The hand that pressed to prevent it called up the very thing it meant to prevent.
January 27th. A line was splitting — the settlement line of some small client firm. I answered to close it. Close it, and the firm would escape default. As always, I pressed the sending column. But this time, instead of closing, the line I meant to close split faster.
The next day, looking at the roster, I understood. My answer had not saved the firm; it had brought down another line the firm had leaned on — a line I had never touched, but to which my answer had shifted the weight — and that collapse, in its turn, dragged the firm down. The default I had meant to prevent came true through the very act by which I meant to prevent it. The moved weight had turned and struck its original place all the harder.
Until now, relocation had been simple. Close one line and the line beside it opened. The give-and-take was clean. Today was different. The lines were bound to one another by strings I did not know, and to pull one line was to send the weight back along that string and sever the very line I had pulled. I no longer knew which line was tied to which. The outcome of an answer had become impossible to foresee.
What this foretold, I felt only dimly. While relocation stayed clean, I had at least known what I was doing — saving one, taking one. Now I could not even know that much. An answer meant to save might take; an answer meant to take might save. The string between intention and outcome had snapped. What would grow in that snapped place, I could dimly make out, like the shadow of an oncoming dark.
I looked a long while at the firm's last settlement line. There was no trace of my answer upon it. A clean default. No one would ever be able to say that I had called it up — not even I could be sure. Innocent, since I had meant to prevent it? Guilty, since the outcome was default? Nowhere on the roster was there a place to answer that. Only one thing was clear: my hand now moved without knowing what it called up.
Every day I press the sending column. But whether it is I who press, or something pressing through me, I can no longer tell.
January 29th. Today I answered a line. Before pressing, I had decided it plainly: I would close this line. But the moment my finger met the sending column, I doubted the decision had been mine. Days on end now — the same hour, the same seat, the same motion. Whether I press because I have decided, or decide because the time to press has come. Which comes first, the decision or the motion, I could not pick out.
When I was a receiver, it had been clear. The law sent tomorrow's roster; I received it. The hand only moved; the will was not mine. Now that I had become a sender, I had thought it would be clearer still — since I was the one pressing, the will must surely be mine. But ever since the receiver cell and the sending column became one, who was writing through whom had blurred. Do I work the law, or does the law work me? The same hand, the same type, the same result. There was no place left to divide the subject of the sentence.
The predecessor's broken sentence came back to me. That last dispatch he sent — was it his will, or the law's? He had become one line of the roster without ever answering that. Today I know why he could not answer. Not because it was unanswerable, but because the question itself does not hold. In the place where the hand becomes the law and the law becomes the hand, to the question "whose hand is this?" both answers are right, and both are wrong.
In the evening I stood before the mirror. I thought of the day the mirror had shown the broken line at my throat. Today, looking at the hand in the glass, I asked it: whose hand are you? The hand in the mirror did not answer. It only rose when I raised mine, and fell when I lowered mine. Whether the mirror was copying me or I was copying the mirror — even that, today, was not clear. I turned my back on the mirror and went back to the terminal, where tomorrow's roster was waiting. Whosever hand it was, that hand would press again tomorrow.
A name I had saved once rose again — on another roster.
January 31st. This morning I saw Min-seok's name on the roster again. Not the firm roster — the personal-delinquency roster. The loan line I had grown in saving his firm had grown for a month and crossed, at last, into the delinquency cell. The weight I had drawn out of the firm had moved into the debt, and now the debt was dragging him down.
I had saved him once. With my first answer I had closed his firm's line, and the price of it was another man turned to an obituary. After that heavy once, I had resolved that Min-seok, at least, I would never touch. But the roster, as if to mock my resolve, raised the same name in another cell. There was no such thing as "once" in saving. Close one line and another line of the same man opened; close that one too, and yet another would open.
Intervention had a limit. No — not so much a limit as no end at all. One man could not be drawn wholly out of the ledger. The sum beneath the ledger does not lessen, so to save him in one seat was to wear him in another. All I could do was choose the line on which he would go under. At the firm? At the debt? And next time, where? Salvation was a choosing of the seat, not a reprieve.
At lunch Min-seok came again. This time he did not speak of luck. He only looked tired, and mentioned in passing that the interest on his loan had risen. I saw the line behind the words. The terminal stood lit at my back, and between me and that delinquency line there lay only the walk back to my seat and the press of a single key. I could save him again. Save him again, and someone else again — or perhaps some other line of his own — would wear in his place. I poured his coffee and kept the unpressed hand beneath the table. Whether that hand would still be beneath the table before the next roster, I could not be sure.
