March 30. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the fifth desk.
The five bundles had gone up to headquarters the day before, so only the sixth bundle and the terminal were left on the desk. The place the bundles had filled was wide now, and the desk looked as bare as on the day I was first assigned. Only, unlike that day, the terminal was on. It had switched itself on the day I came and I had never once managed to switch it off since. I had never set a way to turn it off, so turn it off I could not.
In the body stood my employee number. The day after I was assigned, when I read my own last digit into Do-gyeong's dimmed final place at the end of the fifth bundle's last line, that line had run on into the body and stayed there ever since. This morning, below the number, one more line had come. Not had come — was coming. One character at a time, characters I had not typed were arriving in the body.
The terminal was a credit-rating terminal — a machine that reads out a rating and shows it, not a machine that receives anything. No line came in, no frequency was tuned. And yet a line was arriving. It was reception with nowhere to send from. When one character was added to the body, a long while later another was added. Not at any steady interval, but at the interval of a hand somewhere groping to press and send one character at a time. Whose that groping interval was, I tried not to ask — but even trying not to ask was to count the interval.
I called the telegraph operator's log to mind. His bundle had gone up to headquarters yesterday, yet the log I had read to the end the day after I was assigned rose clear enough to see without the paper. His law was that sentence set in Latin beside the company motto. That which does not sound is heard. On an empty frequency he received the next day's dispatches — dispatches with no sender. Dispatches that had a receiver and no sender, he took down every day. At first he thought the signal mistuned, then thought someone was sending them for a joke, and in the end, his log wrote, he knew there was no separate sending hand. Then one day the dispatch he received was his own employee number. He had received his own number, which he had never sent. The dispatch with nowhere to send from had a receiver, and that receiver was the sender. Only, he had no memory of sending, and so he learned the sender was himself only after he had received it.
I watched the arriving line. It was digits — an employee number filling in one character at a time. I waited for it to fill, then set the risen figures against my own number. The leading digits were the same. The middle was the same. Reaching the last digit, I knew that this one character was the very place I had read into Do-gyeong's dimmed seat the day after I was assigned. It was a place I had read out, not written. What was not written was not sent, and what was not sent was now arriving. The place I had read out had come back as reception. That day I had read that place on the excuse that to preserve I must read to the end, and because the one character I read in had left no memory of writing, I too — as the telegraph operator had — was now receiving a number I had never sent.
Without the bundles, I called to mind in order how the four hands had closed their own logs, and laid them side by side. The librarian's kind of collation happened now not on paper but in my head. Though the bundles had gone, the four closings had not. The surveyor closed with depth: the last sounding of a shaft that deepens the more it is measured was his end line. The lighthouse keeper closed with a date: the last cell of a tide already written when it is pointed to was his end line. The librarian closed with a syllable: the last single syllable of a word that comes loose when read was his end line. The telegraph operator closed with an employee number: the one line in which his own unsent number arrived as reception was his end line.
I laid the four closings over my own procedure of preservation. The hand that had measured the bundle's thickness had become depth; the date I wrote in the preservation log stood there before the writing; the letters with which I wrote the description had split into syllables; and now the terminal was receiving my employee number. Depth, date, syllable, number. The four seats the four hands had each closed were all reproduced within one person's work of preserving. The four laws had not each entered four separate outside things — shaft, tide, letter, frequency. One law wore four faces, and I was the place where the four faces gathered.
The one who measured had become the depth. As the hand that measures a shaft's depth becomes that depth, so the hand that measured a bundle's thickness became that thickness. The measuring and the being-measured met in a single place. The place from which I had read the four hands from outside had shifted to the place where the four hands had closed. I had thought myself the fifth hand, reading the four logs — but since the reading was itself an entering of that seat, I was not the fifth.
I thought of Do-gyeong's log. Do-gyeong had answered by pressing a single character into the sending column, and by answering had begun to become a sender. What she did was to send. Sending had a hand that pressed, and because there was a hand, she could stop — or could at least try to stop. But the seat I had entered was not the sending seat; it was the receiving seat. I pressed nothing. Though I pressed nothing, the terminal received the line. If Do-gyeong's answer had been a single act, my reception was no act at all. I had only preserved, and the line grew; I had only received, and the number arrived. The answer had a button to stop it; reception had none. And so if Do-gyeong's turning was a road walked one step at a time, my turning was a road that arrived while I sat still.
I tried to shut the terminal off. I looked for an off button, but it was a machine that had been switched on and never switched off, and I could not tell where the off place was. The line arrived without stopping. Since there was nowhere to send from, there was no line to cut. To cut it I would have to stop receiving, but the receiving was not mine to do — it was the terminal's. As in the librarian's law even the thought of stopping was the reading of letters, so in the telegraph operator's law the stopping of reception was not a place I could lay a hand on. The receiving seat, unlike the sending seat, had no button to stop it.
The arrived line blinked with one last digit left empty. It was not a filled number. The last digit had not yet come, and that place blinked in the same shape as Do-gyeong's dimmed final seat. As I had read my last digit into Do-gyeong's dimmed seat, so into this line's empty last seat someone's last digit would come. Only, that seat was not the sender's but the receiver's. The one blinking seat was not waiting for a number to send, but for a number to receive.
As each of the four hands had its own closing seat, so I too, in whom the four seats had gathered, would have a closing seat. I counted the hands. The surveyor, the lighthouse keeper, the librarian, the telegraph operator. And Do-gyeong of the fifth bundle. Five hands. The blinking last seat the terminal had left empty was the sixth seat, and just as, the day after I was assigned, I had read out Do-gyeong's seat, I was now reading out that sixth seat. Where the five hands sat there stood a sixth chair, and that one blinking seat was the number of the sixth chair. A number waiting not for the sending hand, but for the receiving hand.