April 6. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the fifth desk. Two days left.
The next processing the log had entered was the transfer: to box the sixth bundle and send it up to headquarters. If preserving was keeping the material inside the archive, the transfer was carrying it out. Keeping inside and sending out were opposites, and yet in the log the two ran on in a single line. That two opposite works should run on in one line was somehow strange and somehow not. Preservation complete, and below it, transfer complete. Where preserving ended, the transfer began; the transfer was not the end of preserving but its next step.
I fetched an empty box and set it on the desk. Cardboard; lighter than I'd expected, so that one hand flew up as I lifted it. 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 receiver had come in, and now the box the sixth bundle would go into. As I lifted the bundle to set it inside, I lost track of whether the setting-in was preserving or transferring. To put it in the box was preserving; to send the box off was transferring. The hand that put in and the hand that sent were the same hand.
Do-gyeong's log held a passage much like this. The day the letter came down from head office ordering preservation, Do-gyeong understood that to preserve was to copy out, and to copy out was to make grow. The order to preserve was an order to make grow. After that day, boxes from other companies were transferred into her archive. Each box carried the note of another company's records-keeper, and each note held the same sentence, broken off at the same place. The law was not in one archive alone but at every place where records gathered. Do-gyeong had sat at the seat that received those boxes. I now sat at the seat that sent them.
The receiving seat and the sending seat were not the same. To Do-gyeong the law had come in boxed; from me the law went out boxed. If her archive was the place the law gathered, mine was the place the law spread out from. The five bundles sent up to headquarters would by now be sitting on some desk there. Someone seated at that desk would be opening the material with no receiver, just as I had the day after I took the post. The place I had sent to would have become someone else's day-after-taking-the-post.
That spring, boxes like it were not one or two. Every fallen company left records behind, and the records left behind were transferred off somewhere. The ledgers of a liquidating company went to a surviving one, the ledgers of the surviving company to a larger one, and the ledgers of the larger company gathered, in the end, into a single place. All the while they gathered, the number beneath the ledger kept growing. When one company fell, one archive received the law; when that archive fell, the next one received it. The whole country was being copied out into one place like a single bundle, and while it was copied out, the last digit of that one volume grew. My one box was one cell in that vast copying-out. Even if I did not send it, the copying-out would not stop; but if I sent it, it moved one cell further along.
I set the bundle in the box and began to fill out the transfer slip: the name of the material sent, the receiving place, the sender. In the receiving-place column I wrote the headquarters department name. In the sending column I wrote my own name. There was no receiver cell on the transfer slip. The material having no receiver, the form had carried no receiver cell from the start. To send material with no receiver to a receiving place was a thing done without any receiver at all. A sending that had a sender and no receiver was, reversed, the very shape of the telegraph operator's reception — a receiver and no sender.
That it was the same reversed, I understood only after writing it down. The telegraph operator had received dispatches with no sender; I was sending material with no receiver. The one had only receiving and no sending, the other only sending and no receiving. Set the two seats against each other, and a sending with no sender and a receiving with no receiver ran on in a single line. The material I sent would reach headquarters as material with no sender. Whoever received it at the desk up there would be receiving a box with a blank sending column. I had written my name in the sending column, but that name too would dim on the way. By the time it arrived, my name in the sending column would stand as empty as a blank receiver cell.
If the transfer was preserving's next step, then just as preserving had been a spreading, so was the transfer. Only, preserving was a spreading that grew in one place, while the transfer was a spreading that grew as it moved from place to place. Preserving had thickened the bundle; the transfer scattered it across many places. If preserving increased depth, the transfer increased breadth. What had been deepening in one place now, by way of the transfer, deepened in several places at once. What had grown in one archive grew on as it was boxed and moved to another archive, and another. Lift my hand from one place to stop it, and once the box reached the next place it grew there again. Stopping the hand at a single place could not stop a growth spread across many. The hand to stop it was one, while the growing places multiplied as far as the box traveled. As I could not stop the preserving, I could not stop the transfer. The transfer slip would be stamped; once stamped, it had to be sent; and not to send it was dereliction of duty.
When I had sent the five bundles up, I wrote that the blank had moved over by one place. Now, once I sent the sixth as well, the fifth desk would be wholly empty, and the blank would be not one place but the whole desk. Yet even with the desk empty, the seat remained. The preserving seat was not the desk but the seat, and so, the desk empty, I would still remain at the seat. Even after sending off all the bundles, I would sit at the sending seat and watch the sent material grow at another seat. The sending did not, in the end, put an end to the watching.
I finished the transfer slip and put the lid on the box. Before I did, I looked one last time at the end page of the sixth bundle. The last line of that page was the same line that had been blinking in the terminal's body. My employee number, the one 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 would be sent. The employee number I had been receiving with no receiver, I would now be sending with no receiver. As the lid came down, the terminal's blinking seemed to hold a beat, then blinked again. The line inside the box and the line on the terminal were blinking to the same beat, the lid between them. Sent, the terminal still did not stop. Even with the sent material gone from the archive, the terminal that had received it stayed behind in the archive, receiving, still, the line of the departed material.