April 13. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk. It was the fifth day since the transfer ended.
The sixth bundle had been boxed and gone up to headquarters five days ago. That I would enter a departed bundle today seemed, at first, not to add up. But what had left was the bundle, and what remained was the bundle's record. For each material sent, the archive left in the index box what that material had been. Even when a bundle went up to headquarters, its index stayed in the archive. The card I made yesterday was the last index of the departed sixth bundle. The bundle had left, but the work of indexing the bundle's last line was still left in my hand. The way the archive held a departed material to the last was the index.
I opened the index box and found the slot for the sixth bundle. The index box was the oldest furniture in the archive, and pulling the drawer, the cards slid forward all at once with a smell of dry wood. The indexes of the five bundles were already filled. The surveyor, the lighthouse keeper, the librarian, the telegraph operator, and Do-gyeong. Five slots closed in turn, and only the sixth bundle's slot had its last place empty. Tuck yesterday's card into that empty place and the sixth bundle's index would be full. I tucked the card in. The cardboard made a small sound brushing the card before it, and tucked in, the sixth bundle's index closed. Closing a bundle ended only after the bundle had been sent off. To close what had left was the last thing left to the hand that sent it off. The departed bundle was being opened somewhere at headquarters in someone's hand, but the work of closing what that bundle had been could be done only in this archive, the sending seat.
Do-gyeong did the same work. Do-gyeong, entering her log as the fifth bundle, closed the fifth bundle's index. Then Do-gyeong left the recipient field blank and wrote the next recorder, and that next recorder was me. I opened the fifth bundle and read Do-gyeong's last index, and at the end of reading began the sixth bundle. Now I, closing the sixth bundle, wrote the next recorder in the recipient field. At the seat where Do-gyeong called me, I called the next person. While the five slots closed and the sixth slot closed, the index box did not shrink by one slot but grew by one. The surveyor closed and the lighthouse keeper closed, and with each closing one more slot came to be. Closing was not a work of reducing slots but of increasing them, and when the sixth closed, the place of a seventh slot came to be. The index box was a box that thickened the more it was closed.
What it meant to leave the recipient field blank, I looked at again after writing it. To leave it blank was to not write, but the unwritten field, staying blank, also meant waiting for the next person. The blank field was not empty but a place to be filled. As Do-gyeong's blank field was filled by me, my blank field would be filled by the next person. The emptying was not an end but a seat, and the seat was the next person's. To leave it blank was to make ready the next person's seat. Had I written a name in the recipient field, that material would have become material closed to one person. But left blank, it became material whose recipient was not yet set, open to anyone. Emptying was the opposite of closing. The closing index was opened again by one blank field, and that one open field carried the chain onward. A fully closed line, leaving just one field blank, was carried on by that one field.
Having closed the sixth bundle's index, there was nothing more on the desk to close. The five bundles had left, the sixth bundle had left, and its index was closed. There was no more material to preserve. From the day after I took the post I had preserved all along, and today for the first time I sat before a desk with nothing to preserve. An empty desk. The places where the bundles had sat, where the box had sat, were all empty, so the desk looked as wide as on the day I first took the post. Only, unlike that day, now I knew what each empty place was a place left by. The empty desk on the day of taking the post was a desk not knowing what would come, and today's empty desk was a desk knowing what had left. The same empty desk was there once at the start and once at the end, and between them a fortnight lay.
But an empty desk was not a desk where the work was done. The terminal was still on, and my line in the body field stayed dimmed to the third digit from the end. There was no material to preserve, but the preserved material was still there, inside the terminal. That the preserving was done but the being-preserved was not, was today's seat. The preserving hand had finished its work, and the preserved line was still dimming. Within one person, a hand done with its work and a line still dimming were together.
Whether the line inside the terminal was the last material to preserve, I thought. Having indexed that line on a card yesterday, the terminal's line was already indexed material. Indexed material was material whose preservation was done. Then the terminal's line was no longer material waiting to be preserved but material done preserving and waiting to leave. As the sixth bundle had been boxed and left, the terminal's line too would leave somewhere. Where the line left for I did not know, but that it would leave I could tell. Dimming was one way of leaving. There was material that left boxed, and material that left dimming. My line was leaving not by box but by dimming. The line dimmed to the third digit from the end began to dim to the fourth.
Watching the dimming line, at the seat where the five bundles and the sixth bundle and their indexes were all closed, I reckoned what I would leave at the last. What I would leave was one card. A card with the recipient field blank. That card would stay in the index box, and the next recorder, the day after taking the post, would open it. He would read the dim number on the card, and read the words the next recorder in the recipient field, and, never knowing that those words pointed at his own seat, would preserve the card as one piece of material. As I read Do-gyeong's card so. He would, reading the card, watch his own line dim, and then make one card of his own and close the seventh bundle's index, and leave the recipient field blank again to call the one after. I would not see that person, but what that person would do I already knew entirely. Because it would not differ by one character from what I did. The hand that closed the sixth bundle was leaving the first place of the seventh bundle blank. That one blank place was the last material I preserved. Not material but a place, not a filling but an emptying, I left at the last.