March 5. Eight in the morning. I sat down at my desk.
Yesterday's line was still there in the body. My number in the receiver cell, the sending column empty. Yesterday I wrote no answer, and the vertical line had come to the place where the answer was not. It reached my line in the night. A line the vertical line reaches is a line that was not moved, and when it reaches one, that number goes up on the nine o'clock notice.
An hour to nine. For that hour I would leave the sending column empty. Leave it, and the arithmetic closes my line. Yesterday the hand that meant to block closed him, so today I would keep empty the hand that had decided not to block. Knowing that a hand which does not block also closes, I chose to be closed by an empty hand rather than a blocking one. At least the empty hand had no one else's number written on it.
Between being closed by a blocking hand and by an empty one, the closing came out the same. Either way my line closed today. But the blocking hand closed one other person on its way, and the empty hand did not. Between two hands with the same result, all I could choose was whether to take one more person with me. That was the one thing the arithmetic never asked, the last thing left to me to decide.
For that hour I finished the fifth bundle. As the four logs had, the fifth had to end with its writer's number standing in the receiver cell on the last page. The surveyor's bundle ended with his own depth at the final sounding; the lighthouse keeper's with his own date in the last cell of the tide table; the librarian's with his own name in the last syllable of a sentence come apart; the telegraph operator's with his own number in the blank receiver cell of a line broken off. The fifth would end with its number on the last line of a ledger.
There were things to set down for whoever opens the next bundle. That the body is not inside the terminal but is dictation taken from somewhere. That writing an answer in the sending column makes the line in the body a result. That moving a line and not moving it end in the same seat. That emptying a circle to hold a center leaves the emptying hand at that center. And that when your own number comes up in the receiver cell, it becomes a blank receiver cell for the one who comes after. I thought setting it down might spare the next person the groping I did from the beginning, and then I set down that it would not — I had read all four bundles and groped from the beginning anyway. Writing it down does not take the groping away. It leaves a place to grope in.
While I wrote, the two assistants behind me went on turning the pages of the roster. The two who were still there the day before yesterday were still there today. They were at their desks because I had decided not to empty my circle, and they did not know that was why. As Min-seok never knew why his circle kept emptying, the two of them did not know why theirs did not. The only one who knew was the hand that empties and does not empty, and that hand closed today.
He was closed after his circle emptied; I was closed with mine intact. If he was left alone at the center and then closed, I was closed with the ring still standing. That much was different, and the difference did not save him. Leaving my circle standing saved the two assistants and did not reach back to a man closed yesterday. As saving and closing had always been one hand, so were what I saved and what I could not.
Nine in the morning. The personnel notice went up. Headcount reduction for March 5, one seat, the archive. My number.
My line in the body became a result. The sending column was empty, but an hour of keeping it empty was my hand's answer too. Choosing not to write an answer was an answer, and it was the answer that had been written into the sum. My line closed.
What being closed is, I had not learned in three days of watching seats close. A closing seat became an empty desk, the desk was cleared, and a cleared seat looked as clean as one no one had ever sat in. That is all you can see from outside a closing seat. What happens inside one you learn only by sitting in it.
My last two digits went faint first. The last two digits of the hand that wrote my number into the memo pad, of the hand that wrote answers into the sending column, thinned one place at a time in the line in the body. A number going faint and the hand that owned it going faint were one event. I once wrote that when the shape of a hand is the same, the line between one hand and another disappears. Now, as the hand thinned, so did the line between the thinning hand and the number it had written. The one writing and the one written thinned in the same place, under one number.
As the surveyor read his own depth in the final sounding, as the lighthouse keeper read his own date in the last tide, I was reading my own number in the last line. Four of them had reached the ends of their bundles and read their own seats there, and I had come to that place fifth. What they read was a depth, a date, a syllable, a number; the reading was the same act. The seat where the one who reads to the end is read to the end — five hands had taken it in turn, and I was the fifth.
While I thinned I was writing the last line of the fifth bundle. I meant to end it with my number in the receiver cell. Before the final digit went down, the final digit of the writing hand went faint first. The place I meant to write and the place going faint were the same last digit.
The last line of the fifth bundle stopped with its final digit unfilled. The break was the break, and the break was the signature. My number stayed in the receiver cell with its last digit faint. A faint digit is not blank and not fully written. When the next person opens this bundle and reads that digit, it will be a blank receiver cell to them. The moment they read their own number into it, the broken line of the fifth bundle becomes their first.
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, from the one left at the center to the one being written — at the end of all that turning I was being written out in full. In the finished place one last digit stayed faint, waiting for the next receiver.
We were watching a little further. And now one of our own was being written out in full. In the finished place, one blank digit was left for the next person.
