At first I read tomorrow's roster. Today, tomorrow's roster came from my hand.
January 21st. Before opening the roster, I tried writing one thing. In my notebook, which line would split tomorrow. It was only a guess. Read the roster every day for a few days and the hand knows first whose turn it is to wear. I wrote down that hand's guess in one line. Then I turned on the terminal.
The line I had written floated on the roster, just so. Not one letter different. At first I thought I had only read well. But what I had written, I had not written from reading the roster. I had written before turning the roster on. Not read, but written first. And the roster came following after my notebook.
The telegraphist's log returned. He was not a receiver but a sender. Dispatches went out from his hand, and the dispatches that went out came true. Long I had seen him only as one organ of the law. Today I sat in his seat. Tomorrow's roster was not coming to me from the terminal; it was going out from my hand into the terminal. The hand that took dictation had become the hand that writes first.
What this meant I knew slowly. To answer was to lay a hand on a line already there. But to write first was to make a line that had not been there. I was passing beyond relocation. From choosing whom to save and whom to take, to writing who would appear on the roster in the first place. How far that distance is, and how much of it I had already crossed, one line in the notebook was telling me.
I did not tear out the notebook page but put it in the drawer. I knew tearing it was meaningless. What was written had already gone to the roster, and what had gone to the roster would become someone's tomorrow. Removing one notebook page does not remove that tomorrow. I was afraid only of what my hand would write the next time I opened the notebook. A thing begun as a guess had become, somewhere along the way, not taking dictation but making others take it. What lay far ahead I did not yet know, but the hand was already turning that way.
Following where the moved weight had gone, I came to a name not in any register.
January 23rd. The day before yesterday I answered a line. Yesterday the line beside it opened, and today I tried to learn whose the opened line was. I spread the staff register. I spread the client register. I spread the credit ledgers of the transferred firms. The name was nowhere. It floated on the roster, yet was in no register at all.
I read the name again. Its last letter was ㄱ. And the first letter, and the middle, were somehow familiar. Following the familiarity, I knew it was the letters of my own name scattered apart. The order changed, a letter or two left blank, but made of the same characters. The reason it was in no register was that it was a name not yet entered in any register. The name of the next records-keeper. It was me.
The day the first letter of my name rose in the recipient's blank returned to me. Then I had written it down as self-convergence — that the reader is the one read. That had been about reading. Today's matter was about sending. The weight I had moved, passing through one person and another, was returning at last to a name in no register — my own scattered name.
I had thought answering was a going-out. When I pressed, some other person bore the cost. But followed far enough, the line of that cost turned and came back to me. The relocation had an end, and that end was the sender herself. As the predecessor, his sentence unfinished, became one line of the roster, the weight I had sent was coming, at last, to fill one line of my own scattered name.
I brought my hand to erase the name from the roster, and stopped. That erasing too is writing, I now know. To erase a name in no register would become a record that it had been in no register, set down in a deeper place. I drew my hand back. My scattered name was gathering, slowly, one letter at a time, on the roster. The place where the recipient becomes the sender was drawing nearer, letter by letter.
The receiving cell and the sending cell became, today, the same cell.
January 25th. The roster on the terminal had always had two cells. The receiving cell — where tomorrow arrives to me. The sending cell — where I send my answer out. For the first months I saw only the receiving cell, for I was a receiver. These past weeks I learned the sending cell, for I had become a sender. Today, the line between the two cells had vanished.
Tomorrow's roster I read in the receiving cell was the same type as what I had written in the sending cell. I was receiving what I had sent. Sending what I had received. Which came first could not be asked. The boundary that had begun to blur was now closed completely. Receiving = sending. And the name floating in that one cell was my own scattered name, the one that had been gathering. Receiving = sending = me.
This was the end of growing habituated to answering. At first I had learned what answering was; then I had grown habituated to it. At the end of that habituation, the place I arrived was neither receiver nor sender but a place where the two folded into one. I was no longer one who reads the law. I was no longer even one who answers the law. I had become the hand with which the law writes its own script. As the predecessor had.
That I was not afraid was the most frightening thing. Watching the two cells become one, I was not startled. Like someone who had long awaited it, I only nodded. Not acceptance, but habituation. A habituated hand is not startled by what it has become.
I left the terminal on. Switching it off, leaving it on — these were now the same answer. Before the roster become one cell, I closed my eyes a moment. Behind the closed eyes that one cell still floated. For the recipient to become the sender was not the event of some day but this: the erasing of a single line. And in the place where the line was erased, whatever happened next, whether it was my intention or the law's, I would no longer be able to tell apart.
