The Date on the Film

For three days I tried not to think of my name, written in the name field of the new personnel card. On the third day, I opened the safe.

My predecessor's last film, never wound to its end. The can that had sat in the records-room safe just as it was. I threaded it into the reader. What one had to know to open that can, I now believed I knew — that the record makes its object grow, and that the last thing he had filmed was our short-term foreign borrowing ledger.

I wound the film one frame at a time. The first frames were ordinary. Leaves of the short-term foreign borrowing ledger. As the dates turned over a day at a time, the balance had grown from its last figure. Each time he filmed a leaf, the number on that filmed leaf was larger in the next frame. The record enlarges its object. The film recorded that law, frame by frame, faithfully.

Then I reached the last frame he had shot.

It was not a leaf of the ledger. It was an index card. The card he had last held in his hand. The next card the arrow had pointed to, gone from the bundle. He had slipped it among the ledger leaves and filmed it last. On the card, in his hand, a balance was written.

I read the number with my fractured eye. One figure at a time, apart.

I know that number. It was the balance the terminal had thrown off on November 1st, stamped with the date "November 2nd." The number my predecessor had written by hand — months before he vanished — had arrived at my terminal as "tomorrow's." The number was arriving, from recorder to recorder, ahead of itself, against the current of time. From his card to my terminal. From my terminal to something of the next person's.

The chill of the basement rose into my fingertips. It was familiar.

The frame after the last card was only half-exposed. The frame he had stopped pressing mid-shutter. On it a ledger leaf was filmed again, but the balance cell was — being filled. Not a leaf shot whole, but the very instant the number climbed from its last figure, halted on the film. The growing number, he had filmed at the last moment.

I read that half-exposed balance. With a fractured eye, down to the empty places between the figures.

Between figure and figure, in the gap where there should have been nothing, was faint writing. A thing invisible to an eye that reads whole, visible only to an eye that has read to the end. Not a number. A date.

A day in December. I remembered where I had seen that date. The new card at the personnel office. The card with only the hire date entered, the resignation date blank. The date that would fill that empty field, my predecessor's film had — before he vanished — already written between the digits of the growing balance.

The film broke off there. Why he had not finished pressing the shutter, I felt I now knew. Wind it to the end, and he too would have seen what the last frame held. A resignation date, written between the growing figures — the next recorder's. He would have thought it his own. But that film had entered the safe only after he vanished, and the date on that last frame was — not his, but the date of whoever next opened the can.

I turned off the reader's lamp. Before I did, I looked once more at the half-exposed frame. The date between the figures had grown sharper than a moment before. Each time I read it.

By then the voices in the corridor were no longer low.

Short-term. Foreign currency. Words that only days before the second-floor clerks of the main building had traded in murmurs were now heard in the elevator, in the pantry. Some merchant bank had been suspended, they said. The exchange rate had risen tens of won a day, they said. The day to repay the borrowed short-term foreign currency was coming, and there was no foreign currency anywhere to repay it. The number the company had borrowed was now moving to swallow the company.

That morning, a filming assignment slip came down to the records room from head office's funds division. Not a dead ledger past its closing. A living ledger — our own short-term foreign borrowing register. Before liquidation, before audit, every leaf was to be committed to film.

It was the very ledger my predecessor had been filming when he vanished. The register whose balance had grown inside his film, never wound to its end.

I was being placed in the exact spot where he had stopped. The same ledger, the same camera stand, the next cell of the same broken-off line.

I looked at the slip again. The seal head office had stamped, the account number to be filmed, and the scheduled completion date.

The completion-date field I read slowly, with a fractured eye.

It was the date my predecessor's film had written between the digits of the growing balance. The date the personnel office's new card had left blank in the resignation field. The date head office's funds division had set for me to finish filming this ledger.

Three places pointed to the same day in December. The film, the personnel card, and the assignment slip. I was assigned to finish filming on that date, and written to be discharged on that date. The company had decided — already — to send me out the day I finished filming this ledger.

I set the slip down on the desk. My hand did not tremble. That it did not tremble made me think of Yun Sang-hak's hand, keeping the lighthouse into his fifth month. In the place where rationalization ceases to work, the hand grows calm instead of trembling. With a calm hand, he walked down onto the flats.

I could have refused. I could have taken sick leave, left the post. But the records-room post was older than the company, and had taken people in and sent them out in turn even before the company existed. Leaving would not empty the resignation date. Leave, and that date would already be written, somewhere, between the figures.

I sat at the camera stand. I spread the first leaf of the living ledger under the glass. Before I laid my hand to the shutter, I resolved to confirm one thing — whether the law that says it does not grow unless recorded held true even before this living number that hundreds of hands copy each day.

I left that leaf of the ledger for a day without pressing the shutter — to see whether, in the day I did not film it, the balance would grow.

The next morning, I opened that leaf. The balance I had not filmed had — grown by three figures at the end.