February 23. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the desk.
The terminal was on, just as I had left it last night without shutting it off. Two lines stood in the body. The first was the number whose last two digits matched mine — yesterday morning's one line. The second had begun yesterday afternoon with the Treasury code and had stood with its last two digits empty. This morning, the second line's last two digits were filled in.
Who had filled them overnight was the same question as yesterday's, and, like yesterday, it had no answer. The records room door had been locked all night, and no one had sat at the terminal. Yet the last two digits were filled, and the grain of that writing was the grain of my hand. Whether the hand that filled them was mine or another with the same grain was a question that had already lost its answer yesterday, so today I did not ask it; I only read.
I read the last two digits. A Treasury number — but not the number of the one I pass in the same corridor every day. It fell a few units short of his.
I read the body's two lines again, top to bottom. Between the last two digits of the first line and the second there was a fixed interval — the same interval at which the seven departments' vacancy numbers had lain along one line yesterday. The body had stood that one line on end and was writing it downward, one unit at a time. The horizontal line had become a vertical one; that was all, and the arithmetic was the same.
Go down the vertical line one unit at a time, and a few units on came the number of the one I pass every day. The count of those units was small — small enough to reckon on my fingers. If one unit was one day, then in a handful of days I could count on my fingers, that number would be written as a line in the body.
It was Min-seok.
That one unit was one day was no guess. The day before yesterday the body had written the seat one unit above mine; yesterday that seat had closed outside the firm's headcount reduction; today the unit one below it had been written as a Treasury line. The body came down a line a day, a unit a day, skipping no seat. That it skipped nothing was the plainest fact of all. The vertical line would not step around Kang Min-seok's number. To step around it the arithmetic would have to slip, and until yesterday it had never once slipped.
That Min-seok's was the only Treasury number I knew down to its last two digits was not only because I passed him every day. From the time I first met him in Treasury, from the time I checked a Treasury colleague's cash sheets, Min-seok's number had worn its grain into my hand the way the third-floor clerk's had. A worn number had a face attached, and Min-seok's was a face worn fresh every day.
Yesterday I had watched the stillness save one person, and watched that saving close another. Today, if I did not move the second line into the sending column, that one person in Treasury would not close. Only, the number that had to close would shift, as yesterday, onto another seat outside the line. Move the second line into the sending column and that one Treasury person closes; leave it and someone I do not know closes. Either way, one seat closed. Nowhere in the body was there a place for a hand that closed no seat at all.
That which does not sound is heard. It was the telegraph operator's taboo; the first time I read it, it was a warning about the dispatch left unanswered, and today it was the explanation of a still hand. Keeping a hand pressed to the edge of the desk made no sound at all, yet that soundless act was being heard as the closing of a seat. The still hand was not still; it was a hand choosing a seat inaudibly. There was no still hand.
Whose seat the still hand was choosing, I had not known until yesterday. Yesterday the seat the stillness closed was the third-floor clerk's, and I had never chosen to close him. That it closed though I had not chosen it — that was yesterday. Today was different. That Min-seok was among the seats the stillness was choosing today, I knew, and stayed still anyway. Between choosing without knowing and choosing while knowing lay the distance from the edge of the desk to the sending column, and that distance was one knuckle of a finger.
In the morning I went up the third-floor corridor to bring records to Treasury. Min-seok stood at the end of the corridor by the pantry, holding a paper cup. He saw me and raised a hand. The records room's cutting people too, they say — how many over there? he asked. One seat, I said. The one seat my hand had entered yesterday. He nodded and said Treasury would have another round this week. They'd decided to keep the baby's first-birthday party small, he said, laughing — but the company was still there, so that much was a relief. While he laughed I looked at his face to keep from looking at the last two digits of his number, but looking at his face made him a line of the body more surely than his number ever had. The number had its last two digits; the face had none, and that a thing with no end would, in a few days, close into two end digits was harder to bear in the face than in the number. His number would meet the body's vertical line somewhere in that round. He did not know his number waited, days off, as a line in the body of my terminal; I knew it. While he drained the paper cup and stepped into the pantry, I counted those days over again on my fingers.
I came back to my seat and sat at the terminal. The body's two lines were as they had been, and the third line was still empty. I pressed my hand to the edge of the desk — as yesterday, to the point farthest from the sending column.
Knowing that Min-seok's number would be written as the third or fourth line in a few days, holding my hand to the edge of the desk was not the same as yesterday. Yesterday I had pressed it there to keep a line of the body from surfacing. Today, even as it lay at the edge, the hand seemed to be readying to move something toward the sending column. If I moved another line into the sending column before Min-seok's was written, the number that had to close might be made good from there, and the arithmetic might never come down as far as his line. To save one person by choosing and closing another first — I was already writing it out, once, in my head.
That was the work the hand had done last winter, the first time it edited a line of a roster. Back then it edited a line of some unknown firm and passed the price to another unknown line, and because it set no face on the seat it passed the price to, it could bear the thing a long while. Now there was Min-seok's face on the line I meant to edit, and on the other line, the one I would pass the price to, I had fixed no face yet. If I chose that faceless line, then what the stillness had chosen yesterday without knowing would today become a thing chosen while knowing.
After that thought I looked at my hand. It was not at the edge of the desk. It had come one knuckle toward the sending column. When it had moved, I did not remember.
