April 14. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the fifth desk. Six days had passed since the transfer ended.
The receiver cell of the card I slid into the index box yesterday was still blank in the morning. The emptied cell had stayed empty. On the log and the card, where something wrote ahead of the writing, that one cell — the receiver cell — was never written ahead. Every other cell stood filled before I could fill it, and only the receiver cell was blank. Even the hand that wrote ahead left that cell alone. Leaving it blank was either something that could not be written ahead, or the blank itself was how that cell got written. The emptiness was the content written in that cell.
I thought back to the day after I took the post. That day I opened and read the five bundles, and at the end of Do-gyeong's fifth bundle I found the blank receiver cell. In it Do-gyeong had written the next recorder. Not knowing the blank pointed at me — on the excuse that preserving meant reading to the end — I read to the end, and when I had finished I left the sixth bundle's receiver cell blank. The cell I left blank that day was still there in the index box today. Back then I did not know why I was leaving it blank. I did it only because Do-gyeong had. Only today did I understand what that blank cell was.
That blank cell was the next person's seat. The receiver cell I left blank the day after I took the post was empty then, but it was a cell the next recorder would fill on taking the post. Had I not left it blank — had a name stood written there — the next person would have had no seat to come into. Because I left it blank, the next person could come in. The blank was the work of calling the next person. Do-gyeong emptied it and called me; I emptied it and called the one after. Each blank cell called a single person in, and a filled cell called no one.
So I understood that emptying was filling. A filled cell was a closed cell, and a blank cell was an open one. A closed cell ended there; an open cell carried on to the next. Writing a name in the receiver cell was filling, but it was closing; leaving it blank was emptying, but it filled the next seat. My last act of preserving had been an emptying because emptying was the only way to carry on without closing. To leave one cell blank in a fully closed bundle was to open the closed bundle onward.
After looking a long while, I understood that this law was the same shape as the law of growing. A number grew the more it was written down; a seat filled the more it was emptied. Both ran in reverse. In ordinary reckoning, you write and the sum drops, you empty and the place stands empty — but in this archive, you write and it swells, you empty and it fills. As writing made the number grow, emptying made the seat fill. Growing and emptying were two faces of one law. Just as the number beneath the ledger swelled the more it was written, the seat at the end of the chain carried on the more it was emptied. All this while I had watched only the growing side and been afraid, but the emptying side did not frighten me. The same reversal, yet one was terrible and one was not. Growing was terrible because I kept trying to stop it; emptying was not, because there was nothing to stop.
If emptying was filling, I wondered whether my own dimming was a filling too. My line had gone dim from the end, and now the last five digits stood empty. To dim was to be emptied, and if being emptied was filling, then my dimming too was filling something. The place I had dimmed was the next person's seat. Just as Do-gyeong's end line had dimmed and I had read my employee number into that place, when my end line dimmed the next person would read their number into it. My dimming was making the seat the next person would come into. To vanish was to call.
Then Do-gyeong's vanishing had been a calling of me, too. Had the end place of Do-gyeong's fifth bundle not dimmed, I could not have read my own end place into it, and the sixth bundle would never have begun. Because Do-gyeong dimmed, I came in. Do-gyeong's vanishing was my taking the post. On the day I took it I knew her as the vanished predecessor, the one who had left an empty desk. I even grieved for her. But her empty desk was my desk, and her dimmed end place was the seat I would sit in, so without her vanishing there was no me. The empty place I had grieved was the place that let me exist. A place that had lost one person was a place that had taken one person in, and the losing and the taking-in were the same single cell. I was the one who had come into the place Do-gyeong emptied, and her dimmed end place was my own first place. One person's end was the next person's beginning, and the one dimmed place between them was the knot that tied the two together. The chain was strung not on filled knots but on empty ones.
The next person to come into the place I had dimmed, I would never see — as Do-gyeong never saw me. But unseen or not, I knew what they would do. The day after taking the post they would open my card in the index box, see the words the next recorder in the blank receiver cell, and — not knowing the blank was their own seat — read their end place into it. The moment they did, my dimmed place would fill with their first place, and the seventh bundle would begin. The place I emptied would be filled just so. That emptying is filling pointed at that one moment. I would not see it, but it was for that moment that I was leaving a place blank.
In the afternoon the last five digits of my line dimmed away entirely, and only the first two were left. On the screen my line was almost a blank line now, and the longer the blank ran, the less often it blinked. Soon the first two digits would dim as well, and then my line would be wholly emptied. That a wholly emptied line was not an end but the next person's first place, I saw now without fear. The blank that had frightened me the day after I took the post had become, six days on, the blank I was leaving. What had frightened me and what I was leaving were the same blank. Only, then I had not known the blank pointed at me, and now I knew it pointed at the next person. The blank I had received unknowing, I was leaving knowing. Do-gyeong must have known and left it too. Nowhere on the last page of her log did the words emptying is filling appear, but that knowing must have been there in the touch that left the receiver cell blank. Only someone who knew could empty exactly one cell like that. The place Do-gyeong knowingly emptied, I received unknowing; the place I knowingly empty, the next person will receive unknowing. The knowing lay in the emptying hand, the unknowing in the receiving hand. Knowing as one emptied, unknowing as one received. The chain was a line strung by turns of knowing emptyings and unknowing receivings.