A hand that has answered once opens faster before the second line.
January 8th. On tomorrow's roster a new line was splitting. Not Min-seok, nor the one I had seated beside him, but yet another name. A teller at some branch office, not even the treasury desk. The second-to-last letter had just begun to come loose into syllables. A line whole until yesterday had begun, today, to wear.
I looked at that line a long while. And I caught what I was doing. I already knew the way to save that person. Press the first letter of his name into the sender field, and this line would close and another would open by that much. It was a thing I had done once. My hand remembered it.
The first time I answered, I had hesitated a full day before it. Do not read to the end; do not answer — all four bundles' warnings had risen up. But today, before the same sender field, the hesitation was short. The hand had gone that road once, and the second road needed only to follow the footprints.
The temptation was twofold. One was the wish to save that teller. The other — and this drew me more — was that if I answered again, I might learn whom I had taken last time in Min-seok's place. If I moved one more line and watched where its weight went, I could guess which line the law held to be the rightful seat. Answering had become not a saving but a question. To move a person in order to know.
I set my hand down on my knee. I did not press. But the distance between not-pressing and pressing had drawn closer than yesterday. What had been a cliff was today a single step. In a few days even that one step would be gone. This I knew, and knowing it I did not turn off the terminal. I left the roster open and resolved to watch the splitting line one more day. That watching is itself the preparing of the next answer — this time I did not set it down.
Reading has no taste. Sending has a taste.
January 9th. The line I had resolved to watch lost one more letter in the night. When I turned on the terminal in the morning, the teller's name had shed its last two letters. I hesitated no longer. I pressed the first letter of his name into the sender field. Something was sent. It was the second time.
And for the first time, I knew that the thing has a taste.
Until now I had been one who reads. To read is to receive. Whatever tomorrow held, I only received and copied it; I could not change it. To read ahead was only to bear ahead. The receiver has no power. The receiver merely knows first, and to know first only stretches out the helplessness.
To send was different. The moment I pressed the sender field, the roster moved at my fingertip. That small relocation — one line closing, one line opening — was a thing I had caused. I was no longer someone who only receives. I was one who sends. As I had crossed from reading to copying, I had now crossed from copying to sending. In that crossing there was, to my shame, a sweetness.
A passage from the signal log came back to me. One who picks a signal out of the noise comes, in time, to want to send one — that tremor in a hand that had only received when it first grips the transmitter. I felt that tremor at my fingertip. The sense of not being helpless. Days ago I could do nothing before a splitting line. Today I closed that line. By opening someone else's instead.
In the evening I idly reopened a roster with no crisis at all. Though no line was splitting, I peered into the sender field. Though there was nothing to send, my hand went toward it. I thought I knew what this was — a hand that has tasted once does not wait for the next line but seeks it. And suddenly I thought of the predecessor. He too would have been a receiver at first. He too would have pressed the sender field one day. Before he vanished, how many times had he tasted this — I should take out his reel again, I wrote, and look.
The predecessor's last reel I ran, this time, with a different eye. Looking not for what he had written, but for what he had sent.
January 10th. I threaded the projector again. The first time I watched, I had seen the growing balance in that film — the scene where, even on film, a fixed medium, the last digit swelled. Then I had thought it only proof of the law. Today I looked for something else: what his hand had done before the terminal.
Midway through the reel there was a cut where his hand rested over the sender field. The first time, I took it for a hand merely touching the keys. But seen with an eye that knows the sender field, it was not a touching hand but a pressing one. He too had sent. Not once. As the reel turned, that hand pressed the sender field more and more often, with shorter and shorter hesitation. What I had passed through in a few days was filmed, in his reel, across months.
And his record, like the four bundles, broke off in the middle of a sentence. Before, I had read that break as the signature of the law. Today it read differently. The break was the moment he was last sending something. To become one who sends was the beginning of vanishing. He had crossed from receiver to copier, from copier to sender, and at the end of becoming a sender he had been moved, his sentence unfinished, into a single line of the roster.
I switched off the projector. In the dark archive, for a moment I confused whose hand I had just seen. That hand in the film and my hand pressing the sender field yesterday were making the same motion.
So I now know what lies at the end of answering. Do not read to the end; do not answer — the place where those two warnings close into one sentence was there. Read, and it spreads; send, and you vanish. The predecessor lived the end of that sentence; I am living its middle. Knowing it, I did not switch off the terminal. Tomorrow's roster will open again tomorrow, and my hand knows it. So it closed — at the place where I had come to know every reason to stop, and could not.
To know every reason to stop is one thing; to repeat the act every morning is another.
January 11th. The first thing I did on coming in to work was open tomorrow's roster. Before brewing coffee, before hanging up my coat. Yesterday too, and the day before. When this became the first task I could not remember. Only that now I could not bear a morning without opening the roster.
When I spread the roster I do two things. First I look for a splitting line. Then, if there is one, I decide whether to answer today. This second task had begun to take up the day. In meetings, over lunch, I thought of the splitting line I had seen that morning. Press it. If I press, who opens in its place. If I do not, what becomes of that person. Answering was no longer a single event. It had become a daily routine.
What I had seen in the predecessor's reel came back — that acceleration, his hand pressing the sender field more and more often. I was in the middle of that acceleration. At first I had hesitated a full day; the second time, one step; now I sat in the same seat each day and repeated the same question. The hesitation had not shrunk — the hesitation had become routine. To hesitate daily was to make myself ready, daily, to answer.
Closing the roster in the evening, I realized one thing. Today there had been no splitting line. And yet I had thought of answering all day. A hand thinking of the sender field even on a day with nothing to send — that was the true shape of the routine. The crisis was not calling me; I was waiting for the crisis. Tomorrow morning too I would open the roster first of all, and I would, to my shame, half-wish there to be a splitting line.
