March 31. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the fifth desk.
In the terminal's body the line that had arrived yesterday still stood. With one last digit left empty, the place blinked all through the night — a blinking that neither filled nor stopped. Since there was nowhere to send from, it could not fill; since there was no off place, it could not stop. While the one empty seat waited for a hand to receive it, I began to ask what seat it belonged to.
The five bundles had gone up to headquarters the day before yesterday. No paper was left on the desk. But though the paper had gone, the seats stayed. The bundles had been moved; the seats where the bundles had closed had not. A seat was not paper. Paper is tied and boxed and sent up to headquarters, but a seat could be neither tied nor lifted. The four seats where the four hands had closed their logs, and the one seat where Do-gyeong had closed, stayed on the desk the paper had left.
I counted the seats. The seat the surveyor closed with depth. The seat the lighthouse keeper closed with a date. The seat the librarian closed with a syllable. The seat the telegraph operator closed with an employee number. Four seats. And the seat where, in the fifth bundle, Do-gyeong had closed with her own number. Five seats. Four hands and one, five hands, each had sat in its own seat and closed its own log.
The manner of sitting differed from seat to seat, but the sitting itself was the same. The surveyor measured the shaft's depth and measured it again, and knowing that the depth he measured was the depth he would go down into, he sat in that seat. The lighthouse keeper wrote the tide and wrote it again, and knowing that the date he wrote was the date he would be closed on, he sat in that seat. The librarian read the word and read it again, and knowing that the syllable coming loose was a syllable of his own name as well, he sat in that seat. The telegraph operator took the dispatch and took it again, and knowing that the number he received was his own, he sat in that seat. The hand that measured depth sat in the seat of depth; the hand that wrote dates sat in the seat of dates. To close was to sit, oneself, in the seat of the thing one had handled. The handling and the being-handled meeting in a single seat — that was closing.
I thought of Do-gyeong's seat. Of the five bundles, Do-gyeong had closed the fifth line by writing it with her own number. Having read the four hands' logs through to the end, she set her own line as the fifth at the end where the four ran on into a single sentence. Do-gyeong had been one who reads, and then one who sat as the fifth at the end of the four she had read. The one who reads to the end sits in the seat that is read to the end — so Do-gyeong's log was writing. The seat where five hands sat: in it Do-gyeong was the fifth.
Then where was I sitting? From the day after I was assigned, I had been the one who preserved the five bundles — the one who sorts and classifies and indexes the five seats, who tends the five seats from outside the five hands. If the five hands were ones who had sat in the seats where they closed, then I, I thought, was the one who looked into those seats and copied them onto cards, one who had not yet sat in any seat at all. The one who preserves had to stand outside what is preserved. Since, if the hand tending the material became the material, there would be no hand left to tend it, I took it that the one who preserves has no seat — none, at least, among the five.
But the one seat the terminal had left empty was another seat, outside the five. The one who preserves the five seats had a seat as well. Only, it lay not among the five but after them. The sixth seat. The seat where the hand that had tended five closes as the sixth; the seat where the one who preserves moves over into the place of being preserved. The place I had taken myself to be standing outside was, in truth, the one last cell at the very end of the line.
I went to write that I had moved over and sat, then saw there was no separate act of moving over and sitting. Recognizing that the seat was mine was itself sitting in it. As in the librarian's law the thought of stopping was not stopping but the reading of letters, so in this seat recognizing was not looking but sitting. The instant I recognized that not the fifth desk but the sixth seat was mine, I was already sitting in the sixth seat. Between recognizing and sitting there was not even the gap of one empty seat.
In the word sixth, a seventh was contained. As Do-gyeong being the fifth made me the sixth, so my being the sixth would make a seventh. The one last seat the terminal had left empty was waiting, I had said, for a receiver — and that receiver was the seventh. As I, the day after I was assigned, had read out Do-gyeong's dimmed seat, so one day the next hand would read out my dimmed seat. The seat where five hands sat was not an end but a line, and the line closed at one end while it lengthened, a cell at a time, at the other. To close was to continue. My closing as the sixth was also the leaving of a blank — the receiver's seat called the sixth — for the seventh.
I tried not to sit. I tried to stay the one who preserves, standing outside the five seats. But in the terminal's blinking seat was my employee number, with only the one last digit empty. That the empty seat waited for a receiver and not a sender meant that it would fill if only I received, even without my sending. Not to sit, I would have to not receive — but receiving, unlike what Do-gyeong had done by answering, was not mine to do. Do-gyeong was herself whether she moved a line or not. I was myself whether I sat or not. The sixth seat was my seat whether I sat in it or not.
How the five hands had closed I could call to mind, but how the sixth hand closes I could not yet know. To know it I had to look at the nearest seat. Of the five, the seat nearest mine — the fifth seat, Do-gyeong's seat. The surveyor and the lighthouse keeper and the librarian and the telegraph operator had closed while handling outside things, but Do-gyeong, like me, had closed while preserving the five hands. Do-gyeong had closed by answering, and I would close by receiving: two different doors of the same law. Read Do-gyeong's depth and I would know my own. I opened the first page of the sixth bundle and set my finger again on Do-gyeong's last line. The place I touched had dimmed one digit further than yesterday. Whether that dimming was Do-gyeong's or mine, even after I lifted my finger I could not tell.