February 18th. I opened tomorrow's roster. The first line was not a firm's name.
Kim ████, Logistics, born 1958, four dependents. Park ████, Sales 1, born 1962, three dependents. Choi ████, Treasury, born 1965, two dependents.
The slot where the firm name should go was empty. In its place stood the department; in the next cell, in place of rank, the year of birth; and after that, the number of dependents. I sat with those cells a long while. The unit had changed.
On the terminal the roster was in a different form. The default roster had been short — one firm to a row; five rows in a week meant five merchant banks had shut their doors. The layoff roster was long. One firm cutting ten people made ten rows. A hundred made a hundred. The page numbers ran down the screen: 1/8, 1/12, 1/20. At the firm scale one row was one firm; at the person scale one firm became a hundred rows. The roster lengthened by just that much.
For the past five months the roster's unit had been firms. Default, suspension, rehabilitation, liquidation. There were people behind those words, but on the roster they came to a single row. I would rewrite that one row, and a row beside it would swell in its place. At the firm scale, all I had to watch was which firm wore thin instead. What sort of people they were — the employees beneath the default, the clients beneath the liquidation, the families beneath the suspension — I knew only by implication. It was never spelled out.
This roster spells it out. Department. Year of birth. Number of dependents.
I saw the words four dependents for the first time. Beside them, the firm's stated reason for the cut, in shorthand — "headcount adjustment / short tenure." One row was one household. The row for Kim ████, born 1958, meant the man himself plus four dependents — five in all, gathered under that single row. Rewrite the row to another employee number and all five move to another row. A household stands in for a household. The same conservation as when firms stood in for firms — only, as the unit shrank, the weight of one row had been compressed to the size of a household.
I scrolled down. One page. Two. Three. At the foot of the fifth page I saw a name I knew.
Kang ████, Treasury, born 1968, one dependent.
One dependent. I knew who Min-seok's one dependent was. Last autumn he had come down to the records room and mentioned his mother was in the hospital — a month as an outpatient, then two weeks admitted. He'd sat at my desk a moment to say it, skipping his lunch. That one person stood written beside the row. Those two words — one dependent — dragged that lunchless afternoon of last autumn back up to the surface.
Departmental headcount reduction. That was how the entry read. A notice ordering a department to shed so many positions. Who would go, the firm decides. The roster only takes down the result. And Min-seok was in it. After his firm had come through its default, after his debt had closed, after his body had closed — his name was on no line of firm or debt or body any longer. But it was still on the line of where he worked. In his department, at the headcount for his rank. In the cell where the headcount was being cut, his name sat.
Min-seok would not know yet. Tomorrow's roster goes out tomorrow morning; today he is still eating lunch at his own desk, in the building beside the records room. Tomorrow morning he will be called into some meeting room and told. That the department's headcount is coming down. That he is one of the seats. That hour, I was already watching. From the moment the roster's first line became a person, the weight of seeing ahead was no longer what it had been when the unit was firms.
I looked at the sending column. My hand had stopped.
When I rewrote a firm, which firm it was stayed far from my hand. Even when the roster shifted to the firm next door, that firm's employees were outside the records room. But to rewrite a person — who would take that seat in his place, the face of the one who would take it, was there at my fingertip at once. Who in the same department would go. What other name at the same rank.
The seat next to Min-seok's is Kim Jae-hyun's. Beyond that, Park Jeong-su's. Kim Jae-hyun came on last spring; Park Jeong-su has twelve years in. Which is the weaker seat in the next headcount adjustment — how the firm runs that sum — anyone who has kept the records room can guess. Short tenure, first to be laid off; long tenure, a salary heavy enough to make its own target. Both are targets. Save Min-seok and one of the two moves over, and the seat he moves into moves over in turn — at the firm scale the swap had been the abstraction of a neighboring row, but at the person scale it was one man you shared lunch with traded for another man you shared lunch with.
Come down one floor to the records room and there is only the one vacancy — the predecessor's seat. A seat never once filled. The seat of a man who is not.
If I rewrite Min-seok, I see whose name goes into the seat. At the firm scale an unfamiliar name had swelled in the row alongside. At the person scale the face in the seat alongside wears thin.
I had come to the place where the hand that had become a sender hesitated for the first time.
I scrolled to the very end of the roster.
The last page. The very bottom. A single line stood there — not wedged among the others, but set off on its own. A name. An employee number. And four characters.
Confirmed target.
I read the number. Two seats off from Min-seok's. Same department, same rank, the next number in the same posting group. The name that went with that number, I knew. A name I had never once answered.
I did not say it aloud. To say it felt as though it would seat the person in the seat. I had never once made a place for him on the roster — had not pressed the sending column, had not rewritten a thing. And yet the roster was announcing him as the next in the seat alongside. When the roster ran at the firm scale, another firm had swelled in the row I answered. Come down to the person scale, it was already writing the next person in beside the row I had not answered.
A seat's width away did not look like a seat's width away. On the roster, two seats off was the blank between two cells — a small gap between one row and the next. But two seats off in the same department were two desks in one department, two chairs at one lunch table, two people on one morning commute. The smaller the distance, the shorter the time. At the seat next door, the hour the next line wore thin was not days off but hours within days.
The roster's release was set for tomorrow morning. But that one line — that one was already fixed. The roster had settled one line ahead of itself and was telling me. Telling me, before the fact, who came next after Min-seok.
Tomorrow's edition would move it to the seat next door.
Before I ever switched on tomorrow's roster, I was already sitting in the seat of one who had seen it.
