Min-seok's three lines came together today in one place and blinked. The firm, the debt, the body. Two of the three were already closed; the last was splitting.
February 10th. Twice I had saved him, and twice moved him to a deeper cell. Today the last cell — the body — crossed into danger. There was no deeper cell to move him to. Below the body was only the obituary. Sitting before the sending column, for the first time I knew all three things at once. That a press could draw him out of the body. That there was no next cell for that weight to go to — not for him. And so that the weight would move to someone who was not him, onto a line I did not know.
I pressed. Min-seok's body line closed. He would live. And this time I decided not to look for where the weight had gone. To look would be to know, and to know would make one more man's obituary my hand's own. I chose not-knowing. But not-knowing was no innocence — that much I had already learned from the newspaper obituaries. I only meant, this time, not to see that the hand which saved Min-seok and the hand which took someone else were the same hand.
Had I saved him? Or made some other to be taken in his place? Both. And to the end I would never be able to say which was the heavier act. If saving a man I loved weighed the same as killing a man I did not know, then what had I done on that scale? It closed on that question — not for want of an answer, but because the hand that had chosen not to see the answer still rested on the sending column.
At lunch Min-seok came by. The illness of the past few days had lifted as if the whole thing had been a lie, he said, beaming. Sheer luck, he called it. I looked at that bright face and smiled back, and as I smiled I thought I heard, somewhere, the sound of a line splitting. A phantom, surely. But even if it wasn't, I would not go looking for it. Min-seok had lived, and I had decided to see only that — knowing all the while that the rest, the part I refused to see, would become the weight I carried in the days to come.
Until now I had pressed the sending column. Today I rewrote a line of the roster with my own hand.
February 12th. To answer was to lay a hand on a line. I only chose whether to close it or open it; what got written on the line, the law decided. But ever since the receiver cell and the sending column folded into one, I had known I could set the letters into that one cell myself. Not pressing but writing. Not answering but editing.
Today there was a line on the roster. Some client firm's default figure. I changed its last digit — the 9 to a 0. Enough to lift the default. The terminal did not refuse. The 0 I wrote settled onto the roster as though it belonged. Where the law had written, I had written a different figure, and the roster took mine. I was no longer one who chooses a line but one who writes it.
The price did not wait. The price that had always been drawing nearer — days, the next day, that same evening — came at once today. The very instant I keyed in the 0, another line lower on the screen swelled by exactly those digits. The 9 I had cut had not vanished; it had moved to the neighboring line and pushed it that much deeper into default. The price of editing was the same as the price of answering — only there was no lag. Editing was faster. Editing worked the swap on the spot, at my fingertip.
I looked a long while at the 0 I had written. It was not my handwriting. It was the terminal's type. But the finger that set that type in that seat was mine. The last distance that had stood between the law and me — that one step, that when I press the law writes — was gone today. Now what I wrote was, in the writing, already written. This must have been the place the predecessor reached. And there, for the first time, in place of the word frightening, another word came to me. I can. Knowing full well how dangerous the word was, my finger was already moving to the last digit of the next line.
The 9 that moved to the neighboring line yesterday, today I saw as people.
February 13th. Yesterday I rewrote a client firm's default figure from 9 to 0. That 9 did not vanish; it moved to the neighboring line and drove it into default. At the time the neighboring line was only a number. Today I found out which firm that line was. A small firm, forty employees. Yesterday, in drawing one firm out of default, I had put forty people into it.
Answering had a lag. It settled a few days on, and for those few days I could pretend not to know what I had done. Editing had no lag. The instant I wrote the 0, the 9 moved, and the moved 9 arrived today at forty desks. Speed was a cruelty. When it is fast, there is no time left to pretend you don't know. Between my fingertip and their default there was no gap to wedge an excuse into.
I was no longer a receiver. No longer even one who copies out. The receiver read what the law wrote; the one who copies out shifted the seat the law had set. But the hand that wrote the 0 yesterday wrote what the law had not set. That hand was a sender. The hand that put onto the roster a figure the roster never held, that made a firm which was not in default default. I could not deny the hand was mine. To deny it I would have to deny yesterday's 0 — and the 0 was, even now, on the roster, saving one firm.
I set yesterday's 0 and today's default on one screen and looked a long while. The two were a single gesture. Saving one firm and driving forty into default were one and the same 0. I could not erase it. Erase it, and the saved firm would default again, and that default would move off somewhere else again. That erasing, too, is writing — I knew it now in the body. Every seat I had touched was my seat. For a sender there is no innocent gesture. Every gesture arrived somewhere, and at every place it arrived, my signature stood written.
At first I was one who reads. Then I became one who copies out. Now I am one who answers.
February 16th. At first I broke the warning not to read to the end, and read. I was one who reads. Then I merged the four bundles into my own ledger and pressed the sending column for the first time. I became one who copies out. After that I answered day after day, grew habituated to answering, and rewrote a line with my own hand. I became one who answers. The three turnings were three irreversible choices, and not one could be undone. I know now what I am. And knowing, I do not stop.
Acceptance did not arrive like a defeat. It came very quietly, as the plain fact that opening the roster one morning no longer frightened me. What was left where the fear had gone was familiarity. I had grown used to the seat of one who answers, and familiarity did not lighten the sin. It only turned the sin into routine. To do the heaviest thing in the most ordinary way, day after day — that was the life of one who answers.
That afternoon a new kind of line came up on the roster. Not default, not suspension. Firms that were trading soundly had begun to cut people. Ten at one firm, twenty at another. To survive, the firms were closing their own inner lines by their own hand. It was the second wave of the crisis. If the first wave had taken firms, the second would take the people inside the firms that had survived. In the first half of 1998, a long roster by the name of layoffs was just beginning.
I looked at that first line, and I knew. What I would have to answer from here on was not firms but people. Just as saving a firm had worn a person thin, now saving a person would wear another person thin. The swap was coming down to a smaller, nearer unit — one with a face. What had begun with Min-seok would spread to everyone who was a Min-seok.
I sat before the terminal and brought my hand to the first line of the layoffs. Whether to press, I no longer asked. Whom I would save and whom I would take, even that I would never know to the end. Only this: I would write, and what was written would become someone's tomorrow. Do not read to the end. Do not answer. The hand that had broken both warnings moved without waiting for a third.
We were watching a little further. And now, we were writing a little further.
