Below the Rating and the Tide's Rhythm

After I learned my terminal printed tomorrow, I was afraid to sit before it. But on November 17th, the terminal threw off a sheet before I had even sat down.

It was a ratings agency's downgrade notice. That our credit rating would be cut one grade lower. The date at the top was — November 18th. Tomorrow. A downgrade not yet announced had arrived at my terminal a day before its announcement.

I know now that it will come true. So the cash report did, and the terminal's balance. Tomorrow, the agency will announce this downgrade. Then foreign creditors will pull their short-term foreign credit lines, the day to repay will be brought forward, and the reserves will run faster toward zero. When the one number called a rating goes down, the foreign debt that cannot be repaid grows that much heavier. The record lowers one side, and the lowering topples the other.

The motto on the boot screen rose, unbidden.

A rating, too, is a number. It does not lie. Tomorrow's downgrade is true — only not yet announced. Whether the agency announces it or not, the rating had already gone down. The announcement is no more than the belated copying onto paper of a descent that has already happened.

I read the rating field of the notice with a fractured eye. The symbols arrived apart. And between the symbols that arrived apart, in the gap where there should have been nothing, I saw the next symbol. A thing invisible to an eye that reads whole.

The downgrade did not stop at one grade. Through the gaps between cells, the rating kept descending. Past investment grade, past speculative grade, to default (D). It should have stopped there. Default is the floor of ratings. But below default, in the gap where there should have been no grade, there were more symbols. Symbols that were not ratings. Cells no agency assigns, that cannot be named.

As the surveyor's shaft did not stop at forty-eight fathoms but went deeper. The rating did not stop at default but went lower. A shaft that deepens the more it is sounded; a rating that descends the more it is read. To read the very bottom of that descent, I brought the notice close to the lamp. In the bottommost cell, instead of a grade, a date was written.

It was the "next rating review date" field at the foot of the notice. The day the agency would next look in upon the company.

That one day in December. The day the reserves reach zero. The day my predecessor's film wrote between the figures. The blank resignation date on the personnel card. And now, the day the agency would look in upon the company again. On that day, the rating will have descended to that nameless cell below default. On that day, the company cannot repay, the reserves are empty, and I am discharged.

I set the notice down. The rating did not lie. The company is downgraded tomorrow, and that downgrade runs on endlessly through the gaps, reaching a bottom that is not a bottom on that one day in December. Below default there are no ratings, but there is an empty place, and in the empty place there was a date.

The hand that wrote that date was the same as the hand that printed the cash report. The hand of my terminal, which I had not laid mine to. And the hand that stamped the same one line on the cover of the four bundles.

Even after the terminal printed tomorrow and the rating descended below default, the company gave me the next task. This time it was the exchange rate.

The treasury department had me copy the won/dollar rate, fixed twice daily by the foreign exchange bank — half past nine in the morning, three in the afternoon — into the records-room ledger. Copying out. The thing I do best, and now fear most. I wrote down the morning fixing. So many hundred won to the dollar. When I lifted the pen, raised my head, and bent to it again, the figure in the same cell had grown a little larger. The afternoon fixing had not even come yet.

At first I thought my hand had trembled and I had misread. But I know now what this trembling is. A written number does not sit still where it is written. So the foreign debt had been, and the cash position, and the rating. So was the rate. Only the rate differed in this: it returned. The debt grew in one direction. The rate rose like a flood tide, ebbed a moment, and when it rose again it came a hand's breadth higher than before.

I read between the morning and afternoon fixings with a fractured eye. Between the two official numbers, in the gap where there should have been nothing, stood a row of unfixed intermediate values. Rising, ebbing, rising higher. In the gap between a rate fixed twice a day, I counted thirteen risings and fallings.

Flood and ebb. I knew where those words had come from. The second bundle in the box — the lighthouse keeper's log.

The keeper, Yun Sang-hak. Counting the tides, he learned that the act of counting multiplied them. And unable to bear the empty cell, he wrote the fourteenth himself. The tide he wrote did not ebb. He carried his lamp down beneath that water.

The rate, too, was a tide. Each fixing one rising and falling. And each time I copied it into the ledger, the next rising came higher than the last. The copying hand was raising the water. As the keeper had lit his lamp and multiplied the sea, I was lifting my pen and multiplying the exchange. That is why the dyke called a fixed rate had broken. So long as it is written, the rate cannot be fixed. Because copying out is itself the rising.

Below the motto on the terminal, the bundle said, another line had stood on the lighthouse plans.

It keeps the light over the abyss. The work of a lighthouse is not to fill the abyss but to hold a single light afloat above it. Yet the one who lights a lamp to look into the abyss deepens it by as much as he looks. The rate had no floor. As the rating had gone below default, the won could go below any dyke at all. I held a small light called a pen over that abyss, and by as much as it shone, the bottom drew further off.

To write tomorrow's morning fixing, November 20th, I set my pen to the new cell. But the cell was not empty. A number was already written there — in my own hand. Far above any line one might call a dyke, the figure for the place where the won is no longer a currency. Beside it a small drawing was set down. It was the keeper's mark for a tide that does not ebb — the sign of the fourteenth tide.

And I had not yet written anything in that cell.