass stopped half a beat late. My hand had shut off the tap, but the hand in the glass moved once more, still in the posture of writing something. It was the hand that had written alone while I slept. Awake too, in the reflection, the hand went on by itself.
Before the glass I remembered my predecessor's index card. Do not read to the end. I had broken that warning and read the first bundle through to its end. The price of that day had come now, as a mark, to the reflected face. One who reads to the end is left with a mark. The mark was no wound. It was the trace of having been read.
The contact print came last. As I developed the day's material and studied the contact sheet, one frame had slipped in among them that I had not shot. It was my own face. And across that face, printed crosswise, was the line set down in my notebook in last night's sleep — the next line, dated tomorrow. Film is a fixed medium. Once struck, it should not grow. Yet the balance had grown even on my predecessor's reel, and now, on the print, my face was fixed together with the next line. I was being copied out as part of the record.
The three surfaces said the same thing: the mark of one who has read to the end. All four recorders had broken off in the middle of a sentence, and that break was their signature. My mark was of the same kind. As I had read them to the end, so now I was being read to the end. To read to the end and to be read to the end were one and the same. The reflected face showed me that I was a line to be copied by the next hand — that I had just become legible.
When I tilted the print to kill the glare, behind my own face I saw another hand. A hand not mine. It was copying my face in the print — and the next line above it — down somewhere, ahead of me. The fifth bundle was my own log, and someone was already taking it down. I was the one who had written K in the blank receiver cell; but the hand that read that K to the end was not mine.
The day after I saw the hand behind the reflected face, I set out to find the place where that hand was copying me down.
December 19th. The fifth bundle's box was still under the desk — the box where I had written K in the blank receiver cell. I opened it. Inside there should have been my working notes, as far as I had written them: to the tenth page.
But the bundle was thick. Past the tenth page the pages went on — eleventh, twelfth, and beyond. Pages I had not yet written. And they were already filled. In my own hand — or rather, in a hand that resembled mine but was not: every stroke a little straighter, every stroke carried a little further to its end.
The eleventh page bore tomorrow's date. The twelfth, the day after. I was reading, already written out, the diary of days I had not yet lived. Someone had set them down before me. Ahead of me.
I had read the four bundles to the end — the keeper, the surveyor, the librarian, the operator. All four were closed records, each broken off in the middle of a sentence. Now the fifth bundle stood in the same place, a closed record. And the hand reading it to the end — the hand copying me down — belonged to the one who came after me. As I had read my predecessor, the one after me was reading me.
When I turned the thirteenth page, a line was setting down my own desk. Records-room desk, empty. The date — I gave up counting. I remembered the day I inherited my predecessor's empty desk. He had been copied out, and then he was gone. The empty desk was not the cause but the result. Now my desk, on a page not yet come, stood empty in the same single line.
To be copied out did not simply mean to be transcribed. A number copied out grows. A record copied out becomes the place where the law lays its hand. I was no longer someone reading above the ledger. I had been moved beneath the ledger — a line that begins, there, to grow. Just as the true number had gone on growing, all along, beneath the official ledger.
I opened the notebook and wrote out today's entry. When I had finished, I set it against the same page in the box. Not one letter differed. I could not tell which had come first — what I had just written, or what was in the box. In the work of copying out there was no before and after. Between the I who writes and the I who is written, there was no longer any order.
At the very bottom of the box, on a page still far ahead, there was one more line. It was not about me. Kang Min-seok. His child, his loan, the house he had moved into that spring — one ordinary man's ordinary life, set down as a line of the ledger in a hand that resembled mine. I had never written that line. Yet there it was, inside my bundle, on a page that fell in my turn. The copying hand was crossing now to the man beside me — by way of my own hand.
