March 25. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the fifth desk.
The tomorrow's date on yesterday's preservation card was today. The card said the preservation ended on March 25, and today was March 25. The day of ending had come, but the sense of having ended did not. The five bundles stacked to one side of the desk sat 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 send it up to headquarters once it was done, and to transfer it I had to check the state of the material once more and enter 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 again at the last page of the five bundles.
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 not the number I had read yesterday. It had deepened by one unit.
I read it again. Thinking I had misread, I traced the places with my finger as I read: first place, second place, last place. The last place was one unit deeper than the depth I had written on the card yesterday. The last number of material I had filed and stacked as finished business the day before had grown a unit while it lay in the stack.
The surveyor was a hand long dead. Somewhere in the bundle the hand that had measured the shaft's depth broke off mid-sentence, and after the break it wrote nothing more. 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 a copied balance's last digit stood larger the next day — I had taken for a law that held only where a copying hand was. 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 moved 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 behind it. I opened the telegraph operator's bundle. It broke off at the number of a severed dispatch. Yesterday I had read that number. Today its last digit had grown by one unit.
All four bundles had grown. The depth deepened, the date was pushed back, the syllable split, the number grew. Each grew in its own way, but grow they all did. Yesterday I had classified the four as a completed past. To be complete, a thing had to grow no further. What grows is not completion but progress. The four bundles were not past material but logs growing now.
There was a grain to how the four grew. The surveyor's depth grew downward. Each unit deeper, the last sounding's number rose, and the risen number meant the shaft's floor had receded that much further. The lighthouse keeper's date grew forward. Each day pushed back, the last tide's date advanced by one, and the advanced date was a day not yet come. The librarian's syllable grew sideways. Each split, a new syllable fastened behind the last, and the fastened syllable meant one word had broken finer still. The telegraph operator's number grew at the end. Depth, date, syllable, number — each in its own direction, and yet all of them grew at the last place. The broken place was the growing place.
That the broken place was the growing place was strange. A break ought to be a stop. If a sentence broke off mid-way, it had stopped there, and what stops should go no further. But the broken places of the four bundles were not stopped places but growing ones. The break was not an end but a starting point. At the last sounding the shaft went deeper; at the last tide the date went further on; at the last syllable the word broke further; at the last number the digit grew further. The four hands had stopped there, but the places where they stopped did not.
I opened the fifth bundle. The previous keeper's last line — the one line with my last digit joined to her number. It too had grown. My last digit had risen by one unit, the same rise I had seen in the body the day before. My one line in the body and the fifth bundle's last line 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 held more to transfer than the five bundles: boxes come over from suspended firms, residual material from departments emptied by layoffs. One line of it was Treasury's material — a bundle of documents gathered from Treasury's emptied seats. Whether the name Kang Min-seok was in that bundle or not, I did not know. When Treasury had emptied out entirely, and what had happened in those empty seats, the transfer list gave in a single line. Treasury residual material, one lot. Whether that line too was growing, I did not open it to see. Open it and you read, and reading, it would spread.
I had thought preservation was the work of holding material still so it would not grow. Filed and stacked, the stack was supposed to hold in that state. But the five bundles grew after filing, grew during filing, and seemed to grow a unit each time the filing hand opened the last page and read it. The one line — read it and it spreads — I had read yesterday in order to preserve, and today I was watching that spread across 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. That I had tried but could not, because the material kept growing — that I could not say. The last entry was supposed to be the thing written last, but the last kept sliding 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 hold still — the handover sheet was made to write once, to one field.
Nearly done, I said again. He said he had heard nearly yesterday too. If what was nearly done yesterday was nearly done again today, that nearly had not shrunk. While the end slid back a unit at a time, nearly stayed always the same distance off from it. As the shaft deepens the more you measure it, the end receded the more I tried to write it.
When he had gone, I looked at the handover sheet's last-entry field. Blank. Some fields it was the rule of preservation to leave blank, and some I could only leave blank. The author field I had left because I did not know the name; the last-entry field I left because the last would not stop. The two blanks lay side by side on the handover sheet. The blank that began in a box with no receiver had passed through a card with no author and reached a handover sheet with no last.