April 6. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk. Two days remained.
The next processing the log had written was the transfer. To put the sixth bundle in a box and send it up to headquarters. If preserving was keeping the material inside the archive, the transfer was putting the material out of the archive. Keeping inside and sending outside were opposite, but in the log the two ran on in one line. Preservation complete, below it transfer complete. Where preserving ended the transfer began, and the transfer was not the end of preserving but the next of preserving. That two opposite works ran on in one line was somehow strange and somehow not.
I brought an empty box and set it on the desk. It was a cardboard box, and lifting it, lighter than I had thought, one hand rose upward. It was the same kind of box the five bundles had gone into last time, with the same grain of pattern on the bottom. A Pnakotic Library box. The box the material with no recipient had been in, and now the box the sixth bundle would go into. Going to lift the bundle and put it in the box, I grew unsure whether putting it in was preserving or transferring. Putting it in the box was preserving, and sending the box was transferring. The hand that put in and the hand that sent were the same hand.
In Do-gyeong's log was a similar passage. The day the head-office letter came ordering preservation, Do-gyeong knew that preserving was copying out and copying out was growing. The order to preserve was an order to make grow. After that day, boxes from other companies were transferred into Do-gyeong's archive. Each box had the note of another company's recorder, and each note had the same sentence broken off at the same place. The law was not in one archive only but at every place where records gathered. Do-gyeong was at the seat receiving those boxes. I was now at the seat sending the box.
The receiving seat and the sending seat differed. To Do-gyeong the law came in boxed; from me the law went out boxed. If Do-gyeong's archive was the place the law gathered, my archive was the place the law spread out from. The five bundles sent up to headquarters were by now set on some desk at headquarters. Someone seated at that desk would, like me the day after I took the post, be opening the material with no recipient. The seat I had sent to would have become someone's day-after-taking-the-post.
That spring there was more than one such box. Each fallen company left records, and the records left were transferred somewhere. The ledgers of a liquidating company to a surviving company, the ledgers of a surviving company to a larger company, the ledgers of a larger company gathered, in the end, into one place. While they gathered, the number beneath the ledger grew all the while. When one company fell, one archive received the law; when that archive fell, the next archive received it. The whole country was being copied out into one place like one bundle, and while it was copied out the last digit of that one bundle grew. My one box was one field of that great copying-out. Even if I did not send it the copying-out would not stop, but if I sent it, it was copied one field further.
I put the bundle in the box and began to write the transfer slip. The name of the material sent, the receiving place, the sender. In the receiving-place field I wrote the headquarters department name. In the sender field I wrote my name. The recipient field was not on the transfer slip. Since it was material with no recipient, the form had no recipient field from the start. Sending material with no recipient to a receiving place was done without a recipient. A dispatch with only a sender and no recipient was, in reverse, the same shape as the telegraph operator's reception with only a recipient and no sender.
That it was the same in reverse I knew after writing it. The telegraph operator received dispatches with no sender, and I sent material with no recipient. One had only receiving and no sending, the other only sending and no receiving. Press the two seats together, and a sending with no sender and a receiving with no recipient ran on in one line. The material I sent would arrive at headquarters as material with no sender. Someone receiving it at the headquarters desk would receive a box with a blank sender field. I had written my name in the sender field, but that name too would dim on the way. By the time it arrived, my name in the sender field would be empty like a blank recipient field.
If the transfer was the next of preserving, then as preserving was spreading, the transfer was spreading too. Only, preserving was a spreading that grew in one place, and the transfer was a spreading that grew while moving places. Preserving thickened the bundle, but the transfer scattered the bundle to several places. If preserving increased depth, the transfer increased breadth. What deepened in one place came, through the transfer, to deepen in several places at once. What grew in one archive grew while being boxed and moved to another archive, and another. Even if I lifted my hand from one place to stop, when the box went to the next place it grew there again. By stopping the hand at one place, I could not stop the growing spread to several places. The hand to stop was one, but the growing places increased as far as the box went.
When I sent the five bundles up to headquarters, I wrote that the blank had moved one place over. Now, if I sent the sixth bundle too, the fifth desk would be wholly empty, and the blank would be not one place but the whole desk. But even with the desk empty the seat stayed. Since the preserving seat was not the desk but the seat, even with the desk empty I would remain at the seat. Even after sending all the bundles, I would sit at the sending seat, watching the sent material grow at another seat. Sending did not, in the end, end the watching.
I finished writing the transfer slip and put the lid on the box. Before putting it on, I looked one last time at the end page of the sixth bundle. The last line of the end page was the same line as the one that had been blinking in the terminal's body field. My employee number, which the terminal had been receiving, had moved over onto the bundle's end line. What had been received had come to the seat where it was sent. The number received with no recipient, I came to send with no recipient. As I put the lid on, the terminal's blinking seemed to pause one beat, then blinked again. The line inside the box and the line on the terminal blinked at the same beat, with the lid between them. Even sent, the terminal did not stop. Even when the sent material left the archive, the terminal that had received it stayed in the archive, still receiving the line of the departed material.