The splitting spread, while I was awake, into paper and into speech. And that night, it descended into sleep.
In the dream I sat at the records-room desk. But the desk was not one. The place where the reader stood was at once before the lighthouse lamp, at the mouth of the vertical shaft, in the library's basement stacks, before the wireless station's receiver. Five seats overlaid in one seat, and five people sat as one. That one person was me.
In the dream I was writing something. My hand moved on its own. The work of 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 continued in another posture. As in November during the bank run, when the basement records room had looked like a refuge from the bedlam above but was in fact the engine room that made the result. Sleep was the same. The place where consciousness stopped was no refuge but an engine room where the hand copied on alone.
The four had all broken off in the middle of a sentence. In the dream I sat with them at the instant of that 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 pen too was moving toward the middle of a sentence. If the break is the signature, I was just about to begin signing. In sleep, with a hand I could not refuse awake.
When I woke, the notebook lay open on the desk. Before sleeping I had certainly closed it. Yet on the open page, in my own hand, a line stood written. Set down while I slept. By the hand alone.
That line continued the sentence Min-seok had muttered in his own mouth yesterday. The next one receives it under a name in no register — and the one after that soon copies it down. At the end a date was attached. 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 did not answer awake, sleep was answering in my stead.
The splitting had spread into paper, crossed into speech, descended into sleep. One seat remained: the reflected face.
December 18th. All through the waking day I kept away from mirrors. But the reflected face, blocked in one place, came for me in another — in the terminal's dead black screen, in the washroom glass, and in the contact print I developed with my own hands. Three surfaces, in turn, showed me the same thing.
The terminal came first. The credit-rating terminal goes black for a single breath between boot and login. The day I first sat at this desk, the boot screen had shown the motto — NUMERUS NON MENTITUR. Today, before the motto rose, my face surfaced first in the dead black panel. And across the throat of that reflected face lay a single thin line, set crosswise. Like script. Like the end of a sentence broken off there. I touched my own throat. Nothing. The line lived only in the reflection. Only where I was reflected was I being read.
I turned the screen face-down. I covered the black panel with my palm. But in the fluorescent glare caught on the back of my hand, in the same place, the same line rose. Covering the surface did nothing. 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 closed the tap, but the hand in the glass moved once more, still in the posture of writing something. It was the hand that copied alone while I slept. Awake too, in the reflected seat, the hand went on by itself.
Before the glass I remembered the predecessor's index card. Do not read to the end. I had broken that warning and read the first bundle to the end. The toll of that day had now come to the reflected face as a mark. One who reads to the end is left with a mark. The mark was no wound. The mark was the trace of having been read.
The contact print came last. As I developed the day's records 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, the line set down in my notebook in last night's sleep — the next line, dated tomorrow — was printed crosswise. Film is a fixed medium. Once struck, it should not grow. Yet on the predecessor's reel the balance had grown, and now on the print my face was struck together with the next line. I was being copied out as part of the record.
The three surfaces said one thing. The mark of one who read to the end. The four recorders had each 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, now I was being read to the end. To read to the end and to be read to the end were one work. 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 light, behind my own face a second hand appeared. A hand not mine. That hand was copying my face in the print — and the next line above it — down somewhere. Ahead of me. The fifth bundle was my own journal, and someone was already taking it down. It was I who had set ㄱ in the recipient's blank, but the hand reading that ㄱ to the end was not mine.
The day after I saw the hand behind the reflected face, I went looking for where that hand was copying me out.
December 19th. The fifth bundle's box was still under the desk. The box where I had set ㄱ in the recipient's blank. I opened it. Inside should have been my own working notebook — as far as I had written, to the tenth page.
But the bundle was thick. After the tenth page the pages went on. Eleventh, twelfth, and beyond. Pages I had not yet written. And those pages were already filled. In my own hand — or rather, in a hand that resembled mine but was not mine. A hand a stroke straighter, a stroke more carried to the end.
The eleventh page bore tomorrow's date. The twelfth, the day after. I was reading, already set down, the diary of days I had not yet lived. Someone had written them before me. Ahead of me.
I had read the four bundles to the end. The keeper, the surveyor, the librarian, the operator. The four were all closed records, each broken off in the middle of a sentence. Now the fifth bundle stood in the same place. As a closed record. And the hand reading it to the end — the hand copying me out — belonged to the one after me. As I had read the predecessor, the one after was reading me.
When I turned the thirteenth page, a line was setting down my desk. Records-room desk, empty. The date — I gave up counting. I remembered the day I inherited the predecessor's empty desk. He had been copied out, and then he vanished. The empty desk was not the cause but the result. Now my desk, in a page not yet come, stood empty in the same single line.
To be copied out did not simply mean to be transcribed. A copied-out number grows. A copied-out record becomes the place the law sets its hand. I was no longer one who reads above the ledger. I had been moved beneath the ledger, a line that begins, there, to grow. As the true number had grown all along beneath the official ledger.
I opened my 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 whether what I had just written came first, 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. Min-seok. His child, his loan, the house he moved into last spring — one ordinary person's ordinary household, set down as a line of the ledger in a hand that resembled mine. I had never written that line. Yet it was inside my bundle, on a page of my turn. The copying hand was now crossing over to the person beside me — by way of my own hand.
