March 3. Seven a.m. I turned the terminal on two hours earlier than usual.
The one line from yesterday was still in the body field. Min-seok's number. Yesterday I had not moved that line, and a line not moved did not vanish. If it was not moved, the vertical line reached it; if the vertical line reached it, the number came up on the nine o'clock notice. Two hours remained until nine. Two hours were the two hours I had come in early for.
I thought about what I could do in two hours. Move his line into the sender field, and my hand closes him. Do not move it, and the arithmetic closes him. Both roads were him. But over three days I had moved his circle to send the count elsewhere. I had only run out of circle to move; the sending-elsewhere itself had not vanished. If the only line in the body field was his, perhaps I could write into the sender field a line that was not in the body field. Write a number other than his in the sender field, and perhaps the count would close that other number and not close his line.
It was not the first time the thought had come. Over three days, each time I moved the furthest line, I had been sending the count to a seat I chose by also deciding which lines not to move. If I decided where the count went, it seemed I could send it even to a seat outside the body field. Today, with only Min-seok's line left in the body field, sending the count outside the body field was the one road that did not close him.
I chose a number to write in the sender field. A number that was not Min-seok's. The number of one person on another floor, not Treasury, whose face and name I did not know. I called up one unknown number and wrote it in the sender field, character by character, hoping that number would close and Min-seok's line would remain.
The instant I finished writing the number in the sender field, the one line in the body field became a result.
What I had written in the sender field did not change the line in the body field. The sender field was the answer, and the body field was the dictation. That writing an answer makes the dictation a result — I had done it every time I moved the furthest line over three days, yet only today did I understand it in reverse. That the numbers I wrote in the sender field over three days had closed was not because they were in the sender field, but because they were in the body field. To move was to copy the body field's line into the sender field as it was, so the body and sender numbers were the same every time. Being the same number, there was never cause to ask which field produced the result.
Today I wrote in the sender field a number that was not in the body field. Regardless of the sender-field number, what became a result was the one line in the body field. When an answer was written in the sender field, the body field's dictation became a result, and the body field's dictation was Min-seok's line. The arithmetic did not ask what was written in the sender field. It asked only whether an answer was written, and if one was, it closed the body field's line. I wrote an answer, and the body field's line was Min-seok.
For three days I had thought the sender field closed a seat. Since writing a number in the sender field had closed that number, I had thought it was the sender field that closed. But what closed was not the sender field; it was the body field at the instant an answer was written in the sender field. What I had closed over three days was not the number I chose in the sender field but the seats that number happened to occupy in the body field. What I thought was choosing was not choosing. The body field decided the line, and I decided only whether to answer it. The arithmetic was always in the body field, and I, outside the arithmetic, only answered. The hand that for three days thought it chose who to save and who to close had been choosing only whether or not to answer a line already set.
Before nine o'clock I tried to erase the number in the sender field. It would not erase. What was written stayed written. Min-seok's line in the body field stayed a result.
Nine a.m. A personnel notice came up. The firm's headcount reduction for March 3: one Treasury seat. It was Min-seok.
To keep from closing him, I had written in the sender field a number that was not his, and writing a number that was not his closed him. The hand that meant to stop it was the hand that closed. For three days I had blocked, knowing that blocking had an end and the end was him, and today the last gesture of blocking pulled that end forward. Left alone, the nine o'clock notice would have closed him; trying to block, my seven o'clock hand closed him. What my blocking did was move the seat the count would close forward by two hours. The hand that meant to gain two hours took two hours away.
In the morning I went up to Treasury. There was no one in Treasury. Among the desks that had emptied one a day over three days, Min-seok's seat was the last to be empty. The seat where until yesterday he had sat alone among empty desks had no one in it today. It had taken days for a section to empty, and two hours for the last seat to empty, and those two hours were the two hours I had tried to save him.
Min-seok's desk had not been cleared by the hand that yesterday cleared his colleague's seat. There was no one left to clear it. No mug, no one to move aside the navy coat that had hung over the empty chair. Clearing an empty seat had always fallen to the one who remained, and in Treasury no one remained. An uncleared empty seat kept its person longer than a cleared one.
Min-seok's last words had been, I'm next. The words he had said yesterday among the empty desks I had already been reading in the body field. If his guessed words had held a day's margin, today I had cut that margin to two hours. His next, in I'm next, was today, and the one who pulled it to today was me. He never knew when his next would be, and I was the hand that moved that next two hours forward. His not-knowing guess and my knowing gesture met on the same day in the same seat.
I came back to my seat and looked at the body field. In the place where Min-seok's line had become a result and vanished, a new line was being written. I read its first two characters. Not the Treasury code. The archive's code.
While the last two digits waited to be written, I knew what they would be. The only number in the archive whose last two digits I had memorized was one. Not a number I had copied twice a month, not the number of someone I passed every day. The number I held in my own hand every day, copied into my own memo pad and sender field every day. My own number.
The new line in the body field finished its last two digits. The last two digits were the last two digits of my number. For three days — no, from before that — I had thought I was emptying a circle to leave one person at the center. I had thought the person left at the center was Min-seok. Only when I saw my own line written in the place where his line had vanished did I learn who the person left at the center had been.
Emptying a circle was leaving a center, and at the center of every circle was the seat where the emptying hand stood. I had thought I held Min-seok at the center and emptied his circle, but the seat where the emptying hand stood was the center that remained to the last. That a hand which chooses the seat to close could not itself go unclosed — I may have known it from the day I wrote that there is no still hand. The new line in the body field was my number, and the hand that would move that line, and the hand that would not, were both the hand whose number that line was. Tomorrow morning, if my hand writes an answer in the sender field, that line in the body field becomes a result. Keep the hand off, and the vertical line reaches that line. Move it, and it is me; do not move it, and it is me.
