February 18. I opened tomorrow's roster. The first line was not a firm name.
Kim ████, Logistics, born 1958, four dependents. Park ████, Sales 1, born 1962, three dependents. Choi ████, Treasury, born 1965, two dependents.
The slot for the firm name was empty. In its place was the department, and instead of rank, the year of birth, and after that the number of dependents. I sat with those cells for a long while. The unit had changed.
The roster on the terminal was a different form. The default rosters had been short — one firm to a row, five rows a week meant five short-term finance houses had shut. The layoff roster was long. One firm cutting ten people made ten rows. A hundred made a hundred. Page numbers ran 1/8, 1/12, 1/20 down the screen. At the firm scale one row was one firm; at the person scale one firm became a hundred rows. The roster lengthened by that much.
For five months the roster's unit had been firms. Default, suspension, rehabilitation, liquidation. People were behind those letters, but on the roster they were a single row. I rewrote one such row, and a neighboring row swelled in its place. At the firm scale all I had to see was which firm wore thin instead. Who those people were — the employees beneath the default, the partners beneath the liquidation, the families beneath the suspension — I knew only by implication. It was not made explicit.
This roster makes it explicit. Department. Year of birth. Number of dependents.
I saw the words "four dependents" for the first time. Beside it the firm's stated reason for the cut, abbreviated — "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 under that single row. Rewrite that row to another employee number and the five move to another row. A household replaces a household. The same conservation as when firms replaced firms — only as the unit shrinks, the weight of one row compresses to household scale.
I scrolled down. One page. Two. Three. At the bottom 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 to the archive and mentioned his mother was hospitalized — outpatient for a month, then inpatient for two weeks. He had sat at my desk briefly, skipping lunch. That one person was written beside that row. The two characters "one dependent" pulled the lunch-skipped seat of last autumn back up.
Headcount reduction by department. That was how the entry was labeled. A notice telling a department to cut a certain number of positions. Who would be cut, the firm decides. The roster only writes down the result. Min-seok was there. After his firm had survived its default, after his debt had closed, after his body had closed — his name was no longer on any line of firm, debt, or body. But it was still in the place where he worked. In his department, at his rank's headcount. In the cell where headcount was being reduced, his name was set down.
Min-seok would not know yet. Tomorrow's roster is issued tomorrow morning, and today he is still eating lunch in the building next to the archive, at his own desk. He will be called into some meeting room tomorrow morning and told. That the department's headcount is being reduced. That he is one of those seats. I was already seeing that hour. From the moment the first line of the roster became a person, the weight of seeing ahead was different from when the unit had been firms.
I looked at the sender field. The hand had stopped.
When I rewrote a firm, the firm in question was far from the hand. When the roster moved to another firm, the employees of that other firm were outside the archive. To rewrite a person — the face of whoever would enter that seat in his place is at the fingertip at once. Who in the same department falls. What other name in the same rank.
The seat next to Min-seok is Kim Jae-hyun's. Next to that is Park Jeong-su's. Kim Jae-hyun came in last spring; Park Jeong-su has twelve years in. Who is the weaker seat in the next headcount adjustment — how the firm calculates it — anyone who has tended the archive can guess. Short tenure means first cut; long tenure means high salary cost and another target. Both are targets. Save Min-seok and one of those two moves next, and the next seat moves on after that — relocation at the firm scale was the abstraction of a neighboring row, but at the person scale it was a person you eat lunch with replaced by another person you eat lunch with.
One floor down, in the archive, the only vacancy is the predecessor's. A seat that has never been filled. The seat of a man who is not.
If I rewrite Min-seok, I see whose name enters his seat. At the firm scale an unfamiliar name swelled in the neighboring row. At the person scale the face in the next seat wears thin.
I knew, then, where the hand that had become a sender hesitates for the first time.
I scrolled to the end of the roster.
The last page. At the very bottom. A line was there — a single line set apart from the others, not pressed between rows. 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 hiring cohort. I knew the name of that number. A name I had never answered.
I did not say it aloud. To say it would set the person into the seat. I had never made a place for that person on the roster — I had not pressed the sender field, had not rewritten. But the roster was announcing him as the next in the neighboring seat. When the roster was at the firm scale, another firm swelled in the row I answered. The roster come down to the person scale was already writing the next person beside the row I did not answer.
A seat away was not a seat away. On the roster two seats off was the small gap between two cells, a blank space between rows. But two seats off in the same department were two desks in one department, two chairs at one lunch table, two people on one commute. The smaller the distance, the shorter the time. The hour the next line wears thin, at the seat next door, was not days but days inside days.
The roster's issue time was tomorrow morning. But that one line — was already fixed. The roster had decided one line ahead of itself and was telling me. Telling me who, in advance, would come next after Min-seok.
Tomorrow's roster will move it to the seat next door.
Before I turned on tomorrow's roster, I was already sitting at the place where I had seen it.
