In the end I answered Min-seok's delinquency line. Knowing that the hand meaning to save him is the hand that takes him.
February 2nd. On the day his delinquency line crossed into the danger cell, I could not bear it and pressed the sender field. I closed the debt. The next day his delinquency was gone. But now I know what comes after. As much as is closed, somewhere opens. I searched the roster for the opened place. I should not have searched.
The opened place was another line of Min-seok's. With the debt closed, this time his health-insurance line split. A third line of the same person. The weight drawn out of the firm had moved to the debt, and the weight drawn out of the debt was moving to the body. Each time I saved him, I was moving him one cell deeper. Lose the firm and live; bear the debt and live; but the body—
That day I saw clearly for the first time. The saving hand and the taking hand were not a figure of speech. The same single press did two things at once: drew Min-seok out of one danger, and put him into a deeper one. I pressed because I loved him, and the pressing was ruining him. The word dilemma was not enough. A dilemma is choosing one of two roads, but here one road was two results.
Looking at that health-insurance line, I resolved not to press. This time for a different reason. Not from fear, but because I knew that the more I press, the deeper he goes. But I also knew what happens if I do not press. Someone will press instead, and the hand that presses instead does not know Min-seok and will move him to any line at all. Press, and I sink him deeper; do not, and he goes anywhere. Neither drew him out. Before the roster, I was choosing in which cell to lose someone I loved.
At first the cost came days later. Now it is already there before I press.
February 4th. The cost of the first answer closed the next day. The second, that evening. The third, before I even pressed. Today, as I went to press the sender field, I saw the line beside it already splitting before I pressed. The cost had outrun the answer. The roster knew first what I would do, and was setting down the cost ahead.
The cost had not only grown faster. It was growing larger. At first, close one line and one opened. One to one. Last week, close one line and two opened. Today, I only made as if to close one and three trembled. The more I answered, the tauter the strings between the lines grew, and the force of pulling one line spread to more lines. There was a passage in the signal log — when feedback reaches its threshold, a small input yields a large output. I was nearing that threshold.
That this was acceleration I knew. The days when stopping could stop it were past. Now the cost came even when I did not press, and when I pressed it came faster and larger. Both roads tilted the same way, ever more steeply. The acceleration in the predecessor's reel, his hand pressing the sender field more and more often — perhaps that was not his desire but the acceleration of the feedback he had fallen into. He too would have tried to stop, and the acceleration would not have let him go.
I lifted my hand from the terminal and brought both hands together on my knees a while. I was trying to stretch out the time of not pressing. But even in that time the roster's lines closed and opened among themselves. The next hand filled the seat I left, and the acceleration of the cost did not stop. I was no longer the driver of this acceleration. I only sat in the driver's seat; the pedal was already pressed to the floor, and whether it was my own foot upon it was no longer even clear. The threshold was near. What lay beyond it, I did not yet know.
I had thought I alone was pressing. In the transferred boxes, I saw the traces of pressing other hands had left.
February 6th. Sorting the records of the suspended firms again, I opened the records-keeper's notebook of one firm (the firm where I had once seen a Pnakotic box of the same grain). That notebook too had a sender field. And in that field there were marks of pressing. Like me, that person had answered. Not once. Toward the back pages the traces of pressing grew more frequent and the margin of hesitation shorter. It was the same curve as my acceleration.
I opened another firm's notebook. The same. Another notebook. The same. Beneath every ledger struck by the crisis there was the same fifth bundle, the same sender field, the same hands answering. I was not the law's only organ. I was one of many organs. In every treasury desk of the city, every branch office, every liquidation archive, nameless hands sat before their own rosters, saving their own Min-seoks and taking their own neighbors.
This finding did two things at once. It made me less alone, and more afraid. That it was not my sin alone was a comfort. But that it was everyone's sin meant that the vast obituary of the crisis was not the work of any one hand but the sum of dispatches pressed by many hands at once. If the nation was one bundle, then on every page of that bundle hands were answering, and the relocations of those answers, entangled with one another, were writing today's obituaries.
I gathered the notebooks in one place and looked a long while. Which hand had taken whom in trying to save whom — that entanglement I could not unravel to the end. That it could not be unraveled was the law's final cruelty. No one sees the end of their own answer. The one I took might have been saved by another hand; the one I saved might have been taken by another. Every hand was scattering the results of every hand. What meaning there is in stopping, inside that scattering, I would ask on the next page.
I had thought stopping would spare me the sin. A price had been set on stopping too.
February 8th. I did not press for five days. To open the roster but not touch the sender field — that was the last exit I had found. For five days I only read. I tried to go back to being a receiver. But on the fifth day, today, I received the price of those five days.
In the five days I did not press, the roster's lines passed to the next hand. Those hands were not as careful as I. I at least pressed knowing whom I moved. The next hand pressed without knowing. In those five days the obituaries under my archive's charge had grown more numerous than when I pressed. I had been sinning carefully, and when I lifted my hand, in that seat someone was sinning carelessly. The price of stopping was the price of a seat handed to a more careless hand.
Continue and pay; stop and pay. If both roads end the same, it was not a choice. In that place I confirmed there was no exit. I could not go back to before I began answering. Once I had known the sender field, knowing itself was an answer. To press, not to press, to sit before the roster, to leave the archive — any of them was the turning of one page of the fifth bundle.
After five days I brought my hand again to the sender field. Not for absolution, but at least to move knowing whom I moved. That a careful hand is better than a careless one — I knew that thought was the last excuse for continuing to answer. But knowing it was an excuse, I did not draw my hand back. In a room with no exit, even the attempt to leave by some door was one more circuit around the room. Min-seok's last line waited for me at the top of tomorrow's roster.
