March 4. Eight in the morning. I sat down at my desk.
One line stood in the body. The line written where Kang Min-seok's had gone yesterday, its last two digits my own number. In the seat at the center, where he sat yesterday, my line sat today.
I ran yesterday's arithmetic on myself. With my line in the body, the moment an answer goes into the sending column my line becomes a result. Keep my hand off the column and the vertical line reaches it. Move it and it is me; leave it and it is me. Where the road once forked around him and came out at him either way, today there was only me.
There was a way to put my line off a day. The same way I had put him off for three days: move my own circle. The archive had the head archivist, and it had the two assistants who were still there as of the day before. Days ago I had entered my predecessor's empty seat as a vacancy and four of us lived, and two of those four were behind me now, turning the pages of a roster they had not finished yesterday. Move those two and my line gained two days. Move the head archivist and it gained one more.
I kept my hand at the edge of the desk and followed the sum to its end. Move the two assistants, move the head archivist, gain three days — and then the archive holds only me. Alone at a desk in the middle of empty desks, with one line left in the body, and that line mine. The seat three days out was the seat he had sat in yesterday. At the end of the three days my circle would buy me, I was standing. The hand that left him at the center left him alone there; the hand that left me at the center would do the same to me.
I decided to let the two hands turning pages behind me go on turning. Not to move the assistants. Not to move the head archivist. Not to empty my circle. Not to put my line off.
If deciding not to postpone was a stillness, I knew by now that stillness is also an answer. I had known it since the day I wrote that no hand is a still hand. But the stillness of those three days was the stillness of watching a circle close in order to hold a center, and today's was the stillness of letting the center go. The same hand, laid in the same place, and yet one stillness meant to save and the other gave up saving. Giving up saving was the first thing I had ever done from outside the arithmetic. The arithmetic asked whether I would move a line or not; it never asked whether I would empty a circle to keep someone. That much was mine to decide, and I decided not to.
Only after deciding did I see that I had not decided it for my own sake. Empty my circle and I gain three days, and in those three days the head archivist and the two assistants close. The price of three more days of me was the three of them. As the price of three more days of him had been his colleague, the seat in front, the half-year hire, the price of me was my own circle. He never learned that his circle was his price. I knew. Knowing it, I decided not to do to myself what I had done to him. What I had done to him could not be taken back. Not doing it a second time was still available to me.
I looked at my line in the body. My number stood in the receiver cell, and the sending column was empty. The receiver was me. Write an answer in the column and the sender would be me too. When receiver and sender carry one number, a dispatch does not ask who is sending to whom. As the telegraph operator wrote his own name into the blank receiver cell of a broken-off line, I was looking at my own number in the receiver cell. The difference was that his cell had been blank and mine was already filled. My number was there without anyone writing it. A dispatch whose receiver was me though no sender had written it had come into the body as a single line.
My predecessor must have read his own number in the receiver cell at the end too. Near the close of his log there is a record of his hand going to the sending column and coming away, and going again. What he decided before he vanished is not in the log. Standing where he stood, I thought now that what he failed to write down may not have been a decision but the absence of one. When the receiver is yourself, when it is you whether you move the line or leave it, laying the hand down and lifting it away come out the same, and nothing is left that deserves the name of a decision. He had not failed to decide. He had arrived at a seat where there was nothing to decide.
After Treasury emptied yesterday, the arithmetic of empty seats did not stop with Treasury. When a section is done the sum moves to the next section, and the archive was the section after Treasury. The hand that had emptied his circle was in the archive, so the first seat the sum touched in the archive was that hand's seat. The hand that picks which seat closes closes first because it stands nearest the arithmetic. I had thought I answered from outside it. A hand standing that close to the sum was never outside it.
I opened the fifth bundle. On the sixty-fifth page I wrote that my line had come up in the body today. As I wrote, I thought about the page being read someday by another hand. As I had read the logs of four bundles, someone would read the log of the fifth. When that someone reached my number on the last page of the fifth bundle, my number would be a blank receiver cell to them. I was the one who read four bundles, the one writing the fifth, and the receiver of whoever opens the sixth. Reading and writing and being read had come full circle inside one person, and the end of that circle was the start of the next.
I came back and sat in front of the body. My hand was at the edge of the desk, the sending column was empty, and my number stood in the receiver cell. Neither laying the hand down nor taking it away, I looked at my number there. Knowing that looking is also a kind of writing, for the first time in days I was not looking in order to save. That eye was not the eye of the three days. For three days I had looked to find the furthest line; today the only line to find was mine, so I looked without searching.
As the hands that wrote the four bundles read their own numbers in the receiver cell at the end, I read mine. From the one who reads to the one who copies, from the one who copies to the one who answers, from the one who answers to the one who empties a circle, from the one who empties a circle to the one left at its center — at the end of all that turning I had become the one being written. When the one being written has no circle left to move, all that is left is to watch the writing.
We were watching a little further. And now we were writing one of our own. The one being written was me.
