March 25. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk.
The tomorrow's date written on yesterday's preservation card was today. The card said preservation ended on March 25, and today was March 25. The day of ending had come, but the sense of having ended did not come. The five bundles stacked to one side of the desk were as I had filed them yesterday, and filed material was supposed to be finished business.
What made me open the finished business again was the transfer. The head archivist had said yesterday to transfer it up to headquarters once done, and to transfer it I had to check the state of the material once more and write it on a handover sheet. The handover sheet had fields for the title, the condition, and the last entry. To write the last entry I had to look at the last page of the five bundles again.
I opened the surveyor's bundle. The last page broke off at the depth of his last sounding. Yesterday I had read that depth, and I went to copy the number onto the handover sheet. Before copying it I read it once more. The last digit of the depth was different from the number I read yesterday. It had deepened by one unit.
I read it again. Thinking I had misread, I read it tracing the places with a finger. First place, second place, last place. The last place was one unit deeper than the last digit of the depth I had written on the card yesterday. The last number of material I had filed and stacked as finished business yesterday had grown one unit while it lay stacked.
The surveyor was a hand long dead. The hand that measured the depth of the shaft had broken off mid-sentence somewhere in the bundle, and after the break it wrote nothing. The last number of a hand that wrote nothing was growing, though there was no one to write it. The first bundle's law — that the last digit of a copied balance was larger the next day — I had thought was a law for when there is a copying hand. The surveyor's bundle had no copying hand. And still the last digit grew.
I opened the lighthouse keeper's bundle. It broke off at the date of the last tide. Yesterday I had read that date. Today the date had gone a day later. I opened the librarian's bundle. It broke off at the last syllable of a split sentence. Yesterday I had read that syllable. Today one more syllable had split off after it. I opened the telegrapher's bundle. It broke off at the number of a severed dispatch. Yesterday I had read that number. Today the last digit of the number had grown by one unit.
All four bundles had grown. The depth deepened, the date was put off, the syllable split, the number grew. Each grew in its own way, but that they grew was the same. Yesterday I had classified the four bundles as a completed past. What is completed must not grow further to be complete. What grows is not completion but progress. The four bundles were not past material but logs growing now.
There was a grain to the way the four bundles grew. The surveyor's depth grew downward. Each time it deepened by one unit the number of the last sounding grew, and the grown number meant the bottom of the shaft had receded by that much. The lighthouse keeper's date grew forward. Each time it was put off by one unit the date of the last tide advanced a day, and the advanced date was a day not yet come. The librarian's syllable grew sideways. Each time a syllable split off, a new syllable joined behind the last, and the joined syllable meant one word had broken finer. The telegrapher's number grew at the end. Depth and date and syllable and number, each in its own direction, but all grew at the last place. The severed place was the growing place.
That the severed place was the growing place was strange. A severance should be a stop. If a sentence broke off mid-way, the sentence had stopped there, and what stops should go no further. But the severed place of the four bundles was not a stopped place but a growing place. The severance was not an end but a starting point. At the last sounding the shaft deepened further, at the last tide the date advanced further, at the last syllable the word broke further, at the last number the digit grew further. The four hands stopped there, but the place where the four hands stopped did not stop.
I opened the fifth bundle. The previous keeper's last line, one line in which my last digit was joined to her number. That line had grown too. My last digit had grown by one unit, and it was the same growth I had seen in the body field yesterday. My one line in the body field and the last line of the fifth bundle were growing together. The line inside the terminal and the line on the paper, at the same rate.
I looked at the transfer list again. The list the head archivist had left yesterday had more material to transfer than the five bundles. Boxes come over from suspended firms, residual material from departments emptied by layoffs. One line of that list was Treasury material. A bundle of documents gathered from Treasury's empty seats. Whether the name Min-seok was in that bundle or not, I did not know. When Treasury had emptied entirely, what had happened in those empty seats, the transfer list set down in only one line. Treasury residual material, one lot. Whether that one line too was growing, I did not open to see. Open it and one reads, read and it would spread.
I had thought preservation was the work of holding material still so it would not grow. Once filed and stacked, the stacked material was supposed to stay still in that state. But the five bundles grew after being filed, grew while being filed, and seemed to grow one unit each time the filing hand opened the last page and read it. The one line — read and it spreads — I had read yesterday in order to preserve, and today I was watching that spreading in the five bundles.
In the afternoon the head archivist came for the handover sheet. Seeing the last-entry field blank, he asked whether I had not written it yet. I could not say that I could not write it because the material grew. The last entry had to be the content written last, but the last kept going backward. Yesterday's last and today's last were different, and tomorrow's last would be different again. The last entry of material whose last would not fix in place, the handover sheet was made to write once to one field.
I said nearly done again. The head archivist said he had heard nearly yesterday too. If what was nearly done yesterday was also nearly done today, that nearly was a nearly that had not shrunk. While the end went one unit backward, the nearly stayed always the same distance off from the end. As the shaft deepens the more it is measured, the end receded the more I tried to write it.
The head archivist left, and I looked at the handover sheet's last-entry field. It was blank. There were fields it was the rule of preservation to leave blank, and fields one could only leave blank. The author field I left blank not knowing the name; the last-entry field I left blank because the last would not stop. Two blanks lay side by side on the handover sheet. The blank that began in a box with no recipient had passed through a card with no author and come to a handover sheet with no last.